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Who Lynches on the Frontier? also subject to massacre and expulsion (Pfeifer 2011, 47–53; Carrigan and Webb 2013, 28, 35–38, 44; Lew-Williams 2018, 1–3).

Background on the Jesuits and Lynching

In an 1874 report for his Neapolitan province, Salvatore Personè, SJ, described the character of the Society of Jesus’s new mission field in the Colorado Territory, as it had been when he and his companion first arrived in Conejos in 1871. Four months before the Jesuits took up their new assignment, three men had been found one morning hanging from the limbs of a tree. Personè’s letter provides no further details about this lynching; nor does he specify its location. (Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish encompassed more than two dozen mission stations scattered across the San Luis Valley). Instead, Personè mentions this event to illustrate the positive effects of the Jesuits’ ministry upon an area previously demoralized by vigilantism. Since Spanish and English-speaking settlers had begun to establish permanent communities in the Valley less than two decades before, Personè’s report provides a good example of a Jesuit incidental reference to lynching on the US Western frontier (Stoller and Steele 1982, 177–84, 4, xx-xxiv).

That Jesuits encountered Western frontier lynching is unsurprising because the scope of their activities in the West grew dramatically during the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, Jesuits came as missionaries to the Rocky Mountains, where some dreamed of recreating the Paraguayan Reductions (McKevitt 2007, 93–94). However, ministry among the indigenous people of the continental United States and, later, of Alaska was by no means the Jesuits’ only commitment in the American West. The shortage of clergy, especially – but not only – for the Hispanic Catholic populations in territories added to the United States following the Mexican American War, made Jesuits a valuable pastoral as well as educational resource for the frontier Catholic Church, and many Jesuits were fluent in languages other than English (Vollmar 1976, 85–87; Owens 1950, 22–23). One of Hillman’s confreres in the Nebraska Jubilee Missions, for example, was a priest from the Austrian Province prepared to preach to the young state’s German and Bohemian immigrants (WL 1882, 86–87).

The need for Jesuits in the American West coincided with the Society’s challenge to resettle members exiled from various parts of Europe. The lifting of the Society’s suppression in 1814 did not eliminate the suspicions that it faced on the continent, especially in a century of political unrest. The revolutions of 1848, for example, drove half of the world’s Jesuit from their native provinces, at least temporarily (McKevitt 2007, 14–35; McGreevy 2016, 8–25). Many nineteenth-century Jesuits had their own stories of facing mob violence (McKevitt 2007, 14–16, 25–26, 28–29, 33–35; Kertzer 2018, 56, 65, 70–71). Even in the United States, a KnowNothing crowd in Ellsworth, Maine, tarred and feathered a Swiss Jesuit émigré, John Bapst, who would later become the first president of Boston College (McGreevy 2016, 26–62). Thus, vigilantism could be a matter of personal as well as pastoral and academic concern for Jesuits serving in the United States.