De Smet in SIouxland iii

It was a mission, although the whole thing was. And it wasn't going well, not at all, for all kinds of reasons, including the St. Louis Jesuits, who seemed all to often to sit on their hands in all things, including simply writing him letters. Life was not easy on the frontier. Most every day he'd see something that he'd never imagined he'd see. Sometimes, especially when the whiskey would roll in, he'd come to wonder a bit about his own calling, whether it was here, whether or not it even existed.

There they sat, in a circle, with their chins on their knees, or so wrote Father De Smet in a letter detailing his visit up river to the Yankton. De Smet was not frail; he was a big man, square-shouldered, a white man, far more Flemish than American, but he wasn't at all accustomed to squatting like the Yankton tribal leaders, "a position," he wrote, "my corpulence forbade me to assume." 

Instead, the corpulent pastor reported he sat "tailor-style," and, after the pipe, was served dinner, a portion of venison so ample he said he could eat left-overs for two days. 

Father De Smet had singlehandedly left Council Bluffs to ask some forbearance. The Yankton knew every nook and cranny from the Des Moines River to the the Missouri and beyond. They were well-supplied and situated in a homeland they'd known for two centuries. There was no cause for them  to go after the rag-tag immigrant Potawatomie, who had no idea where they were, not simply because of the whiskey they all too readily consumed, but also because they found themselves strangers in a very strange and treeless land. He'd left Council Bluffs determined to ask the Yankton for peace.

He hadn't walked all the way, although he would, years later, cover the kind of distance he'd have had to, 100 miles or so. Instead, he'd hitched a ride on a steamboat company up river, where the company was itself a blessing. He'd teamed up unknowingly with a string of scientists who took occasion to doing discoveries whenever the steamer pulled over to avoid a snag or sandbar, which was often. Next to baptizing men and women and children, looking closely at the natural world around him was his very favorite thing to do. His letters make clear that he took great interest and pleasure a new world all around. That he missed his Flemish homeland was clear in the letters he wrote to his family, but this new world was a glorious pageant of heavenly handiwork that delighted him.

When the steamship arrived at the Vermillion River, he left the explorers behind and assumed the divine office of peace-maker. 

He'd come alone and weaponless. Almost 200 years later, that seems shamelessly naive and dangerous. But the mission was crucial, and in everything he said around that circle--he'd never worked with a translator before--the Yankton must have sensed both urgency and conviction because they listened to him. They could have easily sent him home with much, much less than venison left-overs.

So, what happened? There's no record of it, but he might well have told him how, after too many months without food or provisions, finally a steamer came up the river full of so much of what the all needed, how it was close enough for them all the Potawatomie to see, how deliverance from hunger seemed so very close--and how right there in front of them that steamer had sunk. It caught a branch it couldn't avoid. They'd see it all. It'd been right there in front of them. They'd seen it go down. He'd been right there. 

Father De Smet had come to ask them to stop raiding the woebegone tribal people who woke up every morning, without supplies, in a land they saw as a foreign country. They needed to be left alone. He'd come to beg; he had no authority, although he had the black robe the Yankton somehow sensed carried very strong white man's "medicine." This man, this Blackrobe, armed only with faith, had come to call on them to live in peace with the immigrant tribe down river, a people who drank way too much whiskey. They were in dire need to be left alone. It was late May, 1839. "In the name of God," he might well have said, "I'm asking you for peace."

And he got it. The Yankton said okay and stopped the raids, at least for a time. 

And soon enough, Father Jean De Smet left Council Bluffs to go up river again--far, far up river with the Word and the sacraments and an immense reputation for justice and peace. 

That parlay at the Vermillion River isn't the only reason Father De Smet has a place in the stained glass of St. Paul's Church, Marty, SD, in the middle of the Yankton Reservation. Truth be told, very few who know the De Smet story bother much with his visit near near the James River in 1839. There are bigger stories, stronger stories, but none, perhaps, more rich and blessed as Father De Smet's very first innocent attempt at peace-making, just a few miles up river from here.

But this one, a lovely story of peace, is here, in Siouxland.