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c h a p t e r 8 The Ties That Bind 187 WHEN BISHOP GRACE returned from Pembina at the end of September 1861, he found literally on his doorstep John Ireland, who, thanks to the generosity of Joseph Cretin’s patrons in France, had completed his seminary education. The young deacon’s arrival from abroad a month earlier had caused little stir except among his immediate family, depleted during his eight-year absence by the death of his younger brother, Richard, and the reception of his sister Ellen into the Congregation of St. Joseph. Much had changed in the interval. Minnesota was now a state, and St. Paul a lively capital city of eleven thousand. To be sure, because the railroad had not yet crossed the Mississippi, there remained a sense of isolation among people who could depend upon river traffic only from April to November; ten miles of lonely and unused track, running west to St. Anthony and called optimistically the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, was as yet only a harbinger of the future. Even so, the volume of freight moved on and off St. Paul’s wharves had multiplied many times over: more than a thousand dockings recorded in 1861 indicated a bustling if still somewhat limited commercial activity. And the gaudy, often evanescent trappings of civilization had come, as they always do, in the wake of economic expansion. Since Ireland and his companion, Thomas O’Gorman, had departed in 1853, St. Paul had supported three theatrical companies, a minstrel show, a circus, a tent show, and an amateur dramatic society. Verdi’s Il Trovatore had been locally produced in 1859. For the presumably larger number of citizens who did not fancy opera, other forms of entertainment were available: in March of the following year several thousand St. Paulites gathered in a yard next to the new jail to witness the hanging of a woman convicted of poisoning her husband. A jail had indeed been built by the time Ireland came back, and a state capitol, as well as a city hall, a dozen more churches of various denominations, and—thanks to Senator Rice, Bishop Cretin, and I 188 Pilgrims to the Northland the Sisters of St. Joseph—a hospital.1 A native Hoosier and physician named William Worrall Mayo, fleeing “from the malarial hell of the Wabash Valley,” came to St. Paul in 1854 in search of a more salubrious climate; later he would move on south to Rochester, where his two brilliant sons would create the great medical complex that still bears the Mayo name.2 In 1856 the restless eighteen-year-old James Jerome Hill, born and raised in Ontario, “took a notion to go and see St. Paul.”3 He stayed there for the rest of his remarkable life, this builder of empires. John Ireland had divided his French education between two institutions, residing in both in effect as a charity student. He spent the first four years in classical studies at the preparatory seminary at Meximieux, Bishop Cretin’s alma mater. Indeed, in later life he romanticized that experience, so much of it enriched by the kindly and watchful concern of Cretin’s unmarried sister, Clemence.4 In a reflective mood many years afterward, he observed approvingly that at Meximieux “our masters exhibited all the piety and regularity which distinguish the better communities of religious. But, at the same time, priests themselves of the diocese [of Belley] in which their pupils would later serve, they were more devoted to the pupils’ genuine interests and better equipped to show the proper paths to those aspirants to the priesthood.”5 He moved on in 1857 to the theologate conducted by the Marist Fathers6 at Montbel , near Toulon, which, despite its name, was a rather dismal spot considering that it lay hardly more than a cannon shot from the western entry to the visual glories of la Cote d’Azur. Toward this institution Ireland manifested a strikingly different attitude, an almost hostile one, so much so that he habitually refused to confirm that he had even matriculated there. Later in his career he famously—and sometimes irrationally—harbored a deep antipathy toward male religious orders, which he suspected of regularly undermining proper episcopal authority. Whether such feelings took root during his years among the French Marists, it is impossible to say. In any case he received at 1. See Folwell, History of Minnesota, 2:22, 64–66; Blegen, Minnesota, 195–198; Kunz, St...

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