The undersigned cannot allow the Reverend Father De Smet, S. J., to embark for England without doing himself the pleasure of stating, for the information of the friends of the Catholic Church in Europe, how greatly the bishops of the Province have been consoled by the wonderful success which has attended the labors of this devoted missionary and his colleagues among the savage tribes of the Rocky Mountains.
It is now several years since the bishops of the United States urged the good Fathers of the Society of Jesus to charge themselves with the apostolic work of evangelizing the red children of the forest on the eastern shores of the Pacific. Almighty God seems to have blessed the undertaking.
If the zealous Father De Smet could only find means to extend the good work to the new missions which invite him, and to consolidate what has been so happily begun in the others, there is every prospect that many hundreds and even thousands of souls would be thereby brought to the knowledge of Christ, and aggregated to the one fold of his holy church. It would be, of course, superfluous for me to recommend to the friends of religion, a missionary so well known and so justly revered as the indefatigable apostle of the Rocky Mountains, Father De Smet.
X JOHN HUGHES, Bishop o f New York.
NEW YORK, April 22, 1847
My Dear Father DE SMET
Will you allow me press on you the acceptance of the accompanying statement, not for you but for the object you have most at heart, with a request that if by chance it should be useful for your neophytes of the Rocky Mountains, you will not hesitate to use it.
P have reason to believe, Very Reverend and Dear Father, that a brief sketch of the present state of the rising church in Oregon will prove acceptable to your Reverence. There are now the following establishments
a Extract from letter from Father De Vos to editor of the News Letter, October ig, 1847.