The Mission Era: Priests on the St. Joseph River, 1679-1831

1679-1831; the French mission at Fort St. Joseph, the Carey Mission, and Father Badin's Potawatomi mission

The river road: Religion reached the south bend of the St. Joseph River by water, long before there was a town there. On 3 December 1679 Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, set out up the river then called the River of the Miamis, and his party found and crossed the St. Joseph-Kankakee portage, whose landing lay about two miles below the present limits of South Bend. Travelling with La Salle were Recollect Franciscans, among them Father Louis Hennepin. Their passage was a transit, not a settlement; no mission was planted at the bend itself.

The mission upriver: The valley's standing mission stood upriver, at present Niles, Michigan, and it is printed here as the valley's mission, not as a South Bend institution. In the 1680s Pere Claude-Jean Allouez established the Mission de Saint-Joseph there. The City of Niles history dates the French crown's grant of land to the Jesuits for the mission to 1686, and Western Michigan University's Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project describes the post as first established as a mission in the 1680s by French Jesuits, ministering to the Potawatomi and Miami of the area. The French built Fort St. Joseph beside the mission in 1691. The fort's complement included a priest alongside its commandant, soldiers, a blacksmith and an interpreter. Jesuit ministry at the post lasted, in the archaeological literature's phrase, for almost eighty years; a surviving marriage and baptismal register of 1720-1761 attests to its eighteenth-century religious life. Father Aveneau worked at the mission around 1700, assisted by Father Jean Mermet.

The long silence: The British took the fort in 1761. In the spring of 1763 supporters of the Ottawa leader Pontiac attacked it, and the English did not re-garrison it until a brief occupation in 1779. In 1781 a Spanish-supported party raided the fort and claimed it for Spain for a day. After that the post was largely abandoned, and the Potawatomi of the lakes north of the future South Bend remained, as the University of Notre Dame's foundation history puts it, without a church or priest until the American frontier reached them again.

A Protestant mission, at Niles: The first Protestant mission in the valley also stood at Niles, not at the bend, and is boundary-printed in this one line: Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy established the Carey Mission among the Potawatomi about a mile west of present Niles in December 1822, opened its school on 27 January 1823 with thirty Indian pupils, and saw the school discontinued after the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Badin at the lakes: In 1830 Leopold Pokagon, chief of the Potawatomi band headquartered near the river, travelled to Detroit and asked that a priest be sent to his people again. The priest who came was Father Stephen Theodore Badin, ordained by Bishop John Carroll in 1793 and the first priest ordained in the United States. He reopened the Potawatomi mission at Ste-Marie-des-Lacs, by the two lakes north of the bend, the centre of the Catholic settlements of northern Indiana and western Michigan. The mission buildings found in 1842 were log structures; the largest, twenty-four by forty feet, served with its ground floor as the priest's room and its upper story as a chapel for the Catholics of South Bend and the neighbourhood. Badin built a log chapel on the shore of St. Mary's Lake in 1831, on ground that later became the University of Notre Dame.

The purchase: For a planned orphanage and school, Badin bought land at the lakes from the government — five hundred twenty-four acres, in parcels dated by Notre Dame's archives to 1830-1832. When the orphanage plan failed he sold the property in 1835 to Bishop Simon Brute of Vincennes, for one dollar with a further payment promised for his improvements. That ground became the Notre Dame ground; the chain from Brute to Father Edward Sorin, who arrived on 26 November 1842, is told in the Notre Dame file. Badin laboured at the mission until 1835. Father Louis Deseille, who had joined him in 1832, carried the work on until his death in 1837, in the chapel at the lakes.

Preaching at the bend: Inside the town itself, the county history is explicit. When the Reverend N. B. Griffith came to South Bend in January 1831, Chapman records, there was not a church edifice in the town, nor in the entire county; a few Catholic priests had previously been here and a mission started in the neighbourhood of Notre Dame, but no effort had been made in the town. The first Methodist exercises were held on the evening of 30 January 1831; Howard's jubilee sketch adds a prayer meeting at Benjamin Ross's house on 31 January and a preaching visit in March by the Reverend Leonard B. Gurley on a missionary tour; and in April 1831 Griffith organized the Methodist class from which the town's congregational history begins. The mission era thus ends divided by the river: a Jesuit mission upriver, a Baptist mission upriver, and a Catholic mission at the lakes, with preaching, but as yet no church, at the bend.

Sources:

1. Catholic Encyclopedia, "Louis Hennepin" — Hennepin's Recollect novitiate, his place on La Salle's expedition, and the party's setting out on 3 December up the St. Joseph toward the portage.
2. Howard, Timothy Edward, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), ch. on La Salle — the 3 December 1679 ascent and the portage landing about two miles below the present city limits.
3. City of Niles, Michigan, "A History of Fort St. Joseph" — Louis XIV's 1686 land grant to the Jesuits for the Mission de Saint-Joseph, Allouez's ministry, and the fort's establishment in 1691.
4. Western Michigan University, Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project, "Fort History" — the mission's founding in the 1680s by French Jesuits, the post's priest and households, British control in 1761, the 1763 attack, and abandonment after the 1781 raid.
5. Brandao and Nassaney, on the Jesuits at Fort St. Joseph, as indexed — Jesuit tenure of almost eighty years, the 1720-1761 marriage and baptismal register, and Aveneau assisted by Mermet, c. 1698-1702.
6. Wack, John Theodore, Notre Dame: Foundations, 1842-1857 (University of Notre Dame Archives) — Pokagon's 1830 request, Badin as first priest ordained in America, the 524-acre purchase, its 1835 sale to Bishop Brute, the 24-by-40-foot log mission building, and Deseille's succession and death.
7. University of Notre Dame Archives, Badin extracts and archival summaries — the mission as centre of the northern Indiana settlements in 1830, the parcels bought in 1830-1832, and the 1831 log chapel on St. Mary's Lake.
8. Kansas Historical Society, Isaac McCoy Papers, biographical sketch, and McCoy, History of Baptist Indian Missions (1840) — Carey Mission established near present Niles in December 1822; school opened 27 January 1823.
9. Chapman, Chas. C. & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), pp. 880-882 — no church edifice in town or county when Griffith arrived in January 1831, the prior Catholic mission near Notre Dame, Methodist exercises on 30 January 1831 and the class formed in April 1831.
10. Howard (1907), Vol. 1, pp. 412-413, First Methodist jubilee sketch — the 31 January 1831 prayer meeting at Benjamin Ross's house and the Reverend Leonard B. Gurley's March 1831 preaching.