April 8 Illinois History Minute

It’s April 8th, and on this day in 1675, Father Jacques Marquette made a return visit to the Grand Village of the Illinois, a native American settlement of about a thousand people on the Illinois River, across from Starved Rock.

Marquette was a French Jesuit missionary who had first come to the village two years earlier with the explorer Louis Joliet, as part of their exploration and mapping of the northern Mississippi River valley. He celebrated a public mass during this second visit. But a month later, Father Marquette was dead at age 37, a victim of dysentery contracted during the Mississippi expedition.

Actress Patricia Arquette was born in Chicago on this day in 1968. She grew up in a family of actors, winning acclaim for her work in the movies True Romance, Ed Wood, Lost Highway and Boyhood.