Frederic Baraga:
The Snowshoe Bishop
by Kate Convissor

In winter the snow lies deep along the Lake Superior coastline. Winds howl, and the snow swirls and drifts, sometimes eight feet deep. On a frigid winter night it is dangerous to go outside.

But the Ojibway Indian had come in the night, covered with snow and banging on the door, and Fr. Frederic Baraga opened his door to anyone. He welcomed the Indian and his dog and fed them in the warmth of his cabin.

"My mother is very sick," the native said in the Ojibway dialect. "She wants to see the blackrobe."

And so, since Fr. Frederic Baraga refused no one, he set out at dawn with the Ojibway. The old Indian woman was still alive when they reached her cabin after three days of hard travel. Baraga heard her confession and anointed her before she died. Then he returned to his mission outpost at the base of the Keewenaw Peninsula.

Michigan's upper peninsula was the land of the Ojibway in the mid nineteenth century, and Fr. Frederick Baraga was their priest. His efforts to evangelize these Native Americans and to improve their lives have scattered his name like wheat across the evergreen wilderness. A county, a village, a street, a township and numerous shrines in his name are witness to Baraga's historic mark upon the area. He may soon become its saint as well.

Baraga was born into wealth and educated to be a lawyer in his native Slovenia (formerly part of Yugoslavia), but he became a priest instead and left his inheritance to his sisters. As a parish priest Baraga quickly made enemies among his superiors for his impulsive zeal and popularity with the common people. Worn by his colleagues' scorn, Baraga decided to volunteer for the missions, where his energy and dedication might be equal to the challenge of his ministry.

The Michigan frontier was changing when Baraga first saw the blue-water state in 1830. The pine and maple forests had begun to yield to the farmer and the lumber baron. Trapping and lumbering in the lower peninsula were depleting resources that had sustained the ®

nomadic native cultures for centuries. White man's firewater brought a crippling addiction to the tribes, and government agents from the War Department continually pressured the impoverished natives to sell their land.

Baraga was first stationed at Arbre Croche, a peaceful Ottawa mission at the northwest corner of Michigan's mitten. He was diligent, sometimes foolhardy, in carrying out his missionary activities. He went where he was needed at any time, heedless of the distance or the danger. He restlessly circled the land and the lake bringing the Good News to remote huts and villages. Tales of his epic journeys and uncanny rescues began to circulate and are still part of local legend today.

He learned to travel as quickly on snowshoes as his Indian guides, sometimes covering an unbelievable thirty or forty miles a day. But the winter weather, always fickle, could suddenly change, and death might stalk a much shorter journey. Once, in his mid-fifties, Baraga was caught in a blizzard and struggled for twenty-four hours to reach a cabin only seventeen miles away.

He ministered to everyone, but his abiding concern was for the Native Americans, and he became known as the "Indian priest." He lived in their birchbark huts, learned their languages, and composed prayerbooks and hymnals in Ottawa and Ojibway.

For twenty years, he labored to compile grammar and dictionary of the Ojibway language. The manuscript ran to 1,700 pages and is still the most authoritative source for that native tongue today.

"He was one with the people," writes Most Rev. Mark Schmitt, former Bishop of Marquette. "He froze when they froze, hungered when they hungered, and mourned when they mourned. He also rejoiced with them and feasted and celebrated when they feasted and celebrated."

Beginning in 1835, Baraga served the Ojibway in Michigan's upper peninsula, first as priest, then as bishop, until his death. He was often the first "blackrobe" the Native Americans had seen since the French Jesuits evangelized the region 150 years before.

He served at two major missions: one at LaPointe, an island in Lake Superior north of Wisconsin; the other at L'Anse at the base of the Keewenaw Peninsula.

Baraga hated to waste time. Once, he decided to visit the mission of Grand Portage, forty miles across Lake Superior from LaPointe. Two foot waves are normal on Lake Superior; in a storm, these can become twenty-five to fifty-foot swells. Spurning the safer, coastal route which would take four times as long, Baraga set out with an Indian guide in a small fishing boat. His friends stood on the shore begging him not to go.

The lake was calm, the wind steady. Baraga's decision appeared lucky, if imprudent. But storms blow quickly from the west. A dark haze grew on the horizon and soon waves tossed the frail boat like a matchstick. The two men shipped their oars and lay on the bottom of the boat, expecting to capsize.

They were blown westward and eventually saw waves crashing against huge breakers on the shore. It was impossible to avoid the rocks, but their small boat shot gently into the mouth of a river. In gratitude for their deliverance Baraga and his companion marked the site with a rough cross. A marble cross stands there today, and the river is called Cross River.

Perhaps Baraga's serenity in the face of danger lay in the quality of his spiritual life. Every day, whether camping in sub-zero temperatures or dodging raindrops in his birchbark hut, Baraga faithfully woke in the pre-dawn gloom to pray for several hours.

Perhaps his natural courage and zeal was focused and refined by this profound relationship with God. Word and sacrament were vital to him, and he risked his life to bring them to others. As he saw it, this was nothing less than his duty. ``His love for Jesus Christ was so deep and personal and strong that he did everything in his power to help others know and love God,'' said Regis Walling, former archivist for the Bishop Baraga Association.

Baraga was consecrated as the first bishop of northern Michigan on All Saint's Day in 1853. His first official communication was a pastoral letter to his Ojibway converts in their native language and another to English-speaking Catholics. ®

This was Baraga's most difficult appointment. It brought no greater physical comfort -- after a month of eating potatoes at the bishop's house, one young assistant begged for a transfer -- and Baraga was overwhelmed with the care of such an enormous territory. However he trimmed and scraped, his resources always fell short: too little money, too few priests. He dunned his European friends for funds and vocations, but their generosity dropped soundlessly into an ocean of need. "Misere," Baraga wrote often in his journal. "Misere."

He yielded stubbornly to age, pushing himself to travel the length and breadth of his diocese until he could no longer labor over its winter trails. He finally laid aside his snowshoes when he had to be supported under both arms. At almost seventy he finally collapsed at a national council of bishops in Baltimore. Advised to stay in a warmer climate, Baraga fairly fled from his hospital bed. He was so weak that his priest companion had to carry him from one train to another, but he wanted to die in his harsh and snowy homeland. Baraga died eighteen months later on January 19, 1868 in Marquette.

It is said that Baraga baptized some four thousand Native Americans during his mission years. But his heroic quality was his dedication to his duties and his personal devotion to Christ and his church. "I feel his life has a great deal to tell us," said Walling, particularly about the need to be faithful in prayer and zealous that others know about Jesus.

Baraga's cause for canonization is in the final stages of preparation before being sent to the Vatican. A lengthy and detailed positio (documentation) has been drafted and is being translated into Italian. Then the Vatican will indicate which of nearly one hundred intercessions attributed to Baraga they will investigate.