for effective work except in the matter of numbers. These could be had only through the slow process of the novitiate or by recruits from Europe; but as the latter were generally themselves novices, the growth in numbers in early times was very slow.
In 1831 the Missouri Mission, which had heretofore been a dependency of the Province of Maryland, was made an independent mission. In 1833, October 27, the second Provincial Council of Baltimore petitioned that the Indian missions of the United States be confided to the Society of Jesus. The petition was favorably acted upon at Rome July 26, 1834, and the Society was now about to enter upon the last virgin field of its labors, the vast region, still almost unknown, which was then and is now known as the Far West.
This region, comprising more than half the area of the United States, was still the home of native tribes who were just beginning to be acquainted with the white man through intercourse with the traders. In some portions of the nearer territory, along the lower Missouri, were a few tribes, remnants of the great nations that had once held sway east of the Mississippi, but had been crowded from their homes by the resistless pressure of settlement; but for the, most part the tribes were new to the missionary and he was entering an unbroken field. The more important of these tribes, beginning in the lower valley of the Missouri, were the Osages, the Kansas, the Omahas, the Pawnees, the Sioux nations, the Aricaras, the Mandans, the Grosventres of the Missouri, the Assiniboins, the Crows, the Blackfeet, including the Grosventres of the Prairies, the Shoshones with their manifold subdivisions, the Flatheads, Nez Percés and other tribes of the upper Columbia valley, and finally the almost numberless and nameless tribes of the Pacific Coast. It was into this vast field that the Jesuits of St. Louis were about to enter, under the leadership of the greatest and most practical missionary who has ever labored among the Indian tribes of the United States.