priest they met at Lake Winnipeg. With such a mind for the spiritual needs of his family, could he not have communicated to them, and through them to other Indians, some ideas concerning the church of his boyhood, although never devout in his personal habits?
An important service in the gathering of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company was performed by trappers classed as "free-men." They came from Canada, intermarried and lived with the Indians. Many of them were Iroquois of full or part blood, their language was French, and their early religious contacts had been Catholic. These freemen were grub-staked, to use a miner's term; that is, furnished at the trading post with traps and food which were to be paid for with skins during, or at the end of, the season. The late Father L. B. Palladino, resident of the Bitter Root valley in Montana for many years, and author of Indian and White in the Northwest, wrote that the Flatheads obtained their knowledge of God from these Iroquois freemen and the four Indians went to Saint Louis in search of "Black Robes." The writer of this study had a slight personal acquaintance with Father Palladino and holds high regard for his astute service and opinion, but thinks there may have been confusion of these four Indians with others of a few years later, whose visit resulted in the coming of the famous Father DeSmet to the Flatheads and other tribes.
The request made at Spokane Forks to Governor Simpson for missionaries was unheeded. The two boys who accompanied him to Red River were named Spokane Garry and Kootenay Pelly. The latter died but Garry returned to his people, just when has not been positively ascertained. Recently a copy of a Bible has been found in the possession of his great-granddaughter, near Spokane, a well thumbed and marked book which belonged to him and which he may have made use of in the tribe. But he soon returned to the usual Indian life. Governor Simpson passed through the country again in 1841 and tells of finding Garry playing cards in a tepee and unwilling to even come out to greet his former benefactor.[1]
- ↑ George Simpson, Narrative of a Journey around the World, vol. I, pages 144-45.
