Historical Sketches of the Catholic Church in Oregon, During the Past Forty Years

This is no distant history. It is a man who walked these lands when they were still wild, writing about what he saw and built. François Norbert Blanchet arrived in the Oregon Country in 1838, one of two young priests who had traveled thousands of miles by canoe, horseback, and raft to reach the edge of the known world. What follows is his eyewitness account of establishing the Catholic Church in a territory that was still contested, unsettled, and largely unknown to the United States. He writes of braving the wilderness to bring sacraments to remote tribes, of founding missions in the Willamette Valley and along the Columbia River, and of watching the first great wave of American immigration reshape everything. Blanchet knew the legendary figures of Oregon history firsthand: Dr. John McLoughlin at Fort Vancouver, the indomitable Father Pierre DeSmet. Most urgently, he gives a full, contemporaneous account of the Whitman massacre of 1847, written while the horror was still fresh. This is primary source material of the highest order, the memoir of a man who helped forge the spiritual and social fabric of the Pacific Northwest.