Little Convents on the Prairie
Like so many other Americans, I was captivated as a child by the stories in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels and in Michael Landon’s TV show inspired by the books. They shaped my understanding of what life in the days of America’s pioneers and settlers was like and, if I am honest, they still do—even after years of advanced historical study and attentiveness to the experiences and perspectives of people very different from frontier families such as Wilder’s.
The Little House series and other traditional portrayals of America’s prairie lands in the nineteenth century implanted in my mind a decidedly Protestant, and especially congregational, Methodist, and libertarian, picture.[1] Not exposed to the Catholic landscape of Willa Cather’s novels or of the real American Midwest until I was well into adulthood, I simply presumed for a long time that there were not many people like my own East-Coast ancestors of that era—staunch Catholics with strong ties to Europe—roaming about in covered wagons, taming the land, teaching in one-room schoolhouses, and so on. Catholics like me, I generally learned, were not so much part of that American story. Theirs was mostly about building up ethnic-religious enclaves in America’s big cities and, in the process, facing down (and sometimes fanning, with their bouts of illiberalism and fidelity to Rome) the virulent anti-Catholicism of the country’s elites and mainstream population.
Although I have been writing and teaching about the history of Catholicism in both Europe and the Americas for a decade and a half, I am still learning things about my own country that surprise me because of my early-life cultural formation. These days, I am especially coming to appreciate the contributions to the world Laura Ingalls knew of Catholic women, thanks to ongoing new work by historical specialists. Different from what I encountered in the Little House stories, there were, for example, many communities of nuns, school-teaching sisters, and other Catholic consecrated women engaged in hospital work and other social ministries across America’s heartlands in the nineteenth century.
Not a few of these were well established well before Laura Ingalls was born in 1867 in Wisconsin, and most had strong ties to Europe. As early as 1818, for instance, Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne and a group of other French-born sisters of a new women’s congregation, the Religious of the Sacred Heart, started a school in Saint Charles, Missouri. This was before Missouri was a state—and long before the railroad made it simpler for anyone newly arrived from Europe to travel halfway across the American continent. Their Academy of the Sacred Heart was the first free school for children west of the Mississippi River, meaning that no tuition was required for admission.[2] In time, Sacred Heart sisters would go on to open similar schools in many states, including Nebraska, in which the Convent of the Sacred Heart—today’s Duchesne Academy—opened its doors in Omaha in 1881.
They were far from the first Catholic religious sisters active in Nebraska, however. Religious Sisters of Mercy, with roots in Ireland, had been involved in education in Omaha since 1864. Their congregation was also active in education as well as healthcare ministries in other American locations, including Chicago since 1846, where they founded a women’s college—the oldest college of any kind in that brand new city—which in time grew into today’s Xavier University. Other Catholic religious women contributed to the foundations of Midwestern colleges and universities, such as the Marianite Sisters of the Holy Cross whose work for the new University of Notre Dame in Indiana in the late 1840s—while starting their own women’s college and tending to an already Catholic Potawatomi Indian community in the region—included regularly trekking five miles merely to do laundry for the students and staff.[3]
Such Catholic women were pioneers of education generally, not just of Catholic education or schooling for young girls. At the same time, Catholic religious sisters were pioneers in hospital work and administration in the American Midwest, as they had been in many other places, such as Quebec, where Augustinian hospital nuns had been tending to Native American and French-colonial patients since 1639.[4] Notable in this regard were the Daughters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s congregation, who traveled some 1,500 miles by wagon from Maryland to Missouri, establishing a hospital in Saint Louis in 1828. Initially operating in a tiny log cabin, the sisters’ hospital developed considerably thanks to the largesse of the layman John Mullanphy, after whom the hospital was named for many years before adopting its modern name, De Paul Medical Center, in the twentieth century. This hospital run by the Daughters became famously radical for its time by entrusting its infirmary, in 1880, to one of the first university-trained female physicians in the U.S.A., Dr. Nancy Leavell.[5]
Some of the most memorable scenes in the Little House books and TV episodes took place in one-room schoolhouses in small towns such as Walnut Grove, Minnesota—the kind of schoolhouses Wilder herself taught in for a time. Contrary to what I long pictured, it turns out that some of those schoolhouses were led by Catholic teachers, such as the one built in 1861 in a settlement called Champion, Wisconsin, about 250 miles east of where Wilder was born. A convent was erected next door. Local Catholics have long honored the site for its connection to Adele Brise, a Belgian-born girl who, in 1859, experienced a mystical vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, urging her to take up an educational mission for local children. Consecrating her life as third-order Franciscan and wearing a habit, Brise taught for many years at the Champion schoolhouse and recruited other women to join her in an educational ministry that sometimes involved traveling many miles to remote farmhouses to ensure that children without nearby schoolhouses were also given a chance at decent education.[6]
Institutions founded by Catholic sisters in Wisconsin included St. Mary’s Catholic Indian Boarding School on the Ojibwe reservation in Odanah, run by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration from 1883 to 1969. As is true of other Indian boarding schools administered by a range of Protestant, secular, and Catholic authorities in the U.S.A. and Canada in the same period, this school’s legacy of harsh corporal punishments and of forbidding Native American children from speaking their own languages has in recent years come under intense scrutiny.[7] Some of the history still being researched and written about Catholic nuns and other consecrated women in America’s heartlands in the nineteenth century is wrapped up in our nation’s ongoing reckoning with legacies of oppression and abuse of Native Americans, black Americans, and other racial and ethnic minorities. Indeed, some of the most eye-opening specialized scholarship that has recently appeared on nineteenth-century American Catholicism deals specifically with various institutions’ and ecclesiastical authorities’ exploitation of enslaved men, women, and children.[8]
Thanks in part to such studies, the long-neglected legacy of American Catholic women of color who pursued religious callings and developed their own ministries—despite many odds against them, including the prejudice of other Catholics—is also becoming better appreciated. One such woman was Julia Greeley, who had been born into slavery in Missouri around 1833 and suffered brutal treatment as a girl. After being freed from slavery during the Civil War, she worked hard to make a dignified life for herself and for impoverished people she encountered. Eventually settling in Colorado and becoming Catholic in 1880, she distributed much of her hard-earned savings from various jobs to poor people she encountered in the streets of Denver. She also became a third-order Franciscan and encouraged devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus among any who would listen. She was so beloved as a local Catholic philanthropist by the time of her death in 1918 that the Jesuit fathers at Loyola Chapel in Denver allowed her the most unusual honor, previously reserved for clergymen, of having her body lie in repose before their altar.[9]
Given the absence of all the women I have mentioned here from the narratives of American history and national mythmaking literature I was exposed to when young, I wonder how differently my sense of identity as both a Roman Catholic and an American would have developed had I known of such figures much sooner. Staunch Catholics with strong ties to Europe were more a part of the story of America’s settlement and growth than most Americans realize, and not a few American Catholics still make it well into adulthood without serious exposure to this rich, sometimes lamentable, and multifaceted history.
That history indeed is complex enough that, as it happens, even Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family was shaped by Roman Catholicism in a significant way that the Little House books never mentioned. According to Lindsay Kuniyuki, the great-great-granddaughter of Laura’s first cousin, Edith Florence Ingalls, her branch of the Ingalls family converted to Catholicism during Laura’s lifetime, thanks to the influence of the local Catholic school in which Edith enrolled all of her daughters. Kuniyuki, as a Catholic, was quite surprised in part to learn she was a close relative of the storied Ingalls family, in part because of the strongly congregational, libertarian Protestant tone of the Christianity in the Little House stories.[10]
Her surprise, not unlike my own upon initially learning some of the history I have shared here, makes me wonder: how different would my own and numerous other Americans’ understanding of life on the prairies in the 19th century be today had it been a Catholic cousin of Wilder who had, instead, become the famous writer in that family? How many of all our impressions of America’s past, and our sense of belonging (and sometimes ambivalence) about our personal places within the grander American narrative, are rooted in such accidents of who was writing what, and when?
At the very least, such questions reinforce my commitment, as a working historian and teacher, to keep learning from as many voices and experiences from the past as I am able, and to encourage students and readers today to do the same. And, where they are inspired and equipped to do it, I encourage others to join into the important, always-ongoing work of recording, writing, and expanding upon our collective history themselves.
[1] John J. Fry, A Prairie Faith: The Religious Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Eerdmans, 2024).
[2] Catherine Mooney, Philippine Duchesne: A Woman with the Poor (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2007).
[3] James T. Connelly, C.S.C., The History of the Congregation of the Holy Cross (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 48-49.
[4] Mary Dunn, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 60-89; Bronwen McShea, La Duchesse: The Life of Marie de Vignerot, Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France (New York: Pegasus Books, 2023), 134-141.
[5] M. Lilliana Owens, The St. Louis Hospital, 1828 (St. Louis: St. Louis Medical Society, 1965).
[6] Bronwen McShea, Women of the Church: What Every Catholic Should Know (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 142-143); Michael J. Pfeifer, The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience (New York: New York University Press, 80).
[7] See especially Mary Annette Pember, “Death by Civilization,” The Atlantic, 8 Mar. 2019.
[8] See for example C. Walker Gollar, Let Us Go Free: Slavery and Jesuit Universities in America (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2024); David J. Endres, ed., Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2023); Shannen Dee Williams, Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); and Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
[9] Michael Heinlein, ed., Black Catholics on the Road to Sainthood (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 2021), 81-92.
[10] Lindsay Kuniyuki, “How My Branch of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Family Converted to Catholicism,” ChurchPOP.com, 20 Jul. 2017: https://www.churchpop.com/how-my-branch-of-laura-ingalls-wilders-family-converted-to-catholicism/.
Bronwen McShea, Ph.D. (Yale), MTS (Harvard) is an historian, writer, speaker, and artist based in New York City.
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