De Smet in Iowa

It's easy to call it a case of the blind leading the blind. Seriously, the only way to understand what little good Roman Catholic missionaries (virtually all of them fresh off the boat) could do among the Potawatomi (barely at home--just three years!--in Iowa, having been routed from their Great Lakes homelands), the only  way to understand it was the cartoon nuttiness of those first missionaries, the nuttiness of blind faith.

Even the most beloved of the servants, even Father De Smet, who ran away from his Flemish home in Belgium, even the blessed Father, hadn't a clue about the people he was called to serve right there on the east side of the Missouri River in a  country that was still to him a vast undiscovered frontier. Literally, the whole bunch--red and white--were struggling strangers in a strange land, but De Smet and his crew were different--they had a mission.

Two Black Robes, dedicated to purpose, wandered west from what is today Omaha and moved into that sea of grass that was, back then, the Great Plains. Why?--in search of what, no one remembers. They wandered off west and soon enough became dreadfully lost. The plains they'd walked into was, in fact, a "sea of grass." An occasional river valley transgressed the plainness all around, so what was out there seemed unbounded, the horizon itself an illusion, a garden without end. Turn around sometime and there's nothing but more in every direction. It's very much feeling absolutely directionless on water. It's horrible.

But say you had a drone back then, with a video camera, and say you put it up high in the sky to record the movements of those two priests lost in the grass. What you'd see is a cartoon--two men in long black robes irretrievable, lost in that ocean of grass. 

For five or six days, or so, the story goes, two emissaries of the cross were completely lost, nowhere to go, thrashing around on an ocean that had no shores. 

Now speed up the video, and watch those two Black Robes circle around and  around and around, lost in space and time. Speed it up and try not to giggle. The two of them are real people, and they are irretrievably lost in a world where there is literally nothing around them.

Now populate that grassland with a thousand wayfaring immigrants who honestly don't have a clue where they are. What they know is that they were promised a place out west somewhere, out of the way of the blood they'd left in unending war back east. The Potawatomie, at least this branch of them, were walked--on a highway of death--to a place on the Missouri River the white man's government assigned them. There was a treaty, in 1833 there was a treaty in Chicago. That's what they knew. 

What did they know about a place called "Council Bluffs"? Nothing. They were Great Lakes people who, out there alone on a sea of grass, couldn't be farther from home. They were pushed away and forgotten, left to rot, with nothing to do. 

That's where Father De Smet, a young man from a small Flemish town he'd left, was assigned to bring the heathen to Christ. It's nutty. It's an absolutely crazy story of a man and a people who could not possibly be so unequally matched.   

It's a story about failure and faith.