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1754

Mass at Fort Duquesne

No lithograph, drawing, or painting exists of the humble chapel which the French consecrated as the Assumption of the Beautiful Virgin at the Belle Riviere on the sandy banks of the waterway which they referred to as the Beautiful River, but which the indigenous called the Ohio. By 1754, the British had already arrived at the forks of the Mississippi’s greatest tributary, but their attempt to build Fort Prince George was aborted as French soldiers arrived from Quebec to claim the entire Allegheny River Valley. Here was to be the eastern terminus of the massive empire of New France, what Voltaire had dismissively referred to as “A few acres of snow,” but which in reality was the linchpin of Versailles’s colonial policy.

Across Canada and the Great Lakes, France built a mercantile empire built on the fur industry, and whose shock troops were the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries who lived amongst the Natives from the St. Lawrence River to Lake Michigan, and up and down the breadth of the internal continent, while the English still clung to the Atlantic Coast. When the French arrived from the north to easily push the English from their position at the headwaters of the Ohio, they named the new settlement Fort Duquesne in honor of New France’s governor-general. Among their first tasks was the construction of that simple Roman Catholic chapel.

On April 17, 1754, a day after their arrival in this new French city, the first Mass would be celebrated. The officiant was a priest in the Recollect Branch of the First Order of St. Francis named Charles Baron, who upon ordination took the name Father Denys Baron in honor of the Montmartre saint who famously picked his own head up after he was decapitated by the Romans. Baron was described by J. E. Wright and Doris S. Corbett in Pioneer Life as a figure who “became familiar in the coarse brown habit of the … friars, with its cowl and its rope girdle, from which dangled a crucifix.” For two years, until he’d be transferred to Ticonderoga, Fr. Baron would minister to the Catholics of Duquesne, an assortment of not just Frenchwomen and men, but of Irish Catholics, English converts, and baptized Lenape and Iroquois. Fr. Baron’s notes are still preserved at the Supreme Court of Lower Canada for the District of Montreal, and they present a narrative of daily life in Duquesne, of that comingling of the sacred and profane, which mark our existence.

A year after the first Mass, and Fr. Baron would baptize John Daniel Norment; a few months later and he’d bury a trader who “was killed by the Shawnees while coming to join the Catholics of these parts.” Fr. Baron also recorded the welcoming into the Church of “John Baptist Christiguay, Great Chief Iroquois, aged ninety-five years, or thereabout, who being dangerously sick, earnestly desired Holy Baptism.” Fr. Baron’s interests in the joys and tragedies of life was more than just theological, for as Leland Dewitt Baldwin writes in Pittsburgh: The Story of a City, 1750–1865 (with just a hint of conjecture), “it was whispered that he had once been a cavalry officer and had become a priest after the death of the girl whom he was to marry.” Paradise is not man’s to construct on this planet, for death, famine, pestilence, and war shall be things of this world until Judgment Day. As such, Fr. Baron delivered homilies about birth and death, sin and redemption, and as Britain and France slid inextricably toward global conflagration, about war.

Duquesne would be the spark that set aflame the Seven Years’ War. Arguably the first world war, the conflict would see battles on three continents. It would stretch from Monongahela to Mumbai, and a central concern was whether the British or the French would control the interior of the North American continent. According to journalist Maryann Gogniat Eidemiller in an article for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, following a Mass of Fr. Baron, the commanding officer of Fort Duquesne, Daniel Hyacinthe Liénard de Beaujeu, “stripped off his shirt, painted his chest, strapped on a metal shield of armor and marched out with his men and their Indian allies.” He’d be killed in a battle which the French would win (even while they’d lose the war), with Fr. Barron noting that the soldier’s death occurred after “having been at confession and [having] performed his devotions the same day.” Beaujeu would be buried in the cemetery of Fort Duquesne, which was to be erased by the English, his remains somewhere underneath downtown Pittsburgh.

Fr. Baron’s church in the wilderness lacked the sublime gothic beauty of a Notre-Dame or a Chartres, but what did dwell there was faith—faith within the forest, faith among brutality. Appropriate that a Franciscan’s mission should be here, in the wild country of a North America that was so fecund; something transcendental about that sort of chapel, there in the woods, even when the leaves and branches would ultimately drip red with French, Indian, and English blood.