The Unsolved Mysteries of Father Marquette's Many Graves

by Jennifer McGraw

Buried.  Dug up.  Buried.  Dug up.  Buried.  Dug up.  The remains of Father Jacques Marquette have been traveling for three and a half centuries. Or have they?

When devoted missionary and explorer Jacques Marquette perished in 1675, he was buried on the sandy shore of Lake Michigan.  Two years later, his Native American parishioners exhumed his corpse and scraped the flesh from his bones.  They took his bones to St. Ignace, Michigan to be buried under a primitive mission chapel.  In 1877, when thirty-nine bone fragments were found in the probable place of his grave, it was assumed his remains had been rediscovered.  The bones were split up and sent to different unlikely locations, but seven bones were return and again buried.  Those seven fragments were eventually dug up again by archaeologists and tested.  The results were not as expected.

This book discusses his life in North America and the unsolved mysteries of Marquette's many graves.