Philippine Duchesne remained just a year at Sugar Creek, but her memory lives among the Potawatomi people as “the Woman-Who-Always-Prays.” Her companions remained at Sugar Creek until 1848, when the Potawatomi moved father into Kansas. The Jesuits established a new mission at St. Marys, and the RSCJ went with them. The RSCJ stayed at St. Marys until the Potawatomi moved so far west that there were no longer Native American pupils in the school they had established.

The journal of the convent tells of the adaptation in religious customs, educational methods, food and living conditions required by the frontier mission. Letters and biographical notes of the missionaries supplement the journal accounts. A wealth of anecdotes still in the institutional memory of the religious of the Sacred Heart sheds light on the ways in which these women religious viewed their calling to evangelize in the context of their religious vocation in the Society of the Sacred Heart.

We owe the account of the mission to the notes and letters of the superior, Lucile Mathevon, and to a narrative of a certain Catherine Tardiu,1 who served in Kansas from 1871 to 1873. Lucile Mathevon, from Lyon, had been a novice in the Society of the Sacred Heart under Philippine at Ste Marie d’en Haut in Grenoble; she subsequently followed her old novice mistress to America. When bidding her good-bye as she set out for America, Madeleine Sophie Barat had said to her: “I have always had an ardent desire to go as a missionary among the savages, to teach them the knowledge of God and so extend the Kingdom of Christ. My dear Lucile, I send you in my place.” At the time Lucile did not think Mother Barat’s words particularly significant because she thought all of America was inhabited by savages.

Mother Mathevon’s companions, besides Philippine, were Mother Mary Ann O’Connor, one of the earliest American RSCJ, who had directed the small school for Indians at Florissant, and Sister Louise Amiot, a Canadian. The Indians built a log house for them, but it took three months. Their efforts to establish some sort of regular conventual life seem laughable to us: they designated the four corners of their one room house the refectory, dormitory, community room, etc. Into the middle of the room they received their pupils; they opened the school less than a month after their arrival, on July 19, feast of St. Vincent de Paul. As soon as the second story of the house, really a kind of loft, was built, they accepted boarders. They went to the village church for prayer and liturgical services.

The teaching given was, of course, of the most basic sort: catechism, hymns, reading in English and in Potawatomi, sewing, knitting, cooking. It is interesting that Sister Louise taught the needlework lessons, while Mother Mathevon did the cooking at the beginning while she was learning the language. Mother O’Connor could teach English from the beginning, but Lucile’s French was of no use. She had plenty of ingenuity, however, and she was very musical. Thanks to the Jesuits, there were copies of hymns and prayers in Potawatomi; Lucile had these read aloud to her; she wrote down what she heard in French phonetics so that she could repeat the hymns, which she then could teach the children without necessarily understanding the meaning herself. This method served until they all mastered the language they persisted in calling “sauvage.” The Jesuits wanted the children to be taught in their own language so that they would not lose their innocence by exposure to too much European and American literature, but at the same time they seem to have recognized the necessity of the use of English in contacts with the U.S. government and in commerce.

It is important to know a little bit about this people some of whose descendants still live in Kansas and elsewhere in the U.S. They were an Algonquin tribe, hunters and gatherers. Necessity and the encroachment of the white man forced their migration south from the Great Lakes through Indiana and Illinois until finally they crossed into Kansas where they encamped at Sugar Creek. They had been evangelized earlier in their history by the Jesuits, but the suppression of the Society of Jesus put an end to the mission. It was taken up later by a holy Breton priest, Benjamin Petit; he was responsible for translating Scripture texts, prayers and hymns into Potawatomi. Upon his death the Jesuits again took up the cause. By the time religious of the Sacred Heart arrived at their encampment there were over 1000 Catholics in the village. The missionaries had established among them a form of Christian communal life, the description of which sounds like the primitive church: prayer in common morning and evening, daily Mass, the recitation of the Rosary together. Our nuns wrote home about the fervor of the Catholics, the seriousness with which they approached the sacraments; even when they were encamped in the forest far from the village during the hunt, they returned on time for Sunday Mass. At the same time the nuns deplored what they described as superstition and even worship of evil spirits in the native religion of the non-Catholics, and they describe the hold tribal customs had on the people, especially in times of sickness, when they could not resist turning to the “medicine men.”

The letters to Paris and the journal reveal the first reactions of these European women. The nuns admired the deliberate, reflective manner of speaking of the Indians and their remarkable memory: the interpreters could repeat a whole sermon after the priest finished. At the same time the journal minces no words in describing the lack of cleanliness and some of the customs the nuns found repugnant: eating meat raw, for example. They were horrified also to discover by experience that one way of honoring or showing respect to a person was to present that person with a fresh scalp. Sister Louise would accept it with thanks and afterwards reverently bury it with appropriate prayers. They all learned quickly never to show any surprise, still less any repugnance, at these customs, for they found the Indians extremely sensitive.

The journal testifies to the pleasure, even pride, of the nuns in the children’s accomplishments in sewing, knitting, cooking, every kind of domestic art, as well as reading in English and their own language. Their teachers found that these little girls were remarkably skilled at manual work; one little ten-year old could knit a perfect pair of socks. According to the Indian agent who came to inspect, there were schools to which the government was contributing heavily with much less satisfactory results. They were grateful to this agent for securing government support, $500 at first, later $50 per child per year. At the same time the nuns report that it took all their ingenuity and patience to keep these children on task: they were unaccustomed to being indoors, to sitting still, to working at lessons, and occasionally they escaped into the woods. The reputation of the school spread even to the neighboring Osage tribe: one of their number came to the nuns to say he had five daughters; would they please send someone to teach them. That was not to be, but they did receive Osage children as boarders later on.

In 1848, only seven years after the settlement at Sugar Creek, the Potawatomi were forced by a new treaty to migrate farther west across the Kansas River to what is now St. Marys. The Jesuit missionaries and the little community of RSCJ, Mothers Mathevon, O’Connor, Julie Bazire and Sisters Louise Amiot and Mary Layton, went along to the new settlement. The story has been handed down that the men of the tribe were so discouraged in the face of yet another migration that they could not face crossing the Kansas River and hacking their way through the prairie grasses to the lands assigned to them. Seeing their hesitation, Lucile Mathevon took a sickle and led the way cutting down grasses that were taller than she was. Her determination heartened and, perhaps, shamed the men, who then followed her example.

At St. Marys they were enchanted with the terrain: “This country can be compared to the Promised Land, so beautiful is its situation, so fertile the land, so abundant the fish and game. The fish are so huge that on occasion it takes two men to haul one in. Our good Indians spent 1848 building their houses. As for us, upon arrival we found a two-room house ready for us; we started immediately to enlarge it and to build another for the boarding school. We are already enjoying both and we have a chapel besides.” They wrote to the motherhouse that they had no wants except reinforcements of personnel because the work was beyond the five of them. The reinforcements did come, and so did more students, so that by 1866 the nuns reported 96 pupils at St. Marys. The Jesuits had a school for Indian boys near the Sacred Heart convent. As always there was close collaboration and the nuns valued the spiritual help of the priests.

It was not long, however, before pressure to sell their lands to white settlers forced the Indians even farther west. As white families moved in they placed their children in the convent and the Jesuit schools. But the nuns soon found that they could not educate both races together: the extremely simple living conditions and basic instruction did not satisfy the desires of the white children, and there were not enough Indian girls left to maintain a school just for them. In 1869 the character of the mission at St. Marys changed definitively. The Jesuits established a college for white boys, and the Society of the Sacred Heart followed suit for the girls. They built a three-story brick convent and established a traditional boarding school with an academic program for white girls. This school did not succeed, and its fate was uncertain for several years.

Between 1857 and 1876 the three founding members died, Sister Amiot was the first. At her death it became apparent that her mastery of their language and her devotion to their children had endeared her to the Indians. Mothers O’Connor and Mathevon died in 1863 and 1876 respectively; they had both lived into their 80s. Again, the journal notes the love and veneration in which they were held. They are buried along with four other RSCJ who died in St. Marys in a common grave in the town cemetery.

In February 1879 a fire occurred in the Jesuit school building; the nuns moved their pupils into the community part of the house and gave the school part over to the boys. This catastrophe precipitated a decision on the part of the nuns. A few days later the RSCJ moved with their sixteen pupils into a small house in the town until the end of the school year when they withdrew from St. Marys. It is significant that death – in one sense – in Kansas led to life elsewhere, because the superior general, Mother Lehon, decided that since the closing of St. Marys would free a certain number of religious, she could answer a call from New Zealand. Thus, the first RSCJ to go to New Zealand set out from St. Louis in 1880.