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Speaker 1: The history of Montana began with an earnest plea by its native people to learn Christianity, but the mission collided with reality when the two sides could not agree on the purpose of religion. I’m Dan Flores, and this is the American West. Jesus and Animus beneath the Bitter Roots one exquisite rocky mountain autumn morning during the decades I lived in Montana. I walked past tourists in Tanna on the roadside historical marker and descended down to the gray cobbles of a famous little Montana stream named Lola Creek.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: Then I picked my.
00:01:02
Speaker 1: Way west along the ice clear, bouncing waters for a quarter mile or so while yellow cottonwood leaves rotated with studied deliberation against the hump blue profile of the Bitterroot Mountains. I was here because I’ve recently read a century’s old journal entry about this spot. Somewhere along these cobbles, a few of them, perhaps minutely smaller now, since it was nearly two hundred and twenty years ago. Some of the Lewis and Clark party leaving the bitter Root Valley’s pleasant plains of wild high Shop that was their biblical term for sagebrush, approached what they called the Tremendous Mountains and came upon an arresting site. One of the many expedition members who kept the journal, Joseph Woodhouse, described it this way. Wednesday, eleven September eighteen o five, A beautiful, pleasant morning passed a tree on which was a number of shapes drawn on it with paint by the natives. A white bear skin hung on the same tree. We supposed this to be a place of worship among them. Lewis and Clark’s group of Blue Ridge and Missouri hunters, despite many admirable qualities, famously misfired more than once when it came to grasping Indian religions, but not this time. Their path at Lulo Creek had indeed led them past assumis or medicine or power shrine of the people whom Jefferson’s explorers were calling the outlaw Chutes. These were the people Lewis and Clark had met at the upper end of this valley many days earlier. From them, they had acquired additional horses and instructions on how to find a trail on this trail for crossing the bitter Mountains to the waters of the Columbia River and on to the Pacific Ocean, local inhabitants of this valley for generations beyond count These native people then thought of themselves and still do, with a name that translates to the bitter root Salish. For a long time, everyone else mostly ignored their wishes about their name and referred to them as the Flatheads. Now, religious thinking yours everyone else’s, and for sure that of every Native person who ever lived.
00:03:31
Speaker 2: Is a tricky thing.
00:03:32
Speaker 1: I’m not myself a person of a religious faith, although like most of us, I spent many a Sunday morning with parents who commanded me with let’s to church. I know from those years that religion is not just a belief system one happens onto. It functions as a philosophy of life and exploration and explanation of the meaning of existence. Which is why most anyone who touts they if their own religion is the only true one shouldn’t be surprised to find just about everybody else outside their circle more than passing annoyed with them. But suspend your own convictions about the validity of your religion for a moment and ponder this question. While individual conversion from one religion to another occurs frequently, what happens when an entire people with a perfectly serviceable religion falls on hard times and begins to wonder if someone else’s gods might not be more sympathetic. How would something like that play out? And what does that say about the practical function of religion?
00:04:42
Speaker 3: Anyway?
00:04:44
Speaker 2: Interestingly, those very questions.
00:04:46
Speaker 1: Occupy the intersection of events that two centuries ago led to the creation of the western state of Montana. And we do indeed know something about how a religious story like that would play out, because a middle aged French priest who came to the West in eighteen forty left the future of book and a score of drawings and paintings devoted to that very history. This story, then, is one of those much like the writer Mark Twain used to preface with a wonderful sentence, I will now tell you a tale that has in it a touch of pathos. I’m not Salish, although I’ve known people who are, which is one kind of identification. And once, over a twenty year span, I built and lived on a small mountain ranch in the valley the Bitterroot Salish had occupied for a vast stretch of time, which is another way to identify with them. When I moved to Montana in the early nineteen nineties and began exploring the five valleys around Missoula for a place to live, it was the bitter Root Valley that won my sweepstakes. I’d known it would years before. I’d read fairly extensively about the mountain valleys of Montana, then on summer road trips to the west, had driven and camped in most of them. It made me laugh to try to pronounce bitter root the way most of the locals did, where the root and bitter root doesn’t rhyme with your boot, but rather with the foot you slide into it. But this beautiful mountain valley just west of the Continental Divide exerted an undertow pool on me that I’ve never gotten over. With a chance to live in the state, I found myself transfixed by the bitter Roots. Seventy five mile succession of nine thousand foot humped back mountains, split one from the other by soaring granite canyons, every one of them with a trail reaching far back into one of the biggest National forest wildernesses in the west. Below those vast public lands stretched a north south valley four to eight miles wide, slit by a clear, cold Namesake River into a west side and an east side. For haul the high mountain drama on the west side of the valley, what drew me repeatedly was the more modest mountain range on the east side, called the Sapphire Mountains. It was a lower undulation of green ridges and peaks, with a savannah parkland at its feet. This was drier, more open country than the uniformly green mounds.
00:07:27
Speaker 2: Of the bitter Roots.
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Speaker 1: It was a place where sagebrush grew, and the main bitter Root range to the west stood in panoramic relief. In today’s Montana, Grizzly Bears and Gray Wolves and Yellowstone Park and the TV series Yellowstone and its spin offs filled people with fantasies about Montana ranchers and wilderness adventure.
00:07:55
Speaker 2: But in the case of the bitter.
00:07:56
Speaker 1: Root, the reality is that before the arrival of worlds in this part of the West, the beautiful valley had spent a very long time as the primary home of the resident population of Salish, whom Lewis and Clark found here in the Bitterroot’s own version of America’s Native Lands dispossession, though in an eighteen fifty five treaty with the US, those Salis had signed away twenty three thousand square miles in the bitter Root and in return got a two thousand square mile reservation in the Mission Valley north of Missoula. The US government and Montana Territory then methodically forced their last bands, under a leader named Charlot, finally to abandon their Natal Valley in the eighteen eighties or the Flathead Reservation seventy miles to the north. But the Salish had been here for so long, had lived in and managed the bitter Root Valley for such a vast amount of time, that their presence had put an indelible cultural imprint on the place. As a result of Salish ecological practices, for example, the grand Ponderosa pines in the valley, especially those on the Sapphire Mountain side, left American observers like ce Dutton astonished. In his case in the year eighteen eighty seven. The trees are large and noble in aspect and stand widely apart Dutton Road, instead of dense thickets where we are shut in by impenetrable foliage. We can look far beyond and see the tree trunks vanishing away like an infinite colonnade. The ground is unobstructed and inviting. What Dutton called an unobstructed and inviting look was actually the result of centuries of understory burns. The Salish residents had set a human fire ecology cycle that varied between three and thirty years. Then there were the valley grasslands. The natural cover of rough fescue, blue bunch wheat grasses, and Idaho fesque appears from pollen evidence to have expanded in the Bitterroot Valley and became purified of sagebrush and rabbit brush two thousand to three thousand years ago when the Salish arrived as full time residents and began to fire the valley regularly. Along with the shrubs, Douglas firs also decreased, although in truth, Salish fires probably skipped and jumped around enough to create many different mosaics, but bunch grasses and giant scattered yellow belly ponderosis thrived under Salish management. There may have been fewer than a dozen big pines per acre, even in the draws. In both the Bitter Root and sapphire ranges. Fire blackened mountains were common because the bunch grasses were cool seasoned matures that dried and lost their nutrition in the summer. Bison were only infrequent visitors to these mountain valleys, but elk did well and horses loved the place. The Silis got their horses early by the early seventeen hundreds, directly up the mountains from New Mexico. By the time Lewis and Clark arrived a century later, the Bitter Root was already known as a horse valley and supplied many of the expedition’s mounts. In eighteen fifty seven, trader John Owen figured the sailors had four thousand horses in the valley, about ten per person, which required some one hundred thousand acres of grassland to nourish them. When the Pacific Railroad Survey arrived that same decade, John Mullen wrote that the Bitterroot Valley was four to seven miles wide and naturally covered with luxuriant grass over which several thousand horses were roaming scarcely noticed. Another observer spoke tooetically of this product of Indian ecology as constituting rolling seas of bunch grass. In other words, by regularly refreshing their landscape. These Salish set fires were a good part of why the ecology of the Bitterroot country looked the way it did, and they lived as well as they did. I, of course, am not in a position to speak for the Salish, but I will say that these were people with a fine reputation. Everyone who came to know the Salish two centuries ago thought of them as an exceptionally intelligent and practical people. As for the religion that explained the world to them, their religious or spiritual intelligence told them that there was an animating power in the universe that surged through everything and that broke the surface like islands in a lake, and a wide host of animals, power spots, and helpers. The Salish religion was many complex things, but most of all, it was and still is a rational way of explaining why things happen by dint of a fierce and pragmatic assessment of the effects that religion produced. As with most religions, a primary reason for trying to figure out why things happened had everything to do with influencing the outcome. But the Sailors had the kind of fine intelligence that demanded proof. They did not believe anyone’s soons a religious explanation for why things happened until the power of it could be demonstrated. What makes the rather famous story I want to tell now a poignant one is simply this because of change in a world of events larger than they could conceive.
00:13:48
Speaker 2: During the third.
00:13:49
Speaker 1: Decade of the nineteenth century, the Bitter Root Salish apparently began to doubt the ability of their religion to continue to make things happen for them. Of disease, especially smallpox, that their shamans could not combat, kept washing across the mountains into their valley. Then there was the bizarre fifteen year policy on the part of the Hudson’s Bay Company to keep the Americans out of Oregon by trapping a fur desert from the Mission Valley through the Bitter Roots and the Snake River country down to the wassage that brought these interior mountain valleys to the brink of ecological ruin. In the midst of the fur desert years, a mountain man named Josiah Pilcher, who was among the sailors in eighteen twenty eight. In eighteen twenty nine, wrote that in the absence of game and fish, they are driven to every extremity to sustain life, devouring every bird, beast, insect, and creeping thing they can get hold of, and tearing up the ground for roots. As Buffalo numbers west of the Continental Divide began to fade away by the eighteen thirties, sale all Shaman’s attempts to call Buffalo into the Bitterroot Valley failed, and across the divide in the Big Hole and the Three Forks Country, where the Sailors had long journeyed to hunt Buffalo and now love to run their ponies after the pounding herds, the far more numerous Blackfeet who lived east of the divide imposed and us only moratorium on Buffalo. This was something the sailors simply could not abide. Yet Another traveler to the Silish in their valley home in the eighteen thirties noted that the only cause assigned by them for their perpetual warfare is their love of Buffalo. Another, reflecting on the frequent thrashings the better armed Blackfeet gave them, said that the Sailish had considered peace, but decided that going to Buffalo was just too important to them, and anyhow, war kept their people alert, they told him. In this situation, with their traditional religion now shaky in protecting them, early in the eighteen thirties, the Sailish came to the conclusion to call on the most powerful new religion they could see anywhere on their horizon to come to their aid. For at least two decades before the eighteen thirties, there had lived among the Sailish a scattering of displaced Iroquois from the Great Legs, many of whom had been converted by Jesuit missionaries and were at least nominally Roman Catholics. A crucial one of these Eastern Indians come west seems to have been John Gray, who was not only a disciple of the mysterious faith called Christianity, but also a hand to hand fighter of awesome reputation. Gray, in other words, manifested observable religious power. Many of the white mountain men, French and American who are now coming among the Salish were also men of demonstrated power and ability, and they were adherents of this same new religion. But when the Sailish attempted a facsimile of the Catholic chants and prayers.
00:17:12
Speaker 2: Irhois advisors like.
00:17:13
Speaker 1: Ignaci la Mousse insisted that the Summis would boomerang unless everything were done exactly right. That was an explanation that made sense to native people, who had always insisted on precision in their own religious ceremonies. What followed then became famous in early Western history to secure teachers who would show them exactly how to practice the new religion. In eighteen thirty one, the Salish and other allies from the Mountain West made the first of a series of legendary journeys to Saint.
00:17:47
Speaker 2: Louis to ask for priests.
00:17:49
Speaker 1: They continued to do so until the Belgian Jesuit father Jean Pierre de Smet finally established Saint Mary’s mission in the Bitterroot Valley in September of eighteen forty one. Three years before that, in eighteen thirty eight, a Salish buffalo hunting party had suffered a horrifying defeat by the Blackfeet out on the plains, so their fourth journey to Saint Louis had literally been one of desperation. Father de Smet said that with tears in their eyes, they begged me to return with them. All this native pleading to be taught Christianity was just too much for missionaries back east.
00:18:36
Speaker 2: The widely circulated stories drew.
00:18:38
Speaker 1: De smet to the Mountain tribes and Protestants like Jason Lee Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spaulding to Oregon. The potential for religious and cultural misunderstandings between these native people and the missionaries now arriving among them was enormous. For their part, the Salist had only glancingly heard of the deity these old worlders called Jesus. In the Salish religion, animal masters and locales in the landscape were sacred. Dreams could be evidence used in convicting somewhat of a crime. Sexual freedom was available for both men and women, and the Salish readily acceded women’s right to divorce. Christian missionaries to American Indians had long believed that ideas like these meant that Indians must be disciples of the supernatural force Christianity thought of as the source of evil. In fact, few native peoples, the northeastern group Europeans called the Iroquois of the hardy Nosana were an exception, but few people believed.
00:19:42
Speaker 2: There was an evil force in the world.
00:19:45
Speaker 1: But to the missionaries, if Indians embraced animal deities and knew nothing of Jesus, then they must worship Satan. This European conviction that people holding nature sacred worshiped dark forces led to tragedy on numerous occasions.
00:20:02
Speaker 2: Long before the eighteen.
00:20:03
Speaker 1: Forties, it had also produced violent backlashes against missionaries by native people, most famously the Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty in the Southwest, when persecuted Native Shamans had led an uprising that drove Europeans from the Pueblo world for more than a decade. When he arrived beneath the Bitter Roots, Father met had in mind a region wide reduction of tribes, similar to the famous Jesuit reduction in Paraguay. Utterly misperceiving Salish motives, he interpreted their eagerness as evidence.
00:20:43
Speaker 2: That they were the elect of God.
00:20:45
Speaker 1: He said of people who evinced the greatest simplicity, docility, and uprightness, and who also had the courage of heroes. Fortunately, there were many effective points of convergence between the two religions, both Salish Animism and Catholic Christianity embraced chants, songs, ceremony, and prayers.
00:21:09
Speaker 2: Both spoke of a sacred.
00:21:11
Speaker 1: Yearly round, sacred colors and objects, power spots, the use of water and incense for purification.
00:21:19
Speaker 2: And feast days.
00:21:20
Speaker 1: To the Salish, their spirit helpers seemed similar to the Catholic saints, just with different names. Despite the infectious enthusiasm all around from the start, the priest noticed some trouble spots. For one, the Salish not only lacked notions of good and evil, they had no sense of a heaven and a hell, and the more they heard about this particular idea, the less they liked it. To the priests who actually ran brand new Saint Mary’s mission, twenty year old Father Gregory Mangerini and forty two year old Father Nicholas point noticed right off that Salish prayers consisted in asking to live a long time, to kill plenty of animals and enemies, and to steal the greatest number of horses possible. What the Catholics offered was salvation of the soul and its journey to heaven. What the Sailish appeared to want from religion was something else. Entirely dassumes our power to make things happen in this world. The sky is to him nonexistent.
00:22:27
Speaker 2: The Jesuits rope.
00:22:28
Speaker 1: The Indian thinks only of the Earth and wants only the Earth, since it is the Earth that gives existence to everything anyone knows. Thus it is to the Earth that he addresses his first prayers. Among the Europeans, it was Pointed a Frenchman with a manic, depressive personality and a fine thing for us today, also a wanna be artist with some rudimentary art skills, who labored to preserve the details of this classic interaction of ideas, Points paintings, and drawings. Along with a book he wrote, Wilderness Kingdom Indian Life in the Rocky Mountains are founding historical documents in Montana history. He portrayed, for starters, the romantic setting of Saint Mary’s Mission, with the Bitterroot River and mountains behind it, capturing with that romance the high hopes of the priests who were the first American settlers in present Montana. But Point also had an anthropologist’s curiosity about Indians living presumably like the progenitors of modern Man. He found the Salish, their lives and their worldview an exciting counterpoint to European ideas. Point closely observed their religion and would journey with them to the buffalo plane. The Frenchmen persuaded a distinguished saless warrior the missionaries called Ambrose. His real name was shil Cha Lumila, which meant five crows, to allow him to paint a version of the warrior’s pictograph of war exploits. That’s a one of a kind combination in the history of Western art. Here, as Point wrote, deep in the rocky mountains, surrounded by scenes about which I had often dreamed as the beautiful ideal of all natural perspectives, he studied a saleless religion that took him by surprise. They assigned manitou or spirit, to phenomena like the sun, the thunder, and so forth.
00:24:45
Speaker 3: He marveled.
00:24:46
Speaker 1: Their practice of religion centered on the application of what they called medicine or sumis, and Point perceived three versions of it. The first and most important was medicine of util or the power to acquire, with the least possible effort, the greatest possible abundance of things necessary for life. Medicine was also important for purposes of ostentation, for dress, and status, and medicine was likewise called on when one intended malice towards another. Medicine, in effect, was the power to make things happen in this world. It did not focus on outcomes in a second life. Despite the missionary’s hopes of saving souls, it’s clear enough that they came face to face with this reality pretty quickly. As much as the Salsh wanted to please their instructors in this new religion, the Indian sense was that it was a mastery of religious detail that was important to produce worldly success. One of points paintings, which he called Ignase’s Medicine Power, presumably made that clear. In it, the Frenchman showed a famous Iroquois Salish known as Young Ignasse, in a trance like state outside a sweat lodge. Surrounding him were the animal helpers horse, elk, dog, wolf, beaver, deer, perhaps a lynx. That were his special aids to make things happen in the material world, to live long, to have many lovers, to be a successful hunter and horse stealer, and to vanquish foes in battle.
00:26:31
Speaker 2: Those were the whole intent.
00:26:33
Speaker 1: As for his and the missionary’s own feelings about such quests. The Frenchman countered Ignossi’s ideas with a painting he called Worshiping False Idols. Its dark evocations of licking flames, a rhythmic tambourine, and shamanistic incantations capable of sumbling forth devilish spirit forces struck at the heart of the problem the priests believed they faced in turning the Saless towards Christianity. Before very long at all, a road test for the new religion was at hand. It was time for the fall buffalo hunt on the Prairies, and the Sailish and their mountain allies, the nest Perse and the Pondereys, assemble for the journey. As they made preparations to cross the divide that autumn of eighteen forty one, Nicholas Points sat down to his sketch books to capture just why these Indians had tried so valiantly to get the Jesuits to come to their valley. Point gave his painting an obvious name, Blessing of the Arms, before leaving for the hunt. It showed a presiding Catholic sacred heart, as well as a priest with suspended angels. One of the angels in fact fully armed, hovering over the gathered Indians who were holding their weapons alone.
00:28:00
Speaker 2: Off for blessings. Why do that?
00:28:03
Speaker 1: To make their guns impervious to misfires and to the whims of bad spirits who might draw a ball off its mark? As the missionary surely must have realized, none of this was about saving souls. The Salish intended Christianity as a salvation of a people in real time. Point and the young Italian priest Gregory Mengarini accompanied this assemblage on their journey across the mountains to the Buffalo Plains beyond. But Point quickly found that the number of bison, as he put it, has so diminished that the hunting camp with which I was traveling had to march twenty four days before finding any trace of a herd.
00:28:44
Speaker 2: Why so few?
00:28:45
Speaker 1: It’s the result of the campaign of extermination carried on by American commerce, he wrote. Trade of manufactured status goods and firearms was part of it, But the compensation destroyed Indian men and an slaved Indian women. Point believe the Frenchman’s painting Father, Mother and Daughter on the Hunt depicts what he called the barbarous euphoria that drew the sailors from their protected valley out into open country and into harm’s way. But for the now slightly Christianized Indians, the telling moment for the new religion was when they confronted the Blackfeet, and that moment came quickly. The Ponderet group were caught in a surprise Blackfeet attack and were on the verge of being wiped out when a miraculous event occurred. Culix, a woman warrior among them, rallied them and they managed to kill twenty eight of the enemy under her leadership. That routed the Blackfeet into a panic retreat.
00:29:50
Speaker 2: Then another miracle followed.
00:29:53
Speaker 1: In one hunt surround, the sailors took down one hundred and fifty three buffalo. With those kinds of obvious successes, the watching Blackfeet refused to attack the mountain tribes again, they were too powerful. The New Religion had worked. This is probably a story that ought to have a happier ending for the two principles Priests and Silish, but in the real world it naturally could not turn out that way. Indian expectations and Jesuit expectations were arrows shot from different bows that flew past one another in flight. Following the Paraguay model of offering Christianity to all the regional tribes, De Smet and the missionaries decided to extend their hands to.
00:30:46
Speaker 2: The Blackfeet too.
00:30:48
Speaker 1: At one point, when a party of enemy Blackfeet was at the mercy of a Salish hunting party, the priests actually intervened to save the doomed Blackfeet party, to the complete confusion of the Sailish. There were other problems and offering the power of the new religion to enemies. Young men among the Saless soon came to resent the notion of universal brotherhood.
00:31:11
Speaker 2: How was one supposed.
00:31:12
Speaker 1: To earn status and war honors if there was peace with everyone. The final straw came when the missionaries persuaded the Ponderey headman Loyola to give up buffalo hunting in favor of becoming a farmer. Almost at once, Loyola, who had been a wealthy example of Indian success, became impoverished and lost status in his tribe. At this juncture, the Salish shaman Bear Track, or Alexander, as the priest called him, turned from Christianity back to his white buffalo medicine. He remained aloof from the missionaries after that, yet remained respected among the Salish. Most tellingly of all, Sailish summis didn’t keep working until eighteen forty five. The Mountain tribes enjoyed unprecedented successes over the Blackfeet, but after the Blackfeet got their own mission founded by De Smet himself, Salish fortunes seemed to worsen. Then word came from Oregon that the Cayuses had murdered Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and in the aftermath no Indian had suffered some divine retribution. With that, nesper Shamans began disrupting mass at Saint Mary’s, leading the new priest, father Anthony Ravalli, to report to his superiors that the majority gave up private prayer and vented insult and injury every day upon the missionary. When word got out that the Blackfeet Shamans had decided all the Christian missionaries should be assassinated, the Salish went out on their fall buffalo hunt and never even discussed the trip with the missionaries.
00:33:01
Speaker 2: In eighteen fifty, the Jesuits.
00:33:03
Speaker 1: Finally abandoned Saint Mary’s mission in the Bitterroot Valley. This particular morning so many long years later, as I walk along Lolo Creek, with the Bitterroot slopes rising in a series of dark green humps both north and south, I look for, but do not find, that Summus shrine to the Grizzly. I do know that the Sailish still visit Sumi’s spots, like the medicine tree farther up the Bitterroot River, and of course nowadays the cross is in prominent display in every little town in the valley, a rapprochement.
00:33:42
Speaker 3: Of swords, I suppose.
00:33:44
Speaker 2: But then I walk past.
00:33:45
Speaker 1: The tourists again to get to my jeep, and this time they’re arguing over what. I can’t be certain, although for a long moment it sure sounds like an argument over religion.
00:34:11
Speaker 3: Sedan. In this episode, you tell the story of Saint Mary’s mission and the arrival of the Jesuits among the bitter at Salish. And it’s really an interesting story because I think for a long time it was sort of told, or you might find, like in a local tourism brochure, this very simple narrative of you know, they sought out priests and the Jesuits came and they lived together peacefully for a number of years, right, But there’s so much more going on underneath the surface. And so I wonder if you can just begin by talking about the different understandings of faith, I mean, the two sort of main actors in this story, and how just a fundamental difference in what religion is or what faith is sort of set this off on a course that was was sort of inevitably resulted in a breakdown.
00:35:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, it did result in a breakdown, you know. And so this is the beginning the sort of the founding story of the state of Montana. I mean, there certainly obviously had been a lot of history played out by Native people there for a long time, and there had been fur trappers from the Hudson’s Bay and from the American Fur Company and all that coming back and forth through the valley. But this was through Montana even but this was the first time there had ever been an attempt to actually settle on the part of people who weren’t Native. And you know, this was not just a fur trading post. This was something I mean, in the church is still there. I mean, it’s a you know, it’s kind of a tourist attraction in Stevensville, Montana. Today.
00:36:09
Speaker 3: But it’s a story.
00:36:10
Speaker 1: That I mean, I completely agree Randall with your take on it. It’s a story that has often been simplified as here’s the beginning of Montana. These native people journeyed repeatedly to Saint Louis to get priests to come visit them and the clergy. The Jesuits finally did and it was a wonderful thing, and it’s the beginning Montana. Well, the truth, of course is that it featured a classic kind of early contact misunderstanding between the native people in western Montana. And these these priests were largely Europeans. I mean one of them, Father de Smet was Belgian. Nicholas Point was a Frenchman. The other guy, the other guy who was their primary sort of go to guy, was an Italian. And so they were sort of Old Worlder slash Americans who brought the Western world view to it, the idea, you know that we’re going to take the true religion to these indigenous people and lift them up and civilize them. And that’s what the Jesuits thought they were doing. And they were really excited about the fact that here are Native people who have actually journeyed repeatedly to get us to come, and when they got there, what they discovered, and the reason we know this really well is because of Nicholas points work, particularly that book he wrote. What they discovered was that they had a different conception of what they were doing than the sailors did. The salors were caught in a situation where their valley which they had lived in for three thousand years, and they had long not only lived well in that valley, but they had also long gone to Buffalo just over the divide, only about a three days travel and less than that by horse once they acquired horses. They were sort of in the throes of a really bad period because the fur trappers were competing with one another for control of the West, and the Hussin’s Bay Company had come up with this strategy of imposing a fur desert through the Mission Valley, the Bitterroot Valley, the lim High Valley, the Snake River Country, the Wasatch and so for fifteen years, these brigades of trappers came up and down these valleys and basically wiped out not only the fur bears, but they killed off a lot of the game that the sale list were existing on. So the soulis you’re in a herd. They were in a hard place and they were looking for some way to get out of it. And one of the ways, of course you do that is you appeal to your deities, your appeal to religion, to help you escape this situation. So that’s why they were sending their dignitaries to Saint Louis to try to bring the Jesuits out. And once everybody got arrayed at Saint Mary’s Mission, then it began to occur to Nicholas Point in particular, who sort of had an anthropologist interest in Indian religion. Wow, this is not exactly what we thought it was going to be. What they want from religion is for everything in the present day world to work well. And what we want, of course is to save their souls, convert them to Christianity, send them on to an afterlife.
00:39:59
Speaker 2: And they don’t even have a concept of anything like that.
00:40:02
Speaker 3: Yeah. You you make that point that the missionaries are trying to save souls and the Salish wanted them to save their world. Yeah, And to the Salish, there’s not It’s hard to see value in a system of religious belief if it doesn’t produce results.
00:40:25
Speaker 1: That’s precisely what became the rub in this situation because and the sales were they were they were very practical. I mean, religious power was all about demonstrated results, and so you couldn’t just tell us that if we, you know, adopt the practices of your religion, then things are going to be better. You’re going to have to show us, right, So that became one of the interesting aspects of this story too. And of course the field trial of how well Christianity was working for them was how they were going to do when they crossed the divide into black Feet country and went to Hunt Buffalo where the Black Fate were trying to keep them away, and that then became an interesting aspect of the story too.
00:41:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, the.
00:41:27
Speaker 3: I think it’s it’s interesting because one of the interesting aspects of this is that from the Western perspective, religious conversion is sort of a wholesale replacement of theology, right as if there’s sort of a form, you know, blank space and a form and you cross out the old religion and you write in Catholicism, what have you. But the Salors really have sort of a piecemeal approached too. Aspects of Catholicism that they like and other aspects that they don’t like, and so they don’t adopt it. And I think that speaks to like the you know, the utilitarian vision that that you described earlier, Like they don’t like the idea of damnation and hell because it’s unpleasant, So why would you have that as part of your.
00:42:24
Speaker 1: And the more they heard about it, the less I really enjoyed that line.
00:42:28
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. The Blackfeet story is like they they initially when they go over and the Buffalo hunt, they initially have some success, right, they have a good hunt, and there’s a a woman Salish woman who’s a warrior who demonstrats she she takes out a bunch of black Feet.
00:42:51
Speaker 2: Warriors and its.
00:42:54
Speaker 3: Well for the for the missionaries.
00:42:56
Speaker 1: Right Indeed, I mean that that first trip across the divide, I mean for it’s difficult to find Buffalo for a while, they do find the black Feet, and it’s a it’s a kind of an amalgamation of the mountain tribes who often went to Buffalo together. So it’s uh nespers bands, it’s ponderay groups, and it’s a ponderay contingent that actually is about to be wiped out by the black Feet. When this particular female warrior, clix is her name, suddenly rallies the troops and manages to turn the battle around. And I mean, and Nicholas Point actually painted a watercolor of this scene of her leading a charge on the Blackfeet camp, and the Blackfeet are scattering in panic and a lot of I mean. What you have to remember about about these these kinds of encounters is that often Native people would gauge how successful their particular power was on a certain day, and if things did not look good, even though the black Feet probably outnumbered the Pondres, suddenly it looked like the Pondres had more power than one would expect ordinarily. Blackfeet, no doubt, had heard something about the Jesuits going to them and teaching this new religion. So the black Feet panicked and scattered across the landscape. And that, of course was a kind of a miraculous outcome of a battle that looked like it was doomed.
00:44:40
Speaker 3: And then the other thing.
00:44:41
Speaker 1: That happened is within a few days, this combined group of mountain tribes finds a herd of buffalo and one surround they kill more than one hundred and fifty of them, and so man everything looks good at this point, this new religion, absolutely because, as as one of the sailors told Nicholas, point, this is another kind of line I’ve always loved about this story.
00:45:08
Speaker 2: What do you want out of religion? Well, what we want is I want to have a lot of lovers.
00:45:13
Speaker 1: I want to steal more horses than anybody has ever heard of. And I want to be able to kill all my enemies anytime I want to. That’s what religion is supposed to produce.
00:45:24
Speaker 3: And that’s a sticking point because the Jesuit, the sort of universalist impulse of the Jesuit missionaries is to bring everybody together. Oh yes, and the Salish have a real issue with the Jesuits extending their teachings to the enemies of the Salish right and also to try to, you know, get them to avoid engaging in hostilities by which they achieve social standing. Yeah, that’s right, that’s exactly. So there’s these robbing points that.
00:46:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, these are the points at which the story doesn’t go so well, because, yeah, the Christian missionaries are trying to trying to apply the beliefs of universal brotherhood among the sails, and two things basically happen because Father de Smet has the notion that they’re going to do a region wide reduction of tribes, and so we’re also going to take the religion to the Blackfeet and the Crows and whoever wants it. So we’re going to also go to your enemies and build a mission, he informs the Mountain tribes. And the other thing, of course, is that the doctrine of universal brotherhood, it gets to occur to some of the young men among the Salish, well, how do you get war honors? How do you rise in status and marry the woman you want to marry and acquire wealth if everybody is a universal brother And so that sort of flies in the face again of something that they had brought as part of their cultural tradition to this whole game, not expecting that the missionaries were going to say, well, we’re gon We’re going to try to get you all to establish peace with one another. And they kind of decided, you know, that’s not really what we want.
00:47:28
Speaker 3: And so the story it’s the story ends with sort of a whimper rather than a big blowout. And you mentioned in this episode the Payblow revolt and also the Whitman massacres, it’s commonly known, right, and so there are these very prominent instances in the West of religious missionaries coming to violent ends with indigenous folks. And then in the case of the Sailish, it sort of seems that they just sort of lost interest and there developed some sort of you know, a standoff, and the missionaries abandoned Saint Mary’s. So I wonder if you can sort of explain in your thinking why things ended this way instead of perhaps in violence.
00:48:26
Speaker 1: Well, I think the Sailish, for one thing, they wanted to please the missionaries, they wanted to please the priest, and I think they were not inclined to act violently toward them. Although Father Ravali, who Anthony Ravolli, who becomes the last priest to serve it Sat Mary’s mission, I mean in about eighteen forty nine eighteen fifty, and they abandoned the mission in eighteen fifty. He says that every time they tried to whole mass you know, there were yeah, there were nesper Shamans coming in and casting a spur and detigrating Jesus. And so it didn’t turn out to be a violent end, not like the Whitman massacre in Oregon where those missionaries actually were killed by the Cayuses, but or the Pueblo revolt in New Mexico, either where you had several Franciscans who ended up being killed. The sailors didn’t do that, but they and the nest person, the Pondres, made it known, i think, to the missionaries after this ten year experiment, it lasted basically about ten years that we brought you here. We wanted you to come for one reason. You seem to want us to do something that we didn’t really want to do, and then you took your religion to our enemies across the mountains. We’re not really interested in what you have to teach us anymore.
00:49:56
Speaker 3: And so.
00:49:58
Speaker 1: The Saint Mary’s experiment that founds Montana it comes to an end. The building still remains and it’s rebuilt now. But one of the things that the existence of the mission did was it allowed a host of other whites, non natives to come to the Bitterroot Valley. John Owens, a trader, ended up establishing a post there about a mile and a half away from the mission during the last few years that the mission existed, and so that became ultimately the permanence, the permanent settlement that around which Montana kind of coalesced.
00:50:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it also worth mentioning that’s what ultimately led to the dispossession of the sail is because the story doesn’t end with now, the story doesn’t end with the missionaries retreating the sailors within a few decades is they’re removed to the Flathead Reservation and kind of one of the more tragic removal stories in Montana.
00:51:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, and it’s so only five years after the Jesuits abandoned Saint Mary’s the saleesh Are, they sign a treaty Stevens Treaty. Isaac Stevens, the territorial governor, signs a treaty with them in eighteen fifty five where they’re going to be removed from the bitter Root Valley and settled in the Mission Valley about seventy miles to the north, but a contingent of the bitter Root Salish refused to leave, and they remain in the valley until the eighteen eighties when they’re basically forcibly removed. And that’s one of the signal events of that part of Montana, when the Bitterroot Sale Ish Are. Finally they crossed the bridge over the Clark Fork River in Missoula, and of course, in the courthouse in Missoula there are paintings of Charlow and this last group of bitter Roots sailors crossing the Lark Fork River and heading north to the to the Mission Mountain Reservation.
00:52:12
Speaker 3: Well, Dan, appreciate it. You Bet Randall, good questions.
00:52:16
Speaker 1: Thanks, Thanks M. M.
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