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The mission at the lakes began with an invitation, and the invitation is the fact everything else hangs on. In 1830 Chief Leopold Pokagon, leader of the Catholic-leaning Potawatomi villages of the St. Joseph valley, traveled to Detroit and asked Father Gabriel Richard for a priest for his people — reciting from memory, in the university jubilee history's telling preserved in the university fragment, the prayers and catechism his people had kept through seventy years without a resident missionary. The priest sent was Stephen Theodore Badin, a man whose place in the American record was already fixed: ordained at Baltimore on 23 May 1793 by Archbishop John Carroll, he was the first priest ordained in the United States, and by 1830 he was a veteran of the Kentucky and Michigan frontiers in his sixties. Badin was sent to reorganize the old St. Joseph Mission near Niles. What he did instead — or in addition — made this ground: he moved the mission's center south to the lakes. He purchased land at St. Mary's Lake, named the station Ste. Marie des Lacs — St. Mary of the Lakes — built the log chapel that stands at the head of the landmarks file, and made the lakes the mission center of northern Indiana and southern Michigan. The tract he assembled, 524 acres, and the chain by which it passed from him to the bishops of Vincennes and at last to Sorin, stand in the university fragment of this record; here the point is only what the land was for.
Badin's plan for the tract was not, at first, a college. It was an orphan asylum. Badin had seen, earlier than most, what was coming: it was evident to him by 1830, in Father Thomas McAvoy's account of the mission's founding, that the Indians would be removed regardless of their rights, and in 1831 he bought the land for his "Orphan Asylum" — shelter for the abandoned Indian children of the nearby villages of Pokagon, the Carey Mission and the Grand River country. The institution was chartered by the Indiana legislature (the asylum was "not approved until February 2, 1833," the mission chronology notes, because no cabin yet stood on the site), a chapel and farmhouse were built in September 1834, Sisters came, and the orphanage and school functioned — briefly. It did not last much more than a year. Bishop Bruté, writing in 1835, already spoke "of the neglected and abandoned orphanage." The asylum died; the place did not. The chapel remained a mission post, the tract remained church land under the condition of Badin's 1835 conveyance to Bishop Simon Bruté of Vincennes — that it be applied "to the establishment of an orphan asylum or to such other religious, charitable institution" as the bishops judged proper — and the mission at the lakes passed to the two younger men whose names, with Badin's, are the mission era.
Louis De Seille. The Belgian priest Louis De Seille (the name also printed DeSeille and Deseille) came to the valley in 1832 — most accounts place his arrival between September 1832 and February 1833 — to work with Badin, and succeeded him as the mission's resident priest. His field was the whole Catholic Potawatomi country: Bertrand and Pokagon's village in Michigan, South Bend's few Catholics, Twin Lakes far to the south, where in August 1834 he baptized Chief Menominee and members of his band under an oak — the first priest seen there, the scholarly account says, in at least seventy years. From the lakes he rode a circuit through three states' worth of scattered villages, and the mission's flock in those years was counted, in the jubilee history's figure carried in the university fragment, at a thousand souls and more. His end is the mission era's most told scene, and the record tells it with unusual agreement on the essentials: returning on foot from Pokagon's village to the chapel at the lake — a walk of about seven miles, after visiting the Catholics of South Bend and Bertrand — he fell ill in the night and died, alone, in the early morning; Sorin's chronicle says he terminated his career in the mission house "after administering holy communion to himself," having dragged himself to the altar, and Sorin later recorded saying his own first Mass at Notre Dame over De Seille's tomb in the chapel. The date the scholarly record fixes is 26 September 1837. His age the record does not fix: the university's devotional account calls him 37; the Indiana Catholic History biography gives his birth in 1795, which would make him about 42; both are printed in the wave note as an unresolved conflict, and neither is chosen here. He was buried at the foot of the chapel altar, at his own wish in the tradition, and his remains were moved with the others, in time, to the church Sorin built and eventually under the replica chapel — the landmarks article follows the stones.
Benjamin Petit. De Seille's successor arrived in November 1837 days after his ordination: Benjamin Marie Petit, born at Rennes, France, on 8 April 1811, a lawyer who had practiced in Rennes as late as 1835, come to Indiana in 1836, and ordained by Bishop Bruté on 14 October 1837 after less than a month as a deacon — ordained, in the plain language of the modern lecture record, because Bruté "had few choices to replace" De Seille. Petit took up the lakes mission and the Twin Lakes mission together, learned the Potawatomi language fast enough to preach and record baptisms and marriages in it by the summer of 1838 (his registers survive in the Notre Dame library), and walked straight into the catastrophe told in the next article: the removal of Menominee's band. Bruté permitted him to accompany his people west. He rejoined the emigrant column on the march (16 September 1838 in the university fragment's dating), buried the dead along the road, delivered the survivors to the Jesuit Christian Hoecken at the Sugar Creek mission in Kansas on 4 November 1838, and started back for Indiana on 2 January 1839, sick with fever and covered in sores. He reached the Jesuit seminary in St. Louis, said his last Mass there on 2 February, and died on 10 February 1839, aged 27 years and 10 months. His letters from the march, published a century later as The Trail of Death: Letters of Benjamin Marie Petit (Indiana Historical Society, 1941), are the mission era's own voice, and they belong to the removal article as much as to this one. Where his remains rest is told three ways in the sources — brought back by Sorin in 1856 in most accounts, in 1857 in one reference's wording; first laid under Sorin's church, later moved to the crypt of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, and (in 1987, on the fullest account) exhumed and reburied under the replica of Badin's log chapel, where the mission generation now lies together. The sequence in its fullest form is printed here; the 1856/1857 variance is carried as a conflict in the wave note, not averaged.
Bruté's part, and the mission's people. Behind both priests stands the bishop who sent them. Simon Bruté, first Bishop of Vincennes — the diocese that then covered Indiana — received the lakes tract from Badin in 1835 under the asylum condition, visited the mission in person (the centennial history remembers him signing the Indians and whites "with the cross and chrism" on his rare visits), ordained Petit in his emergency, gave the permission that sent Petit west with the emigrants, and died in June 1839, four months after his youngest missionary. The tract, the condition and the succession passed to his successor, Bishop Hailandière — whose offer of the lakes to Sorin's congregation in 1842, on condition a college rise within two years, is the university fragment's story and is pointed to, not retold. The mission's people, finally, must be named as the article closes, because they are too easily written as scenery: the Catholic Potawatomi of Pokagon's and Menominee's villages, the métis families of the Bertrand trading country, the Sisters who staffed the orphanage's brief year, the interpreter Charron and his household in the mission buildings, and the few white Catholic families of South Bend who walked out to the lakes for Mass. When Sorin's party arrived in November 1842, the centennial chronology puts "as many as two hundred Indians still in the area." The mission era did not end in a ceremony. It thinned — by removal, by death, by the asylum's failure — until what was left at the lakes was three log buildings, a chapel with a priest buried under its floor, a condition in a deed, and a flock scattered between Kansas and the Michigan woods. The next article tells where the flock went.
Sources: Thomas T. McAvoy, C.S.C., "Father Badin Comes to Notre Dame," Indiana Magazine of History (Badin sent 1830; land signed over 10 Nov. 1832 in that account's dating; orphanage purpose; De Seille brought in 1833 as successor; 1835 transfer to Bruté on the asylum condition). Dorothy V. Corson, "A Cave of Candles" / The Spirit of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame (Badin moved the St. Joseph Mission center to St. Mary's Lake; orphan asylum bought 1831, approved 2 Feb. 1833, chapel and farmhouse Sept. 1834, Sisters' orphanage and school lasting little more than a year; Bruté in 1835 on "the neglected and abandoned orphanage"; De Seille's walk, illness and death; Petit's succession). Sorin, Chronicles of Notre Dame du Lac, Toohey translation (1895) (De Seille's death in the mission house after administering communion to himself; Petit sent the day after his ordination). Indiana Magazine of History, "The Centennial of the Trail of Death" (De Seille at Twin Lakes, 27 Aug. 1834; death 26 Sept. 1837; Petit arriving November 1837). Indiana Catholic History, De Seille and Petit biographies (De Seille born 1795 at Sleidinge — age conflict noted; Petit born 8 Apr. 1811 at Rennes; language learned by June 1838; registers at Notre Dame; Hoecken handover; return journey; death 10 Feb. 1839). John Wm. Houghton lecture notice (Bruté's few choices; Petit ordained after less than a month as deacon; died St. Louis 10 Feb. 1839). Benjamin Petit reference and marker records (initial burial St. Louis; removal by Sorin — 1856 in most accounts, 1857 in one; Log Chapel resting place; Basilica crypt interval and 1987 reburial in the fullest account). The university fragment of this record (Pokagon's 1830 deputation; flock of 1,000–1,200 at the start of 1838; Petit rejoining the column 16 Sept. 1838; the 524 acres and the grant chain — pointer).