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 WASHINGTON

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WASHINGTON

Almost with the dawn of Catholicism in the North- west, charity had commenced its errand of well doing to the sick, the poor, and fallen. On 8 Dec, 1850, the Sisters of Charity of Providence (Montreal) ar- rived at Vancouver, and there began their errand of mercy in the North-west. Their charitable institu- tion at that place housed and supported in 1911 no less than 130 orphans and 2.53 aged and infirm persons. From humble beginnings their admirable work extends now proportionately to almost every larger city of the state: Colfax, Colville, Everett, North Yakima, Olympia, Port Townsend, Walla Walla, Spokane, and Seattle. Their new Providence Hospital at Seattle, built at a cost of approximately $1,000,000 and dedi- cated on 24 Sept., 1911, has rooms for 300 patients, not including its spacious general wards. Other sister- hoods engaged in hospital work in the state are the Sisters: of St. Dominic at Aberdeen and Chehalis; of St. Joseph of Peace (.lersey City, N. J.) at Belhngham; of St. Francis (Glen Riddle, Pa.) at Tacoma; the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have care of no less than 271 wayward and orphan girls. The liberahty of Mrs. E. Briscoe Foss enabled Bishop O'Dea to open the Briscoe Memorial Home and Training School for orphan boys on 15 June, 1909, which now gives pro- tection to about SO young lads. In the large cities the St. Vincent de Paul Society and the Catholic Social Betterment League are likewise doing efficient charity work.

General HisTORT.^The names of the first explor- ers of the coa.st of Washington are immortahzed by the physical features of the North-west. Inlets and bavs bear the names of Juan de Fuca (1.592), Cook (1778), Puget (1791), and Gray (1792); Van- couver and Whidby (1791) are recalled by two islands; while Lewis and Clark's expedition (1805) as well as Gray's ship, "Columbia, "have beenperpetuated by the largest rivers. Washington was originally a part of the long controverted Oregon Count rj-, whose joint possession by both England and the United States was regulated by the treaty of 1818; but lying north of the Columbia River, which the British Government considered a favourable boundary, it remained until 1846 almost exclusively under the control of the English Hudson's Bay Company, who exploited it for its wealth in furred animals all the more energetically in the hope of establishing a claim of preponderant influence in favour of the home countr>'. In this they were, however, destined to disappointment. When tho time arrived the United States demanded the 49th parallel as the international boundary both by reason of prior discoverj- and of prior colonization of the whole Oregon Territory. In 1853 Washington was organized as a separate territory, and was ad- mitted to the Union as a state with its present hmits on 11 Nov., 1889.

Church History. — Before the advent of Christian civilization the Indians of the north-west coast hved in the grossest ignorance, and their morals were correspondingly low. They recognized a superior divinity, Ekannum, and an inferior god, Etalapa.sse. The former created everything visible, including the human being; while the latter gave man the use of his eyes and mouth and created the Columbia with its fishes for man's food. Idolatrj' was extensively prac- tised; even the lowest animals and the shades of the dead received divine honours; nor were human sacri- fices infrequent, especially after successful wars. Father De Smet, S.J., the pioneer Indian missionan,', tells us of a child consecrated to the shade of one of its companions, who had died the previous day. "Al- most in front of a house occupied by the Protestant mi-ssionary", he says, "the little victim was .'io cruelly garroted that the cords entered the flesh; it was ex- posed on a rock where it could not have failed to soon expire had not Mr. Perkins succeeded in ransoming it." It waa the general custom of the north-west

tribes to bury their dead, though the funeral pile was also occasionally used. Among the Chinooks and Puget Sound Indians a strange funeral practice was favoured. The bod}', arrayed in the deceased one's best garb, was placed together with his weapons into one of his canoes, and permanently raised on long poles or a scaffold. Every tribe was governed in patriarchal fashion by a chief. Intermarriage of persons of diff'erent tribes was forbidden, but polyg- amy tolerated. Prisoners of war, if not killed at subsequent festivities, were never adopted into a tribe, but performed slave work in the families of those who had fallen in battle. The Indian believed in immortahty as a reward for personal bravery, which was one of his prominent virtues. He was fear- less on land and sea, and in no way overawed by a white man's sailing vessel.

How Christianity became first known to the aborig- ines of the north-west coast, whether by stranded mariners or missionaries from California, can only be conjectured. Vv'hether the few reUgious objects fotmd among them by the first kno^vn ex-plorers were obtained from venturesome fellow-tribesmen roaming southward to the California borders, from mission- aries, or, as articles of exchange, from passing sailors and traders must likewise remain an unsolved prob- lem. Certain it is that the desire to see the "Black Gowns" was to no small extent aroused by the French- Canadian trappers and hunters in the employ of the Hudson's Bay Company, and that the coast Indians were anxious to accept the Catholic Faith when the first known missionaries, Fathers F. N.Blanchet and Modeste Demers, arrived (cf. Seattle, Diocese of). The first Catholic services known to have been cele- brated within the present State of Washington were held in the Big Bend, Okanogan Co., 14 Oct.; at Walla Walla (Wallula) 18 Nov.; and at Vancouver 24 Nov., 1838. The first mission in the whole North- west was established at Cowlitz, where Father Blan- chet said Ma,ss in the home of Simon Plamandon, one of the four Catholic settlers at that point, on 16 Dec, 1838. So strenuous, zealous, and successful was the work performed by these two apostles of the North- west, that in 1844, when Father Blanchet was raised to the episcopal dignity, he could report to his superiors the conversion of more than 5000 Indians and the return to their religious practices of about 1500 whites. A new impetus to Catholic life came through the gradual arrival of more missionary labourers and especially through the wise division of the vast Oregon Territory into two dioceses in 1846, one of which by a change of title has now become the Diocese of Seat- tle. Bishop A. M. A. Blanchet was its first head as Bishop of \^'alla Walla, later of Nesqually.

In eastern Wa.shington the Jesuits have always been zealous and influential missionaries and have met with wise foresight the ever-growing exigencies of this sec- tion. For nearly forty years they were almost exclu- sively in charge of the vast northern district lying between the Cascades and the Rockies, and a debt of gratitude is owed to some of those intrepid apostles who, by their prudent conduct and timely advice to both mihtary leaders and turbulent tribes, prevented strife and bloodshed on many occasions during the Indian wars of Wa.shington's territorial years. Among the religious labourers of the Society of Jesus in the North-west, since their first apostle. Father P. J. De Smet, planted the cross on the summit of the Rockies in 1840, may be mentioned Fathers Joset, Tosi, Jaquet, and Cafaldo, whose names are more intimately linked wn'th the early hi.storj- of Washing- ton. By far the most important mission from a present-day point of view was the one established among the Sppkane Indians by Father Cataldo, who celebrated Mass there for the first time on 8 Dec, 1866

Since then the Indian has almost disappeared, and