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EDITED BY John C. Parish
Associate Editor of the State Historical Society of Iowa
| Volume I |
October 1920 |
No. 4 |
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Copyright 1920 by the State Historical Society of Iowa
(Transcribed by Gayle Harper)
FATHER MAZZUCHELLI
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A young Italian stood clinging
to the mainmast of a sailing vessel that plunged desperately
in the midst of a gale upon the Atlantic. His imagination was
stirred by the spectacle of the sea in its turbulence and he
held his perilous position and watched the waves vent their
wrath upon the boat and toss their crests across the deck,
while overhead the wind howled through the rigging and the
thunder crashed in the darkened sky.
Wide-eyed and fascinated he gazed at
the storm about him, and with the same wide-eyed eagerness he
looked forward to the quest upon which he was embarked. Samuel
Charles Mazzuchelli was answering a call that had come to him
at Rome. Since he was seventeen he had been preparing for the
life of a Dominican priest, but when he was about twenty-one
and not yet ordained he had heard a man from America tell of
the need of preachers and churches on the far western edge of
that new country. And with hardly more ado than a trip to
Milan to bid his parents farewell, he had set out for the land
of possibilities.
In France, on a two months' sojourn,
he had picked up a little knowledge of French, but he spoke no
English. He had no companion, nor was any one to meet him in
New York. He only knew that somehow he was to get to
Cincinnati where he was to be taught English, ordained, and
assigned to a mission. And somehow he did get there and began
the last round of preparation for his life work.
Two years
later, in 1830, Mazzuchelli appeared at Mackinac Island in the
northern part of the Territory of Michigan. This island in the
straits between Lakes Huron and Michigan was one of the posts
of the American Fur Company. During the winter it was
comparatively quiet but in the summer when the fur traders
accompanied by their boatmen and clerks came in with their
loads of furs – the result of a winter's work upon a hundred
rivers and lakes in the northwest – the island swarmed with a
motley population of Americans, French Canadians, half-breeds
and Indians.
Here the young priest began his
labors. At first he was the only Catholic priest within
hundreds of miles, and he tried to make this whole vast region
his parish. He spent his time for five years traveling over
wide spaces to celebrate mass and preach to Indians and
scattered fur trading settlements. In a trader's boat he
crossed Lake Michigan to Green Bay, and there lie designed a
church and managed its erection. He visited again and again
the far off Winnebago village on the Wisconsin River, and he
trailed across country to the Mississippi and preached to the
settlement at Prairie du Chien. Menominee, Ottawa, Chippewa,
and Winnebago Indians as well as American and French traders
and their half-breed assistants came to know and like this
slender young Dominican. He was not a rugged man, but small of
stature and delicate of physique. Yet, though he never spared
himself, the brightness of his eyes and the rich color of his
cheeks remained with him to the end of his days.
He journeyed
on foot, by canoe and on horseback, and in winter on
snow-shoes and by sledge over the deep snows or up and down
the frozen rivers. His memoirs read like pages from the Jesuit
Relations of a century and a half before. He held services
sometimes in the open under the trees, sometimes in lodges
made of bark and mats brought and set up for the occasion by
the Indian worshippers. He lived at times in the cabins of
Indian tribes, eating with them, trying to master their
languages, and sleeping upon their mats at night.
Nature never
ceased to delight him. In his memoirs, in which he always
spoke of himself in the third person, he tells of a journey to
Arbre-Croche on the shore of Lake Michigan.
“Taking
advantage of ten Catholic Indians leaving for Arbre-Croche in
a bark canoe one evening crossed the Straits of Mackinac with
them, and spent the first night in a dense forest, under a
little tent cheered by a crackling fire close by, – which was
supplied with fuel by the company. Who will forget the sweet
canticles sung in their own native tongue by the pious oarsmen
while crossing the Lake? The starry vault above, the calm of
the limpid waters, their immensity lost in the western
horizon, the pensive stillness of the shores far-off yet
barely discernible, all seemed to echo the sweet reverent
tones of the simple good Ottawas".
During these
five years other priests had come to the Territory of
Michigan, and the trading posts and Indian villages became
accustomed to the sight of the long black mantle of the
Dominicans. Mazzuchelli began to think of new fields of labor.
In the spring of 1835 he made a trip to Cincinnati by way of
St. Louis and the Ohio River, and as he went down the valley
of the Mississippi he visited for the first time the town of
Galena on the Fever River in Illinois and the little
settlement at Dubuque on the west side of the Mississippi.
In
these two lead mining towns were many Catholics, without
either church or pastor, and following the visit of
Mazzuchelli they petitioned his superiors to allow the priest
to give his services exclusively to that section of the
frontier. Thus began a new period in his life. His work was
now almost entirely among the white settlers of the towns
along the Mississippi, but it was none the less a life of
ceaseless activity. He became more definitely a church
builder. In the town of Dubuque he stirred the people to make
subscriptions for a building; he drew up the plans himself,
hired the workmen, and laid the corner-stone. The church was
built from the native rock of the vicinity and under the
zealous eye of the priest it grew slowly but steadily to
completion.
In that same year, 1835, Mazzuchelli
began a church at Galena. Here again he was architect and
superintendent and it took long months to complete the work.
In the meantime he built a little wooden chapel with a
confessional on one side of the altar and a closet on the
other, six feet by five, in which he slept. He alternated
between Galena and Dubuque; and in the latter town while the
church was going up he made his home in a little room under
the Sanctuary, with unplastered walls and with the bare earth
for a floor.
Eliphalet Price, who furnished the
stone for a part of the Dubuque church, wrote of him:
“We never
transacted business with a more honorable, pleasant and
gentlemanly person than the Rev. Mr. Mazzuchelli. We left him
seated upon a stone near the building, watching the lazy
movements of a lone Irishman, who was working out his
subscription in aid of the church.”
Just so he
must have been remembered by the inhabitants of many a
frontier town – seated upon a stone with the skirts of his
mantle tucked up about him, overseeing the work upon a church
that owed to him not only the inspiration for its erection but
the practical details of its architecture as well.
In 1839 the
arrival of Bishop Loras to take charge of the newly created
Diocese of Dubuque relieved greatly the burden of
Mazzuchelli's work and widened the scope of his energies.
Wherever he went churches sprang up. He made trips up and down
the river in every kind of weather and over every kind of
road. A little frame church was the result of his work at
Potosi, Wisconsin; and at Prairie du Chien he drew plans and
superintended the erection of a stone church a hundred feet in
length.
He carried his religious
ministrations to Antoine Le Claire upon the site of Davenport
before that town existed. Not many years later, in conjunction
with Le Claire, he made arrangements for the building of a
brick church in the new town. He had complete charge of the
building of the first Catholic church in Burlington, and when
it was finished but not yet consecrated he rented it for one
session to the Legislative Council of the Territory of Iowa
and was paid three hundred dollars for its use – sufficient to
finish paying the debt incurred in its construction.
When
Iowa City became the capital of the Territory of Iowa and the
government offered free sites in the town for churches if they
were built within a given time, the energetic priest hurried
over to the inland town and made preparations for building a
church. And when Bishop Loras came in 1841 to lay the corner
stone, Mazzuchelli, standing on a mound of earth thrown up by
the excavators, gave the address of the occasion.
So this
pioneer priest passed from town to town, celebrating mass,
visiting the sick and everywhere leaving brick and stone
monuments to his energy. Churches at his inspiration raised
their crosses to the sky at Maquoketa and Bellevue and
Bloomington (now Muscatine) in the Territory of Iowa and at
Shullsburg and Sinsinawa in the Territory of Wisconsin. One
who knew him well credits twenty churches to this
far-wandering priest.
Father Mazzuchelli took a keen
interest in things political as well as religious. In 1836 he
officiated as chaplain at the first Fourth of July celebration
in the town of Dubuque. In the fall of that same year he
responded to an invitation to open with prayer the meeting of
the Territorial Legislature of Wisconsin at Belmont; and he
never ceased to praise the wisdom of the framers of the
Federal Constitution for allowing religion to exist free from
the trammels of the political state.
In February
of 1843, having heard much of the sect of Mormons, he
determined to visit in person their prophet, Joseph Smith, at
Nauvoo. Being then at Burlington he journeyed to Fort Madison,
and from there passed down the river on the ice and across to
the Mormon town on the Illinois side, where the prophet talked
to him at length but unconvincingly of the many tunes he had
conversed with God in person, of the revelations he had
received from St. Paul, and of the golden Book of Mormon whose
whereabouts an angel had revealed to him.
A few weeks
later he started on a long journey back to Italy. While there,
largely to enlist funds for his missionary enterprises, he
wrote and published in Italian his Memoirs dealing with the
fifteen years of his life in America. With characteristic
modesty he invariably used the third person, speaking of
himself as the Missionary or the Priest, and nowhere in the
book, not even upon the title-page, does his name appear. In
1915, over fifty years after his death, the volume was
re-published in an English translation.
Mazzuchelli
did not stay long in Italy, but returned to devote nearly a
score of years to additional service in the Upper Mississippi
Valley. His later life was spent largely in southwestern
Wisconsin, and since there were many priests now in the field
his labors were less arduous. But he passed down the years
with busy feet, founding schools and colleges, teaching and
preaching and raising new buildings, visiting the sick and
dying, and now and then with unflagging devotion attending the
victims of an epidemic like that of 1850 when the ravages of
cholera swept over southwestern Wisconsin.
A man of
wide interests and versatile talents was Father Mazzuchelli.
His ability as an architect has been mentioned. Aside from the
building of churches, Archbishop Ireland credits him with
having drawn the plans of the first court house in Galena, and
although he himself makes no mention of it in his writings, he
is said to have designed the Old Stone Capitol at Iowa City.
The carving of a beautiful altar in a chapel in Dubuque is
attributed to him by Archbishop Ireland. If, as seems
probable, the maps of the Mississippi Valley and Great Lake
region which accompany his Memoirs, and the frontispiece
depicting the habitation and family of a Christian Indian, are
his, he must have had unusual skill with the pen. His memoirs
themselves show a fine command of language, a genuine love of
the beautiful in nature and life, and an intense patriot- ism
for his adopted country.
He died in 1864, not yet old, and
still busy serving his fellow men. A sister in Santa Clara
College, which Mazzuchelli founded in southwestern Wisconsin,
writes of his death:
"One bitter night he spent laboring
from one death bed to another, and dawn overtook him creeping
to his poor little cottage, no fire, no light, for he kept no
servant, and benumbed and exhausted, he was glad to seek some
rest, "When morning came, unable to rise, they found him
stricken with pneumonia, and in a few days his hardships were
at an end forever. He who had served the dying in
fever-haunted wigwams, in crowded pest houses, in the mines,
and on the river, added this last sacrifice to the works of
his devoted life."
Ardent but gentle, inspiring yet
practical, this energetic Dominican played an unusual part in
the development of the West. His life was, throughout, one of
service, but perhaps the keynote lies in those early years of
wide and weary travel and church building. Here he was in very
truth a pioneer; and wherever canoe or sled or his own
tireless feet carried him, men of varying and of mixed races,
of all creeds and of no creed, were better for the sight of
his kindly face, the sound of his cheering words, and the
unceasing labors of his hand and mind.
JOHN C.
PARISH
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