State We're In: Reflections on Minnesota History

Early Catholic Minnesota: New Sources and New Questions

173 TangI vIllerbU s Early Catholic Minnesota New Sources and New Questions The 1840s and 1850s in what is now Minnesota reflect a history of the process of border-making: spatial, ethnic, racial, religious. During this period, the space between the Great Lakes and the Upper Missouri River narrowed to become Minnesota Territory in 1849, then Minnesota State in 1858. While those political boundaries were being drawn, the Catholic Diocese of St. Paul was established in 1851. The changes exemplify the process of continental conquest in an era of transition between an old colonization and the new Euro- and Anglo-American one: the 1840s are the last decade of the middle ground (where and when accommodations were difficult but possible between Indian peoples and colonizers) and the fur trade–dominated economy; the 1850s saw an incredible land rush in the southern part of the territory that transformed and nearly destroyed the old communities while creating new social networks.1 During those decades two parallel structures were born, political andreligious—theAmericanstateandnationandtheCatholicChurch. Both wanted to control the society: the former in the 1840s,the latter in In this essay French historian tangi villerbu—born and raised in Brittany—offers a thorough introduction to the wealth of French sources about the state, many of which have not yet been mined. His walk through these little-known and little-used sources reminds us how much historians miss when we work in only one language. By using these sources,he uncovers the parallel development of both church and state in pre-Minnesota history. Yes, Minnesota later becomes better known for the Congregational Church of the Yankees and the Lutheran Church of the Scandinavians, but the Roman Catholic Church of the French exercised a vital influence not just in Minnesota’s many French place names.Villerbu urges us to think again about how the power and complexity of the church structure shaped the nineteenth-century identity of this place now called Minnesota . He also urges us to expand the horizons of the sources we employ. 174 u vIllerbU the 1850s. I will focus here on the Catholic strategies of social control in that new missionary territory and examine them through sources that have been mostly unknown or underused, mainly because the early Catholic history of Minnesota was lived in French.2 The Sources The sources of the early Catholic history of Minnesota in the 1840s and 1850s are numerous and scattered.In the United States they include,at the least,the archdioceses of St.Paul,Dubuque,New Orleans,Detroit, and Cincinnati and the historical societies of Minnesota and Wisconsin .In Europe,the sources include,for starters,the French dioceses of Belley, Le Puy, Lyons, and Strasbourg; archives of the Brothers of the Holy Family; and the Vatican archives. Let’s focus on four of them. The LeTTeRS TO LORAS Monsignor Mathias Loras became bishop of Dubuque (now in Iowa) in 1838,after years as a missionary in the American South.He immediately did what all his French colleagues did: he returned to France to recruit some young seminarians eager to evangelize or to escape their French destiny or, more rarely, some older priests already in their parishes .So he came back to his diocese with,among others,Fathers Lucien Galtier, Augustin Ravoux, and Joseph Cretin. Later, Antoine Godfert came to Dubuque, too. Loras and those four Frenchmen worked and carried on a correspondence in what we now know as Minnesota between 1840 and 1851.3 Usually historians can find and use a bishop’s letters: the archives of the American dioceses often possess such sources, because of the very hierarchical and centralized structure of the Catholic Church.The letters written by the priests themselves are scarcer, not because priests did not write, but because their letters were not saved as carefully as the bishops’ were. Writing was an important part of the priests’ job. They had to convince their bishop of their good work, or their French countrymen to send some money to the poor American dioceses. To accomplish this,they had to narrate an evangelization process in a way early caTholIc MInneSoTa u 175 that was glorious for the church, yet humble for themselves. So Loras received letters from the priests he had sent to the Upper Mississippi: we have thirty of them. The letters are scattered in three archives: the archdiocese of Dubuque and of St. Paul and the Association for the...