The Ground Before the College — Ste. Marie des Lacs

1680s–1842 · the mission ground

The lakes came first. The university's jubilee history of 1895, compiled from the institution's own chronicles and correspondence, traces Catholic presence on the ground to the mission of Father Claude Allouez, who from about 1680 ministered to the Miami and Potawatomi from a station near the St. Joseph River; Allouez died in the summer of 1690, and the mission establishment near the later site of Fort St. Joseph was kept up under his successors until 1759, when the French garrison was defeated and the priests carried off as prisoners to Quebec. The mission then dissolved for nearly a hundred years, and the ground reverted to the Potawatomi world of the river valley.

The revival came through the Potawatomi themselves. In 1830 Chief Leopold Pokagon led a deputation to Father Gabriel Richard at Detroit and asked for a priest, reciting from memory — in the jubilee history's telling — the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, a catechism his people had kept through the missionless decades. The priest sent was Stephen Theodore Badin, and Badin's place in the American record is fixed independently of this ground: ordained at Baltimore on 23 May 1793 by Archbishop John Carroll, he was the first priest ordained within the United States. Badin re-established the mission as Ste. Marie des Lacs — St. Mary of the Lakes — built the log chapel that Sorin would find standing a decade later, and purchased from the United States government the section of land containing the two little lakes of St. Mary and St. Joseph, intending, in the jubilee history's words, that it should one day be the site of a great university. The Scholastic's 1893 sketch of Sorin's life, published by the University Archives, dates Badin's purchase to 1830; other institutional accounts place it in the early 1830s, and the variance is printed here as the record carries it. The documented transfer is dated: Badin transferred his claim in the land to Bishop Simon Bruté on 31 July 1835, and the tract passed with the see of Vincennes to Bruté's successor.

Badin's successor at the mission, about 1832, was the Belgian priest Louis De Seille. Sorin, saying his first Mass at Notre Dame on the feast of St. Andrew, 30 November 1842, recorded that Father Benjamin Petit "so often before me had offered the Holy Sacrifice over the tomb of the saintly Father De Seille" — De Seille had died alone at the altar, having dragged himself to it and administered the viaticum to himself, and was interred at the foot of the altar at his own wish. Petit, a Rennes lawyer who had come to Indiana in 1835 and was ordained by Bruté on 14 October 1837, served a Christian Potawatomi flock the jubilee history numbers at 1,000 to 1,200 souls at the start of 1838. That year the United States removed them: in early autumn 1838 the government took the mission house and church, some 800 Indians were assembled under pretense of a conference and put under arrest amid a discharge of musketry, and the forced march west began. Bruté permitted Petit to follow his people; he rejoined the emigrants on 16 September 1838, buried six of them under a cross six miles from Danville, handed the charge to Father Hoeken a day's journey from the Osage River settlement, and died at St. Louis on 10 February 1839. In 1856 Sorin brought Petit's remains back from St. Louis and laid them beside De Seille's under the church — the founding generation gathered, deliberately, into the ground it had inherited.

1. A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, Indiana, from 1842 to 1892 (Werner, 1895)
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, "Sketch of Father Edward Sorin's Life," Notre Dame Scholastic, 11 November 1893
3. Notre Dame Magazine, university annals