Sent to the Oblate missions in Oregon Territory, U.S.A. in 1850, D’Herbomez served under Father Pascal Ricard in the Olympia mission. After establishing the mission of Saint Joseph d’Ahtanum for the Yakima Indians, he was posted at Olympia to evangelize the Indians of Puget Sound. The 1855 Indian war in the Yakima valley meant that the Oblates remaining there also moved to Puget Sound. Owing to the illness of Father Ricard, Father D’Herbomez was appointed to take over his duties as superior of the Oblate’s Oregon missions between 1856 and 1858.

Since the Oblates’ relations with the American government? and the Roman Catholic hierarchy did not improve even after the Oblate withdrawal from the Yakima missions, D’Herbomez’ Oblate superiors authorized his moving his headquarters and clergy north to Bishop Demers’ see in British territory. With the protection of a French- speaking bishop and friendly Hudson’s Bay Company officers, the Oblates intended to serve the white settlers and evangelize the Indians, linguistic and cultural relations of those groups they had worked with previously. Even with the influx of miners to the Fraser River gold rush in 1858 the Indians remained numerically the larger population and the focus of Roman Catholic missionary efforts in these British Pacific colonies.

In the Indian mission work D’Herbomez, being short staffed, employed methods developed from the Oblates’ American experience with the Jesuits’ Quebec Mission to the Pacific. Their long range plan was to establish model agricultural villages for the Indians on the lines of the Jesuit “reductions’”® for the Indians of Paraguay in the seventeenth century. In the early 1860’s the Oblates founded central mission posts at Esquimalt, Okanagan Mission, New Westminster, and Fort Rupert. From there priests travelled to surrounding Indian villages® for periodic “missions.” During these instructional and liturgical gatherings the fathers used Blanchet’s Catholic Ladder,’ a pictorial chart of the history of Roman Catholicism. They encouraged converted Indian communities to take the temperance pledge, join the Temperance Society and live up to the motto on its flag “Religion, Temperance, and Civilization” could be attained by following the native catechists and watchmen in each village, adhering to the practices of the Catholic religion and abjuring not only alcohol but Indian dances and ceremonials as well. DHerbomez implemented his plan that each mission district have a reduction: a church-centred village separate from the debauched gold rush towns where the Indian band could settle down to a temperant life, learn Christianity and agricultural self-support, do public penance for sins, celebrate Catholic feasts in replacement of pagan ones, and see their children educated in an industrial school. He sent Father Fouquet to find sites for missions, founded Saint Mary’s Mission and its industrial school upriver from New Westminster, and ordered prayerbooks and hymns translated into Indian languages. For the Catholics among the non- Indian population D’Herbomez established parishes and schools including St. Louis College for boys in Victoria.®

With this growth in the Oblate Western missions, D’Herbomez sought to make his congregation’s work autonomous in the mainland colony of B.C. He became titular bishop of Melitopolis and Vicar Apostolic of B.C. in 1863, was consecrated on 9 Oct. 1864 and took up his seat in New Westminster a week later. Over the next year he

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removed Oblate missionary priests and brothers from the diocese of Bishop Demers. In 1865 they established St. Louis College in New Westminster. Their superior encouraged the Sisters of St. Ann to establish a school for girls there and later one for Indian girls at St. Mary’s Mission. In the next four years Bishop D’Herbomez opened 55 chapels in Indian villages, began centres for mission districts at Williams Lake and Stuarts Lake, and made extensive pastoral tours. With his health failing from the strain of this work he engaged Father Paul Durieu,? director of St. Mary’s Mission as his assistant in 1867. On a trip to Europe for the Vatican Council the bishop suffered imprisonment during the Franco-Prussian war.

When D’Herbomez returned to B.C. he wrote to H.L. Langevin,!° Canada’s Minister of Public Works who was then on an inspection trip in the new province, a letter summarizing the nature of his Indian mission administration. In it he recommended that the government set aside reserves for the Indians in existing villages, extinguish their title to the lands of the province, give them annual grants for agricultural implements, clothes and blankets, and appoint Catholic agents for Catholic Indians. D’Herbomez especially requested industrial and agricultural boarding schools for Indian children.'! He pointed out that the Oblates had founded such a school at St. Mary’s Mission and intended to establish one in each mission district. In the mid-1870’s D’Herbomez began new mission districts at Stuarts Lake and in the Kootenays. He did not live to see the federal government extend their Industrial School policy from the North West Territories to B.C.

Despite the expansion of Roman Catholic missions in the 1860’s and 1870’s, the Indians’ seeming acceptance of them and the white community's praise,'’ Oblates had to struggle to consolidate their achievements. Methodists and Anglicans established competing missions. Indian employment in cannery and mill jobs aided their persistence in traditional religious and social activities.'*

With the appointment of Paul Durieu as his co-adjutor bishop in 1875, D’Herbomez, though ailing, could further expand Roman Catholic missionary efforts: to the Indians at Kamloops in 1878, to the'C.P.R. construction crews and the railway’s terminal city of Vancouver in the 1880's. At the grand missionary gatherings of that decade,!° crowds of devout Indians from model villages like Squamish camped under temperance banners to hear sermons and attend ceremonies seemingly in fulfillment of D’Herbomez’ early plans for them. Delegates of the Oblate Superior General, missionaries from the N.W.T., Indian Agents, the press and the public of the province lauded the success of the Oblates in christianizing and civilizing the Indians. Such success was ephemeral. Protestant missionaries’ achievements and Indian persistence in traditional patterns of life, supported by the booming economy of the post-railway years, meant that the schools failed to enrol many Indian pupils or to train them for very long.

By 1887 when D’Herbomez went to Rome for the Oblate’s General Chapter, his ill-health was more pronounced. He asked to be relieved of his functions as missionary vicar. Consequently his co- adjutor, Durieu, took them over in 1888. On June 3, 1890 Durieu had to inform Indian tribes gathered at Sechelt for their annual “mission” that their bishop had died.!° The New Westminster Indians transported him to their church and watched with his body the night

Le chronographe Volume III no. 1-2, Printemps-Eté 1986