The November Journey — Sorin's Own Account

16–30 November 1842 · the arrival

"Everything was frozen, and yet it all appeared so beautiful." Sorin's letter to Moreau, quoted at length in the jubilee history, is the founding document of the university, and it is carried here at the length it deserves. The party departed St. Peter's on 16 November 1842 — "seven of the Brothers set out with their Superior," the history's narrative says. On the eleventh day five of the party arrived at South Bend; three came slower behind with the ox team, eight men in all on the history's own arrival count. The size of Sorin's bands is carried differently across the university's records — six brothers on the 1841 Atlantic crossing in the headnote to his papers, seven brothers named in the Scholastic's 1893 sketch, seven companions on the 1842 trek in the university's chronology — and the counts stand here as the carriers give them. Of the arrival Sorin wrote: "Everything was frozen, and yet it all appeared so beautiful. The lake, particularly, with its mantle of snow, with a vast area of virgin forest extending to a considerable distance all around, resembled — who shall say? — a field which seems to be the accomplishment of our most ardent wishes."

The party reached South Bend and viewed the tract on 26 November 1842 and took formal possession the following day; the university keeps the 26th as its founding date, and both dates stand in the institutional record. The log house on the ground was too small to hold them for the night, so they returned to lodgings prepared in the village, and the next day established themselves at Notre Dame du Lac in what Sorin had been given: Badin's log cabin, twenty-four by forty feet, a priest's room below and a chapel above, and a small two-story frame house where a half-breed interpreter lived with his family. "The following day — the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle — I said my first mass at Notre Dame where Father Petit so often before me had offered the Holy Sacrifice over the tomb of the saintly Father De Seille." The letter's accounting is unsparing: "We have at present but one bed, and they insist that I should take it. They themselves sleep on the floor, just as they did for three weeks at St. Peter's." "I had just fifty cents." A brother's foot was frozen on the road, another's toe. The community's total funds on arrival, the jubilee history states, were less than $1,500, including the bishop's collections and a small amount from Europe. And the letter states the terms back to France without illusion: "Notre Dame du Lac has been given to us by the Bishop only on condition that we build here a college. As there is no other within five hundred miles, this undertaking cannot fail of success."

1. Sorin to Moreau, November–December 1842, quoted in A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, online chronology and Sorin sketch
3. University of Notre Dame, Office of the President, "Our Founder"