Introduction
In September 1840, at their summer camp at Pierre’s Hole
in present southeastern Idaho, the Salish community of Montana’s Bitterroot
Valley greeted a stocky, 40-year-old man dressed in the black robes of a Jesuit
missionary with exclamations of joy. The man was Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J.,
and if the Salish regarded him as the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy that
foretold the arrival of men with white skins who wore black robes. De Smet, too, must have offered prayers of gratitude, his long-held dream of being a missionary
in the Rocky Mountains having come true. And while De Smet was the first Catholic
missionary to arrive in the Rocky Mountain region, he was far from being the first Jesuit in North America.
Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J.
Pierre-Jean De Smet was born on January 31, 1801, in
“Termonde, a prosperous, neat little town of East Flanders, Belgium” to a
wealthy and “socially prominent” family. Preferring action to academics, De
Smet bounced from one school to another until he ended up in a Jesuit seminary
near Brussels. There, he discovered the vocation to which he would devote his
life. According to his biographer, Robert C. Carriker, De Smet “listened in
rapt attention” as Father Charles Nerinkckx, a Jesuit missionary recruiter,
described “an America of rustic cities, rugged mountains, free-spirited rivers,
and dusky natives.” “The vision,” adds Carriker, “was irresistible” to the
20-year-old De Smet, who immediately volunteered “to join the Catholic
Missionary corps in America.” Only a few weeks later, on August 15, 1821,
Father Nerinkckx guided De Smet and nine other seminarians to Amsterdam where
they “boarded an American brig, prophetically named the Columbia, and set sail
for America.” (Palladino, 23; Carriker, 3)
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| Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J. |
During the long voyage to the “New World,” De Smet’s
conviction to become a priest did not waver, and after the Columbia docked in
Philadelphia, he entered the Jesuit novitiate at White Marsh, Maryland. Two
years into his training, De Smet’s heart must have raced when he learned that
the Maryland Jesuits would soon migrate to the new state of Missouri. In 1823,
the Right Reverend Louis Du Bourg, Superior of Upper Louisiana and Lower
Louisiana, needing “priests for the vast Louisiana Purchase,” had offered the
Maryland Jesuits 200 acres of land on the outskirts of St. Louis if they would
agree to assume responsibility for missionary work in the region. The Jesuits
jumped at the offer. Not only had the White Marsh seminary been founded on thin
soil, it was also on thin ice financially. (Carriker, 8)
Father Charles Van Quickenborne, Superior of the White
Marsh novitiate, led a group of 19 people to Missouri. Thirteen of the members
were Jesuits, either priests, brothers, or novices like Pierre-Jean De Smet,
and the other six people were the property of the Society of Jesus. The enslaved people were three married couples, Thomas and Molly Brown, Moses
and Nancy Queen, and Isaac and Susan Queen-Hawkins. After a rigorous journey that concluded with a 150-mile walk,
the migrants arrived in St. Louis on May 31. After a brief rest, Van
Quickenborne led “his tiny Jesuit community the final fifteen miles to their
new property at the Franco-Spanish village of Saint Ferdinand de Florissant.”
(Carriker 10)
Four years later, on September 23, 1827, De Smet received
the sacrament of Holy Orders; six years later, he applied for American
citizenship, and then promptly left the country. “In view of Father De Smet’s
family connections with some of the wealthiest and most influential people in
Belgium,” including his own father, Josse De Smet, Missouri Mission Superior,
Father Van Quickenborne, had decided to send Pierre-John to Europe to raise
money, “and, if possible, attract new recruits to the society.” (Carriker, 14)
The dutiful Jesuit reached Belgium early in 1834, and
spent the next nine months collecting both funds and goods for the Missouri
Mission. “Gratified by the results of his effort,” De Smet made plans in
November 1834 to sail back to North America. During the first leg of his return
journey, however, he experienced such severe seasickness that the ship’s
captain put him ashore in England so that he could receive medical treatment.
(Carriker, 15)
De Smet Falters
With a diagnosis of “an internal rupture of some sort,”
probably brought on by violent vomiting, De Smet spent the next month in bed at
doctor’s orders. According to Carriker, the injury was “a set-back without
parallel” that left the priest so depressed and discouraged that he began to
question his commitment to missionary work. “De Smet," writes Carriker,
"searched for God’s meaning in this untimely change of plans. Perhaps he
had only joined the Society of Jesus to further his romantic notions about faraway
lands and aboriginal people, and this was God’s way of punishing him for his
selfishness.” De Smet also fretted about the financial burden of his medical
treatment on his order and ultimately “convinced himself that he should
withdraw from the Society of Jesus but still honor his vows as a priest. He
would live the remainder of his life in Belgium as a parish priest.” The
Society’s Father General, John Roothaan, S.J., accepted De Smet’s resignation
in March 1835. (Carriker, 15)
De Smet Recovers
For the next two years, De Smet experienced "a
certain measure of satisfaction" working as a parish priest, but as his
body healed, so did his soul, and he asked for permission to re-enter the Society of Jesus. The order agreed, and in 1838, De Smet returned to the Missouri Mission,
where he was given his first assignment as a missionary: St. Joseph’s Mission
near Council Bluffs, Iowa, among the Potawatomi People.
A year later, when two members of the Bitterroot Valley Salish community, Pierre Gauché and
Young Ignace, arrived at St. Joseph's, De Smet was still at the mission. De Smet spent hours talking with the two men and, according to Carriker, eventually came to the conclusion that “if anyone should be assigned to a new
Flathead mission, he must be that person.” De Smet remained at St. Joseph’s for
five more months, but in February of 1840, he simply left the mission and
traveled to the motherhouse in St.
Louis. There, he begged Father Peter Verhaegen, Superior of the Missouri
Mission, to send him to the Salish. At first, Verhaegan denied De Smet's request but later changed his mind. Carriker claims that De Smet’s “eagerness
and ardent zeal for the work” convinced his Superior that “it was hardly possible
for us to make another choice.” (Carriker, 16; Carriker, 29; Carriker, 30)
Jesuits in North America
Pierre-Jean De Smet may have been the first Jesuit missionary to arrive in the Rocky Mountains, but he was far from being the first Jesuit in North America. Jesuit
missionaries arrived on the continent as early in the late sixteenth century, and
before their order was globally suppressed in the eighteenth century, they had established
missions throughout North America. From “the banks of the Rio Grande and the
Rappahannock, the Red River, the Missouri, and both sides of the Mississippi,”
writes Jesuit historian Robert I. Burns, Jesuits “had touched almost half of
the present fifty states, from Arizona to Minnesota and from Florida to New
York. They had explored Lower California and the Mississippi Valley, had passed
the Yellowstone, and were the first to reach Hudson Bay.” In fact, adds Burns,
the Jesuits established “a mission chain” in French Canada that rivaled
“Paraguay in fame, reaching from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Great
Lakes, and probing toward the secret Oregon Country beyond the Rockies.”
(Burns, 43)
As pervasive as Jesuit missions were in North America,
they could not escape the fate that befell all Jesuit missions in 1773. On the
cusp of the Napoleonic era, many European monarchs perceived the Society of
Jesus as a threat to their authority and insisted that Pope Clement XIV
suppress the Order. After doing as he was told “Some twenty-three thousand
Jesuits, 670 colleges, twenty-four universities, and 276 missions lost their
ecclesiastical status within the Catholic Church.” For nearly 30 years, writes
Burns, the “Jesuit spirit flickered low.” (Burns, 43)
By 1814, when the Order was officially reinstated, there
were “perhaps two dozen” Jesuits available “to restore and rebuild the
shattered structure” of Jesuit operations in the United States. Even by 1831,
when the first Inland Northwest Native delegation visited St. Louis, seat of
the order’s Missouri Mission, resources were still too low to support
missionary activities in the Rocky Mountains. By the time Pierre Gauché
and Ignace La Jeune visited St. Louis in 1839, the Missouri Mission had
recovered enough to spare a missionary for the Rocky Mountains. (Burns, 43)
Rocky Mountain Mission
In 1841, the Missouri Mission authorized the establishment
of the Rocky Mountain Mission, “a far-reaching missionary enterprise” located
within “a practically inaccessible zone” west of the Mississippi River that
included the present states of Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Oregon. During
the period of initial interchange between the first Jesuits and the Indigenous
Peoples of the region from 1840 to 1847, the Jesuits founded several missions,
including St. Mary’s among the Salish in 1841 and Sacred Heart among the
Schitsu’umsh (Coeur d’Alenes) in 1842. The missionaries also founded two
missions among the Qlipsé, St. Michael’s in 1844 and St. Ignatius in 1844 and 1845.
(McKevitt, 49; Dorel, 124)
In the Rocky Mountain Mission, according to Frédéric
Dorel in “A Romantic Invented Tradition: Restoring the Seventeenth-Century
Paraguayan Reductions in the Nineteenth-Century Rocky Mountains,” the Jesuits,
led by Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, hope to achieve an “Empire of Christian
Indians.” Under this model, Dorel explains, Indigenous Peoples were seen as
naturally innocent, and the role of the Jesuits was “to stand above the powers
of the Indian and white communities. Their aim was not to adapt the Indians to
white “American” values but rather to adapt the Natives to superior (and
specifically, Catholic) values.” (Dorel, 125)
De Smet’s Toolbox
According to Dorel, De Smet based his “missionary
strategy on four main tools.” The primary tool was language. “Mastering the
local languages enabled him to communicate with the leaders and the shamans,
who would then convince the tribe. He was also able to translate the prayers
and to organize the confessions.” Dorel adds that the first Jesuits to the
Rockies “became attached to the study of the Salish language, which they
immediately adopted as the official language” of the Mission. Jesuit scholar
Gerald McKevitt echoes Dorel in “Jesuit Missionary Linguistics in the Pacific
Northwest: A Comparative Study” when he writes that the “ability to speak
aboriginal tongues was crucial for successful evangelization. That language
serves as a key to the minds and hearts of a people, and to their culture, was
a truism recognized by all effective missionaries.” (Dorel, 126-7; McKevitt,
“Jesus Missionary Linguistics in the Pacific Northwest,” 281)
The second component in De Smet’s plan relied on technology.
“European technologies in the domains of agriculture, architecture, and
medicine” were meant to “disrupt” Native structures, writes Dorel. The “clock
spoke, the plow commanded the plants, reading and writing enabled missionaries
to communicate at a distance.” The third and fourth tools were music and visual
art. “Music,” writes Dorel, “became the major means of communication with the
Natives, as well as between them and the afterlife. Music rang out as a divine
voice.” Visual art, displayed in sculptures and paintings, was used to teach
“invisible mysteries” and “visible miracles.”
(Dorel, 127)
Paraguay Reductions
The romantic model under which De Smet and the other
Jesuits labored also “fueled” their “desires to recover and “restore” the lost
Paraguayan reductions” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “The
Reductions,” explains Burns, “were a confederation of autonomous native towns,
which covered large parts of modern Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile,
Brazil, and Bolivia. They enjoyed a kind of independent dominion status under
the Spanish crown. Europeans were excluded by law from the area.” (Dorel, 100;
Burns, 41)
“As many as a hundred Reductions were founded,” each
“carefully laid out on much the same pattern and holding from 350 to 7,000
souls,” writes Burns. Reductions elected their “own rulers and officials,”
maintained police departments and armies, and had “homes, workshops, hospital,
school, and farms,” all of which were centered around “an ambitious church of
some size and magnificence.” Their economies were communal, and men, as well as
women, “put in an eight-hour working day.” (Burns, 41)
In addition to economic organization, the Jesuits also
organized social and cultural activities. Because musical expression was
considered especially significant, every reduction, writes Burns, “had its
orchestra and choral group.” De Smet extended this practice to the Rocky
Mountain Mission where he and the other Jesuits “quickly discovered that the
Salish, as well as other Inland Northwest Natives, had a musical legacy of
their own,” according to Chad S. Hamill in Songs of Power and Prayer in the
Columbia Plateau. De Smet, Hamill adds, was not only delighted by the
musical “acuity” the Salish demonstrated but also realized that song was their
“primary vehicle for spiritual expression.” (Burns, 30; Hamill, 39)
Hamill explains that the “Salish enthusiasm for melody
was nothing new. For millennia, tribes throughout the Plateau had continually
offered melodies in the form of prayers to pierce the veil that separated them
from the realm of their ancestors and their spirit guides. Reading the spirits
required a good heart and strong voice resounding with resolve and conviction,
an approach that often offended the delicate European sensibilities of the
Jesuits in the Rocky Mountain missions…These priests were reacting to the
indigenization of the hymns—absorbed, reconstructed, and re-sung as expressions
of Native identity.” (Hamill, 42)
Reduction SOPs
If the Reduction concept was the policy upon which Jesuit
missions were based, there were also standard operating procedures that the
missionaries followed to establish and operate their missions. According to
Burns, the first step a missionary took was to travel to Native homelands to
meet with individual members of the community. If he believed the community
showed a sufficient commitment to conversion, he would proceed. The mission
site, writes Burns, was selected “with an eye to protection from White
contacts, and for centrality to other tribes. A cross was raised with due
solemnities. Plans were carefully drawn, trees felled, and roads opened. The
Jesuits would survey, fence, and plant a farm.” A farm was meant to do more
than provide food; according to Burns, it was also “meant to furnish an
alternate economy” to the traditional seasonal economies of the Indigenous
Peoples.
The Jesuits also constructed buildings on the site. A
chapel was built first, followed by other structures, such as a house for the
missionaries, a barn, and often, a hospital and an infirmary. The buildings
were not makeshift; for example, the chapel at St. Mary’s Mission held “four to
five hundred” people. (Burns, 51)
In addition, according to Burns, a “bewildering variety
of materials had to be imported or contrived. Bells, statues, vestments, and
the ecclesiastical appurtenances were needed.” On the secular level,
much-needed saws were often “devised from wagon tires, windows from scraped
deerskin, rope from woven grass, and wheels from tree sections.” A mission was
meant to become self-sustaining, “producing its own bricks, candles, soap,
smoking pipes, potato sugar, bronze crosses, chisels, bellows…and the like. In
the Inland Northwest, Fort Vancouver on the west side of the present state of
Washington, was the closest place to access farm animals, such as cattle,
poultry, and pigs, as well as seed and agricultural implements. (Burns, 51; Burns,
49)
As the mission was being built around them, its
inhabitants – Native and Jesuit – followed a strict agenda of daily activities.
An adult Native’s day began with Mass and instruction and ended with more
instruction and prayer. Native children were instructed in the afternoon, and
according to Burns, the Jesuits often used “pedagogical devices, such as puppet
shows, awards, songs, and recitation,” which members of the order had used for
centuries. Likewise, the priests used other techniques from the Jesuitical
teaching toolbox, such as “emulation, rapid shifts of attention, formal
assembly, and concentration of influential individuals” to provide instruction
in secular subjects, particularly reading, writing, and arithmetic. The routine
of daily instruction and worship was balanced with extravagant celebrations on
major feast days. The celebrations, according to Burns, included both
“spiritual and secular festivities.” Displays of oratory, horse racing, and
musical performances were among the most popular activities. (Burns, 50)
“Miracle of Grace”
Neither the nobility of the Reduction concept, nor the
specificity of De Smet’s toolbox, nor the practicality of the order’s standard
operating procedures brought about “a miracle of grace” in the Rocky Mountain
Mission. Like the Paraguay Reductions, the Rocky Mountain Reduction did not
succeed, but the mission did experience a brief grace period in which
“unexpected points of convergence” between its missionaries and Inland
Northwest Natives were “revealed.” (Chittenden, 125; McKevitt, 49)
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