Grace Period, 5: Interchange Begins

About Grace Period

Revised December 2022

Introduction

In the early 1840s, Jesuit missionaries established missions in four Native communities in the Inland Northwest: St. Mary’s among the Salish in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana in 1841; Sacred Heart among the Schitsu’umsh (Coeur d’Alenes) of northern Idaho in 1842; St. Michael’s at a Qlispe winter camp near Albeni Falls, Idaho, in 1844; and in1845, St. Ignatius in Qlispe territory in northeastern Washington. During this initial period of encounter, harmony and goodwill prevailed. The Natives welcomed the Jesuits into their homelands and adapted their ways of life to their instructions, religious and otherwise. Yet, as graceful as was this period, it was brief. As early as 1847, Inland Northwest Natives were growing increasingly hostile to Christianity and its messengers. 

The First Jesuit

In the fall of 1839, Pierre Gauché and Ignace La Jeune, two Iroquois men who lived among the Salish Tribal People of present western Montana, met with Catholic officials in St. Louis to request that a Black Robe be sent to their homelands. The Right Reverend Joseph Rosati, Bishop of the diocese of St. Louis, and Father Peter Verhaegen, Superior of the Missouri Mission of the Society of Jesus, assured the two representatives that a missionary would be sent to the Salish in the spring of 1840. The man chosen for the job was the 40-year-old Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, a native of Belgium who had emigrated to the United States in 1821.   

De Smet began his first journey to the Pacific Northwest on March 27, 1840; his purpose was straightforward. He was to assess the prospects for a successful mission among the Salish Tribal People who lived in the Bitterroot Valley of present western Montana. As was his order’s way of mission-building, De Smet was to travel to Salish territory where he would observe and get to know the people and then return to Jesuit headquarters in St. Louis where he would report his findings to his superiors. If the Jesuits deemed the Salish suitably devout, a mission would be established at a later date. As Chittenden and Richardson put it, Father De Smet was to “survey the ground and report whether it would be worth while to carry the work farther.” (CR, v. 1, 31) 

De Smet’s destination that late March day was Westport, Missouri, the “jumping off” point for westward travel. There, he met up with Ignace La Jeune, one of the Iroquois Salish men who had traveled to St. Louis in 1839. De Smet and Ignace were acquainted; the two men had met the year before at St. Joseph Mission in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where De Smet was working as a missionary. After being assured that a priest would be sent to the Rockies in the spring of 1840, Ignace had spent the winter close by, at a Jesuit mission in Kansas, so that he could guide the promised priest to his home. In Westport, De Smet and Ignace persuaded Andrews Drips of the American Fur Company to let them join his brigade bound for the annual Green River fur trade rendezvous in present Wyoming. (Carriker, 31) 

Oregon National Historic Trail

Drips’ brigade moved out on April 30. It was a good-sized caravan. In addition to the “four horses and three mules” De Smet had purchased to carry his supplies, there were also four wagons, two of which belonged to three missionary families, Harvey and Emeline Clark, Alvin and Abigail Smith, and P.B. and Adeline Littlejohn. The other two wagons, according to Killoren, “transported the five children and supplies” of Joel P. and Mary Walker and Martha Young, Mary’s sister, “the first declared emigrants for Oregon.” According to Chittenden and Richardson, Drips followed “the general route of the Oregon Trail.” (Killoren, 60; CR, v. 1, 31) 

As the caravan moved into the extreme weather of the Great Plains, De Smet became ill. In addition to suffering from a high fever and heat exhaustion, he also “developed a reoccurring, retching cough.” Chittenden and Richardson describe De Smet’s condition as “malaria,” adding that it “did not finally leave him until on his way home some three months afterward.” But by time the caravan reached the rendezvous on June 30, De Smet was healthy enough to enjoy the “curious assemblage such as only a rendezvous of the fur trade in those early times could produce.” Among those assembled were the members of a welcoming party led by Pierre Gauché. He and nine Salish men had traveled to the rendezvous to greet De Smet and then escort him to Salish territory. During the week that De Smet spent at the rendezvous, he visited with, and preached to, Natives, Americans, and French-Canadians alike. He also struck up a friendship with a fur trader named Jean-Baptiste de Velder who, liked De Smet, hailed from Belgium. (Carriker, 33) 

Monument commemorating first Mass celebrated in Wyoming

At the end of the week, on Sunday, July 5, De Smet convened the rendezvous-attendees for Mass, “the first ceremony of the kind in the Rocky Mountains north of the Mexican possessions,” according to Chittenden and Richardson. De Smet described the setting for the Mass in a letter he wrote to “Rev. F.J.B.” dated February 4, 1841. “The altar was placed on an elevation, and surrounded with boughs and garlands of flowers; I addressed the congregation in French and in English and spoke also by an interpreter to the Flat-head and Snake Indians. It was a spectacle truly moving for the heart of a Missionary, to behold an assembly composed of so many different nations, who all assisted at our holy mysteries with great satisfaction. The Canadians sang hymns in French and Latin, and the Indians in their native tongue. It was truly a Catholic worship…This place has been called since that time, by the French Canadians, “la prairie de la Messe,” in English, the Mass of the Prairie. (CR, v. 1, 32; De Smet, Letters and Sketches, p. 138, image 16)

 

Pierre's Hole Historic Site

A week later, on July 6, De Smet, his Salish escort, de Velder, and “a dozen Canadians” began the trip toward the Salish. Their first destination was Pierre’s Hole, a beautiful valley that “lies just west of the Teton Mountains and is about twenty-five miles long by five to fifteen broad.” According to Chittenden and Richardson, Pierre’s Hole “was a favorite resort for the traders, trappers, and Indians and several rendezvous were held there.” The travelers reached their destination on July 12. Waiting there, according to De Smet, were “about 1,600” Salish and Qlispe men, women, and children who “came all together to meet” him and shake his hand. Eventually, Salish leader Tjolzhitsay (Big Face/Grand Visage) “stepped forward” and welcomed the priest into his camp, and with his approval, De Smet spent the next four days instructing the Natives and leading them in the common recitation of prayers. (O’Hara, 244; CR, v. 1, 223; Carriker, 36)

Henry's Lake, Idaho

A few days later, Tjolzhitsay began moving “his indefensibly large camp to safer territory at the headwaters of the Missouri River.” The two Belgians, De Smet and de Velder, joined the march, which, according to Carriker, “began on July 16 and ended three weeks later.” The large group crossed the Continental Divide somewhere between Henry’s Lake and Red Rock Lake, and at a point near there, De Smet decided to climb to “the summit of a high mountain, for a better examination of the fountains that gave birth” to the Columbia and Snake rivers. For “six wearisome hours,” De Smet trudged upwards, passing “snow drifts more than twenty feet deep, before he was “compelled to give up” his plan. Before he began his descent, however, De Smet “thanked the Lord that he had been deigned to favor the labors of his servants, scattered over this vast vineyard, imploring at the same time his divine grace for all the nations of Oregon, and in particular for the Flatheads and Pend Oreilles, who had so recently ranged themselves under the banner of Jesus Christ.” The priest also “engraved on a soft stone” an inscription that read, “Sanctus Ignatius, Patronus Montium, Die Julii 23, 1840.” The next day, writes Schoenberg, “De Smet offered a Mass of Thanksgiving at the foot of the mountain.” (Carriker, 36; Carriker, 37; CR, v. 1, 230; Schoenberg, HCC, 54)     

After the group left Henry’s Lake area, it moved north toward the Missouri River, heading for the Three Forks campsite. Located at the convergence of the Gallatin, Jefferson, and Madison rivers – the three forks of the Missouri River – the Three Forks campsite was the home of one of the “truly great Indian trade fairs in the West,” writes Carriker. “Each August the flat, well-watered grasslands surrounding the Three Forks attracted a large number of plains and plateau tribes.” The area, a “great and beautiful plain,” also attracted “numberless herds” of buffalo, and in August, Natives gathered there to “lay in their winter supply” of buffalo meat. “Four hundred horsemen,” writes De Smet, “old and young, mounted on their best horses, started early in the morning for their great hunt. At a given signal, they rode at full gallop among the herds; soon everything appeared confusion and flight all over the plain; the hunters pursued the fattest cows, discharged their guns and let fly their arrows, and in three hours they killed more than 500.” (Carriker, 37; CR, v. 1, 231-232)

As the month of August drew to a close, Tjolzhitsay began to coordinate the move back to Salish homelands in the Bitterroot Valley, some 200 miles distant, and De Smet came to an important decision. He decided not to join the march. According to Chittenden and Richardson, De Smet “thought it best not to take the time to go there on this occasion; but rather to hasten home, report the situation to his superiors, and get the necessary assistance for the commencement of a permanent mission.” De Smet had, in other words, made a decision that was not his alone to make and had done so without having visited actual Salish homelands in the Bitterroot Valley. But perhaps the most reckless step De Smet took was to promise the Salish that he, as well as “a reinforcement of missionaries,” would return the following spring. “Long before sunrise” on the day De Smet had set for his departure from the Three Forks, “all the nation was assembled before my lodge; no one spoke, but grief was painted on each face. The only thing I could say that seemed to console them was a formal promise of a prompt return in the following spring.” (CR, v. 1, 34; CR, v. 1, 234) 

"Full of trust in the Lord who had preserved” him "thus far," De Smet; his compatriot, Jean-Baptiste de Velder; and an escort of 17 Salish men left the Three Forks camp on August 27. Because the American Fur Company brigade had already left for St. Louis, the travelers were on their own, and according to Carriker, they followed the route along the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers that the Native delegations of the 1830s had taken. Chittenden and Richardson, who published a four-volume set of De Smet's letters and writings in 1905, write that the "little cavalcade took up their route from the Three Forks very much along the modern line of the Northern Pacific Railroad." (CR, v. 1, 234; CR, v. 1, 35)

At Fort Alexander, an American Fur Company post at the mouth of the Rosebud River in the traditional homelands of the Crow Tribe of present Montana, De Smet requested that the Salish men return to their Bitterroot Valley homelands. According to Carriker, De Smet reasoned that he and de Velder traveling alone would attract less attention from potentially hostile Natives than would a large group of men. With Fort Union, an American Fur Company post located at the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, as their destination, the two Belgians traveled on alone, "constantly looking death in the face," as De Smet puts it. (CR, v. 1, 36)

In fact, on the second day of their journey, De Smet and de Velder were forced to assume a low profile to avoid being detecting by a band of possibly dangerous Natives. That night, the two men built neither a camp fire, nor cooked supper. Despite being at peril, De Smet recalled the incident with humor. “I rolled myself in my blanket,” he writes, “and stretched out on the sod, commending myself to the good God. My grenadier [de Velder], braver than I, was soon snoring like a steam engine in full swing. Running through all the notes of the chromatic scale, he closed each movement of his prelude with a deep sigh, by way of modulation. As for me, I turned and rolled, but spent a sleepless night.” (CR, v. 1, 36-37)

Conclusion:

On September 20, De Smet and de Velder reached Fort Union, safe and sound. After a three-days’ rest, the two men resumed their journey, stopping before they reached their penultimate destination, St. Joseph Mission in Council Bluffs, at two other American Fur Company posts, Fort Clark, in present North Dakota, and Fort Pierre Chouteau in present South Dakota. De Smet and de Velder arrived at the Iowa mission on November 24, and in mid-December, they “took to the saddle once again” and reached St. Louis two weeks later. “In a dramatic gesture,” writes Carriker, “De Smet entered the Jesuit residence at Saint Louis University on New Year’s Eve, 1840.” There, he soon learned that a return trip to the Rocky Mountains in 1841 was far from certain. Had the priest made a promise he could not keep? (Carriker, 42) 

Grace Period, 6: St. Mary's Mission

Text Sources:

Carriker, Robert C. Father Peter John De Smet: Jesuit in the West. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman and London, 1995.

Chittenden, Hiram Martin and Alfred Talbot Richardson.

Life, Letters and Travels of Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J., 1801-1878, Vol. 1, Francis P. Harper, New York, 1905. 

De Smet, Pierre-Jean and Reuben Gold Thwaites. 

De Smet's Letters and sketches, 1842. [Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906] Image. https://www.loc.gov/item/06024573/. 

Killoren, John J., S.J. “Come, Blackrobe” De Smet and the Indian Tragedy. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman and London, 1994. 

O’Hara, Edwin V. “De Smet in the Oregon Country,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Sep. 1909), pp. 239-262, Oregon Historical Society. 

Schoenberg, Wilfred P., S.J. A History of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest 1743-1983. The Pastoral Press, Washington, D.C., 1987. 

Image Sources: (in order of appearance)

National Park Service. Oregon Historic Trail Map, last visited July 5, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. Monument to Fr. DeSmet, Realwyo, 21 September 2014, Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, last visited July 5, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. Pierre's Hole Historic Site, Lowjumpingfrog, 12 September 2012, Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, last visited July 5, 2021.

Wikimedia Commons. Henry's Lake Area of Critical Environmental Concern, Idaho (15053928764), Bureau of Land Management, 31 October 2014, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic, last visited July 5, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. US-MT (1891) p513 THE THREE FORKS OF THE MISSOURI, Image extracted from page 513 of King’s Hand-book of the United States planned and edited by M. King. Text by M. F. Sweetser, by SWEETSER, Moses Forster. Original held and digitised by the British Library. Copied from Flickr, last visited July 5, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. Northern Pacific Railroad map circa 1900, Original uploader was Slambo at English Wikipedia. Later version(s) were uploaded by Ian13 at en.wikipedia, map created by L.L. Poates, Engr’g Co., New York, 1900, last visited July 5, 2021.