Who Marquette is named for

The name Marquette is everywhere here — the city, the county, the university — and it honors a man who never lived to see any of them: Father Jacques Marquette, a French Jesuit missionary and explorer of the 1600s. He’s one of the most famous figures of early Great Lakes history, and his name was given to this place long after his death, when the iron-shipping town on Lake Superior was established in 1849.

Marquette came from France to New France (Canada) in 1666 and spent his life among the Native peoples of the upper Great Lakes. He had a gift for languages and learned several, and he founded missions at Sault Ste. Marie and at St. Ignace, in what’s now Michigan’s eastern Upper Peninsula. His most famous journey came in 1673, when he and the fur trader Louis Jolliet set out by canoe and became among the first Europeans to travel and map the northern Mississippi River. He died in 1675, still a young man, while traveling near the Lake Michigan shore.

It’s worth remembering that long before Father Marquette paddled these waters, the Ojibwe and other Anishinaabe peoples had lived along Lake Superior for countless generations — this was their homeland, and remains central to their story. Marquette the missionary passed through and is remembered with this name; the Native nations of the region were, and are, here for the long haul. Both truths sit side by side in the name on the map.