Father Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit missionary and explorer, died on May 18, 1675, while returning to his mission at St. Ignace after leaving it in 1673 for an exploring trip to the Mississippi and the Illinois country, and two French companions buried him somewhere along the Lake Michigan shore of the lower peninsula. The exact location of his death has long been controversial, but evidence presented in the 1960's indicated that a site near the natural outlet of the Betsie River, at the northeast corner of a hill that stood there until 1900, was the place of his death and that the Betsie was the Rivière du Père Marquette of early French accounts and maps. His bones were reburied at St. Ignace in 1677.