Francois Norbert Blanchet was a Canadian-born American Catholic clergyman. He was the first bishop and archbishop of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon.
Background
Francois Blanchet was born on September 3, 1795, in Quebec, Canada, the son of Pierre and Rosalie Blanchet, Canadian landowners, who traced descent from the earliest adventurers of New France. Well connected with the best families, the Blanchets had given a number of sons and daughters to the Church and one of them had founded the Canadien, an influential journal.
Education
Educated at the parish school of St. Pierre, Rivière du Sud, Quebec, and at the Sulpician petit seminary of Quebec, Blanchet in 1816 entered the major seminary where he won distinction in theological studies.
Career
Ordained in 1819, Abbé Blanchet was assigned to the Cathedral for a year. He was then sent as a missionary to the Acadians and Micmac Indians of New Brunswick, where in addition to the native dialect he learned English in order to serve a group of Irish immigrants. For seven years, Blanchet labored zealously in this vast, wild region where he built three churches and made visitations by horse, snowshoes, canoe, and dog-sledges, according to seasonal demands. With regret he left this perilous work and his primitive communicants for the rectorship of a well-established parish at the Cedars near Montreal. During the cholera (1832), the abbé was presented with loving cups by non-Catholics in admiration of his courageous service which knew neither creed nor race. It was here that he came into contact with the fur-traders and learned of the need for priests among the trappers, traders, and Catholic Iroquois in the Oregon region.
The French petition for a priest through Dr. McLoughlin, chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company, was heard by the bishops of the Red River Valley and of Quebec. Blanchet was ready and was thereupon appointed vicar-general to Archbishop Signay of Quebec with jurisdiction over the whole Oregon region though cautioned to establish his missions north of the Columbia River. Accompanying the annual Hudson's Bay Express, he preached at all posts on the route and at the Red River was joined by Abbé Modeste Demers, a newly ordained priest. The French and half-breeds at Vancouver and in the settlement of St. Paul's in Willamette Valley welcomed the missionaries for whose reception they had built a log church. From the first these missionaries were successful, aided as they were by Catholic half-breeds and Iroquois from whom they learned the various native dialects and who popularized their work among the pagan redmen.
Demers with his chapel at Fort Nesqually as a center labored among the northern tribesmen as far as Alaska, and Blanchet served missions at St. Paul's, Astoria, Walla Walla, Vancouver, Cowlitz, and the Cascades. Their work was made easier with the conversion of Judge Peter Burnett, and the American official Secretary Long. All this success aroused bitterness. Methodists circulated the "disclosures of Maria Monk, " which Blanchet answered by citing the American Protestant exposé. Religious, political, racial, and fur-trading rivalries combined to separate the Catholic and Protestant missionaries. Blanchet had little interest in Oregon politics, but he did not discourage the projected if extra-legal settlers' government. Later charges that Catholics inspired the Indian uprising which resulted in the murder of Marcus Whitman's party have been disproven. The Indians were actually aroused by the loss of hunting lands, stories of rival traders, absurd belief that Methodist settlers had poisoned the game and brought smallpox, by the murder of a chief by an American, and the whipping of Indians for thefts from the Methodist mission.
The younger Blanchet and Abbé Brouillet visited the Indians assembled in Walla Walla to aid the factor in quieting them and in obtaining the release of prisoners (1847). They also consoled the survivors, and risked death by burying the dead. Blanchet, however, did not hesitate to attend the five Indians who were executed for supposed complicity in the Whitman murder after a dubious trial (1849). In the meantime Blanchet, who in 1843 had been made vicar apostolic and titular bishop at the joint suggestion of the archbishops of Quebec and Baltimore, learned on the way to Paris of his elevation to the archbishopric of the newly established see of Oregon City (1846) with his brother Augustine as bishop of Walla Walla and his faithful friend Demers as bishop of Vancouver, a recognized part of Canada.
Blanchet visited Rome, France, and the German states in the interest of his archdiocese and obtained the services of several priests and Notre Dame nuns. While abroad, he was received in audiences by the courts of Belgium, Bavaria, Austria, and France and was presented with a purse by Louis Philippe and the Leopoldine Society. On his return he consecrated Bishop Demers and held a provincial council. At his invitation, the Oblate Fathers soon sent a mission band (1848). The diocese faced bad years with the seizure of McLoughlin's estate in Oregon City, the withdrawal of communicants for the California mines, and Cayuse and Rogue Rivers Indian Wars of which the Whitman massacre was a prelude; yet the bishop was of good heart at the First Plenary Council of Baltimore. In 1855 he visited Peru, Bolivia, and Chile where he collected enough money to meet the diocesan debts, because of the enthusiasm aroused by his Spanish publication of the story of Oregon. Four years later he was in Canada seeking aid and enlisting thirty-one priests and nuns, including the Sisters of Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, for service in Oregon. By 1862 when the bishop moved his see to Portland, conditions had become normal as the Civil War had little effect on the Coast.
Bishop Blanchet representing the Catholic hierarchy protested against the unfairness of Secretary Delano of the Interior in applying Grant's Indian policy of assigning the Indian agencies to "such religious denominations as had hitherto established missions among the Indians. " Of thirty-eight reservations only four were assigned to Catholics, although on the basis of Indian desires and the number of active stations fully two-thirds might have been allotted with justice. The Yahima tribesmen seem to have been assigned to Methodists who showed marked hostility to Catholic priests, though Methodist missions were inactive and regarded as unsuccessful by Indians and candid observers. At any rate, Blanchet's heated correspondence with Delano aroused the Catholic hierarchy to establish a permanent Catholic Indian Commission at Washington to deal with the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and assume general supervision over Catholic missions.
Soon after celebrating his golden jubilee, Blanchet journeyed over the new transcontinental railroad from San Francisco and accompanied Bishop John Ireland to the Ecumenical Council in Rome (1870) where he was appointed an orator and warmly supported the formal declaration of infallibility. Worn by age, he obtained the Alaskan missionary Charles Seghers as coadjutor bishop (1879). Two years later he resigned and as titular archbishop of Amida retired to the hospital which he had founded. Here he lived two years, rounding out sixty-four years as a priest and forty-five as a missionary apostle on the Pacific Coast.