Catholic beginnings in Kansas City, Missouri; an historical sketch

Contents

GEVILMORIGINS © 20- G00 85 9) is ee en et Dn on ec) THE FIRST PRIESTS 2 ah eer de; peSleg thie) Seppe tices ge cM ee me THE PASTORATE OF FATHER Roux, 1833-1834 . . . . . 36 THE PASTORATE OF FATHER Roux, 1834-1835 . . . . . 66 THE JESUIT MINISTRY, 1835-1846 . . . . . . =. . 85 HARLy ERENCH RESIDENTS . . . . . . =. % « - I14

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTH “7. &, en pa eee. El oS

Preface

In 1916 the author of the present sketch, in the course of ‘a casual examination of the Archdiocesan Archives of St. Louis, chanced upon the correspondence of Father Roux, the pioneer priest of Kansas City, with Bishop Rosati of St. Louis. It did not take him long to recognize in this correspondence an historical source of the first importance for the story of Catholic development in the second city of Missouri, once an Indian trading-station and the ultimate advance-post of the white man’s civilization on the highway of travel to the Great Plains, but now of metropolitan proportions with no element lacking to fill up the perfect measure of its modernity. The letters of Father Roux, packed with interesting detail and remarkable as the earliest body of correspondence indorsed ‘‘from the mouth of the Kansas’’ anywhere to be found, became accordingly the centre around which this sketch is largely written; but other material, mostly from unpublished sources, has also been utilized enabling the author to carry his narrative forward from the first appearance of the Faith on the Missouri frontier to the pastorate of Father Roux and thence to the advent of Father Donnelly, under whom the pioneer stage of Kansas City Catholicity passed into history.

St. Louis Unwwersity September 1, 1919

ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter I

French names and associations cluster around the birth of nearly all the larger cities of the Middle West. Men of French origin or descent either founded them or were the first of civilized folk to set foot on their sites and leave to posterity the earliest recorded notice of their topographical features. We have only to recall Marquette and Joliet in Chicago, Cadillac in Detroit, Juneau in Milwaukee, Laclede in St. Louis, Robideaux in St. Joseph and Francis Chouteau in Kansas City. History does not forget that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the entire Mississippi Valley and the region of the Great Lakes, in their civilized aspects, were both Catholic and French. Parkman in his classie volumes and more recently Justin Winsor in his great co-operative work, Narrative and Critical History of the Umted States, have unfolded the successive acts in the great drama of exploration, discovery and splendid pioneering that was enacted on the stage of mideontinental North America by the gallant race whose life-and-death struggle today on the battlefields of Pieardy and Lorraine holds the rapt attention of an onlooking world.*

*Written in July, 1918.

Following, then, a more or less general law, according to which the great cities of the Middle West shaped themselves into being, the pioneer beginnings of Kansas City, Missouri, are colored both Catholic and French. The very name of Kansas was in a sense a gift to the world from Catholic hands. It was probably first written into history when the chronicler placed on record the picturesque adventure in 1601 of Juan de Ofiate, that led him from San Gabriel in New Mexico to the ‘‘Escansaques,’? whose tents were pitched a hundred leagues to the northwest near the ‘‘Panana’’ or Pawnees.! Later, Louis Joliet and the Jesuit, James Marquette, discoverers of the Mississippi, were in a very literal sense the first to put the name of Kansas ‘‘on the map.’’ Their published maps, the earliest extant of the trans-Mississippi country, indicate the ‘‘Kansa’’ Indians by name as occupying approximately the same lands in which they were settled when white men first

* Frederick Webb Hodge, Handbook of American Indians, (Bureau of American Ethnology), Washington, 1912, 1:653. See also Kansas Historical Collections, 10:355, article, History of the Kansas or Kaw Indians, by George P. Morehouse, ‘‘Some have thought that the Escansaques were the Utes, but the greater weight of evidence, as I have shown, seems to establish the fact that they were none other than the Kansa—now so considered by the United States at Washington’’. Hodge, however, in the authoritative work cited above, while apparently accepting the identification of the two tribes, (1:653), notes later, (654), that the Escansaques were ‘‘ possibly the Kansa’’. William Elsey Connolley in his recently issued Kansas and the Kansans, Chicago, 1918, 1:20, declines to accept the hitherto accepted identification of the two tribes in question. The Rev. Michael Shine of Plattsmouth, Nebraska, a close student of Western Indian lore, inclines to the theory that the Escansaques began to make their aequaintance.2?- From the Indian tribe the name Kafnsa or Kansas passed to the river that drained the lands occupied by the tribe and from the river it passed to the town that was destined to rise just inside the western state-line of Missouri at the point where the Kaw or Kansas River mingles its waters with the muddy tide of the Missouri.

Probably as early as 1705 French voyageurs and traders had ascended the Missouri as far as the mouth of the Kansas and beyond.t ‘Certainly in 1724 the Sieur were the Akansa Sabe or Apaches of the Plains. Cf. also Bureaw American Ethnology, 29th Report, p. 574.

* Hodge, op. cit., .2:653. ‘‘Marquette’s autograph map, drawn probably as early as 1674, places the Kansa a considerable distance directly west of the Osage and some distance south of the Omaha, indicating that they were then on Kansas River’’. Reproductions of the original maps of Joliet and Marquette will be found in Thwaites’ Jeswit Relations, 59:86, 108, and in Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, 4:200-220. The theory has recently been advanced that the Kansa of Marquette are to be identified with the Akansea or Arkansas (Quapaw) Indians.

*For an interesting discussion of the name Kansas and the various forms it has assumed, ef. Connolley, Kansas and the Kansans, 1:204.

* Kansas LHistorical Collections, 9:266. A communication addressed by the Marquis de Beauharnois to the French King in 1727 cites among other government allowances on behalf of the Jesuit missions, the item, ‘‘For the support of a missionary at Kanzas—600 livres’’ (O’Callaghan, Documents Relating to the Colonial History of New York, 9:995). No corroborative evidence | of the presence of a Jesuit missionary among the Kansas Indians in the eighteenth century is anywhere available, the Jeswit Relations, to mention one authoritative source, being absolutely silent on the point. While eighteenth-century French posts were de Bourgmont passed the latter river on his way up the Missouri from Fort Orleans, the second oldest French establishment in Missouri founded in 1720 on an island in the Missouri River near the present Brunswick in Chariton County. Before 1750 one or more garrisoned posts had been established by the French on the Missouri above the Kansas, the ruins of one of these posts being found by Lewis and Clark near the site of Leavenworth City. On July 12, 1795, Jean Baptiste Trudeau or Truteau, St. Louis’s first schoolmaster, then in charge of a trading expedition to the Upper Missouri country, passed the mouth of the Kansas River, up the valley of which, as he notes in his recently discovered Journal, beaver, otter and deer were to be found in abundanee.. A decade later, in 1805, Lewis and Clark encamped at the mouth of the Kansas, a meagre mention of some of the physical characteristies of the surrounding country, which occurs in the Journal of their historic erected on the right bank of the Missouri in the neighborhood of the Kansa Indians, their erection does not appear to have antedated 1745. The reference in Margry, 6:452, to the missionary ‘‘destined’’? for the fort on the Missouri in 1725 is referred by Houck, History of Missouri, 1:268, to Fort Orleans. Father Paul du Poisson, §.J., was missionary to the Akensas or Akansas at the French settlement on the Arkansas River during the period 1726-1729 (Jeswit Relations, 69:259). Is the ‘«Kanzas’’ missionary referred to in the Beauharnois document to be identified with Father Du Poisson? At all events, the writer feels that further evidence must be awaited before we can accept with anything like confidence the conclusion that the Jesuits were established among the Kansa Indians as early as 1727. A more plausible explanation, perhaps, is that ‘‘Kanzas’’ in the same document is a mistake for Kaskaskia, where Jesuit missionaries certainly were established at the period named.

CIVIL ORIGINS bl expedition, being, the earliest published reference, after that of Truteau’S, to the locality of the future Kansas City. By the logic of geographical position at the great southwest bend of the Missouri, that locality was destined to assume importance as an outfitting-station and point of departure for Santa Fe trader, Rocky Mountain trapper, California goldseeker, Oregon settler and other elements in the tide of human travel which through several decades of the last century moved westward across the Great Plains.°

To a common factor, the Santa Fe trade, was due the initial prosperity of Independence, Westport and Kansas City, the three historic towns (though Sibley should be mentioned to complete the list) of Jackson County, Missouri. The oldest of the three, Independence, six miles south of the Missouri river and twelve miles east

> American IZistorical Review, Journal of Jean Baptiste Truteau, 19:203; Elliot Coues (ed.), Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1:33. ‘‘The earliest historical mention made of the present site of Kansas City is found in the memoirs of Daniel Boone, Jy., who reached the first bend of the Missouri River as early as the close of the last century. When young Boone was but eighteen, he left his home at Fort Hamilton, on the big Miami, just west of Cincinnati, and being well armed and mounted on an Indian pony, came West. * * * He went as far as the ““Great American Desert and returned to St. Louis, having passed by and noted the spot upon which Kansas City is now built.’’ Barns, Commonwealth of Missowri, St. Louis, 1877, p. 747. No information as to the alleged ‘‘memoirs of Daniel Boone, Jr.,’’ is available. Daniel Morgan Boone, son of the historic Western pioneer, Daniel Boone, is usually credited with having been the first white man to reside on or in close proximity to the site of Kansas City. Two daughters of his were baptized by Father Roux in 1834. t of its junction with the Kaw was laid out in 1827 as the seat of Jackson County. Only four years later it had become the eastern terminus of the Santa Fe trade. The goods were shipped from the East in wagons over the Alleghanies and then by the Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri water-route to Blue Mills or Independence Landing (Wayne City) on the Missouri, six miles distant from the town of Independence. Thence they were transported in wagons drawn by mules or oxen or on pack-mules over the historic Santa Fe trail for a distance of eight hundred miles to Santa Fe, then within Mexican territory. Independence prospered on this commerce, but only for the briefest spell, the commerce being promptly absorbed by enterprising little Westport with its better landing-place on the Missouri. With the washing away of its landing-station at Blue Mills or Wayne City in the flood of 1844, Independence saw its fond dream of great commercial expansion vanish into thin air. °

Ten miles to the west of Independence near the junetion of the Missouri and Kansas rivers grew up the thriving frontier town of Westport. It was laid out in 1833 by John Calvin McCoy, a surveyor, son of Isaae McCoy, a Baptist minister conspicuous in early missionary enterprise among the Indians of the West.? MeCoy settled down at about the intersection of the Independence-Santa Fe road with the present Grand Avenue of Kansas City. It was not many years before the town grew to importance as an out-fitting station and ‘‘jump-

* Conard, Encyclopaedia of the History of Missouri, St. Louis, 32349. *Id., 6:449.

ing-off place’’, eventually wresting from Independence the coveted prizé of the Santa Fe trade. It had an excellent landing on the Missouri four miles to the south at the foot of the present Grand Avenue in Kansas City. As late as 1846 when Francis Parkman passed through Westport to follow the windings of the Oregon Trail, it was still a typical frontier town. ‘‘ Westport was full of Indians whose shaggy ponies were tied by dozens along the houses and fences. Saes and Foxes with shaved heads and painted faces, Shawnees and Delawares, in calico frocks and turbans, Wyandots dressed like white men and a few wretched Kanzas wrapped in old blankets, were strolling along the streets or lounging in and out of the shops and houses.’

Not for long did Westport hold the prize of the Santa Fe trade, which it had snatched from its more ancient neighbor, Independence. It was doomed to relinquish the booty into the hands of its younger rival, Westport Landing, the future Kansas City.® As early

* Parkman, Oregon Trail, p. 4.

° Materials exist for a critical study of the first white settlements at the mouth of the Kansas; but such study has yet to be attempted. John Calvin McCoy, the founder of Westport, has left his reminiscences, now preserved in typewritten form among the records of the Missouri Valley Historical Society, Allen Library, Kansas City, Missouri, (Tales of an Old Timer, by John Calvin McCoy—compiled by W. W. Harris, Jr., November 25, 1916). Pertinent material will very likely be also found in the McCoy Papers, an extensive collection of letters, ete., in the Library of the Kansas State Historical Library at Topeka, Kansas. Isaac McCoy, father of John Calvin McCoy, arrived at the Missouri frontier in 1830. The best among the printed accounts of early Kansas City history is perhaps to be found in W. H. Miller, The History of Kansas City, Kansas City, 1881.

as 1821 Francis Gesseau (Jesse) Chouteau, a son of Pierre Chouteau, Senior, and grandson of Laclede, the founder of St. Louis, established a general agency of the American Fur Company on the south bank of the Missouri River a short distance below the mouth of the Kansas opposite Randolph Bluffs and near the place known as Randolph Point. He brought his wife and children in a pirogue from St. Louis, twenty days being required for the journey which now may be made by rail in seven hours. In 1826 a great rise of the Missouri submerged the agency, which was thereupon abandoned, a new trading-house being opened by Francis Chouteau at.a point farther up the river at the foot of the present Harrison Street. A group of traders, trappers and employees of the Chouteaus built their cabins close to the new post which thereupon assumed somewhat of the character of a settlement.1° As late as 1837 Wet-

John Calvin McCoy in his Reminiscences, 253, 255, states that the Francis Chouteau trading house was in 1821 on the south bank of the Missouri opposite Randolph Bluffs. According to Frederick Chouteau, brother of Francis and Cyprian, the Chouteau trading-house was located for a while on the north bank of the river across from the site of Kansas City. ‘‘I came to Randolph, Clay County, Missouri, about two miles below Kansas City, on the opposite side of-the Missouri River, in the fall of 1825, October or November. My brothers, Francis and Cyprian, were trading there.’’ Reminiscences of Frederick Chouteau in Kansas Historical Collections, 8:423.

There were a few French settled at the mouth of the Kansas even prior to the arrival of the Chouteaus. About 1815, Jacques Fournais, with a party of thirty Canadian voyageurs and traders, all in the employ of the North American Fur Company, brought a bateaw of goods for the Indians up the Missouri to the locality of Kansas City. He did not return with the expedition, but more’s Gazetteer of Missouri, in a table of Missouri- River distances, réfers to the Kansas City site simply as ‘‘Chouteau’s’’. Previous to the ‘thirties the lowlying bottom land along the right bank of the Kansas at its mouth, known as West Bottoms, was covered with a dense growth of timber. In 1832 and the years immediately following, a number of French Canadians with their Indian wives and half-breed children came down the Missouri River in successive parties from the Rocky Mountain. region and: entered or purchased land in the West Bottoms, thus forming a second settlement known for a while as Kawsmouth or Kansasmouth, though this name was often used to designate the Chouteau post as well. The two settlements, Chouteau’s and Kawsmouth, together with Westport, were the chief nuclei of growth of the future Kansas City."?

settled there permanently, dying at Kansas City in 1871 at the reputed age of one hundred and twenty-four years. Barns, op. ctt., T49.

“‘This [Chouteaus’ settlement] was the first recognition of the natural advantages of this angle of the river for a large distributive trade and the actual founding of the interest which has since expanded into the varied and wide extended activities of this city.’’ W. H. Miller, The History of Kansas City, Kansas City, 1881, p. 10. ‘‘This settlement was never very large, probably never exceeded a few dozen families, but it was always important as the headquarters of a very extensive trade.’’

“Catholic Historical Review, Washington, D. C., 3:334. Barns, op. cit., 749, gives the date of settlement of West Bottoms as 1823 or earlier, erroneously, however, if we are to follow John Calvin McCoy’s and other accounts. ‘‘Until 1832 the only house in the river bottoms of West Kansas City was the cabin of Louis Bertholet which stood near where are the best houses on the willow island in the river. Soon after that date, other French

Francis Chouteau was joined by his brother, Cyprian, in 1825 and later in the same year by another brother, Frederick.2. The Chouteau Warehouse, as the second establishment of the St. Louis traders came to be known, stood at the foot of Harrison Street, or some little distance to the east. Francis Chouteau lived here until his death in 1838, having entered the land on which the Warehouse stood. This tract of 160 acres, located at the northeast boundary of the original city limits was sold by his widow, Madame Therese Chouteau, in 1853 at $12.50 an acre and became known as Guinotte’s Addition to Kansas City.7* For many years families, chiefly from the trapping-grounds of the Western mountains, were from year to year added to that settlement in the bottoms until all the land lying east of the state-line was occupied by them in small farms of ten to forty acres each. The women being mostly natives of the mountain Indian tribes, their arrival and settlement was about in the order named: Louis Tromly [Tremble’], John Grey [Gray], and his son-in-law, Benj. Lagotrie [Lagautherie], Louis Turjon [Turgeon], Theodore Etue, Peter Vieux, Ferrier and a few others not remembered.’’ Reminiscences, p. 53.

““Kawsmouth is a very appropriate and convenient term to be used in describing facts and events of a certain character connected with the history of Kansas City and its environs. In fact, that name should have been adopted at first for the future city, but it was never thought of on that early spring day in 1839 [1838?] when we met in the log-house down at the river to adopt a name and make other preliminary arrangements for ushering in the new era that was about to commence at this point.’’ John C. McCoy, Reminiscences, 12; Kansas Historical Collections, 8:423; Miller, History of Kansas City, p. 10.

“ Kansas Historical Collections, 8:423; Miller, Hist. Kansas City, p. 10.

*C. C. Spalding, Annals of the City of Kansas, Kansas City,

CIVIL ORIGINS iL?

the road climbing the -high ground at the Chouteau Warehouse, at about the line of the present Forest Avenue, was the only one leading from the river-front to Westport and the prairies beyond. It ran through the woods to where Twelfth Street is now laid out and thence southwest to what is now the intersection of Seventeenth and Broadway, where it descended the hill to Westport. The Santa Fe traders, who had to haul their Eastern-made goods from Independence to Westport eighteen miles over a none too easy road, soon realized that it was decidedly to their advantage to land the goods at Chouteau’s with only a four-mile overland haul to Westport. It was the first step in the process by which the tide of Western commerce and trade was directed to the site of the future Kansas City.

But some distance above this primitive startingpoint of the commercial greatness of Kansas City was a natural landing-place superior even to the one at Chouteau’s. It included the ground where those great business arteries, Walnut and Main Streets and Grand Avenue, meet the south river-front of the Missouri. Here was established a flat-boat ferry by Peter Roy, whose father, Louis Roy, had settled at the foot of Grand Avenue or a little east of it, as early as 1826. The Platte Purchase of 1836 with its promise of increased immigrant travel and trade from the south to the north

1858, p. 52. The Guinotte Addition is ‘‘located at N. E. boundary of original city limits (Troost Avenue) and is all even meadow land encompassed on the south by the river bluff and on the north by the Missouri River.’’ A second Chouteau tract (Coates Addition) was sold by Madame Chouteau in June, 1855, for $60 an acre to Mr. Coates. , side of the Missouri was among the circumstances that led to the establishment of the primitive ferry. Peter Roy cut a road through the woods, the second in the locality after Chouteau’s, which ran up and across the high ground to a point on the city-map of today represented by the crossing of Walnut and Fifteenth Streets and thence to Westport. Thus was the overland haul to Westport still further shortened and the creation of a commercial center at the river terminus of Peter Roy’s woodland road made quite inevitable.**

The first tract of government-land acquired within the limits of the present-day Kansas City was entered in 1828 by James H. McGee. French settlers entering land within the same limits were, in the order of their claims, Joseph Philibert (1831), Louis Bartholet (1831), Gabriel Prudhomme (1831), Francis Chouteau (1831), Gabriel Philibert (1831), Clement Lessert (1881), Joseph Philibert (1832), Louis Roy (1832), Calise Montordeau (1832), Pierre La Liberte (18382), Benedict Roux (1834), and Francis Chouteau (1886).%% Of the tracts thus taken up, Gabriel Prudhomme’s, 271.77 acres in extent, as being the site of the original Town of Kansas, surpasses all the others in historic interest. It is described as being the east fractional half of section 32, township 50, of Jackson County, Missouri, and included the land lying between Broadway and Troost Avenue from the river back to the township line, which

“ Miller, Hist. Kansas City.

* Miller, Hist. Kansas City, p. 12. Names of Americans who entered government Jand on the site of Kansas City between 1828 and 1836 are James H. McGee, O. Caldwell, H. Chiles, W. B. Evans, W. Gillis, J. Jarboe, and W. Bowers.

a -

= ee EN Agee

Crucifix of Gabriel Prudhomme, who entered the land (1831) on which the original Town of Kansas was laid out. Loaned to the collection of the Missouri Valley Historical Society, Kansas City, by his grandson, Alexander Turgeon.

runs along Independence Avenue. Within its bounds was the fine natural landing-place where Peter Roy had established his ferry. Of Gabriel Prudhomme, owner of the property, the historian has little to record. His daughter, Marie Louise, was married November 22, 1836, by Father Charles F. Van Quickenbourne to Prosper Marcier ‘‘a l’église de Mr. Chouteau a l’entrée de la riviere des Kans dans 1’état du Missouri;’’ and another daughter, Marguerite, was married in the same church, April 29, 1841, to Louis Turgeon, Father Nicolas Point being the officiating clergyman.'¢ A posthumous daughter born to Gabriel Prudhomme became in later years the wife of Milton J. Payne, for several terms mayor of Kansas City, and an unsuccessful suit instituted to secure her an interest in her father’s property, her name having been omitted from the list of heirs among whom a division of the property was made by order of the court, caused a cloud to rest for a long time on every lot in the Prudhomme tract. The names of several of Gabriel Prudhomme’s grand-children figure in the baptismal records of the period. Of their number, Prosper Marcier was baptized April 19, 1840, by Father Peter De Smet. Gabriel Prudhomme died in 1837. His erucifix, exquisitely carved out of wood and of unusual dimensions for a private object of devotion, is preserved in the collection of the Missouri Valley Historical Society of Kansas City, being a gift to the latter from his grandson, Alexander Turgeon.’

” Kickapoo Mission Register; Westport Register (Archives of St. Mary’s College, Kansas).

“% Miller. Hist. Kansas City, p. 40. The Gabriel Prudhomme mentioned in the text is not to be identified with the Flathead &

On October 30, 1837, Gabriel Prudhomme’s daughter, Marie Louise, wife of Prosper Marcier, petitioned the Cireuit Court of Jackson County for an allotment of dower to her mother and for the partition of her father’s estate among the heirs. The court granting the petition, the estate was sold at public auction July 7, 1838, to Abram Fonda for $1,800, James H. McGee, who had been appointed guardian of the minor heirs, being the crier on the occasion. This sale was subsequently set aside by the Court on the ground of illegal procedure, complaint having been filed that certain bidders were denied a fair opportunity to present their bids. Another sale of the property was accordingly advertised by order of the Circuit Court in the Missourt Republican of St. Louis and the Far West of Liberty, with the result that on November 14, 1838, it was disposed of for $4,220 to a stock-company, which contemplated laying it out as a town. It was the choicest tract of land in the locality, including, as it did, the natural landing-place where Peter Roy established his ferry and where everything indicated the speedy growth of a busy line of communication between the Missouri-River route and the Santa Fe trail. The land was subdivided at once into lots and called Kansas (in 1850 the Town of Kansas).1* But the town-building project lay dormant until 1846 when the stock-company that had acquired the Prudhomme property, having reorganized itself, disposed at public sale of 124 lots at an average price of about $55.00 each. Thereupon the mixed-blood of the same name who was guide to Father De Smet on some of his Rocky Mountain trips. * Miller, Hist. Kansas City, p. 28.

CIVIL ORIGINS Dill town started at once to develop rapidly, reaching within a few months a population of four or five hundred. It was first officially organized May 3, 1847. The chief cause of its early development was the Santa Fe trade, which had been diverted almost entirely from Westport as early as 1850, during which year six hundred wagons started westward from the Town of Kansas to the ancient Spanish Capital. In 1853 the Town of Kansas adopted the style ‘‘City of Kansas,’’ and in 1889 the style ‘‘Kansas City,’’ and in 1899 it absorbed Westport within its corporate limits. Nature had indeed dictated the growth of a great city at the mouth of the Kansas river. ‘‘The situation,’’ wrote Charles Dudley Warner, after visiting Kansas City in the early ‘nineties, ‘‘at the point where the Missouri River makes a sharp bend to the East and the Kansas River enters it, was long ago pointed out as the natural center of a great trade.

Aside from the river advantage, if one studies the course of streams and the incline of the land in a wide cirele to the westward, he is impressed with the fact that the natural business drainage of a vast area is Kansas City. The city was therefore not fortuitously located and when railroads centered there, they obeyed an inevitable law.’’?®

C.D. Warner, Studies in the South and West, p. 350. a,

Chapter II The First Priests

Heclesiastically, the locality of Kansas City has belonged in succession to the Catholic dioceses of Quebec (1680 circ.—l776), Santiago de Cuba (1776-1787), Havana (1787-1793), Louisiana and the Floridas (1795- 1826), St. Louis (1826-1880) and Kansas City (1880-). When in 1815 the Abbé Louis Valentine William Du Bourg was appointed Bishop of Louisiana and the Floridas, he found himself charged with the spiritual destines of the Louisiana Purchase, the most extensive of all the accessions that ever came to our national domain. It was a spiritual jurisdiction of truly imperial extent, ranging as it did from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and probably beyond their snowcapped crests to the Pacifie Coast. Bishop Du Bourg fixed his residence first at St. Louis (1818-1821) and later at New Orleans (1821-1826). Liberty, three hundred and seventy miles up the Missouri River from St. Louis and only fifteen miles east of the Missouri state-line, was the extreme outpost of civilized life to the west; beyond were the ‘‘Great Plains,’’ dotted here and there with Indian villages and traversed by innumerable buffalo.

A tradition of undetermined value places the first visit of a Catholic priest to the site of Kansas City in the time of Bishop Du Bourg. The conversion of the 22

Indian tribes of the West was from the first a matter of the deepest concern to “that great ecclesiastical figure. In 1820 a Dee of seven Osage chiefs earnestly solicited the Bishop at his episcopal residence in St. Louis to visit the villages of their tribe near the Missouri frontier.°’ Unable to go in person, Bishop Du Bourg commissioned Father Charles De La Croix, parish priest of St. Ferdinand or.Florissant near St. Louis, to visit the Indians in his name. Father De La Croix accordingly undertook two missionary journeys, the first in the spring, the second in the summer of 1822, to the Great Osage, whose principal village was at that time near the junction of the Marmiton and Little Osage Rivers in Vernon County, Missouri. These journeys were noteworthy in an historical way, marking as they did the earliest attempt of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth eentury to evangelize the trans-Mississippi Indian tribes. The missionary in the course of his trips officiated at the Ligueste Chouteau trading-post near the present Papinville, Bates County, Missouri, about eighty-five miles southeast of Kansas City.2t That he