The Hesitant Beginnings of the Catholic Church in Utah

BY JEROME STOFFEL

In 1776 an expedition of Catholic priests and laymen penetrated to the heart of the Great Basin with an eye to mission settlements as well as an overland route. Yet, nearly a century would elapse before it was clearly evident that the Catholic church had come to stay. In the late summer of 1871 a small adobe structure in Salt Lake City, previously remodeled to become the first Catholic chapel in present-day Utah, was torn down to be replaced by the Church of St. Mary Magdalene. The ninety-five years of hesitation were finally at an end.

The years were hesitant, but they were far from empty. Years rich in the deeds of the little man, his hidden treasures are both the delight of the historian and the source of his frustrations. Many of these almost forgotten ones were Catholic — men and women living out the life-span gift from their Creator without benefit of biographer or personal diary.

Catholic laymen, the good and the bad, participated in almost every phase in the making of the West. It was they who first proclaimed the name of Jesus Christ within the Great Basin, they who introduced Christian teachings by word and custom to its natives, they who matched Christian names to Utah's rivers, valleys, and mountains. They were among the trappers, the surveyors, the roadmakers, the cowboys, the freighters, the men gored by the oxen, the children stolen in slavery, and the women lonely in the anguish of childbirth. They rode the Pony Express, manned the lonely way station, strung the telegraph line, mapped the desert, fed and bedded the traveler, soldiered the trail, prospected, mined, and smelted ore, and built the railroad.

The named and the nameless, Catholic laymen helped weave the brilliant tapestry of Utah's history — forgotten traders trodding the Spanish Trail and marking their faith on its physical features, Iroquois families pausing for Sunday devotions along the tributaries of the Bear, unnamed trappers humorously recalling the law of Friday abstinence while verging on starvation — these are some of the threads. Others mark the exploits of the known and the remembered — Thomas Fitzpatrick, the Robidouxs and the Sublettes, Denis Julien, Etienne Provost up from Taos; the Martin Murphy clan down from Soda Springs; and Kit Carson, Pat Connor, the Creightons, the Con ways, and Ed Toohy. Like a thousand tiny polarized particles of iron, each an infinitesimal magnet, these were the men and women whose hopes and anxieties, dreams and discouragements slowly pointed the church to the places of Catholic settlement and the fulfillment of its promises.

The problem for the Catholic bishops, responsible both to the native and to the wandering intruder, lay in discerning and then reading correctly the accumulating force and its direction. To complicate the problem there were the factors of an extreme scarcity of clergy, an unclear geography, and last but not least, the political and economic complexities of Europe's intrigues, the immigrant and his poverty, the mild and sometimes not-so-mild persecutions in the cause of Nativism, and even the not inconsiderable stresses of anti-Mormonism.

To reconstruct the story of Catholic beginnings, then, one must turn to the bishops who made the decisions and especially to the priests who were both their eyes and their hands. In the history of the Catholic church beginnings in Utah, scarcely a dozen priests mark the hesitant path, and only a few stand out from the shadows with any clarity.

THE SPANISH-MEXICAN PERIOD OF SOVEREIGNTY

At the beginning two lamps mark the start of an otherwise obscure pathway, the Franciscan Fathers Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Atanasio Dominguez. After that the path is marked by no cleric until the days of Utah's settlement nearly three-quarters of a century later. It is the period of the explorer and the traveler. It is also the period of unclear geography and international conflicts of interests.

The present State of Utah comprises not only the Great Basin but a considerable part of the Colorado River drainage. Together, these two areas represent most of Utah. On the other hand, because of an arbitrary boundary established by the Nootka Sound Convention of 1790, the complicated drainages of the upper Green River, the Bear River, and the tributaries of the Snake River, made for some complex territorial claims on the part of the United States, Spain, and Great Britain. The complexities of the claims and the resulting confusion are often reflected in the uncertainties as to ecclesiastical responsibility for Utah even as late as 1868. This uncertainty must be kept in mind as the story unfolds.

The Catholic story begins when all of Utah was deemed part of the vast Spanish Empire. Vested with extraordinary jurisdiction in church matters, the Franciscan missionaries of New Spain also were endowed with quasi-civil authority over the natives to protect them from conquistadorial ambitions. So it was that, in the eighteenth century exploration of the Spanish borderlands, the padres marched with the soldiers in search for new colonial outposts favorable to the dignity and future civilization of the Indian as well as the political security of New Spain. The result was the mission village or community which flourished in the last part of the eighteenth century in upper California.

Utah was envisioned as a potential part of that system by a man such as Escalante, resident missionary in the Pueblo of Zuni, as well as by his religious superior, Dominguez. Hence, it is not at all surprising that, as a result of a preliminary survey to the west in 1775 by Escalante, the expedition of 1776 should penetrate so far into the present State of Utah not only in search of an overland route to California but also to determine the feasibility of future mission settlements in the land of the Yutas to serve both spiritual and temporal needs.

The journey itself is well known, but for our purposes, it is also important to note that the promises of the friars to return among the Indians were not empty. They intended to return. Only the sanction of Madrid and Mexico City was needed to establish mission settlements in the San Juan basin and near the shores of Utah Lake. Miera y Pacheco, cartographer and seasoned soldier, on his return made an eloquent plea for such a plan in a letter to the King of Spain.

But it was not to be, principally because, in the very same year, Juan Bautista de Anza led an expedition from Sonora across the Colorado near Yuma to found the new mission which became San Francisco. The practicability of this route seemingly was assured even though the outpost established in 1779 near Yuma was overrun shortly thereafter by hostile natives. With this as a beginning, the dream of a Utah mission weakened and then dissolved in the changing political climate which saw Spanish Louisiana retaken by Napoleon through the secret Treaty of San Idelfonso in 1801 and then sold to the independent nation rising to the east in 1803. The crumbling power of Spain finally collapsed under the impact of Mexican independence, and with it, the magnificent religious institution, the mission, disappeared into history, victim of the anticlerical and the plundering in the name of secularization. The Indians were dispersed, subjected to a new kind of poverty, and their faith destroyed by the perverse example of the new ruling class. Utah's promised civilization was buried in the rubble.

Yet, in spite of all this, there are hints that the natives of Utah were not entirely forgotten. William Kittson in his journal notes the encounter in 1825 with Ute Indians wearing silver and brass crosses. 5 One also cannot help but wonder if certain later Indian names are not corruptions of baptismal names. Santaquin sounds suspiciously like a contraction of San Tomas Aquinas. Is it possible that San Pitch or San Pete are derived from San Pedro? Or even an outside chance that Wakara (Walker) might be a derivative of Joachin?

In the early 1800's Catholics were approaching Utah from another quarter, moving west through Canada and thence south with Hudson's Bay and Northwest Fur companies into Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana. With them came that remarkable phenomenon, the Christian Iroquois responsible for introducing Catholic prayers and teachings to the tribes of the Northwest. These created the desire which eventually brought priests from far-off Quebec and St. Louis. At least once, this influence lightly touched Utah in the Snake River Expedition of 1825 under Peter Skene Ogden, but with no observable effects as yet identified.

This period of the trappers and the trail blazers which opened into Utah after the Mexican Revolution brought many Catholic names from the north, the east, and the south. To our knowledge, however, no priest came into what is present-day Utah unless perhaps Father Pierre Jean deSmet. There is the possibility that this remarkable traveler may have walked briefly upon Utah soil as his group and the Bartleson-Bidwell party passed down out of the hills north of Woodruff to the valley of the Bear River. Because of his extensive knowledge of the Great Basin and especially because of a reference to his visit with Brigham Young in 1846, it has been assumed that he had firsthand knowledge of the valleys of northern Utah. It seems unlikely that deSmet did, at least previous to the Mormon settlement in 1847 since, in accounting for his travels in the West from 1841 to 1846, there appears to have been no opportunity for a journey south of the Oregon Trail. Moreover, it is unlikely that he would have journeyed to a territory under neither the jurisdiction of Bishop Blanchet of Oregon nor Bishop Miege of Indian Territories of the United States. Utah in those years was Mexican territory and at the same time jurisdictionally under the Bishop of Durango in Old Mexico.

The Mormons came to Utah in 1847 and by the right of prescription, assumed ownership of its fertile valleys and mountain slopes. In 1848 civil jurisdiction over this land of the Utes was wrested from Mexico. In a short interlude which followed, bearing witness to the last moments in the death of an empire and the agonizing birth of another, the Catholic church paused, not with regret, but as if to decently bury the dead and then in the best way possible to salvage whatever good remained of a dispoiled heritage. The once brilliant hope of a Junipero Serra in California and an Escalante in Utah were now quite unreal in the midst of the economic and moral wreckage marked by the Santa Fe slave trade, the decaying missions, and the avarice and greed of a gold rush.

THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT

In 1850 the new American territory of California was cut away ecclesiastically and erected into the Diocese of Monterey (in California). It would seem that Utah west of the Colorado River was included. At the same time a new Diocese of Santa Fe was created out of territories once belonging to the ancient Diocese of Durango, its area to include all those lands north of the new international boundary and east of the Colorado.

Within three years, however, the Diocese of Monterey was again divided, being split by an east-west line approximately at the 37th parallel drawn to the Colorado River. South of the line was the new Diocese of Monterey extending south to the Mexican border. Extending north to Oregon Territory at the 42nd parallel and east to the "Colorado River" was the new Archdiocese of San Francisco. Thus, in 1853, the settled part of Utah definitely became the responsibility of that remarkable Catholic prelate, Joseph Sadoc Alemany, first Archbishop of San Francisco. But Utah was still far removed from the centers of administration — San Francisco for the lands lying west of the Colorado and Santa Fe for the lands to the east. The problem of distance remained for a long time to plague the formation of the Catholic church in Utah, aided and abetted by the confusion of the term "Colorado River" which, in the beginning, seems to have signified the main channel but later the whole drainage basin.

FATHER BONAVENTURE KELLER

A growing national concern with the Mormon settlement and its territorial claims, the publication of a revelation on celestial marriage and the accompanying "polygamy question," and stories of tribal unrest among the Indians allegedly promoted by Mormon zealots helped bring on what history knows as the Utah War. Almost as an oversight, it brought what may well be the first non-Mormon minister of religion into settled Utah. The man was a Catholic priest.

In 1857 the Utah Expeditionary Force was assembled and moved west to confront the Mormons. Clever harrassment by the Mormons forced the army to winter near Fort Bridger and delayed the entry of the troops into the Salt Lake Valley until the summer of 1858. In the spring of the same year, another complement of troops was assembled to march west from Fort Leavenworth under General W. S. Harney to reinforce the government position. In May 1858 Father deSmet was commissioned a chaplain and assigned to accompany the troops. However, news of the Steptoe Massacre in the Northwest brought a radical change of plans for this second contingent. Harney was recalled and, accompanied by deSmet, sailed from the East Coast by way of Panama to San Francisco and from thence to the country of Oregon. Again the famous Jesuit missionary almost, but not quite, reached Utah.

By November 1858 the troops already in Utah and reinforced by elements of the second contingent were garrisoned in a new camp. Approximately three thousand troops and an equal number of civilians in official and unofficial capacities made of Camp Floyd a post of no mean dimensions and no little problems. Without a chaplain of any kind, the Post Council, therefore, petitioned the War Department to provide one. In a letter dated January 25, 1859, they asked for a Catholic chaplain to be named by Archbishop Kenrick of Baltimore, requiring only that he was to be a "native-born American." Asa result, but not as stipulated, there came to Utah sometime in April 1859 perhaps the first priest ever to assemble a congregation in Utah.

Yet the man has long remained a mystery, glamorous in the obscurity of two entries in the diary of John Wolcott Phelps, an officer then stationed at Camp Floyd. Reflecting a rather prevalent Nativist antipathy to things Catholic, the diarist noted in an entry dated June 5, 1859, the action of the Post Council on the previous day in which its three members had selected a Catholic priest then at Georgetown, District of Columbia, as chaplain for the Camp. To his diary Phelps confided his disgust at the choice, possibly reflecting the feelings of other officers also. The Irish and German troops who comprised a considerable part of the Camp strength were in good measure both Catholics and emigrants, and therefore doubly the object of Nativist feelings.

On Friday June 10 Phelps noted the presence of "a Catholic priest in camp, the first clergyman of any denomination, I believe who has arrived in the valley." Perhaps because of his strong feelings, he did not see fit to identify the man, nor did he in a later entry, noting only the presence of a "Catholic priest in his robes" at the funeral of a Dragoon.

Two nameless entries by a hardly favorable witness! To this interesting puzzle we now have some answers. Within the past year the man has been identified even to acquiring a brief biography compiled forty years ago as well as a photograph. Curiously, his sojourn in Utah seemed unknown to his biographer. However, a further lead just previous to publication has added certitude as to his trip to Utah and some important details not yet fully understood. As we have reconstructed it, the story is as follows.

Father Bonaventure Keller, O.M.C., is the man. He, too, like Escalante and Dominguez was a Franciscan priest, but of a different branch known in the period of our history as the Order of Minors Conventual and more familiarly as "the Black Franciscans," a reference to the black rather than brown clerical habit.

Leonard Keller, son of Anthony and Mary Keller, was born in Unterweigertshofen, Upper Bavaria, on November 2, 1822. Beginning his novitiate in Rome in 1842, he took the religious name of Bonaventure, and in the following year made his profession at the Convent of the Holy Apostles in Rome. On August 7, 1845, he was ordained a priest at Wuerzburg, Bavaria. Eventually he became Superior at both Oggersheim and Schoenau.

In response to a plea by Bishop Odin of Galveston, Texas, for priests to serve the German immigrants within his diocese, Keller was made Superior of a newly established American mission in 1852. Accompanied by Fathers Leopold Bonaventure Maria Moczygemba and Anthony Mueller, another unnamed priest, and a laybrother, Keller sailed from Havre on July 6, 1852. Upon arrival in Texas, the group took charge of four parishes there.

Due to poor health, Keller left Texas in 1854 to serve first in the Diocese of Cincinnati, and later in Brooklyn (then Williamsburg). Responding to an appeal from Bishop Neumann of Philadelphia, Keller took charge of St. Alphonsus Church in that city, becoming its first Franciscan pastor. The church, still in use today, became his charge in February 1858. One year later, on February 2, 1859, Father Leopold Moczygemba, then "Commissary General" of the Order in the United States and therefore Keller's superior, paid an official call at the Monastery of St. Alphonsus, and within a month had appointed another pastor to replace Keller.

It is here that the Utah story of Keller begins. He, together with another of the original band, Father Anthony Mueller, set out sometime the latter part of February for California with the purpose in mind of establishing a monastery there to serve the German immigrants. It seems unlikely that the letter to Archbishop Kenrick from Camp Floyd, dispatched on January 25 could have reached Baltimore or Philadelphia before their leaving, but it is possible that later correspondence influenced the decisions which were yet to be made.

At the present time we can only conjecture on their route, but likely it was by ship to Panama, then across the Isthmus, and again by ship to San Francisco. The overland route by mail wagon was hardly practical in the spring of 1859 since heavy snows in the Rockies delayed the mails even for weeks.

In California Keller and Mueller were welcomed by Archbishop Alemany whose decision had been communicated too late to have reached them before they left Philadelphia. No agreement was reached, and the two began their return journey, this time by the overland route, perhaps by way of Santa Barbara to Salt Lake City.

Arriving in April in the City of the Saints, possibly with the first wagon train from California that year on April 19, Keller was taken sick and unable to continue. Remaining to recuperate but exhausted of funds, the man paid a visit to Camp Floyd where he was welcomed by the Catholics and urged to stay. With the permission of the commanding general of the Utah forces, Albert Sidney Johnston, he remained until October, offering Sunday Masses in the Post theatre, and baptizing, marrying, and burying the dead. We may suppose that he also conducted a school, a duty expected of chaplains, although he was never commissioned a chaplain for the Post, possibly because he was not, as specified in the conditions originally imposed by the Post Council, a "native born American." Even the problem of rations, therefore, necessitated a special order of the commanding general.

Although Keller spoke English and although he received the necessary authorization from Archbishop Alemany whose jurisdiction extendedto Utah, it would seem that the foreign-born priest was never fully accepted as a brother-in-arms. Several bits of information suggest this. Keller was surely in the camp by the first week of June, yet, on June 5 the Post Council convened again to obtain a chaplain, ignoring Kellerand recommending to the War Department a Father James Clarke then teaching at Georgetown College in Washington, D.C. Possibly it was Keller who suggested the name. Clarke turned it down for reasons unknown, and on August 27 the Council again met and this time proffered the chaplaincy to a Father Garesche in St. Louis. Again Keller was passed over.

In the meantime conflicting stories found their way back to Keller's Superior, Father Moczygemba, and to Archbishop Alemany, and these resulted in Keller being recalled by his own Superior over the protest of the Archbishop of San Francisco. Keller left sometime in October, but it was not until December 2 that he was officially relieved of his appointment by Archbishop Alemany, who, shortly thereafter appointed a Father Louis Riviercio in his place. The latter seems never to have arrived to take up his duties, possibly because by the time the passes over the Sierras were open, Camp Floyd was already disintegrating under the pressures of the coming Civil War.

Keller was a dedicated man, forthright in decisions and seemingly quite outspoken. Are these the qualities which made him the object of controversy in a lonely, often miserable outpost removed from other settlements, plagued by a motley crowd of drifters, deserters, and camp followers. It was in many ways a severe camp kept disciplined by the sheer will of a truly great general and some remarkable subordinates. It was a camp with hatred for the government policies that had caused it to be and with much dislike for its civilian neighbors. Were these the factors? Or was it simply the question of Nativism in one of its violent moods? As yet we do not know, but one thing is clear: Father Bonaventure Keller was neither fool nor weakling. Returning to the East, he left his mark in Utica, New York, and Louisville, Kentucky, and in the first Provincial Chapter of his religious order in 1872 was elected to the office of Provincial and, confirmed in that office by apostolic rescript, guided the destinies of his Province until his death, April 5, 1877.

FATHER JEAN BATISTE RAVERDY

Keller moved on, and it was five years before another Catholic priest came to Utah. In 1861, while civil war was spreading upon the land, a new ecclesiastical jurisdiction was created to meet the needs of northern California, the goldfield towns of the Sierras, and the new camps on the east slopes in Nevada. Bishop Eugene O'Connell of the new Vicariate of Marysville assumed responsibility for all the territory north of the 39th parallel east to "the eastern boundary of Nevada," a boundary twice changed in succeeding years. Not clear in the turmoil of the Civil War was the responsibility for Utah. Reflecting this confusion, the venerable Bishop Miege, vicar bishop for the once vast and somewhat nebulous Vicariate of Indian Territory, deemed Utah somehow his responsibility until the situation was clarified.

In 1860 two priests of the Diocese of Santa Fe had been sent to the "Pike's Peak" region following the gold rush there in 1859, Fathers Joseph P. Machebeuf and Jean Batiste Raverdy. Their parish was huge, yet Bishop Miege urged a visit to Utah where there were a few Catholics, principally with the California Volunteers at Camp Douglas who were sent to Utah to protect the overland route and to contain the Indians. It was this suggestion, it would seem, which prompted Father Raverdy to embark on the journey which brought him to Camp Douglas in September 1864. There he remained for a few days, offering Mass, instructing children and baptizing them, and blessing the graves of the soldiers. He then moved on to the goldfields of Bannock and Virginia City, Montana Territory, and afterwards, perhaps by river boat down the Missouri, he returned to Denver.

FATHER EDWARD KELLY

Spain had come to Utah in the persons of Escalante and Dominguez. Germany was represented next in Keller. France was represented by Raverdy. Now it was the turn of the Irish.

In the fall of 1865, the Civil War was over when Father Edward Kelly of the Vicariate of Marysville in California was sent to the Reese River area of Nevada, the scene of new mines. At first pastor of Austin, he set about to construct a church. Responding to a sick call in Salt Lake City (three days travel time to the east), he arrived in the City of the Saints the latter part of May; remained to offer Masses at Camp Douglas, the city itself, and Stockton; and baptized a dozen children. Impressed by the Catholic communities, small in numbers but long in enthusiasm, and receiving the approval of Bishop O'Cormell, Father Kelly arranged for the purchase of a piece of land on Second East near First South in Salt Lake City, and then departed the latter part of June for Austin to await his replacement there. In August he made a quick trip to Marysville, California, gathered his belongings, and returned to Utah in September as its first Catholic pastor. Title to the property purchased in his absence was in doubt and he appealed directly to Brigham Young for a decision. The settlement was in his favor, but apparently the very fact he willingly submitted to a judgment by Brigham Young cooled the ardor of those who had hoped to find in him a champion of the forces of anti-Mormonism. His dream of church and school became the less pretentious reality of a small adobe building on the new property remodeled as a home for the teaching nuns he hoped to bring to Utah.

However, in October of the same year, the Catholic bishops of the United States met to clarify the Catholic position doctrinally and socially in the aftermath of the Civil War. And, by rearrangement of territorial responsibilities, particularly in the West, they hoped to provide more effective use of their scarce clergy. In the plans, approved in Rome the following year, Utah was removed from the jurisdiction of the Vicariate of Marysville and joined together with Colorado in the new Vicariate of Colorado-Utah. The pioneer "Pike's Peak" priest, Father Machebeuf, became its new vicar bishop in August of 1868. The decision made in October 1866 was reflected in the withdrawal of Father Kelly; he remained only long enough to offer the first Christmas Mass in Salt Lake City. The property was left in the charge of John McGrath rent-free until all indebtedness had been discharged.

BISHOP JOSEPH P. MACHEBEUF

More than a year was to elapse before the changes were fully effected, and in that period no name appears except that of Father William Kelly, appointed by Bishop O'Gormon of Omaha to a strange kind of parish, accommodated to the new railroad and extending from Sydney, Nebraska, "to Wasatch Canyon, Utah Territory." It is possible that that intrepid missionary, Father Toussaint Mesplie, then a priest in the Vicariate of Idaho Territory, had also paid an occasional visit. His affection for Utah and its scattered Catholic charges long remained with him.

In November 1868 after completing visits to all other parts of his new vicariate, Bishop Machebeuf set out for Utah. He caught the stage for Cheyenne, rode a regular passenger train to Laramie, and then climbed aboard a work-train to the end-of-the-line in Green River. Continuing by stage, he arrived in Salt Lake City Sunday morning, November 20, and was escorted to Camp Douglas by Colonel P. E. Connor. There he offered Mass, instructed and baptized, visited the small community in the city, and confirmed. He remained until December 10 and then returned to Denver. An unexpected and very cold bath in the middle of the winter by reason of an overturned stagecoach made the Bear River crossing a memorable experience to him.

Priests were extremely scarce in his vast vicariate, but before going to Europe in search of others to help, Machebeuf succeeded in attracting a young priest from Marquette, Michigan. To him the bishop entrusted the Catholics in Utah Territory. The bishop left for Europe in May 1869, just before the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory. Possibly the new priest, Father Honore Bourion, did not arrive in Utah until after the event, possibly not until June or July, perhaps not until early fall. His stay was not long. Completely unimpressed with the situation, particularly with Corinne's tents and adobe and frame cabins, he stayed but six weeks and then returned East in disgust. His complaints, reported to Bishop Machebeuf when the latter returned from Europe in December, reflect the twin problems which were to plague the church in Utah for many years; i.e., a transient Catholic population scattered far and wide and frequently quite poor. In 1869 the communities were very small, money scarce, and prices high: $2.00 for a meal, the same or more for a bed, even when the guest supplied his own bedding. The picture was grim.

In the six weeks Bourion spent "exceeding 365 [dollars] and received in Ogdon [sic] and all railroad stations $20 for me and $95 for the building of a church." Yet, to this man, it would seem, belongs the honor of offering Mass for the first time in Ogden and Corinne.

FATHER JOHN FOLEY

Corinne now became the focal point of attention, not only because it expected to become "the Gentile Capital of Utah," but because many of its citizens were extremely vociferous and wildly anxious to build a new Chicago or St. Louis on the banks of the Bear River. Railroads were projected northeast to Deadwood, north to the Montana goldfields, and northwest to the Dalles and Portland; and, in opposition to Brigham's Utah Central, a marvelous steamer to sail the Great Salt Lake to the mines of Ophir and to the commerce of Stockton and Lake Point. Churches and schools were part of this plan, and Catholics were urged to build the new "Cathedral of the West."

It was into this maelstrom of ideas and wild speculations that Father John Foley stepped when he climbed off the train from Denver in September 1870. Naturally it was expected that he would center his activities in the metropolis of Corinne. Lots were already available depending upon his plans. Already the Methodist Episcopal church could boast a fine new brick structure, the Episcopal church was planning enlargement to its adobe school and temporary church, and the Presbyterians were constructing theirs. Quite naturally, Utah's first Catholic church would join the rest.

But Foley did not agree, and by December he had moved to Salt Lake. Perhaps the diet of anti-Mormonism in Corinne was a little too rich for his blood. In Salt Lake City he remodeled the little building on Second East into a chapel of sorts, and thereafter served Corinne as a mission.

But the spirit of Corinne was yet unsinkable. New warehouses to store the freight to Montana were abuilding; the new lake steamer, not Brigham's "Uncertain Railroad," would freight the ores from the south; and Congress was still debating the relative merits of places like Harrisville for the railroad terminals. In the eyes of the "Corinnethians" the future was still rosy. So, it is not surprising to find the ubiquitous Father Mesplie, on his way from Camp Douglas to Fort Hall in December 1870, pausing in Corinne to announce that the Catholics would soon erect a school there forty by one hundred feet and three stories high. The school was never built, nor can we even discover the property on which it was to stand.

FATHER PATRICK WALSH

Father Foley remained until the end of May 1871. Perhaps he hadbeen to Corinne to witness the much heralded launching of the City of Corinne and saw it settle most ungraciously into the mud of the river bank. Was he wise enough to read this harbinger of the future? Perhaps not! Those who had come to know Corinne in the boisterous years of 1870 and 1871 could still envision Corinne, not Ogden, as gateway to the North and West.

But it did not matter what Father Foley judged to be its future, for a decision made in Rome at the request of Bishop Machebeuf to be relieved of the responsibility for Utah resulted in Foley's recall. Archbishop Alemany of San Francisco had again accepted the responsibility, and with a few more priests now at his disposal, quickly moved toward the establishment of a parish in Utah.

Father Patrick Walsh was sent, apparently with instructions to erect a church. Detraining in Corinne on a June day, he would have witnessed the bustle of the numerous freighting outfits departing or returning from the North, steamers upon the river, ore cars upon the sidings, the Alger Reduction Smelter waiting to smelt the ores, and the magnificent beauty of the Wasatch front to the east and the horizons of distant mountains to the south with green marsh lands to frame the picture. Corinne still in the bloom of youth, dreamed of greatness.

Father Walsh could not help but be impressed. The community was small but ambitious and not afraid of the odds. The Catholics were waiting with a welcome and with plans. A meeting with some of the prominent citizens resulted in a committee appointed to solicit pledges for a church and school. Two days later they could report nearly $2,500 in pledges and talk of a church costing $20,000. On a recently published map of the city, even the location for the new Catholic church was indicated.

But in the judgment of others, Corinne must wait its turn. Walsh moved on to Salt Lake City and set plans in motion for a new church to replace the temporary chapel there. To Henry Monheim of Corinne went the contract for designing and constructing the edifice, and before the year was out Archbishop Alemany traveled to Utah to dedicate the new church to St. Mary Magdalene and personally assure the Catholics in Utah that the church had come to stay. The days of hesitation were over.

FATHER PATRICK DOWLING

Now it was Corinne's turn. Possibly at the suggestion of Father Walsh, Archbishop Alemany paused in Corinne on Wednesday morning, November 29, 1871, offered Mass in the opera house and met with its Catholics. Apparently impressed, he returned to San Francisco and shortly thereafter appointed a priest for Corinne. Father Patrick Dowling came in January as Corinne's first pastor. It is not yet clear what the extent of his parish was, but seemingly he was responsible for the little communities lying along the railroad, principally Ogden and Kelton. Newspaper accounts speak of the "Catholic church" in Corinne, but no site or building can be so identified, and we can only guess that it might have been the little building acquired by Ed Conway behind the Central Hotel and known as "Fitch's schoolhouse."

But in spite of the hustle and bustle, the cracks were fast appearing in Corinne's foundations. In August 1871 Brigham Young had broken ground for the Utah Northern Railroad, and though Corinne's merchants were trying hard to outdistance him with a "Utah, Idaho and Montana Railroad," the backing simply was not available. The handwriting was on the wall for those who could read it. Some of the other churches had already lost their pastors, and finally Dowling was reassigned in June 1872 to Salt Lake City to assist Walsh with the increasing demands from the many mining and smelter communities coming into their own. Occasionally Dowling returned to Corinne, and then in August for the last time, pausing to attend a farewell dinner and receive a handsome gift watch from a community which had grown to love him, he moved on to California.

Much like a postscript to the story, Father Mesplie, visiting in Corinne in February 1873 and perhaps at the urging of some of those who shared his dreams, turned his eyes elsewhere in one last effort to save Corinne. Possibly feeling that the railroad towns deserved a better break, he turned to the one man who was extremely conscious of their needs, Bishop O'Gormon of Nebraska, and urged with great emotion the creation of a Vicar-Apostolic of Utah and Montana. Why Montana is not clear. But it was not be be. A year later Father Lawrence Scanlan came to Utah as replacement for Father Walsh, stayed to become the Vicar-Apostolic of Utah established in 1886, and in 1891 became the first bishop of the newly created Diocese of Salt Lake, embracing the Territory of Utah and the eastern two-thirds of the State of Nevada. One hundred and fifteen years after the dreams and hopes of Escalante, the Catholic church in Utah had finally come of age.

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