Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 4.djvu/361

 and buried him beneath the sand, carefully marking the grave. Two years later some of his Indian friends sought his grave, disinterred his body and tenderly conveyed it to St. Ignace Mission where it was buried beneath the church which he had founded. More than two hundred years passed away and the name of the discoverer of Iowa had become historic and honored wherever his achievements were known. In 1877 the old grave was found and a monument erected to his memory on the site of the old church of St. Ignace, by descendants of his French and Indian companions. History will hand down to the latest generations the brief record preserved of one of the noblest of America's pioneers. Breese in the “Early History of Illinois,” says:

“For years did this devoted man, silent and unobserved in the gloomy forest amid untamed savages, forsaking home and kindred, fired by a lofty zeal—exert his energies to exalt the condition of abject and degraded humanity. In the accomplishment of his mission, a domain more than imperial, destined to nourish multitudes as countless as those of the plains of India, was opened to the world.”

Michigan has given the name of Marquette to a river, a county, and a city, while Iowa has done nothing to connect his memory with the State whose eastern shores he first explored. WILLIAM B. MARTIN was born March 17, 1846, at Rochester, Vermont. He was reared on a farm and educated in the public schools and the Orange County Grammar School. At eighteen he began teaching, which he continued for three years. In 1867 he went west locating on a farm in Henry County, Illinois, where he taught school winters. In 1869 he removed to Adair County, Iowa, where on the wild prairie he improved a farm. He was elected auditor of the county in 1873 and after serving four years entered into the real estate business in Greenfield, and in 1890 was mayor of the town. In 1893 he was elected on the Republican ticket Representative in the House of the Twenty-fifth General Assembly and as a member of the committee on the suppression of intemperance he devised the Mulct Law, which so changed the prohibition acts as to permit the legal voters in towns and cities to determine whether saloons should be established within their jurisdiction. Mr. Martin was reëlected to the Twenty-sixth General Assembly where, as chairman of the building and loan committee he framed and secured the passage of an act regulating the business of such organizations. In 1899 Mr. Martin was nominated by the Republican State Convention for Secretary of State and elected by the largest majority ever given in Iowa to a candidate for a State office. He was elected for a second term in 1902.  CHARLES MASON was born in Onondaga County. New York, October 24, 1804. He was appointed a cadet in the West Point Military Academy 