The Indians of Mackinaw and vicinity, and also those of Kaskaskia, were in great sorrow when the tidings of Marquette's death reached them. Not long after this melancholy event, a large company of Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Hurons, who had been out on a hunting expedition, landed their canoes at the mouth of the Marquette river, with the intention of removing his remains to Mackinaw. They had heard of his desire to have his body interred in the consecrated ground of St. Ignatius, and they had resolved that the dying wish of the missionary should be fulfilled. As they stood around in silence and gazed upon the cross that marked the place of his burial, the hearts of the stern warriors were moved. The bones of the missionary were dug up and placed in a neat box of bark made for the occasion, and the numerous canoes which formed a large fleet started from the mouth of the river with nothing but the sighs of the Indians, and the dip of the paddles to break the silence of the scene. As they advanced towards Mackinaw, the funeral cortege was met by a large number of canoes bearing Ottawas, Hurons, and Iroquois, and still others shot out ever and anon to join the fleet. When they arrived in sight of the Point, and beheld the cross of St. Ignatius as if painted against the northern sky, the missionaries in charge came out to the beach clad in vestments adapted to the occasion. How was the scene heightened when the priests commenced, as the canoe bearing the remains of Marquette neared the shore, to chant the requiem for the dead. The whole population was out, entirely covering the beach, and as the procession marched up to the Chapel with cross and prayer, and tapers burning, and laid the bark box beneath a pall made in the form of a coffin, the sons and daughters of the forest wept. After the funeral service was ended, the coffin was placed in a vault in the middle of the church, where the Catholic historian says, "Marquette reposes as the guardian angel of the Ottawa missions." "He was the first and last white man who ever had such an assembly of the wild sons of the forest to attend him to his grave. "So many stirring events succeeded each other after this period--first, the war between the English Colonists, and the French; then the Colonists with the Indians, the Revolutionary War, the Indian Wars, and finally the War of 1812, with the death of all those who witnessed his burial, including the Fathers who officiated at the time, whose papers were lost, together with the total destruction and evacuation of this mission station for many years, naturally obliterated all recollections of the transaction, which accounts for the total ignorance of the present inhabitants of Point St. Ignatius respecting it. The locality of his grave is lost; but only until the Archangel's trump, at the last, shall summon him from his narrow grave, with those plumed and painted warriors who now lie around him."