De Smet in Iowa ii

A Rudolph Kurtz sketch

Father De Smet began the ministry he'd long ago dreamed of when some of those refugee Pottawatomie asked for their very own Blackrobe, someone to come and minister to them and bring the white man's medicine. Not far away, a recently planted mission among the Kickapoo, who'd also originated in the Great Lakes region, went belly up when the Kickapoo simply walked away from the reservation system. 

With the angry Kickapoo gone and the newly arrived Pottawatomie begging, the choice was simple. De Smet went up river to Council Bluffs to begin "to bring Christ to the heathen" in an effort to accomplish the dream of establishing a very distinct Christian community among Indigenous all around. He boarded a river boat in St. Louis and started the trek up to a place in the river not far from the grave of chief Blackbird, a place where not many years later a small prairie town named Omaha would arise.

A veteran traveler, he had crossed the Atlantic three times, but was not unaware of the problems steam ships had with the Missouri. "I would rather cross the ocean than ascend the Missouri River," he wrote. "The current is so swift that in order to get up the river the boat must be heavily loaded and the steam at full pressure." And that's not all  "We run upon sand bars every day." And then there's always those felled trees. "The river bristles with snags which tear a boat open." The average life of a Missouri River steam boat was three years.

There was a crowd to greet him at the moment his arrival. He was thrilled, but soon realized that the gathering was not for him but for a something far more precious than anything De Smet might deliver, something stored in the hold of the ship, something of even greater value--whiskey. 

Often, of course, people came to him with their medical problems since it was understood even before he'd arrived that this white man, like all Blackrobes, had a very special "medicine," new treatments for their bloody noses, feinting hearts, and traversed souls, and a book, a miracle cure-all, the white man's medicine.

There were some successes. Often, when Pottawatomie parents would come to him with a sick child, he would take care to help with those physical needs while dispensing spiritual strength on the sly. "When I find a child in danger whose parents are ill-disposed toward religion, I take out my bottles and recommend certain medicines," some of which he administered surreptitiously. "I begin by rubbing the child with camphor; then taking water, I baptize it before their unsuspecting eyes, and thus open heaven to the innocent souls."

But that other white-man's medicine had far more influence on the tribal people than the word he'd brought--whiskey, supposedly contraband, but, in truth, always available somehow by white men seeking to make their fortunes by offering hard drink for thirsty souls. The German artist Rudolph Kurz traveled up the Missourisketching the Native people throughout his travels. "The worst Indians I have seen in my travels," he wrote in his diary, "are the white people who live on the borders."

The Pottawatomie, far from home and now within the fledgling reservation system had reason to be miserable, but taking to whiskey the way they did made life even more miserable among them, even to the Blackrobes, who found them, at least initially, "gentle and peaceful." There was, among them, no "rank or privilege," De Smet told his friends by letter, and the chief was paid no salary whatsoever, maintained his position by way of his weapons, his bravery and courage. "His horse is his throne."

But when they were drinking, De Smet told the Father General, "all the good qualities of the Indian disappear." What's left is barely human, he might have said. "He no longer resembles man; one must flee from him."

Where there was money to be made, the white man was there; and thus, even though trade in liquor was expressly forbidden by the law, every last steamer  up river had it's own snoot full, often obscured. Liquor was a constant, and its effects on every phrase of life among the Pottawatomie was, in many moments, horrifying. 

And then there were the Sioux, marauders who swept down south of their homeland for horses, or for any number of reasons, and took what they wanted, leaving the Pottawatomie bleeding and grieving. 

The problem of raiding Yankton somehow appeared to Father De Smet as something he could do something about. Frequent letters to government officials, complaining about the whiskey appeared to go unanswered. Despite his protestations among the people, everyone drank whiskey and most of those who did drank far, far more than they should have. 

But these flagrant attacks from the north, from the Yankton Sioux, that was something, this young, squarely-built Flemish priest, an immigrant, somehow decided, he needed to end.