St. Peter's Mission Church and Cemetery

With the relocation of the border of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation as the federal government forced the tribe to give up more and more land,[11] the Jesuits decided to move their mission again to remain close to the tribe they were proselytizing. The mission moved in 1881 to its final location on Birch Creek, at a point 10.5 miles (16.9 km) west-northwest of Cascade, Montana.[4][12]

The first buildings at St. Peter's Mission were spartan. With assistance from some of the Métis and, occasionally, soldiers from nearby Fort Shaw, the priests built a one-story rectangular chapel out of logs, which were stripped of bark and roughly squared off by hand. For a time the chapel doubled as sleeping quarters for the priests. A second square-log building attached to the chapel was quickly constructed to serve as sleeping quarters and kitchen. This structure doubled the mission's size. By the end of 1881, the priests had constructed several small log cabins to serve as individual priestly residences. They attached these to the west end of the expanded chapel, creating an L-shaped structure.[7]

St. Peter's Mission continued to expand in 1882. The log cabins were separated from the chapel and moved south of it, and a one-story clapboard dormitory for priests and male students was built in their place. A three-story clapboard bell tower was built where the chapel and dormitory met.[7]

In the 1880s, a shortage of Roman Catholic priests in Montana led the priests of St. Peter's Mission to travel widely throughout the area in the summer months to perform weddings, baptisms, and other ceremonies.[13] Father Imoda planned from the beginning to expand the mission to include a day school or boarding school. To make it a success, he felt, it had to be run by nuns.[14] Father Palladino described the intended curriculum as reading, spelling, and writing, with enough basic mathematics to allow for simple business transactions to be undertaken without being cheated. "Book learning" would be supplemented with industrial arts: Animal husbandry, farming, and ranching skills.[15]

In 1883, Father Joseph Damiani offered Métis leader Louis Riel a teaching position at St. Peter's Mission. Riel, his wife Marguerite, and his son Jean-Louis were living with nomadic Métis. But with Marguerite pregnant with their second child, Riel decided to settle in one place to provide his children with more stability. In December 1883, Riel began teaching English, French, mathematics, and training in a variety of practical manual skills (wood carving, metal working, leather making, and so on) to 22 to 25 Métis boys.[7][16]

The student body at St. Peter's Mission changed over time, however. A'aninin (known to whites by the mistranslated name "Gros Ventres") boarding students soon outnumbered the Métis day-students, and the Jesuits began to successfully encourage the Piegan Blackfeet to send their children to the school as boarding students as well.[15]

Mother Amadeus, photographed in early 1884.

Riel spent his time writing poetry and thinking about politics, in time concluding that he should work toward the establishment of a Métis republic in northwest Canada. On June 4, 1884, a delegation of Métis arrived at St. Peter's from Saskatchewan to ask Riel to return with them to assist in the Métis effort to secure treaty enforcement from the Canadian government. Riel agreed, and he and his family left St. Peter's on June 10, never to return.[17][18]

Meanwhile, the new (and founding) Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Helena, Jean-Baptiste Brondel, invited the Ursuline religious order of women to join the Jesuits at St. Peter's Mission in January 1884. A sister in the Toledo chapter, Mother Mary Amadeus (Sarah Therese Dunne),[lower-alpha 1] led five Ursulines to St. Peter's in October. They quickly established a boarding school for girls (open to children of settlers and Native Americans).[20][21] The Jesuits gave the nuns $200 in provisions, a farm, some cows, and some wagons to help them survive, and promised to pay them $200 a year to teach boys if more nuns could be brought to the mission.[20][22] In 1885, the Jesuits began turning over the educational duties of St. Peter's Mission to the Ursulines,[22] who opened St. Peter's Industrial School for Girls that year with 11 Blackfeet students.[7]

Life for the Ursulines was not easy. Their housing was extremely primitive. In addition to their teaching duties, they also cooked, cleaned, sewed, did laundry, nursed the sick, and tried to generate money for their own activities by engaging in for-profit farming, ranching, poultry raising, egg farming, supplying rock, and timber cutting. In a letter to a colleague, Mother Amadeus expressed frustration with having to spend so much time taking care of the priests[14] and with the Jesuit priests' refusal to fund-raise for the Ursulines while back east.[23] Some Ursulines were unable to cope with the harsh life. In 1884, Sister St. Gertrude from the Brown County, Ohio, Ursulines joined St. Peter's. But she left in October 1885, "not able to bear the strain of missionary life", as Mother Amadeus said tactfully.[24]

Illness affected the Ursulines, too. In April 1885, Mother Amadeus fell ill with pneumonia. As her condition worsened, word reached the Ursuline convent in Toledo. Mary Fields, an African American ex-slave who had formerly been employed by the Dunne family as a servant, worked at the convent. When Mother Stanislaus journeyed to Montana to nurse Mother Amadeus, Fields accompanied her.[22] Amadeus recovered, and Fields decided to stay in Montana. For the next eight years, she helped the sisters with farming, constructing buildings, running the laundry, and driving the freight wagon to nearby Cascade.[25] Known as "Stagecoach Mary," she cursed, smoked cigars, drank liquor, carried a loaded firearm, and fought anyone who gave her the slightest insult. In 1894 Bishop Brondel demanded that Fields leave the mission after she fought a duel in Helena with a man who insulted her. Estranged from the church by Brondel's decision, Fields moved to nearby Cascade. Mother Amadeus provided her with funds to open a restaurant. When the restaurant later failed, Mother Amadeus helped Fields win a job as a mail carrier.[26]

The expansion of St. Peter's led to federal approval for a post office at the mission in 1885.[27] After arriving in Montana, Mother Amadeus asked Bishop Brondel to give her control over the Ursulines, but he declined to do so. Amadeus repeatedly asked Mother Stanislaus, head of the Toledo chapterhouse (and who exercised authority over the Ursulines at St. Peter's), for more sisters to help with the work in Montana. Her requests were denied. She appealed to Richard Gilmour, Bishop of Cleveland, Ohio. When Mother Stanislaus complained, Mother Amadeus denied she was making an end-run around the chapterhouse, claiming instead that she was acting under instruction from Bishop Brondel. In February 1886, Bishop Gilmour ordered the Ursulines in Toledo to stop talking about how much they wished to teach in Montana, and ordered the St. Peter's Ursulines separated from the Toledo chapter.[28]

The 1887 buildings: The priests' residence (with picket fence) attached to the stone boys' school. In the background (right) is the original chapel, nuns' residence, and bell tower.

Federal funding for the Jesuit boys' school and private donations proved adequate to allow construction of two new buildings in 1887. The first was a boys' school. This four-story stone building featured a mansard roof, dormers, and square cupola above the front entrance. The building contained dormitory space, classrooms, smithy, cobbler shop, carpentry shop, and a dining room. A three-story wood frame priests' residence with centrally placed square cupola was attached to the boys' school on the south. A kitchen garden was planted west and south of these buildings.[29]

Construction of the boys' school changed the way boys were educated at St. Peter's. Most instruction was now carried on indoors, in great contrast to the Native American way of life at the time (in which most time was spent outdoors). The boys were responsible for maintaining the kitchen garden, herding and feeding the small herd of beef cattle, and feeding and milking the dairy cattle, so some time each day was spent in the barns, corrals, or garden.[29] Small fields, watered by irrigation ditches, were also maintained by the boys. The curriculum did not change throughout the year. Boys were expected to work in the fields even in winter, and the amount of time spent indoors did not vary (even during summer, when the growing season demanded that most of the day be spent outdoors).[30]

The educational structure at St. Peter's changed in 1889, and this proved controversial. Most Jesuit missions in Montana were on Indian land, and it was common for white settlers in the area to pay tuition and have their children educated alongside Native Americans at Jesuit schools. The Jesuits believed this integrated educational system also prepared Native Americans for participation in white society. But as the borders of the Piegan Blackfeet territory shrank over time, St. Peter's Mission found itself standing on non-Indian ground. At the request of Bishop Brondel, Father Damiani made the highly controversial decision in 1889 to segregate the Native American children.[31] Nonetheless, both whites and Native Americans credited the school with providing a clean, safe, warm place to live; three meals a day; and an excellent education. Piegan Blackfeet leaders later credited the mission with giving their tribe well-educated leadership other tribes lacked.[32]

The Ursuline convent and girls' school, finished in 1896

Mother Amadeus was still agitating for additional independence. Although the Ursulines at St. Peter's won independence from the Toledo chapterhouse in 1886, the Ursulines were still subject to the authority of the priests and local bishop. Little support came from either source. Although the Ursuline mission in Montana had rapidly expanded, there were still too few nuns to do the work. In 1893, six Ursulines from Canada joined the St. Peter's mission on a temporary basis. Mother Amadeus tried to assert jurisdiction over them, claiming them as permanent residents. Angry, the six returned to Canada (even though Mother Amadeus refused to pay for their travel home).[33] In 1898, convinced that mission work in Montana was ending, Mother Amadeus petitioned Bishop Brondel for permission to travel to Alaska to found new Ursuline convents, but he denied her request.[34]

Since their arrival in Montana, the Ursulines had attempted to raise funds for the support of their missionary work at St. Peter's. These efforts bore fruit in 1888 when Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, heiress Katharine Drexel donated $5,000 to allow the nuns to build a convent and school.[35][lower-alpha 2] The three-story stone structure was built in a mixed Queen Anne and Second Empire architectural style. It featured a mansard roof, dormers, small towers capped with cupolas, and a centrally-located four-story square domed tower over the entrance.[36] The cornerstone for this building was laid on September 9, 1888, and it was occupied on January 1, 1892.[37][38] The Ursulines called the new school Mount Angela Institute. In 1895, Drexel donated a small herd of cattle to the Ursulines at St. Peter's.[39]

With the expansion of these facilities, the girls' education changed as well. In addition to religious instruction, the girls learned "modern" (that is, white) ways to cook, sew, and wash laundry. One of the old residential log cabins was turned into a bakery, and some girls learned how to bake with wheat flour and yeast.[lower-alpha 3] Unlike the boys, the girls spent all their time indoors.

The Ursulines also constructed an "opera house" in 1896. This L-shaped structure was 10 bays wide on its long edge, and the wing was three bays wide. The wood building contained an auditorium and stage for musical performances, and here the girls were taught dancing, embroidery, painting, wood carving, and how to play various musical instruments.[27][36] The sisters also added a barn, corral, laundry, and workers' housing.[43]

Remains of the boys' school and dormitory are surveyed in 1887 after the structure burned to the ground.

By 1895, the curriculum taught by the Jesuits and Ursulines was being questioned. Most Piegan Blackeet and A'aninin hated working indoors, no matter how well-constructed or decorated the schools and dormitories. Federal officials in charge of Indian education at the local level were aware of the Native Americans' hearty dislike of the schools, and by the mid-1890s most federal officials believed the indoor curriculum was inappropriate. (Indeed, by 1901, Commissioner of Indian Affairs William A. Jones announced the curriculum had failed.)[30]

In 1896, the federal government began phasing out its financial support for parochial education for Native Americans. St. Peter's Mission was one of the first schools to lose its federal funding, even though it had more than 100 girls in classes[44] and (just a short time earlier) 102 boys.[45] With the loss of funding, the Jesuits and Ursulines concentrated their attention on Holy Family Mission. This mission, founded in the spring of 1886 by Father Damiani but not formally dedicated until October 25, 1890, was located on the Blackfeet reservation about 100 miles (160 km) north of St. Peter's.[36][46] (For years, Holy Family was dependent on St. Peter's.)[47]

The Ursulines took over the boys' educational program from the Jesuits.[48] The refocusing of Jesuit energy on Holy Family Mission did not mean that the Jesuits abandoned St. Peter's Mission. It still acted as a base of operations and a residence until May 1898, when Father Damiani (Superior of St. Peter's since 1892) and the remaining three Jesuit priests announced they would abandon the mission.[45][49] The diocesan clergy remained to care for the church and conduct Mass, while the Ursulines remained to oversee the educational function.[50]

A major development in the international Ursuline organization in 1900 gave the St. Peter's nuns the independence of action they sought. For some years, a movement had existed to unify the hundreds of independent Ursuline chapterhouses into a single organization. A union would also give the Ursulines most of the independence they sought. Pope Leo XIII asked for Ursuline delegates to meet in Rome to consider creating an Ursuline Union. Mother Amadeus traveled to Rome to attend the meeting, in part because she advocated a union and in part because she believed she could win approval from the new organization for an expansion into Alaska. Mother Amadeus cast her eight convents' votes for the union, which was formed.[lower-alpha 4] She won approval to go to Alaska from the Union's new Superior General, Mother St. Julien Aubrey.[51] Additionally, the Ursuline Union divided the United States into two provinces and appointed Mother Amadeus provincial superior over the North Province.[52]