Grace Period, 6: St. Mary's Mission

About Grace Period

Revised December 22, 2022

Introduction 

In the evening of December 31, 1840, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet arrived back home in St. Louis, completing an eight-month round-trip journey to the Rocky Mountains. De Smet, the first Jesuit missionary to be sent to the Rockies, had fulfilled the promise his superiors had made to the Salish Peoples of present western Montana to send a priest to their country. As had his superiors, De Smet also made the Salish a promise; he promised them that he would return the following year to establish a permanent mission in their homelands. De Smet would keep his word, but within days of his homecoming in St. Louis, the missionary received news that put his pledge in serious jeopardy.

A Promise Kept

"On my arrival at St. Louis,” De Smet writes in a letter to the editor of the Catholic Herald dated May 1, 1841, “I gave an account to my superior [Verhaegen] of my journey and of the flattering prospects which a mission beyond the Rocky Mountains held out. You will easily believe me when I tell you that my heart sank within me on learning from him that the funds at his disposal for missionary purposes would not enable him to afford me scarcely half of what was necessary for the outfit and other expenses of an expedition.” Buoyed by his confidence in “the visible protection of the Almighty,” De Smet took matters into his own hands and began a begging tour of the wealthy Catholic communities of the East and Southeast. “In the course of a few months,” write Chittenden and Richardson, the missionary “had succeeded in raising the necessary amount” to outfit a return expedition to the Rocky Mountains. (CR, v. 1, 38; CR, v. 1, 39)

 

Rocky Mountain Mission

With funds in-hand, De Smet’s superior, Verhaegen, not only authorized the establishment of a permanent mission among the Salish but also staffed it with five additional Jesuits: two priests and three brothers who were to serve under De Smet’s direction as Superior of the Order’s new Rocky Mountain Mission. The priests were Nicolas Point and Gregory Mengarini, and the brothers were “Charles Huet, a tinsmith; Joseph Specht, a carpenter; and William Claessens, a blacksmith.” Garraghan explains that De Smet had mistaken Father Point for a Vendean, but the 42-year-old priest was actually “a native of Rocroy in the Ardennes, France.” Father Mengarini was a 29-year-old Italian, “specially selected by the Father General himself for this mission on  account of his age, his virtues, his great facility for languages, and his knowledge of medicine and music.” Mallet adds that Brothers Huet and Claessens were Belgians, and Brother Specht, “an Alsacian.” (Carriker, 43; Garraghan, v. 2, ch. 24, 259; Mallet, 202) 

Father Gregory Mengarini, S.J.

According to De Smet’s biographer, Robert C. Carrick, De Smet had “four goals” in mind for the work he and the other missionaries would do in the Rocky Mountain Mission. In addition to establishing a permanent mission among the Salish, De Smet also “planned to write a series of “edifying” letters. His superiors, in fact, requested it of him.” Letter-writing, explains Carriker, was a practice established by St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order. Thorough, descriptive letters not only served built collegiality among the far-flung members of the order but also were public relations tools. De Smet’s third goal was “to establish communication with both Father Blanchet [François Norbert] and the Hudson’s Bay Company, the dominant ecclesiastical and political authorities, for all practical purposes, in the jointly occupied Oregon country.” Last, De Smet “hoped to identify travel routes” between the mission he would establish and the Hudson’s Bay Company posts at Fort Vancouver, Walla Walla, and Colville. (Carriker, 44) 

In addition to a plan of action, the Jesuits also had an outfit of “mounts, some pack animals, four carts and one wagon drawn by oxen” when they departed St. Louis on April 24. When the party arrived in Westport, De Smet’s hopes of traveling west with the American Fur Company brigade were dashed when he learned that the traders were on a fast-track for the Rockies and were unwilling to let the unwieldy Jesuit expedition tag along. With the American Fur Company door closed, another opened. Famed fur trader and frontier guide Thomas Fitzpatrick, the same man who had “conducted Marcus Whitman and his party across the plains in 1836,” agreed to escort the Jesuits “at least as far as the Green River rendezvous.” In Fitzpatrick’s crew were hunter John Gray; “an Englishman named Romaine” and “five teamsters.” (Palladino, 30; Schoenberg, HCC, 59; Garraghan, v. 2, ch. 24, 260) 

Oregon Trail

“Thence the Oregon Trail…”

Fitzpatrick moved the wagon train out on May 10 and followed, according to Chittenden and Richardson, the “usual route across the country to the Platte and up that stream past Fort Laramie, Independence Rock and South Pass.” A few days into the journey, the smallish caravan, heavily-laden with bachelors, expanded into a family-sized fleet of around 70 travelers. “At Sapling Grove, just below present-day Topeka, Kansas,” the Western Emigration Society, composed of several families who had come together for the purpose of emigrating to California and Oregon, joined Fitzgerald’s wagon train. (CR, v. 1, 194; Carriker, 44) 

As a consequence of the caravan’s size, and the inexperience of its members, there were a substantial number of accidents along the trail. As Carriker puts it, “mules ran away, horses became ill, wagons got stalled in mud,” and in a letter dated August 16, 1841, De Smet noted some of the mishaps that befell the Jesuits. “Father Mengarini,” he writes, “had six tumbles and Father Point quite as many; once while riding at full gallop my horse fell and I flew over his head, and not one of us in these various occurrences received the least scratch.” The Jesuit brothers, “who had become teamsters from necessity much more than from choice,” were often “astonished at finding themselves, one upon the croup, another on the neck, another among the hoofs, of their mules, without any clear idea of how they had come there, but thanking the God of the traveler that they had gotten off so easily.” (Carriker, 45; CR, v. 1, 300-301)  

While none of the accidents were serious, they did put the caravan well-behind schedule. Running a little over two weeks late, the wagon train reached South Pass on July 7, and by the time, it arrived at the site of the Green River rendezvous on July 24, the rendezvous had already taken place. While most of the attendees were long gone, there were a few stragglers at the site. According to Carriker, a “party of disenchanted pioneers on their way back to the states” was there, as well as Francis Xavier [François Saxa], son of Ignace Partui, who was waiting for the Jesuits in order to guide them to the Salish summer camp. (Carriker, 45) 

Seated: Victor, Kalispel; Alexander, Pend d'Oreille; Adolph, Salish; Seltis, Coeur d'Alene; Standing: Denis, Colville; Bonaventure, Coeur d'Alene; Pierre-Jean De Smet; Francis Xavier [François Saxa], c. 1857

To Idaho

At the rendezvous site, De Smet decided that he and the Jesuits, as well as Saxa, would not go directly to Salish territory but would stay with Fitzgerald and the Western Emigration Society families as far as Soda Springs, a stopping point on the trail, in present Caribou County, Idaho. De Smet described some of the “natural curiosities” he saw as he traveled through the Soda Springs area in a letter dated August 16, 1841. “Situated near this plain are a great many springs, differing in size and temperature. Several of them have a slight taste of soda, and the temperature of these is cold…The earth for some distance arounds resounds like an immense vault, and is apt to frighten the solitary traveler as he passes along.” (CR, v. 1, 302-303) 

Soda Springs on the Bear River, Caribou County, Idaho, 1871

The travelers arrived at Soda Springs in mid-August, and then went their separate ways. Wagon master Fitzpatrick, writes Carriker, “had business elsewhere and went off alone.” The emigrants who had opted for California moved south, and those bound for the Willamette Valley moved north toward Fort Hall, a Hudson’s Bay Company post on the Snake River in southeastern  Idaho. The Jesuits needed fresh horses for their journey to Salish country, so De Smet decided that he and Saxa would make a fast-track to Fort Hall, while the other Jesuits would continue northward with the Oregon-bound emigrants. (Carriker, 46) 

Fort Hall experienced something of a population explosion that mid-August of 1841. De Smet and Saxa arrived there soon after meeting up with “the vanguard of the Flatheads” on August 14, the “eve of the beautiful festival of the Assumption.” According to De Smet, the members of this group, who had “traveled upwards of 800 miles to meet” the Jesuits, were Wistilpo, the “chief of this little embassy;” Simon, “who had been baptized the preceding year, was the oldest of the nation, and was so burdened with the weight of years, that even when seated, he needed a stick for his support;” Francis, “a boy from six and  to seven years old, grandson of Simon;” Ignace La Jeune, whom De Smet called Ignatius; Pilchimo or Pelchimó, brother of one of the Native men slain by the Sioux at Ash Hollow; François Saxa, whom De Smet referred to as Francis Xavier; and Gabriel Prudhomme, a Canadian Metís, who had been adopted by the Salish and had been De Smet’s interpreter in 1840. According to Palladino, François’s brother Charles, was in this group as well.  (CR, v. 1, 291-292; Palladino, 30) 

Sohon, Charles "Lamoose," son of Ignace Partui, 1854

Sohon, Ignace La Jeune, 1854

In Montana

On August 18, the Jesuits began their journey to Salish homelands in western Montana, their initial destination being the camp of Salish leader Tjolzhitsay (whom De Smet renamed Paul) on the Three Forks of the Missouri River. A few days out, an advance guard of four “principal chiefs,” met up with the travelers somewhere on the Beaverhead River, and less than two weeks later, on August 30, the group arrived at their destination, “an extensive plan, at the western part of which the Flatheads lay encamped.” Taking Father Palladino’s advice, “We shall let the reader imagine the joy that must have filled the breasts of the Indians and their zealous apostles at the meeting!” (CR, v. 1, 304; CR, v. 1, 305; Palladino, 31) 

Hell Gate, near Missoula Montana, 1893

In early September, writes Palladino, the “Fathers, with an escort of a few lodges, started for the Bitter Root Valley, where the Mission was to be located and where, according to promise, the Indians were to join them in the fall.” The caravan, adds Palladino, “ascended the slope of the mountains, recrossing the main divide, and by the Deer Lodge Pass descended” into the Deer Lodge Valley. It then followed the Hell Gate River, which the priests christened St. Ignatius, and passed through Hell Gate, a narrow pass near present Missoula, Montana, that members of the Blackfoot Confederacy historically used “to inhibit would-be trespassers from invading their buffalo hunting lands on the plains adjacent to the Missouri River.” After a few more days of travel, the caravan arrived at the Bitterroot River, and on September 24, near Stevensville in present Ravalli County, Montana, the Jesuits chose a location for their “principal missionary station.” In a letter dated October 18, 1841, De Smet writes that the missionaries decided “unanimously to proclaim Mary the protectress” of their mission, which he, accordingly named, St. Mary’s. (Palladino, 31-32; CR, v. 1, 316) 

Fort Colville, United States, Washington Territory, 1879

Through Qlispe Country and Back Again

With the construction of St. Mary’s in progress, De Smet and 10 Salish men left the Bitterroot Valley on October 28 to travel to Fort Colville, a Hudson’s Bay Company post located in present northeastern Washington. The purpose of their journey, explains Palladino, was “to secure seed and other needed supplies for the Mission.” According to Tolan, De Smet also wanted to visit the Qlispe “who camped in the autumn on the borders” of the Clark Fork River. Historically, Tolan adds, non-Natives referred to these Qlispe as “Lower Kalispels (altitude-wise) or the Pend d’Oreilles of the Bay, to distinguish them from the Upper Kalispels, or the Pend d’Oreilles of the mountains. (These latter were in the Mission Valley, below Flathead Lake [present Montana].” (Palladino, 37; Tolan, 32) 

To reach Fort Colville, the travelers followed the Pend Oreille Trail that ran east-west from Qlispe homelands in western Montana to those in northeastern Washington. As De Smet shows in the letters he wrote describing his journey that autumn of 1841, the trail certainly lived up to its reputation as one of the most popular routes across the Bitterroot Mountains. Only a few days into his journey, a family of Coeur d’Alenes joined De Smet and the other travelers “on the road.” Then, at “the ford of Clark’s Fork,” “two encampments” of Qlispe, having gotten word of the approach of De Smet’s party, went “thither” to meet them. “Men, women and children,” writes De Smet, “ran to meet us, and pressed our hands with every demonstration of sincere joy.” In addition, as De Smet notes, although the Qlispe had never seen him before, “they knew all the prayers” he had taught the Salish the year before. “The fact is,” he explains, “on hearing of my arrival in the mountains, they deputed an intelligent young man to meet me, and who was also gifted with a good memory. Having learned the prayers and canticles, and such points as were most essential for salvation, he repeated to the village all he had heard and seen.” (CR, v. 1, 345-346; CR, v. 1, 346) 

Next, sometime after November 3, De Smet and the others encountered a Qlispe family that was traveling along the Clark Fork River. The women, he writes, “were rowing up the river their light canoe, made of fir-tree bark, which contained their children and all the baggage, the men followed along the bank with their rifles or bows in their hands in pursuit of game.” On November 4, De Smet and the Salish “entered a cedar and pine forest so dense that in its whole length” they “could scarcely see beyond the distance of twenty yards.” It took three days for the travelers to cross the forest, which De Smet describes as a “real labyrinth” in which, “from morning till night we did nothing but wind about to avoid thousands of trees, fallen from either fire, storms or age.” (CR, v. 1, 349) 

Alden, Kellispelm (Pend Oreille) Lake, 1856

But when the travelers emerged from the darkness of the forest, it was as if the scales had fallen from their eyes. “Our view,” writes De Smet, “extended over the whole surface of the lake called Pend d’Oreille, studded with small islands covered with woods: over its inlets and the hills which overlook them, and which have for the most part their base on the borders of the lake and rise by gradual terraces or elevations until they reach the adjoining mountains, which are covered with perpetual snow.” As magnificent as was this scene, another, claims De Smet, was greater. Before the travelers reached the lake, they “traversed a forest, which is certainly a wonder of its kind,” regarded by the Natives as “the finest in Oregon.” Each of the specimens there, according to De Smet, were “enormous in its kind,” in length and diameter. Many of the cedars measured 24 or 30 feet in circumference, and one measured 42 feet. A fallen cedar measured more than 200 feet in length. (CR, v. 1, 350)

Leaving the majesty of the forests behind them, De Smet and the Salish moved onward. On November 7, the travelers stopped “to rest at a Kalispel camp on a bay of Lake Pend Oreille,” according to Carriker. There, writes Carriker, “another party of travelers, eight men paddling two boats” appeared. One of the canoeists was a Salish man named Charles whom De Smet knew, his having worked for him as an interpreter in 1840. Charles, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, came bearing messages for De Smet from John McLoughlin, chief factor at the Company’s Fort Vancouver post. “How,” asks Carriker, “could the Hudson’s Bay Company know so much about” De Smet and his Salish companions? Soon after the Jesuits had arrived at Fort Hall back in mid-August, Carriker explains, post factor Frank Ermatinger had “dutifully alerted” his superiors at Company headquarters in Fort Vancouver “of the arrival of the Jesuits and their intentions in the Oregon Country.” (Carriker, 51) 

A week later, on November 15, “in the midst of a snowstorm,” De Smet and the Salish arrived at Fort Colville. For the next three days, the men repaired their saddles and packed their “provisions and seeds.” “Wherever one finds the gentlemen of the Hudson Bay Company,” writes De Smet, one is sure of a good reception,” and in De Smet’s case, the Fort Colville factor, Archibald McDonald, “went so far as to have his lady prepare and put among our provisions,” without De Smet’s knowledge, “all sorts of little extras, such as sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, butter, crackers, flour, poultry, ham and candles.” (McDonald’s “lady” was likely his wife, Jane Klyne, the daughter of a French-Canadian named Michel Klyne and Suzanne Lafrance; the couple had 13 children and remained together until McDonald's death.) (Carriker, 53; CR, v. 1, 357; Wikipedia, “Archibald McDonald”) 

Well-provided for, De Smet and the Salish began the return trip to St. Mary’s by the same route they took to Fort Colville. Along the way, De Smet met with Qlispes “who had repaired thither from different parts of the mountains to see” him. For example, on December 3, the feast of St. Francis Xavier, the priest “baptized sixty persons…of whom thirteen were adults.” Five days later, on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, De Smet and the Salish arrived at St. Mary’s. By this time, writes Carriker, “Brothers Huet, Specht, and Claessens had transformed Saint Mary’s from a temporary outpost into a permanent village. Fences now defined the fields, and a palisade bristling with three thousand stout stakes enclosed and protected the mission buildings. The chapel interior, constructed with no tools other than an ax, saw, and auger, accommodated an altar, balustrade, choir, seats, and columns.” (Carriker, 53) 

St. Mary's Mission Chapel, 1965

De Smet spent all of Christmas Day in the chapel, celebrating the first Mass at 7:00 in the morning and performing baptisms throughout the day and night. According to Palladino, De Smet baptized “115 Flat-Heads, led by their chiefs; 13 Nez Perces and their chief; a Blackfoot chief and his whole family.” De Smet described the holiday as “certainly an offering most acceptable to God and which, we trust, will draw down the dews of Heaven upon the Flat-Head nation and the neighboring tribes.” 

Conclusion:

During the coming year, from their base in the Bitterroot Valley, De Smet and the other Jesuits would do their part to “draw down the dews of Heaven” upon several of the tribes whose aboriginal territories bordered those of the Salish, including those in the present state of Idaho. In fact, in 1842, the Jesuits would establish the region’s second mission, Sacred Heart, in the heart of the aboriginal lands of the Coeur d’Alenes, a tribe many non-Natives called the Pointed Hearts. (Palladino, 35) 

Grace Period, 7: Crisscrossing

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. 

Dorel, Frédéric, “A Romantic Invented Tradition: Restoring the Seventeenth-Century Paraguayan Reductions in the Nineteenth-Century Rocky Mountains” in Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814-2014, edited by Kyle B. Roberts and Stephen R. Schloesser, Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2017. 

Garraghan, Gilbert J., S.J., Ph.D., The Jesuits of the Middle United States, Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1983. “Virtually Garraghan,” Jesuit Archives and Research Center, last visited July 30, 2021. 

Mallet, Edmond and Francis X. Reuss, “The Origin of the Flathead Mission of the Rocky Mountains,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1886-88, Vol. 2 (1886-88), pp. 174-205, American Catholic Historical Society. 

Palladino, L.B., S.J. Indian and White in the Northwest; or A History of Catholicity in Montana. John Murphy & Company, Baltimore, 1894. 

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

Tolan, Sister Providencia, S.P. A Shining from the Mountains, Sisters of Providence, Providence Mother House, Montreal, Canada, Copyright 1980 by The Sisters of Charity of Providence in Eastern Washington (Native Americans), last visited August 26, 2020. 

Wikipedia. “Archibald McDonald,” last visited July 30, 2021. 

Image Sources: (in order of appearance)

Wikimedia Commons. Fort Owen State Park, Bitterroot Valley, Montana, last visited July 30, 2021. 

Google Books. “To The Rocky Mountains,” The Indian Sentinel, Vol. 111, No. 2, April 1923, p. 51, last visited July 30, 2021. (Marquette University Special Collections and University Archives has a digital collection of The Indian Sentinel.) 

Wikimedia Commons. Father Gregory Mengarini, c. 1875, last visited July 30, 2021. 

Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries. DeSmet, Father Pierre Jean and Indian Chiefs at Close of the Oregon War, last visited August 30, 2021.

Wikimedia Commons. Soda springs, on Bear River. Caribou County, Idaho, last visited July 30, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. Outside Fort Hall, Snake River, Idaho, 1849, last visited August 3, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. Inside Fort Hall, Snake River, Idaho, 1849, last visited August 3, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. Charles "Lamousse," son of Ignace Partui, 1854, last visited August 3, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. Ignace La Jeune, 1854, last visited August 3, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. Hell Gate, near Missoula, Montana, last visited August 3, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. Fort Colville, United States, Washington Territory, 1879, last visited August 3, 2021.

Wikimedia Commons. Pfly, Clark Fork River, 2007, GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, last visited August 3, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. James Madison Alden, "Kellispelm or Pend'oreille lake," between 1857 and 1862, last visited August 3, 2021. 

Wikimedia Commons. St. Mary's Mission, 1965, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, MONT,41-STEV,1-4, last visited August 3, 2021.