History: "Jesuits in Oregon" - St. Francis Xavier's Mission ********************************************************************************* USGENWEB ARCHIVES(tm) NOTICE: ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/or/orfiles.htm ********************************************************************************* Transcribed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: W. David Samuelsen - April 2002 ************************************************************************ Chronological List of Jesuits in Oregon "Jesuits in Oregon" 1844-1959, Rev. Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., published June 1959 by the The Oregon-Jesuit to commemorate the Centennial Year in Oregon. No copyright, not registered. St. Francis Xavier's Mission 1844 When Indians of the far western plains and mountains sent a delegation from their number to the east to seek "Black Robes," their historic appeal bore strange fruit. Protestant missionaries were the first to come to them. Having wives and lacking the celibates cassocks that Indians had come to expect, they were rejected; and, thus, the Indians renewed their appeal by making other dangerous expeditions to the east to obtain "Black Robes." Father DeSmet Arrives Father Peter DeSmet, S.J., was the first priest to comply with their request. He made his first journey to the far west in the summer of 1840, reaching at that time a point near the Montana-Wyoming border. After satisfying himself that missions were sorely needed, he returned to the east for others to help him and made his second journey to the west in 1841, establishing in that year the first mission in Montana St. Mary s Among the Flat-heads. Fr. DeSmet s activities in the interior were known to other missionaries: Protestants, who were well-established by then in the lower Columbia and in several specific locations upriver; and Catholics, who had come two or three years earlier to work among French Canadian voyageurs in the general vicinity of Fort Vancouver. The latter, Fathers Francis Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers of the secular clergy, had enjoyed an extraordinary success during these years with Indians of the coastal regions. They, too, wanted help. With the assistance of Dr. John McLoughlin of the Honorable Hudsons Bay Company. Fr. Blanchet dispatched an invitation to Fr. DeSmet to come to Oregon in order that they might discuss their common cause and arrange to have Jesuit missionaries in Oregon. In this warm invitation, Dr. McLoughlin attached another, urging the same matter. Church and State in Oregon had spoken in the person of the Vicar General and the Governor of the Honorable Hudsons Bay Company. Fr. DeSmet was only too happy to respond. Vancouver Visited When the spring of 1842 released him from the prison of the Bitter Root Mountains snow, he hastened via the Columbia to Fort Vancouver, his great Belgian head bulging with schemes for countless missions on every bend of the river. He arrived at the fort in June and was given an "old-world" reception by both Church and State. Many pious devotions, broken by long weighty consultations, followed. During these, it was decided that Fr. DeSmet should return to St. Louis as rapidly as possible to gather men and equipment for a Jesuit mission in Oregon. Fr. DeSmet was in St. Louis by the end of October. After making a brief tour through the more Catholic of American cities, plucking them as clean as honest begging allowed, he embarked for his native Belgium to repeat the performance. By January, 1844, satisfied with his gleanings, he chartered a ship, gathered his 5 Jesuits and 6 Sisters of Notre Dame Du Namur on its decks, and ordered the captain to set his sails. First Sisters Arrive The "Indefatigable" had a prosperous voyage around Cape Horn. On July 31, 1844, Feast of St. Ignatius, it crossed the perilous bar at the mouth of the Columbia and cast anchor off the banks of Astoria. The next day the 6 sisters went ashore to visit the home of a certain Mr. Birnie, who gave them a warm welcome and introduced them to his family of many daughters. These were the first sisters to set foot in Oregon. Fr. DeSmet, characteristically impatient to be moving, found several Indians who were willing to take him to Fort Vancouver in a dug-out canoe. He hastened away with them while the more cumbersome "Indefatigable" proceeded cautiously up the river. Five days later, when the ship arrived at the fort, he was on hand to welcome it. With him was Dr. McLoughlin, the doctor s wife, Dr. Barclay, and many others Indians and white who gaped with wonder while the sisters stepped daintily ashore. After a respite of 9 days, made altogether delightful by the hospitality of Dr. McLoughlin, the gay little group prepared themselves for the last stretch of their across-the-world journey. Fr. Blanchet had come from St. Paul s during the interlude to escort them, and his attention to their needs was exceeded only by his anxiety to get the sisters to their destination. On August 14, they set forth again in 4 canoes and a small sloop. Like swans, the little flotilla coasted down the Columbia and entered the Willamette cautiously, their wet oars flashing in the late afternoon sunshine. When dusk fell, they camped on the bank of the river on the present site of Portland. That night mosquitoes kept them awake, but the next morning, after Fr. Blanchet had said the Mass of the Assumption and all had received Holy Communion, they were eager to embark again. Two days later their voyage ended. The flotilla arrived at St. Paul on the Willamette at 11 in the morning, August 17, 1844. This marked an end and a beginning, but the former fades away in the blazing glory of the latter the beginning of convent schools in Oregon and the arrival of the Jesuits. Mission Site Selected After a TeDeum had been sung to thank God for the biscuits and salt pork of their journey, as well as their safe deliverance, the sisters were dispatched by horse-drawn cart to their partly completed convent some 6 miles distant. The Jesuits accepted Fr. Blanchet s gracious hospitality and, during the following week, selected a site for their mission. Their choice, made after considerable discussion, was a pleasantly wooded tract near St. Paul s on the bank of the river. Fr. DeSmet was in ecstasies over it. "In no part of this region," he wrote, "have I met with more luxurious growth of pine, fir, elm, ash, oak, button ball, and yew trees. The intervening country is beautifully diversified with shadowy groves and smiling plains, whose rich soil yields abundant harvests, sufficient for the maintenance of a large establishment." It is no wonder the Jesuits turned down the offer of the Methodists, who wanted to sell them the mission they were abandoning. Fr. DeSmet reported it to be "entirely destitute of wood and arable land;" and though, according to Bancroft, the Methodists had spent a quarter of a million dollars on it, Fr. DeSmetwould have no part of it. He wanted a luxuriant forest of "oak, button- ball, and yew trees" and on the site chosen, he surely had got them. Dedicating their new mission to a brother Jesuit, St. Francis Xavier, Fr. DeSmet ordered work to be started without delay. With the aid of French Canadians, brush was cleared away, 3 shops erected, and lastly a 2-story log house was begun, measuring 45,x 35 and containing 15 rooms, which Fr. DeSmet piously hoped would soon be filled with missionaries. Fr. DeSmet summoned Fr. Peter De Vos, S.J., from the Coeur d Alene Mission in Idaho, to direct the new foundation, then departed in high spirts with visions of a greater St. Francis Xavier s to fill his head while he visited other tribes of the upper Columbia. Missionary Work Begins Fr. DeVos arrived in September. Since he was the only Jesuit who knew more than a scattering of English, he became a teacher for all. They studied while they built their house and barns. Nor was this all. They had come across the world to be missionaries, so they spent part of their time in apostolic work each in his own way. Fr. Ravalli, a skilled doctor of medicine, visited the lodges of Indians throughout the entire area, treating them for a mysterious "bloody flux," which had struck every family. Father Vercruysse preached and said Mass for the French Canadians at Grand Prairie, where he supervised the building of the Church of St. Louis, the most beautiful and grandest in Willamette." Fr. Nobili worked among whites and Indians at Fort Vancouver, and Fr. DeVos undertook the spiritual care of English-speaking Catholics at Oregon City. Meanwhile, the sisters finished their convent and opened a school for Catholic children. Certain people in the east, who called themselves "Know Nothings," would have been dismayed to see how much Catholic activity there was on the Willamette. Since Father DeVos was extraordinarily successful at Oregon City, it was decided by his superiors that he should take up residence there. Fr. Accolti succeeded him as superior of St. Francis Xavier s in May, 1845. Before his departure for the upper Columbia, 2 years later, Fr. DeVos built the first Catholic Church in Oregon City, which he called St. John s, and, for good measure, converted 2 very prominent Americans to the Catholic faith, Peter Burnett, who later became the first governor of California, and Dr. J. E. Long, Secretary of the Oregon Provisional Government. The Forty-Niners In. 1849, the Gold Rush fever struck Oregon. Rushing off to California, the frontiersmen left Oregon desolate. "Gold, gold, gold," cried Fr. Accolti from the silence of St. Francis Xavier s. "It s the watchword of the day. Go where you will, the people speak of nothing but gold . . . No one can hold these people back, Everybody is leaving, and the country remains a desert." In 1852, the sisters, for lack of students, closed their school and followed the prospectors not to seek gold but to teach their children in San Francisco. Ironically, Frs. Nobili and Accolti preceded them, at the urgent request of the Vicar General in San Francisco. Fr. Accolti, especially, had been very outspoken in his defense of the Oregon Mission. "This country," he stoutly assured the Jesuit General when there was talk of closing St. Francis Xavier s, "is going to become in a very short time one of the richest and most flourishing in the Union." To other Jesuits, he dispatched glowing accounts of Oregon that would have done justice to the best real estate promoters on the Pacific. "I assure you that there is no humbug in what I state," he said, and, no doubt, he was right; but today his fame, like Fr. Nobili s, lies in California, where he took over an ailing college and built upon its foundation the great University of Santa Clara. The General of the Jesuits, Fr. Roothaan, ordered the Willamette property to be sold in 1854, partly because the work of the Jesuits was no longer needed in Oregon, and partly because St. Francis Xavier s on the Willamette was too remote from the mountain missions to serve as their headquarters. The final sale of this property to 3 devout Germans, whose descendants, the Schultheises and the Nieblers, are still prominent in the Northwest, was concluded on September 26, 1868. This brought to an end the first period of Jesuit activity in Oregon. Except for an occasional passage of a missionary to or from the interior, it was 20 years before Fr. DeSmet s confreres returned. By that time, the great "Black Robe" of the western Indians had said his last word. He was in his grave near St. Louis, Missouri, at the heart of the continent he had crossed many times.