At Standing Rock and Wounded Knee: The Journals and Papers of Father Francis M. Craft, 1888–1890 (review)

In 2002, Thomas Foley published the first full-length biography of Jesuit priest and missionary Father Francis Craft. Wounded seriously as a participant and witness to the tragic events that occurred at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, Craft was little known for anything else at the time Foley published his biography. His biography revealed Craft as a complex and controversial figure—a man who, as the great-grandson of a Mohawk chief, was raised as an Episcopalian, trained as a physician, served as a soldier in three wars on two continents, converted to Catholicism, worked as a missionary priest among the native peoples, and ended his days as a much beloved pastor of a Catholic church in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.

Much of Foley’s research in preparation for the biography was concentrated in the personal journals meticulously kept by Craft during his missionary years. At Standing Rock and Wounded Knee presents for the first time Craft’s personal notes on two of the most important years of his ministry and the U.S. engagement with the Lakota tribe. Foley’s extensive knowledge of the journals and his profound awareness of the intricacies of U.S. Indian policy in the 1880s enable him to both effectively edit Craft’s personal journals and, through footnotes and chapter summaries, annotate them so that they are understandable to the modern reader.

As Foley explains in his introduction, Craft’s journals “reveal the deeply intimate and eloquent personal expressions of a classically educated, erudite eastern white man in the midst of the Sioux Nation in the final stages of collapse” (p. 19). They also disclose a man equally at ease with the writings of Lord Byron, the Latin musings of the Roman poet Juvenal, and the common epithets and sayings of the Lakota nation. The journals show us Craft at his best and his worst—and go a long way in explaining why his contemporaries held such varied and controversial opinions of him and his ministry—a fact Craft himself acknowledged in writing, “So all agree that I am a very odd fish” (p. 49).

These journals also illustrate the difficulties confronting modern historians in analyzing and assessing the role played by priests such as Craft in the execution of the U.S. Indian policy. On the one hand, Craft certainly exhibited the all too common ethnocentrism of his day when he described the Sioux as “wild cattle” characterized by “the obstinate brutal yellowness of Sitting Bull, wheeling, plunging & bellowing like demons around me” (p. 40). Yet, this same man showed himself to be capable of deeply identifying with the native peoples in his fierce stance against the duplicity of Indian agent James McLaughlin whom Craft categorized as “having the cunning of Satan” (p. 42). His empathy for the Lakota also showed itself in his comment, “I have done all that a man can do. I have labored & taught unceasingly—defied men, demons, & the elements; borne heat, cold, hunger, thirst, poverty—spent days & nights in the saddle while my body was racked with pain & my brain & my heart with anxiety & misery, until blind & dizzy” (p. 48). Above all, his willingness to identify himself completely with the Lakota is manifested by his stated desire to be buried with the fallen Sioux warriors should his wounds suffered at Wounded Knee proved to be fatal.

In annotating and editing these journals, Foley has thus added both depth and insight into our understanding of the interior thoughts and external actions of the missionary-priest Francis Craft as well as the larger cultural world that he alternatively confronted and accepted. Above all, a careful reading of Craft’s journals is another potent warning of the dangers of reducing the study of history to a moral game of finding “good guys” and “bad guys” by showing us the...