PART VIII.
MISSIONARY WORK AMONG THE INDIANS.
(When not otherwise noted, the letters in this part are here published for the first time.)
CHAPTER I.
THE FLATHEAD AND OTHER MISSIONS.1
The Kalispel church-Virtues of Standing Grizzly-Victor and Insula -Beginning of present St. Ignatius Mission -American and European savages-Indian uprising feared-Object to parting with their lands-The little news of a remote mission.
To the Editor of the Precis Historiques, Brussels:
University of St. Louis, April, 1856.
Reverend and Dear Father:
INCLOSE you a letter of Reverend Adrian Hoeken, brother of Christian, whose death you announced in your volume of 1853, page 394.
Father Adrian Hoeken was one of my earliest traveling companions in the missionary journeys to the Flatheads. He has ever labored, and still continues to labor here, with the greatest zeal and the most plentiful results.
I have this month dispatched a perfect cargo to him, by a steamer which was about to ascend the Missouri. It con sisted of tools, clothes and provisions of all kinds. The boat will go 2,200 miles; then the goods will be transported by a barge, which will have to stem the rapid current about 6oo miles; there will then remain 300 miles by land with wagons, through mountain defiles; so that the objects shipped in April can arrive among the Flatheads only in the month of October.
1 From Western Missions and Missionaries, p. 295. [12281