Black Robes Enter Coyotes World: Chief Charlo and Father De Smet in the Rocky Mountains

Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World brings to life the complicated history of Jesuit missionaries among Montana’s Native peoples―a saga of encounter, accommodation, and resistance during the transformative decades of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Sally Thompson tells the story of how Jesuit values played out in the lives of the Bitterroot Salish people. The famous Black Robe (Jesuit) Father Pierre-Jean De Smet actually spent little time among his “beloved Flatheads.” Instead, he traveled extensively between the Pacific and the Rockies, mapping the pathways and noting the valuable resources. His popular writings helped spark the westward movement of white settlers. In this up-close account of the Bitterroot Salish people during the lifetime of Chief Charlo, anthropologist and cultural heritage consultant Sally Thompson examines the fundamental differences in the ways Euro-Americans and Native Americans related to land and nature.