Grace Period, 3: The Salish Delegations

About Grace Period

Introduction:

Jason Lee, the first Protestant Christian missionary to respond to the made-up call to evangelize the “Flatheads” of the Rocky Mountains, arrived in the Pacific Northwest in 1834. Other Protestant missionaries, including Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding, soon followed, and as they migrated westward, the Salish of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley journeyed eastward. Most likely inspired by the ceaseless imploring of Ignace Partui, a Catholic Iroquoian who had migrated to the Bitterroot Valley years before, the Salish organized three times for to acquire a "black-robe," first in 1835, then in 1837, and lastly in 1839; this final delegation succeeded where the first two had failed. A year later, the Salish got their black-robe, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, the first of many European Jesuits who would attempt to achieve the greater glory of God as missionaries among the Indigenous peoples of the American West.  

Bitterroot Valley, near Stevensville, Montana

Delegation of 1835

Many western historians, including Josephy, Fahey, Palladino, Garraghan, and Mellis agree that the Delegation of 1835 was composed of three people: Ignace Partui and his two young sons, “lads between ten and twelve years of age,” according to priest-historian L.B. Palladino, S.J. In his 1894 history, Indian and White in the Northwest, Palladino explains that Partui took the boys with him “for the sole purpose of having them baptized, and probably also confirmed; although of this latter we find no specific evidence.” He adds, “Ignace started with the intention of going to Canada, the place of his birth, where he thought he could more easily obtain missionaries for the Flat-Heads, which, as said, was the main object of his long, perilous journey. Learning, however, on his way that there were Jesuit Fathers at S. Louis, he turned his steps in that direction, and reached the place late in the Fall, after frightful privations and sufferings.” (Palladino, 19)

Partui, however, did not lead his sons to St. Louis; instead, he took the boys to Florissant where St. Stanislaus, the Jesuit seminary of the Missouri Mission, was located. There, a Belgian Jesuit named Father Helias d’Huggeghem instructed and then baptized the two youngsters. As their father requested, the eldest son was given the baptismal name of Charles, and the younger, Francis Xavier. Writing in The Jesuits of the Middle United States, Garraghan adds that Partui appealed to the priests to enroll his sons in the seminary but was refused; his request that a priest be sent “to the roughly 6,000 Inland Northwest Native souls whom he represented” was also turned down. (Garraghan, v. 2, ch. 24, p. 12 of 119) 

After leaving the seminary, according to Garraghan, the Partui family headed for “Liberty, Missouri, on the frontier of the state, where they counted on spending the winter with their [own] people.” Josephy explains that, in the early 1830s, Iroquois trappers and their families “had been making their way to the States and settling, for a while at least, in a village of former French trappers and voyageurs that had been established in 1826 at the site of present-day Kansas City, Missouri.” Garraghan also mentions a group of “Catholic Iroquois Indians” who “emigrated from the Rocky Mountain regions” to Kansas City…Of the thirteen baptisms administered by Father Benedict Roux on February 23, 1834, the first recorded in the history of Kansas City, two were of Iroquois-Flatheads (as the register describes them).” (Garraghan, v. 2, c. 24, p. 12 of 119; Josephy, 670; Garraghan, v. 2, c. 24, p. 4 of 119) 

In the spring of 1836, according to John C. Mellis (another priest-historian), writing in “Ignace Partui: Iroquois Evangelist to the Salish, ca. 1780-1837,” the Partui family left Missouri and eventually reached home safely; both Garraghan and Palladino claim the same, but another historian, Sister Providencia Tolan, offers a different ending of the story. In A Shining from the Mountains, Tolan claims that when Partui arrived home, he arrived without his sons. She cites an oral tradition “among the descendants of Ignace La Mousse [Partui] on the Flathead Reservation” that the boys’ mother became so outraged when she discovered that her sons were not with their father that she “went to St. Louis by herself to bring them home.” (Mellis, 213; Tolan, 23)  

The Delegation of 1837

The story of the Delegation of 1837 is a tale of courage and cowardice in which the hero and the villain fulfill their destinies amid great violence. While the story ends on the plains of western Nebraska, it begins in the Inland Northwest in the traditional homelands of two Native peoples, the Salish and the Spokane. The story begins in the spring of 1836 when William H. Gray, an “ambitious, self-assured young man of 26,” as Josephy describes him, appeared to Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding in St. Louis as they prepared to journey westward to establish missions in the Pacific Northwest.  According to Josephy, Gray informed Whitman and Spalding that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which had authorized their missions, had also assigned Gray “to join the group as a mechanic and helper.” Had the Board adequately examined Gray’s suitability for mission work, adds Josephy, it would have found that he was “an unhappy choice to dispatch to the Indians, for in time he proved to be a restless, impatient fault-finder as well as narrow and bigoted.” Indeed, Gray also proved an unhappy choice for the Whitmans and the Spaldings. On the journey west, he bickered with his fellow evangelists, “complained about everything,” and incessantly pressed Whitman to authorize him to set up his own mission among the Salish. Once in the West, Whitman relented to Gray’s demands, and in late March 1837, Gray left for western Montana. Yet, before he reached Salish territory, he changed his mind. (Josephy, 146; Josephy, 153)   Probably somewhere around present Spokane, Washington, Gray decided to postpone setting up a mission for the Salish; instead, he would “take some Indian horses to the States that summer to exchange for cattle for the Salish, and while in the East would visit the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston and ask its members to send out a reinforcement of personnel to help him establish a mission for the Salish-speaking peoples.” To this end, Gray left the Spokane country on April 5 with a Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) brigade bound for the Green River rendezvous. (Josephy, 164)  According to Josephy, the brigade crossed the Bitterroot Mountains via the Clark Fork River, so it must have headed north toward Qlispe country to use the east-west Pend Oreille Trail over the mountains. That the travelers “paused” at “Flathead House,” a Hudson’s Bay Company post near present Thompson Falls in northwestern Montana, further substantiates the conjecture. In addition, Palladino suggests that Gray and the HBC men went north before they headed south for the rendezvous; he writes, “Instead of taking the usual route more to the south,” Gray “purposely passed through the Bitter Root Valley” (in present central-western Montana) to scout out a potential Presbyterian mission site. (Josephy, 167; Palladino, 20)  At this point, however, Palladino and Josephy offer different interpretations of when and where Gray’s brigade met up with the hero of the story, Ignace Partui. Palladino writes that Partui and four other men – three Salish and one Nez Perce – left the Bitterroot Valley in the summer of 1837 to travel to St. Louis for the purpose of acquiring a priest; this party, he adds, met up with Gray and the HBC brigade at Fort Laramie in present Wyoming. Josephy, on the other hand, writes that Gray and Partui met in Montana at Flathead House. There, he writes, “a large part” of the Salish tribe and “some Iroquois members” of it joined the fur brigade and “moved south” with it to the rendezvous, unlike Gray. (Palladino, 20; Josephy, 167)  Gray, according to Josephy, grew impatient with the slow-moving brigade and took off on his own with a small group of Natives. Near Fort Hall in present southern Idaho, Gray’s group overtook another rendezvous-bound Hudson’s Bay Company brigade and traveled with it to the rendezvous. There, Gray ran into an acquaintance, Salish leader Tjolzhistay (Big Face in English, Grand Visage in French), and Gray agreed to take his two sons with him to receive religious instruction in the East. Soon, Gray’s impatience re-surfaced, and when his badgering failed to budge the fur caravan with which he had planned to travel, he once again took off on his own, against the advice of the fur men. Gray left the rendezvous on July 25 with Tjolzhistay’s sons, Ignace Partui, and a group that included three French Canadians, a Métis youth, and several Native men. At Fort Laramie, writes Josephy, Gray was again warned that he was “courting disaster by starting east alone,” but even after the departure of one of his white companions, Gray “pushed on blithely, down the Platte.” (Josephy, 168)  Ash Hollow, Nebraska

On August 7, the inevitable happened when a band of Lakota Sioux attacked the group at Ash Hollow in the North Platte Valley of present Nebraska. Gray and the other travelers, Josephy writes, scrambled to “a defensive position on top of a hill” as the battle began. He adds that a French trader with the Lakotas shouted out to Gray that the Lakotas “only wanted to kill the Flatheads, and that Gray and his white companions could save themselves by coming out and surrendering.” Gray, after compelling the two French Canadians and the Métis youth to join him, stepped out into the open, and the Lakotas swarmed past the whites and killed all the Natives, including Ignace Partui and Tjolzhistay’s young sons. According to Palladino, Partui could have avoided death. “Ignace,” he writes, “being Iroquois and habited like a white man, had also been told to stand apart with the whites, but the brave fellow chose the lot of his adopted brethren and died with the rest.” (Josephy, 168; Palladino, 20-21)  

The Lakotas, writes Josephy, held Gray and the others as captives until the next day when they set them free with “a few horses on which to subsist as they made their way to the settlements.” He adds that “Gray had been wounded twice in the head, and thought himself lucky to have survived. But the Sioux and their French friend spread the story across the plains about the white man’s cowardice, and in the mountains the Flatheads and their trapper allies waited angrily for Gray’s return.” (Josephy, 168)  

The next year, 1838, Gray returned to the Northwest, but the only retribution he suffered was delivered by a group of drunken trappers during the annual summer rendezvous, held that year on the Popo Agie River in present Wyoming. Gray and the missionaries he had recruited in the East had traveled west with a fur caravan bound for the rendezvous. On July 4, according to Josephy, “the trappers’ carousing reached a patriotic pitch, and that night some of the mountain men, who had been eying Gray, decided to avenge the deaths of their Flathead friends.” The men stormed the tent in which Gray was hiding, but “luck was with him,” writes Josephy. “The men kept yelling and swearing and then began to sing. Gradually, they became good natured…and staggered away.” Josephy, 176)  

Gray’s good luck continued after he returned to Oregon; there he became one of the state’s leading citizens, active in politics and, in 1870, publishing A History of Oregon. Perhaps some satisfaction can be taken in knowing that Gray’s book received less than enthusiastic reviews. Noted Oregon historians Frances Fuller Victor and George Bancroft both condemned it as an acrimonious and dishonest tirade disguised as history. (Josephy, 176)  

Delegation of 1839

After learning of the deaths of Partui and the other Native members of the Delegation of 1837, “two men,” writes Palladino in Indian and White in the Northwest, “both Iroquois, stood up and announced themselves willing and ready to go and bring the Black Robes.” The two men were Pierre Gauché (“Left-handed Peter”) and Le Jeune Ignace (Young Ignace). According to yet another priest-historian, Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., in The History of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest, Pierre and Ignace left their Bitterroot Valley homelands in the summer of 1839 and traveled with a “Hudson’s Bay Company brigade that floated down the Yellowstone River to the Missouri and on to St. Louis.” Unpredictably, writes John Fahey in his book The Flathead Indians, the traditional enemies of the Salish, the Blackfoot, were nowhere to be seen during the journey, and on September 18, Pierre and Ignace reached “St. Joseph Mission among the Potowatomies at Council Bluffs without incident.” (Palladino, 21; Schoenberg, History of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest (HCC), 49; Fahey, The Flathead Indians, 69-70) 

At the mission, Pierre and Ignace visited with the missionaries, one of whom was Pierre-Jean De Smet. According to Schoenberg, De Smet “was ecstatic” to meet the two men, and he “spent hours with them speaking in French which both Indians could understand, and questioning them about all particulars related to their nation. He offered to accompany them to their homes and composed for them a letter to his superiors in St. Louis, whence the Iroquois were determined to go.” (Schoenberg, HCC, 49) 

After about a month, Pierre and Ignace resumed their journey to St. Louis. There, they visited the city's Catholic cathedral and met with Joseph Rosati, Bishop of the Diocese of St. Louis, and with Father Peter Verhaegen, Superior of the Jesuit’s Missouri Mission. According to Garraghan in The Jesuits of the Middle United States, the two Iroquois men “succeeded in interesting Bishop Rosati and the Jesuits in the object of their visit,” and according to Mellis, they also received the sacraments of Confession, Holy Eucharist, and Confirmation. (Garraghan, v. 2, ch. 24, 248) 

“Assured that a missionary would be sent out to the Rocky Mountains the following spring,” writes Garraghan, Pierre and Ignace began their journey back to the Rocky Mountains on October 20, 1839. At Westport, just outside of St. Louis, the two men decided that Ignace would remain there “to await the arrival of the promised missionary” and guide him to the Rocky Mountains the next spring. Pierre, on the other hand, would return to Salish country to report the good news. (Garraghan, v. 2, ch. 24, 248) 

Conclusion:

“A great desire to have some Black Robes in their midst” having taken “hold of their souls,” the Salish of the Bitterroot Valley Salish finally achieved their goal in 1839. The next year, Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet arrived for the first time in the Rocky Mountains, and while he never settled among the Salish as their missionary, he did establish their mission, St. Mary’s, in 1841. With St. Mary’s as their headquarters, De Smet and the other missionaries of the Rocky Mountain Mission built a network of missions throughout the Pacific Northwest. (Palladino, 10) 

Grace Period, 4: Rocky Mountains Jesuits

Content Sources:

Fahey, John. The Flathead Indians. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman and London, 1974.  

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. 

Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1965. 

Mellis, John C. "Ignace Partui: Iroquois Evangelist to the Salish, ca. 1780-1837," International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 33, No. 4, October 2009, last visited March 12, 2021. 

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

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. 

Image Sources in order of appearance:

"Peter Gaucher and Little Ignace (After a painting by Geo. Catlin." Palladino, L.B., S.J. Indian and White in the Northwest; or A History of Catholicity in Montana, John Murphy & Company, Baltimore, 1894, inset opposite p. 22. 

Wikimedia Commons. File: Bitterroot-mountains-from-lee-metcalf-wildlife-refuge-near-stevensville-montana-may-2011-rogermpeterson-005 (5882205805).jpg, last visited December 16, 2022. 

Wikimedia Commons. Unknown NPS photographer, Ash Hollow, Nebraska, last visited April 8, 2021.