Jesuit Missions in North America - Further Expansion

Further Expansion

By 1667 the Jesuits had established a station near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Illiniwek whom they met there are reported to have asked the French to send a missionary to them in their home country. In 1673, Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette and French-Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet undertook the journey and explored the Mississippi river as far south as the mouth of the Arkansas River.

During the late 1690s, the Jesuits expanded along the middle of the Mississippi river, in competition with the Seminary of Foreign Missions of Quebec (a branch of the Paris Foreign Missions Society). In 1700, the Jesuits established themselves at the mouth of the River Des Peres. From 1703 a large Jesuit establishment was based at Kaskaskia in Illinois country, when Jacques Gravier was appointed vicar general of the Illinois Mission. He was located in Fort de Chartres.

Many of the missionaries compiled studies or dictionaries of the First Nations and Native American languages which they learned. For instance, Jacques Gravier compiled the most extensive Kaskaskia Illinois-French dictionary among works of the missionaries before his death in 1708.It was not edited and published until 2002, but the work has contributed to the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma's language revitalization project with Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Great Britain took over colonial rule of Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi River in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In Quebec they allowed the Jesuits to continue to minister to First Nations villages.

The Jesuits maintained a presence until their order was dissolved in France. They were officially expelled from Louisiana in 1763. At that time twenty-seven of them were officiating from Quebec to Louisiana. After the Order was restored by Pope Pius VII in 1814, Jesuits resumed missionary work in Louisiana from around 1830.

Several Belgian men came to study at Whitemarsh, near Bowie, Maryland, in the early 1820s. They all had volunteered to be missionaries to Native Americans. Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, who started working in Missouri in 1830, would eventually build strong relationships with leaders of numerous tribes of the West, including Sitting Bull, war chief of the Sioux. Through the nineteenth century, Jesuit priests founded missions and schools among Native tribes in present-day Montana and Idaho.