NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Stories—by the early 19th century, that’s all that remained of the early French Jesuits and their missions among the Iroquois. Some tribes hadn’t seen the men they called “Black Robes” for more than a century. But they still told stories about the priests and the God they proclaimed.
In 1823, some of those Iroquois married into the Salish tribe and repeated the stories of the Black Robes to their new brothers. After eight years of listening to the stories, the Salish decided to look for a Black Robe who could come teach them about God. Due to sickness and hostile tribes, it took four tries and seven years before a Salish delegation successfully made the trip from modern-day Wyoming to St. Louis. When they arrived, the Jesuits they found promised to send Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet back with them.
At the time, the Belgian-born DeSmet had just returned from establishing a mission for the Potawatomi Indians. Although DeSmet arrived in America in 1821 while still a seminarian, poor health and other responsibilities had limited his contact with Native Americans. From 1838 on, however, he devoted the entirety of his priestly ministry to serving them.
As for the Salish, in 1840 DeSmet found the tribe in present-day Wyoming. There, 1,600 Native Americans awaited him. Some had traveled nearly 800 miles to meet him. Within a month, he baptized two great chiefs and 350 others.
After establishing St. Mary’s Mission in southern Montana, DeSmet entrusted its care to others. He then spent the next 33 years on the move—negotiating treaties for the federal government, crossing the Atlantic 16 times to raise money for Native American missions, and traversing more than 180,000 miles ministering to tribes spread across the West.
Through it all, however, St. Mary’s Mission remained his favorite. And before his death on May 23, 1873, he attempted to pay the Salish one last visit.
He found the mission abandoned, his friends dead, and their children the victims of a government perpetually unfaithful to its promises.
