6. Nom de plume In addition to being the 13th president of Boston College, Thomas I. Gasson, SJ, taught economics, law, philosophy, and ethics and worked in the Indian missions. In 1906 Gasson spent a week in Pleasant Point, Maine, ministering to and evangelizing members of the Passamaquoddy tribe, who honored him as an “adopted son,” according to an account in the Globe. Gasson also began an association with the Sioux of South Dakota, when in 1909 the University rented its Massachusetts Avenue athletic grounds—students referred to the large field as “the Dump”—to the “Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Real Wild West” show. This spectacle, again in the words of the Globe, reproduced the “sports, perils, adventures, romances, pastimes, and routine duties of the prairie.” And while the Miller Brothers never earned the fame or profits that went to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and other first-tier extravaganzas, its visit provided revenue for the struggling University, which was trying to build on the Chestnut Hill Campus purchased two years
32
bcm v f all 2013
earlier. The Indians in the show were Sioux, a tribe whose long and generally warm association with Jesuits traced back to the late 17th century and meetings with missionaries who had come south from “New France.” When Gasson met in front of their teepees with the 80 Indians taking part in the show, they presented him with a beaded vest, and bestowed on him—noted the Globe—“what is considered a very high name, that of ‘High Bird’” or “Zin Tka la Wanketuya.” Gasson became reacquainted with some of these Sioux in 1913, at a Catholic Missionary Congress held at Boston College Hall in the South End. When his presidency ended in 1914, he worked for a summer on the Sioux mission in South Dakota before being recalled to Georgetown for a —Thomas Cooper teaching position. During a 1913 Catholic Missionary Congress held at Boston College’s campus in the South End, Gasson (second from right)—or Zin Tka la Wanketuya, as the Sioux named him—posed with tribe members from South Dakota.
photograph: Courtesy Georgetown Special Collections