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BOOK REVIEWS115 access to a man whose life sheds light on the often-misunderstood interaction of Catholic missionaries with government personnel, Native people, and sundry other folk who met on the frontier. While some commentators offer the undiscriminating assessment that "Christian missionaries" were in league with every other non-Native profiteer or military man during this period, Carriker'sWest is more multi-dimensional. For example, his DeSmet castigates both State and Federal officials for their lax protection of Indian peoples against bootleggers. Similarly ,Jesuits are shown as not always walking lockstep with one another while "on mission." Without my prompting, a college student chose to report on Carriker's biography for a class I conducted. The student said that she was pleasantiy surprised thatJesuit in the West kept her attention. Similarly, Carriker's biography so renewed my interest in DeSmet and his era that I was moved to visit, and learn more from, Jesuit biographer Küloren—who is himself a kind of modern-day DeSmet now in residence at St. Louis University. While there, I walked turf that was well known to the nineteenth-century priest, and then concluded my journey with a prayerful pilgrimage to Florissant,where he is buried. In light of this activity, I am perhaps giving Carriker's book a pretty decent recommendation. Either that, or I am simply testifying to the appeal still cast by Peter DeSmet, one-time Jesuit in the West. Michael F. Steltenkamp, SJ. WheelingJesuit University Getting Sense: The Osages and Their Missionaries. By James D. White. (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Sarto Press. 1997. Pp. vii, 389. Paperback.) In his valuable work Getting Sense: The Osages and Their Missionaries, James White traces the history of the Catholic mission to the Osage Native Americans. At the start of his book he identifies a mystery or paradox concerning the Osages: they asked for Catholic missionaries but were reluctant to convert . White begins his book with a useful and concise summary of the history and religion of the Osage Native Americans to the 1870's. In this summary he covers the Osages' contacts with missionaries and provides an insightful account of the Osages' political, economic, and religious history. White then discusses the effects of President Grant's Peace Policy on the Osage Mission. Under the terms of the Peace Policy the Department of the Interior gave the Quakers the exclusive right to evangelize the Osages despite the fact that the Catholics had a historic relationship with them and that the Osages requested Catholic missionaries for their tribe. White suggests that many of the full-blood Osages may have preferred the Catholic missionaries to the Quakers not for religious reasons, but rather because the Catholics were not as strict as the Quakers and because the Osages opposed a Protestant government agent who they believed wasted their tribal funds. Furthermore, he says that the 116BOOK REVIEWS Catholic missionaries had more success with the Osages of mixed ethnic heritage , many of whom sent their children to the Catholic mission school. White also chronicles the trip of an Osage delegation in 1874 to Washington to request Catholic missionaries and a Catholic government agent for the reservation . After providing an account of the decline of the "Peace Policy," White then describes the struggles to establish Catholic schools for the Osages. He provides a detailed history of the struggles of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions with the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, Thomas Morgan and Daniel Browning, who sought to dismantle the practice of the federal funding of contract (religious) schools. Also crucial to the survival ofthe Catholic schools was Mother Katharine Drexel, and White describes how this heiress became involved in the financial support of the Osage mission schools when the Indian Office began to withdraw its support of these schools. White's book is a solid and useful history ofthe Osage Mission which is based on extensive research. At times the book is encumbered by more detail than is necessary, but on the whole the book is a valuable contribution to the study of the Osage mission. Ross A. Enochs Manchester by the Sea, Massachusetts A History of the Poles in America to 1908. Part III: Poles in the Eastern...

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