tions to have a black-robe sent them, and whenever he passed through their country in later years it was like a triumphal march. They came to see him and pour out their grievances and to have their children baptized. All in all their love and veneration for this man present one of the most touching spectacles in the history of the native races in America.
Father De Smet planned his work among the Indians on a far greater scale than he was able ever to realize. This was due in the first place to lack of resources. The Jesuits never had either the workers or the funds that were necesary. In the second place the field itself was entirely swept away. In 1846 Father De Smet no doubt anticipated that the seed he had sown in Oregon would grow into a mighty harvest. But what man proposes is rarely realized. In 1863, as he passed over the country again, he found it occupied by a new race, the hunting grounds of his neophytes filled with settlers; the Indians struggling in vain for their lands and being rapidly huddled together on small reservations. The whole opportunity for a great work had gone in the twinkling of an eye. The work of the missionary among the Indians was confined to a few small localities whose influence upon the general community was wholly inappreciable.
This is not saying that, their work so far as it went was not a success. There is no finer example of an Indian mission than St. Ignatius in Montana; but a few individual successes were not a vast field. The truth is the Indian was gone, swallowed up in the flood of settlement, and no longer a factor in the life of that country.
It is a reasonable conclusion from the history of the Catholic missions in Oregon, that if the Indians had remained in a state of primitive wildness, the missionaries would have accomplished their conversion to the Christian religion; and that, without interfering with their native customs to any great extent, they would have lessened the wars among the tribes, promoted cleanliness and virtue among them, and at the same time have left them free in the exer