DE SMET, PIERRE JEAN

Founder of Native American missions; b. Termonde, Belgium, Jan. 30, 1801; d. St. Louis, Mo., May 23, 1873. De Smet was of Flemish-Walloon stock and the fifth of nine children. After meeting Charles Nerinckx, early Kentucky missioner, he came to the U.S. in 1821, entered the Society of Jesus, and was ordained at Florissant, Mo., on Sept. 23, 1827. He then became treasurer of St. Louis College (later University). Returning to Belgium because of ill health, he remained there for four years, two of which he spent outside the Society. In 1837 he returned to Missouri, was readmitted to the Jesuits, and a few months later set out for the mission at Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he remained until 1839. The same year he visited native tribes along the middle Missouri River and encountered two Flathead natives en route to St. Louis to ask for priests to instruct their nation. This visit was to prove the turning point of his life.

De Smet visited the Rocky Mountain area in 1840. Returning in 1841 with five companions, he founded St. Mary's Mission (near Missoula, Mont.), visited Fts. Colville and Vancouver in the far Northwest, and with missionaries F. N. blanchet and Modeste demers (both future bishops) planned the expansion of the Church in the Oregon country. In 1843 he sailed to Europe, recruited five Jesuits and six Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, chartered a vessel in Antwerp, Belgium, and returned to the United States on July 31, 1844. After founding a central mission on the Willamette River (near St. Paul, Ore.), De Smet revisited the natives in the mountains and journeyed to Ft. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to bring the Blackfoot confederacy to peaceful ways.

On his return he was notified of his removal from the office of superior and of his recall to St. Louis. Arriving there he was made provincial treasurer and secretary; his formal missionary career in the Far West had come to an end. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, he visited the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains seven times as an agent of the federal government. In 1864 he alone could enter the camp of Sitting Bull; and his last journey West (1870) was to establish a mission among the Sioux. De Smet was not so much a missionary as he was a promoter and procurator of missions; in their interest, he made repeated journeys to the mountains and crossed the Atlantic Ocean 16 times. His principal published works include Letters and Sketches (Philadelphia 1843), Oregon Missions and Travels (New York 1847), Western Missions and Missionaries (New York 1863), and New Indian Sketches (New York 1865).

Bibliography: h. m. chittenden and a. t. richardson, Life, Letters and Travels of Father Pierre Jean De Smet, S.J., 4 v. (New York 1905). g. j. garraghan, Jesuits in the Middle United States, 3 v. (New York 1938). e. laveille, Life of Father de Smet, S.J., tr. m. lindsay (New York 1915). h. margaret, Father De Smet, Pioneer Priest of the Rockies (Milwaukee 1940). j. schafer, Dictionary of American Biography, ed. a. johnson and d. malone (New York 1928–36) 5:255–256.

[w. l. davis]