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“Blackrobe” Father DeSmet

The Big Smoke at Horse Creek

September, 1851

Officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs requested DeSmet to support the government in initiating a peace policy in 1851. Specifically, D.D. Mitchell, Superintendent of Indian Affairs with headquarters in St. Louis, asked the Jesuit to use his good offices in negotiating with the Indians in a general council of representatives of the western tribes east of the Rocky Mountains, The council was to be assembled at Fort Laramie on September 1, 1851. After accepting that invitation, DeSmet left St. Louis by boat on June 7, 1851, moved up the Missouri river on his way to Fort Union, near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers in Dakota Territory. DeSmet arrived at Fort Union on July 14, 1851, met with the representatives of a number of tribes and proceeded overland to Fort Laramie. In an account of the journey in one of his letters, DeSmet wrote: “We numbered thirty-two persons; the greater part were Assiniboins, Minnestares and Crows, who were repairing to the great Indian Council to be held in the vicinity of Fort Laramie, and by the same route that we had chosen, which was scarcely less than 800 miles in length. . . . . The four vehicles were in all probability the first that had ever crossed this unoccupied waste. There is not the slightest perceptible vestige of beaten track between Fort Union and the Red Buttes, which are on the route to Oregon and 161 miles west of Fort Laramie.” In the course of this journey DeSmet later recorded: “We arrived quite unexpectedly on the borders of a lovely little take about six miles long, and my traveling companions gave it my name.”

The party reached Fort Laramie in September, 1851, only to learn that the meeting of the Great Indian Council had to be assembled at Horse Creek near the Nebraska border because there was not enough grass around the fort for the horses of the ten thousand Indians who came to take part in the council. When DeSmet was not needed in the meetings he used every available occasion to evangelize the Indians, ministered to the “half-bloods,” and baptized a considerable number of the “little ones” among the Cheyennes, the Brules and the Osage Sioux. The message of the United States government to the Indians, of the “Great Father” to “his Red Children,” was given by Commissioner Mitchell: “Your condition is now changed from what it formerly was. . . . Now, since the settling of the districts West of you by the white man, your condition is changed, and you Great Father desires you will consider and prepare for the changes that await you.” Specifically, the Indians were to keep peace among themselves and with the whites and the bad whites were to be punished solely by the United States; the Indians were to select one among them as “Chief of the Whole Nation” through whom all government business was to be transacted with the “Great Father”; and annuities were promised to those Indian nations who entered into treaty with the United States. After he returned to St. Louis, DeSmet drew a map of the Indian country of the upper Missouri and Platte rivers which was used in the council and later sent to Washington, D.C.

DeSmet reflected the optimism of the Great Council when he wrote: “It will be the commencement of a new era for the Indians -- an era of peace. In future, peaceable citizens may cross the desert unmolested and the Indian will have little to dread from the bad white man, for justice will be rendered to him.” The dedicated friend of the Indians must have been saddened as the hope for peace generated by the agreements of 1851 was shattered by news of the series of wars and broken treaties that followed. DeSmet entered Wyoming territory from time to time after 1851, but left no further permanent trace of his presence there. Father DeSmet is remembered annually at the Mass at Daniel and memorialized by the enduring presence of the lake that bears his name.