Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla & Nesqualy, 1846–1879 by Roberta Stingham Brown and Patricia O'Connell Killen Roberta Stingham Brown

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 pation in the West morphed along racial lines into a national era of exclusion. Smith excels at illustrating her arguments with the stories of real people struggling to make a living and find their place in California ’s society and polity. Rather than abstract nameless victims of bound labor and a legal system dominated by faceless white men of power and greed, she reconstructs individuals with agency, motive, and history. Smith mines information from newspapers, memoirs, letters , and legal cases, introducing readers to a parade of characters who illustrate the ambiguity and historical contingency of unfree labor.Readers meet indentured Indian servant Augustín, a New Mexican genízaro, who along with Mexican debt peons Benito Pérez and his wife, travelled from Sonora to California to dig gold and wash laundry for their patrone Antonio Francisco Coronel. There is James Brown, who legally converted his hereditary slaves,Richard and Lucy Brown,to contractual employees in order to use California’s legal system, which had banned slavery, to protect his rights to the Browns’labor until they could meet his emancipation fee. Smith describes Oliver Wozencraft and hisYuki Indian domestic servant, Shasta, held under legal guardianship as his ward, as well as Lucy Young of the Lassik people, stolen, sold, escaped, captured, and traded between white owners most of her life. And then there is the story of Ma Ho, her six-year-old daughter Quin Ti, and the Chinese man Chu Quong,who was either Ma Ho’s wronged husband or the person who held her in prostitution and kidnapped her daughter to do the same. These are poignant portraits of the visceral reality of unfree labor, race, and the law in a free state. Freedom’s Frontier is thoroughly researched, but it is also well written and a pleasure to read. Smith makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on the antebellum West and the complicated story of human bondage that unifies western history with our national history of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. David Rich Lewis Utah State University Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla & Nesqualy, 1846–1879 by Roberta Stingham Brown and Patricia O’Connell Killen translated by Roberta Stingham Brown University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2013. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 288 pages. $40.00 cloth. Although the Roman Catholic Church played a major role in the Pacific Northwest during the nineteenth century, for many decades research on the church’s activities was largely the realm of Catholic scholars,such as Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., author of A History of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest (1987). With the publication of the Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla and Nesqualy, 1846–1879, editors Patricia Stringham Brown and Patricia O’Connell Killen have provided a useful resource that will appeal to a wider audience. Following extensive research on the A.M.A Blanchet collection of some 900 missives, Brown and Killen selected forty letters addressed to a diverse group of historical figures and organizations ,includingA.M.A.Blanchet’s brother F.N. Blanchet, Bishop of Oregon City; church officials in Quebec, the eastern United States, Europe, and the Vatican; the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in France; federal officials and military officers in both Washington Territory and Washington City; and local clergy and missionaries in Blanchet’s bishopric.  Reviews Brown and Killen open the volume with a preface that outlines the scope of the project, their method and approach to editing the letters, and their attention to three “sensitive topics”: the use of ethnic labels, relations between missionaries and Native peoples, and the connection (or distance) between the perspectives of the editors and those expressed in the letters (p. xii). In the introduction, the editors provide a concise overview of Blanchet’s biography and his career, beginning with his ordination in Lower Canada in 1821.As Brown and Killen observe, Blanchet’s life spanned a dramatic and tumultuous period in the Pacific Northwest, and his correspondence provides a window in the multi-cultural, “cosmopolitan reality of the Washington Territory” during the 1800s (p...