Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J. (1801-1873)
Apostle of the Rocky Mountains

    Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet was born at Termonde (Dendermonde), Belgium, on January 30, 1801. He emigrated to the United States in 1821 to give himself to the missions, entering the Jesuit novitiate at Whitemarsh, Maryland, and moving in 1823 to the new Jesuit house at Florissant, near St. Louis, founded for work among the Indians; he was thus one of the founders of the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus. Ordained in 1827, he made his first missionary journey in 1838, founding St. Joseph's Mission for the Potawatomi at Council Bluffs, where he also arranged a peace between the Potawatomi and the Sioux, the first of his many peace missions.

    His life's work began in 1840. As early as 1831 the tribes of the Rocky Mountains, prompted by Catholic Iroquois living among them, had sent the first of four delegations to St. Louis to beg for a "black-robe," and the last, in 1839, was answered with Fr. De Smet. Traveling with the American Fur Company brigade, he was received by the Flatheads and Pend d'Oreilles, gave instruction, and promised a permanent mission, a round trip of some 4,800 miles. In 1841 he returned with Fr. Nicholas Point and founded St. Mary's Mission on the Bitterroot River, the first Jesuit mission for the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. In 1843 he went to Europe for funds and workers, returning in 1844 around Cape Horn with new missionaries and six Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and founded St. Ignatius Mission among the Kalispel. In 1846 he sought out the Blackfeet, the most feared tribe of the region, in the Yellowstone valley, and persuaded them to make peace with their neighbors. Later that year his superiors recalled him to St. Louis, and his companions made his foundations permanent.

    His hold on the tribes' trust soon made him a public figure. At the government's request he attended the great council near Fort Laramie in 1851, where some ten thousand Indians gathered for the Horse Creek Treaty. He went as chaplain with General Harney's expedition in 1858 and afterward to Oregon and Washington to calm fears of an uprising; when the government resolved on a punitive campaign after the outbreak of 1862, he refused to lend it the sanction of his presence. In 1868, on what his biographer Chittenden calls the most important mission of his career, he crossed the Bad Lands and entered alone the camp of some five thousand Sioux warriors under Sitting Bull; General Stanley wrote that "Father De Smet alone of the entire white race could penetrate to these cruel savages and return safe and sound." His counsels were accepted, and the treaty was signed on July 2, 1868. On behalf of the Indians he crossed the ocean nineteen times, and by careful reckoning traveled some 180,000 miles. His books, beginning with Letters and Sketches (1843), were read across two hemispheres, and the King of the Belgians made him a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold. Fr. De Smet died at St. Louis on May 23, 1873.

Material on Fr. De Smet's western travels follows WyoHistory.org, edited by Tom Rea.