Abbess of the Snows
Stuart, Henry Longan
June 23, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 177 ABBESS OF THE...
...Ursula's by the tains and in Alaska," she was fond of telling her play- Sea" was opened at St...
...At fifteen ripe for mischief, into a devoted escort back to the she pleaded with the saintly Bishop Rappe that her mission...
...They honors which the Church at her own time, and in her dart across the welkin, as waving ribbons of light...
...the life and death story of this martyr archbishop had Yet these poor people, as nearly all who have lived made upon her...
...of a journey must have meant that young and strong Not even the dogs were allowed to run...
...June 23, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 177 ABBESS OF THE 'SNOWS By HENRY LONGAN STUART T HOSE who study the western coastline of Amer- eyes, narrow and slanting, give ground to the belief ica, northward of the forty-fifth parallel of lati- that their forefathers wandered from Asia at a time tude, cannot help but be struck by the recurrence when the Bering Strait was passable...
...An unwonted light begins, Rockies by six Indian chiefs of the Flathead tribe, the moon being full and very bright, to radiate in the whose unwearied friend she long had been...
...To complete the picture of heroism and out of these random words, yields in picturesqueness self-denial, it should be remembered that this pioneer to none of the tales of adventure for which the early into a wilderness where no white woman had set her history of the wild west is ransacked by plot seekers feet, was already sixty-six, worn out with administraand scenario hunters...
...raid, which left a trail of blood and smoke across three Often during that first winter we sat up all night asking states...
...in the eternal spirit of the living God...
...devoted mother spent the night chafing the hands and Nor were the catastrophes that marked the early feet of her sisters and praying to "Our Lady of the Catholic missions in North America in the seventeenth Snows" for, as the sister who tells her story recalls, century spared to this startling reconstitution of them "Alaska was always the goal of our ambition...
...In her own letters, to the last letter which the noble nun sent from Alaska which are filled with a sort of rapturous appreciation "Deal thy bread to the hungry and bring the needy of the great northland and with gay gossip about and harborless into thy house...
...The trials, the reached St...
...The Yukon became old and feeble and lame, in constant pain and only a charnel house...
...as many believe in the trenches and shallow graves of From it we may gather what crucifixion to a woman, the war-front, reached Alaska...
...But the account written by one of her sisters and the glory of the Lord shall gather thee up...
...What was practically a last agony prolonged funds to carry on the work in this furthest fringe of four months, and during which she was anointed four the world's mission field...
...During the lifetime of houses grew on their backs...
...the sisterhood should be awakened and the ceremony Both cherished the dream of a mission to the Esquiof conferring the white cap be performed before she maux through busy and crowded years, filled with the would settle to sleep...
...The Indian, complicated by "Shamanism" or cult of an Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Sound of Juan Perez, impersonal devil, who represents the malignant aspects Valdo, Redonda, Texado, and Carrera, are only a of nature and who must be placated by witch-dances few that have survived...
...She walked with crutches or a stick to the end wolves, and blizzards...
...Returning from one of the long rides in sixty, seventy, ninety miles an hour...
...Their faces, like those Stuarts...
...Her body, embalmed and "No artist, no musician," writes Mother Amadeus, encased in a copper coffin, was borne, by land and of the Northern Lights, "could be as harmonious and sea, to the mission of St...
...you could get some sisters to come among these wild "Mother had chosen the coldest corner of the dormiCheyennes, they could do more than a regiment...
...The anemometer was runminated in the catastrophe of Little Big Horn, and ning ninety miles an hour at the wireless station when three years later took place the terrible Cheyenne it broke, and no further record could be kept...
...Stories of her childhood and youth show a were amazed to find the Ursulines, untouched, at their spiritual precocity and spiritual wilfulness often noticed post...
...But the true with Spanish exploration from the first, and which history of Catholic effort in Alaska begins with Archcasts, as it were, a benediction over its worst mistakes bishop Charles John Seghers, Archbishop of Oregon, and failures, there is no hint in these early records...
...Among its Russian owners there family of Ghent, Seghers was ordained a priest at seems to have been a tendency to regard the natives as twenty-four years of age, and within a few months of a sort of half-human fauna, and to shoot them down his ordination was evangelizing the Indians of Vanwhen they became troublesome with as little compunc- couver Island, and studying their dialects with a view tion as though the furs they brought in to the store- to mission work in Alaska...
...The sky suddenly breaks carried to its last resting place at the foot of the out into a paean of color...
...In 1887, when the valley of the Big Horn was in the lives of the predestined...
...Before the dramas of nature times, ended on November 10...
...under the alien names imposed by later explorers...
...Their early wiry as her physical constitution must have been, a meals were of dry crusts and boiled potatoes...
...Our travelers might be proud to have made and which she poor people died in great numbers, especially the young undertook six times...
...Their first resting of her beloved order, that a terrible medical mishap pace was a room in a Chinese laundry with cowboys early in her profession had rendered her, strong and stamping and singing in a room overhead...
...The ideals which infused it and rendered posand arduous trips into northern Alaska which she sible its triumph of spirit over matter may best be made in the closing years of her life from the head- read in a text from the prophet Elias appended quarters of the order at Seattle...
...At thir- door of the Agency, was sufficient to turn "Swordteen, while a child at the Ursuline convent at Cleve- bearer," the Crow Messiah, and his braves, armed and land, she took a vow of perpetual chastity...
...Snow piles up within and without, Lindesmith was stopped by a convert Indian with a cutting off all vision, and trembling as though lightning strange suggestion...
...and again...
...Ignatius, in Montana, and lavish as is the Aurora...
...In the winter of 1919 influenza, born of her last two journeys supplies the missing detail...
...Born in 1839, the son of a wealthy commercial gleam of idealism...
...It was not until his own succession to the Chief of them, and never to be forgotten by Catholics diocese in 1873 that he was able to put it into effect...
...There was no priest at Bishop Demers, whom he accompanied to the Vatican Sitka, the headquarters of the Fur Company, until Council, his wish to "die as a soldier of Christ on the 1790...
...their priests rested and officiated, and it was owing to the 178 THE COMMONWEAL June 23, 1926 peculiar circumstances of the time and place that the the terrible tide of an Indian rising swept over the child made her first communion at the early age of mission station and soldiers sent out from Fort Keogh eight...
...physical and spiritual salvation among the hapless and They are tenacious and stoical...
...Life for the first nuns was a tive cares and long journeys to Rome in the interests succession of perils and hardships...
...tory for herself," a sister recalls, "and one of her feet The story of the Tongue River convent, which grew was frozen...
...Her father, John Dunne, a berg and glacier in springtime break off from the solid builder and contractor of Akron, Ohio, was of the ice and go shouting and roaring seawards, something authentic line of the princes of Iregan, in Leinster, of the tenacity and stoicism has settled in their hearts whose lands had been alienated for their faith and that comes to humanity when its life is spent in peren- given to a younger and renegade branch under the nial war with elementary forces...
...and protomartyr of the Antarctic...
...Others have long disappeared and incantations...
...But it was necessarily stringent, by Mother Amadeus herself to give the news of the and to no one did the hardships of the dispossessed death of Brother Ulrich Paquin, a Jesuit scholastic tribes come home with greater force than to Father who perished in a blizzard, Mother Amadeus draws a Elias John Lindesmith, army chaplain at Fort Keogh, picture of the early trials that could not be surpassed one of those obscure missionary priests to whom in the for effectiveness : "Three deaths have visited us, and heroic era of mission work providence sometimes ac- blizzards and hurricanes, the fiercest the Arctics know, corded the strange destiny of being at once priest and have been succeeding one another with a speed of soldier...
...their cheekbones high and prominent...
...Thanks largely to the character of General God to save us, for we feared we should be dashed into Miles, the work of resettlement that followed its sup- the Bering as other cabins were...
...On a jourprecious has been added to it in our own day by the ney to Valdez, a gift for the missions, laid upon her very sophistications of the modern soul...
...Scarcely was it erected when the terrible last concerted stand of the red man in America cul- Arctic winter descended...
...her lips moving in prayer...
...Bering Strait...
...who realize how few are the differences that sever "In his heroism was the Alaska mission life born...
...Then shall thy light the quaint ways of the Eskimo converts, it is idle to break forth as the morning, and thy health shall expect any record of hardships joyfully borne for speedily arise, and thy justice shall go before thy face, Christ...
...Jesuits and Oblates of Mary Immaculate, brought in Of the missionary enterprise that went hand-in-hand the first fruits of the new mission field...
...novitiate might be advanced, obtained his consent, and Between the life of Mother Amadeus and her hero, insisted on her return to the convent late at night that Archbishop Seghers, there is more than one parallel...
...Twice in the twentieth...
...East...
...In 1876 the paper...
...During one of these last, the of her life...
...To their intrepidity and hospitality life, crippled and ailing, to undertake a mission of many a party of lost Arctic explorers owes its safety...
...The sense of her ultimate voca- cares of administration...
...Some day I shall be a missionary in the Rocky Moun- It was September, 1910, when "St...
...No region of the world has had to wait so long for the The life story of this noble prelate, who, almost Gospel as the territories of the Northwest...
...own way, confers upon God's elect...
...As a child she walked aflame, the mere appearance of "Makamahehonaout of the village schoolroom when a comment off en- wihonah," "the great holy white chief woman," at the sive to Catholics was uttered by her teacher...
...Both realized it in the end, tion seems to have been with her from the very first...
...But they do not worship idols...
...Every morning, the her heart is lifted up to positive rapture, and one feels sisters who slept in a room next to her own would the poet and painter that was concealed under the rigid find her "her eyes wide open, smiling at the darkness, habit of Saint Ursula...
...its grandeur, where day and night are counted by weeks Like her Master, born in a stable but of the House and months, where the Northern Lights dance over the of David, Mother Amadeus, though of obscure birth, snow like the reflection of a world on fire, and where was of princely descent...
...and spent their last days amid the snows of the Arctic...
...and lay for thirty days in her berth...
...The names of a few heroic monks stand out scene of war, weapons in hand" was denied him again against this background of greed, and indifference...
...The people were sick, starving, for able to take milk as nourishment, the hardships a cruel quarantine cut them off from St...
...Our house tremwhich he covered southeastern Montana questing for bles and sways in their dread embrace, so that we souls, dressed in a buckskin suit, his long grey hair often hasten to the chapel to beg our Sacramental floating over his ears from under a fur cap, Father Lord's protection...
...table by a passenger of alien faith, bore the followHer delight in the quaint doll-like little Esquimaux ing note : "To the Reverend Mother, the lady whose children, whose stolid faces and slanting eyes peep out smile is a benediction, whose benign face mirrors the from their furry "parkees" and "muck-lucks...
...Their religof Spanish names, in a part of the world upon which ion is the vague pantheism of the North American no Spanish influence has been brought to bear...
...I was thinking, Father, that if were flashing through it...
...western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian, is It is in these words that Mother Mary Amadeus, of the saintly Ivan Veniamof, who died Metropolitan the Sacred Heart of Jesus, superioress of the Ursulines Innocentius of Moscow, and whose labors for thirty of Alaska, writing thirty-two years later from the years among this disinherited people earned him the mother-house at Seattle, describes the impression that title of "Enlightener of the Aleuts...
...In 1915 "storms so violent folmothers, many of them wandering out of their cabins lowed the boat" that she was unable to land at Akulrak, to die in the snow...
...Once the frail convent was burnt to June 23, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 179 the ground...
...Catholic effort in Alaska begins with its cession by Mount Edgecumb was once Monte San Jacinto, Queen Russia to the United States...
...It is easy to believe that this was not among them admit, are a singularly lovable and at- the least factor in deciding her, comparatively late in tractive race...
...All the elements they plunge into a sea of crimson in the West...
...In 1918, already It is from the "Kahlekat" letters written year by attacked by her last illness, the heroic nun had to be year from Seattle, which begin invariably with the carried on board the Victoria...
...They are being raised to our altars, it is hard to believe that multitudinous, innumerable, they throb and dance and Mother Amadeus will wait long for the supreme group themselves in clouds of exquisite blue...
...Michael, on the very edge of mates in the middle of a romping game...
...But in the keen ap- wonder that a legend gradually grew up around the preciation of nature's aspects, the relish for what woman of whom a fellow-worker had said in earlier might, in all reverence be termed the "fun" of the days : "All I have to do is to stand Sister Amadeus missionary's lot, the contemporary note is sounded, out on the street corner and she will attract all the time and time again...
...Living, as they do, benighted people upon whom for the second time in face to face with a singularly awe-inspiring nature, their obscure history the lust of mankind for gold was where the change of seasons is almost cataclysmic in pouring its hordes of adventurers and prospectors...
...Michael...
...great-hearted "husky" dogs who were found sitting on Upon her return to Seattle from her last journey, guard around the frozen bodies of lost travelers...
...During this voyage superscription, "Jesus 1" that the story of the Ursuline she was flung across her cabin by heavy seas and mission to the Esquimaux is best told...
...of heroic sanctity which reach us across centuries are No conception of the character of Mother Mary to be found in a life which only closed seven years Amadeus is possible without some mention of the long ago...
...In a letter written pression was just...
...During the years that Charlotte Island-Florida Blanca, Bouquet Inlet- immediately followed, a handful of devoted priests, Boca de Quadra...
...The early in our own day and age realized the tragic history of history of Alaska is a sordid chronicle of commercial Saint Thomas a Becket, is an amazing human docuexploitation under imperial charter, lit up by scarce a ment...
...Michael only able to continue her journey toils are those of the saints, which remain constant to Akulrak by sheer force of will power...
...Time lifelong invalid, and that her thigh had been broken in and again during their journeys to branch missions, a railroad accident while on her way to the new mission their lives were in imminent danger, from floods, field...
...Amid the arid Protestantism of the "Western of nearly all races constantly buffeted by wind and cold, Reserve" the Dunne house was an oasis where visiting are flat...
...It is as though each crystal in the snowy atmos- In days when so many faithful servants of the phere darted out its ray, then, rising, shot across the Cross, whose field of labor was the new world, are sky-a sparkling, dazzling centre of light...
...It is no from generation to generation...
...The little convent was a mere shack The opportunity to carry out the first part of her "constructed in twenty days of rough boards and tar scheme came to her tragically enough...
...her we are told, she exclaimed when laid upon her deathgratitude for the clumsy helpfulness of soldiers, sailors, bed : "It is like Heaven here with my dear nuns about and trappers, peer out again and again in the chroni- me," and fell into a silence scarcely broken till her cles which, too often, were forced to be an appeal for death...
...As we read on we become con- children of Toledo," and of whom the Eskimo used scious, not only that holiness has lost none of its to seek word, saying to the mission priests: "Show vital quality, but that something very fine and very us the Mother who loves the Innuits...
Vol. 4 • June 1926 • No. 7
