Old Missoula

Blackrobe Arrival Paved the Way for White Settlers in Bitter Root and Western Montana

The story of Missoula is not complete without relating the events that led to the settlement, before the Garden City’s founding, of the Bitter Root Valley by the white man in earlier years.

One of the favorite subjects of the late Arthur L. Stone, founder of the Montana State University School of Journalism and onetime editor and manager of The Missoulian, was the coming of the missionaries or blackrobes to western Montana.

It was Dean Stone’s belief that the establishment on the first Sunday of October 1841 of St. Mary’s Mission at what is now Stevensville in the Bitter Root Valley marked the real beginning of Montana. Other trails had led into and through the region, but they had doubled back. This was the trail which found its journey’s end in Montana.

Believed in Greater God

The Salish tribes occupying what is now western Montana had a vague belief in the existence of a god greater than any of those they worshipped. Sometime before 1831 they encountered someone from the east – Canadian voyagers, trappers or possibly a band of westward traveling Iroquois – who told them of the deity of whom they had dreamed.

In 1831, two messengers of the Salish reached St. Louis. By use of the sign language they made known their urgent pleas that blackrobes be sent to give them directly the messages of the new gospel they so ardently craved. These two messengers never returned to the Bitter Root Valley – it was believed they were killed on their westward journey through the Sioux country.

Second Journey Made

In 1835 the journey was made again to St. Louis. A promise was received from Jesuit headquarters that as soon as possible missionaries would be sent. When no missionaries appeared after two years a party of five Salish Indians headed for St. Louis, but they were killed in a battle with a band of 300 Sioux in the lower Missouri country.

Records of the Sioux show the five killed 15 Sioux before the last died. In 1839 Young Ignace, son of the leader of the five, and Left-Handed Peter reached St. Louis and were promised a missionary would be sent the next spring. Left-Handed Peter returned to the Bitter Root with the good news, while Ignace remained to guide the promised priest.

DeSmet Accepts Challenge

Peter John DeSmet, born Jan. 31, 1801, in East Flanders, Belgium, was the man chosen for this hazardous missionary work. There was not enough money in the Jesuit treasury to send two missionaries, and the authorities were inclined to abandon the project. But Father DeSmet was so impressed with the earnestness of Ignace he insisted on coming alone.

With Ignace, he left St. Louis March 27, 1840. In June he was met by Left-Handed Peter and a band of 10 at Green River, Wyo. There he celebrated his first mass among the Salish. At Henry’s Lake near the head of the Snake River, Father DeSmet found 1,600 Salish and Nez Perce Indians awaiting him. Sunday, July 5, he had formal services, a rude altar having been erected on the lake shore.

Agrees to Return

After a few days of conferences with the Indians Father DeSmet realized the impossibility of one man’s performing the work that lay ahead of him. An agreement was made with his new people that he would go back to St. Louis and return the following year equipped to remain permanently.

The entire band accompanied him to the Gallatin Valley. From there he started out alone for St. Louis. At Three Forks, he encountered a French trapper, Jean Baptiste de Velder, who had been a grenadier in the army of Napoleon. So impressed was he by the dauntless priest, he volunteered to guide him through the country of the Assiniboines, the Blackfeet and Sioux. They were molested only once when captured by a hunting party of Blackfeet. Their chief, on learning who the priest was, ordered him carried in honor to their camp. After a brief visit, he and de Velder were allowed to continue their trip and reached St. Louis without further trouble.

Six in Party

In the early summer of 1841, Father DeSmet, with two clerical companions and three lay brothers, started back for the Bitter Root. Their journey was without incident as they traveled by the Omaha trail to Green River, then to Ft. Hall, Idaho, and into the Beaverhead country, thence over the low divide to Silver Bow, down through Deer Lodge and Hell Gate to the Missoula Valley, then up the Bitter Root to the Salish home camp.

Father DeSmet directed the erection of a cross made of two rough-hewn logs. Doing the work were Fathers Mengarini and Point and three lay brothers, Joseph Specht, William Claessens, and Charles Huet.

About them, observing closely every movement, were the interested, eager Salish. This was the formal establishment of St. Mary’s Mission on the first Sunday of October, 1841.

Father DeSmet and his associates were the pioneers of all Montana pioneers. Twenty years later the discovery of gold in the upper Hell Gate Canyon by Granville and James Stuart brought a rush of treasure seekers into what is now Montana – probably the most diversified crowd of immigrants that ever flocked to a region.

From the east there came thousands of men who had worn the grey uniform and other thousands who had fought in the Union ranks during the years of the Civil War. From the west and southwest came a tide of immigrants experienced in the ways of the west and wise in the details of placer mining. Most of them found their way to Montana from old gold camps of California, Nevada and Idaho.

Mingling Brews Trouble

The mingling of these strangers brought about a situation that developed into a crisis in Montana’s history resulting from deeds of lawlessness almost unparalleled in the settlement of the West.

During the two decades between the founding of St. Mary’s Mission and the discovery of gold, Father DeSmet and his successors labored diligently among their Indian charges and had ministered without discrimination to the needs of the early arriving whites. Dean Stone said: “How much of the credit for the final triumph of law and order in Montana is due to the unselfish devotion of this group of missionary priests we can only speculate.

“But one thing is certain. Their labors had paved the way for the right sort of civilization, and if it had not been for their presence here, we may feel certain that the suppression of lawlessness would have been tremendously more difficult than it was.

“It was characteristic of the work of Father DeSmet and his associates that they did not confine their efforts to the teaching of the gospel and to the development of the morality among their adopted people; but that they taught them also agriculture, building, crude manufacturing and lost no opportunity to promote the material comfort of these Indians as well as to minister to the physical needs of the scattered white population which drifted in during these two decades.

“In the Bitter Root, they planted potatoes and grain, taught the Indians how to cultivate them and later how to make flour from wheat which they had grown.

“In the face of many discouragements and working against what was at times organized outside opposition, these priests held, to a remarkable degree, the loyalty and trust of the Salish; and it is a matter of record that no Salish tribe ever went on the warpath against the whites, even when invasion of the latter threatened the loss of their ancestral homes.

“Had it not been for this preparation of the Salish, through the understanding thus brought about there might have been added to the story of western Montana chapters of outrages in which the red man figured. Happily, those pages in western Montana’s history are blank.”