Bishop Paul Sirba of the Duluth Catholic Diocese and Father Seamus Walsh of St. John’s Catholic Church in Grand Marais stand before Father Baraga’s Cross at a rededication ceremony August 5, 2012. The cross was erected 80 years ago and was recently moved several yards so it would stand on Catholic Church property adjacent to the Schroeder Township park. A wooden cross was placed on the site in 1846 as a symbol of thankfulness after Father Baraga and an Indian guide barely made it through a storm on Lake Superior as they paddled from the Apostle Islands to the North Shore.
How many travelers passing through Schroeder have seen a sign marking the turnoff to Father Baraga’s Cross and wondered who Father Baraga was and why a cross on the shoreline of Lake Superior bears his name? A group of about 70 people gathered by the sparkling waters where Cross River meets Lake Superior on Sunday, August 5, 2012 to remember Father Baraga and rededicate the site 80 years after the granite cross was erected.
For months, Jim Norvell of Schroeder has been generating excitement for the rededication ceremony and recruiting volunteers to help make improvements along the trail leading it. “It’s good for Schroeder,” he said at the Schroeder Township annual meeting in March. Other memorials to Father Baraga sit on Madeline Island and on the Michigan side of Lake Superior, he said.
“It’s one of the most asked questions at the [Cross River] Heritage Center,” said Linda Lamb. “A lot of people go down there.” She and her husband Skip own the property around the cross. In fact, the cross sat on their property for many years.
The Duluth Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church owns a thin strip of land leading from the parking lot of the Schroeder Township park to the cross. Last year, the cross was moved several yards east onto church property. At the same time, the trail was refurbished and erosion control measures were installed with the help of Greg Gastecki and Edwin E. Thoreson Inc. This summer, volunteers landscaped the trail leading to the cross. The end of the trail faces west, with the Cross River on the right, Lake Superior on the left, and a sweeping view of the shoreline straight ahead.
Man with a mission
Father Frederic Baraga was born June 29, 1797 in what is now Slovenia. He was orphaned at age 14. He devoted much of his young life to education, earning a degree in law from the University of Vienna and becoming fluent in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and German.
After law school, Father Baraga gave up his inheritance and entered the seminary. He was ordained in 1823 at age 26. Hearing of a great need for priests in the Great Lakes region and sensing a call to work with Native Americans, he requested a move to the United States. He was 33 when he arrived in America, and he got right to work learning the Ojibwe language from a Native American attending seminary in Cincinnati. His first assignment was in what is now Harbor Springs, Michigan, on the northeast shore of Lake Michigan.
Father Baraga would eventually write many books, including an Ojibwe-English dictionary, an Ojibwe grammar book, a 200-page book of sermons in Ojibwe, and an Ojibwe language prayer book. He also kept a diary.
In a preface to his Theoretical and Practical Grammar of the Otchipwe Language, he wrote about the difficulties of being the first outsider to attempt to write down the language of a foreign group of people: “This is, I think, the first and only Otchipwe Grammar that ever was published in the United States. It was rather a hard work to compose it…. No wonder, then, if all be not correct in this first essay. Those who shall find errors or omissions in this Grammar will oblige me very much by sending me their corrections and remarks, which will be thankfully received and duly considered.”
Baraga agreed with a historian by the name of Henry R. Schoolcraft, whom he quoted as saying “that the true history of the Indian tribes and their international relations must rest, as a basis, upon the light obtained from their languages.”
Father Baraga’s work eventually took him to the people living around Lake Superior. According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, within eight years of arriving at La Pointe, Wisconsin, his congregation grew to 700 Ojibwe, Métis, and French-Canadians on Madeline Island. He traveled hundreds of miles to reach people, by foot and canoe in the summer and by snowshoe in the winter. In February of 1845 he traveled 600 miles in five weeks.
According to a summary of Bernard Lambert’s Shepherd of the Wilderness: A Biography of Bishop Frederic Baraga (1967) by the Reverend Glenn Phillips, Father Baraga developed warm friendships with many Indian groups. He spoke out against injustices against the Indian people that were being perpetrated by the government and the fur trading industry. An Indian agent sought his removal after he tried to protect the rights of the Indians in negotiations with the government, and fur traders threatened his life after he confronted them on unscrupulous practices against the Native people.
Father Baraga took trips back to Europe to raise funds to help the Indian people who were struggling to find new ways to survive after the end of the fur trade era and the loss of their lands. He recruited others to help serve the people and defend their rights.
The historic crossing
Upon hearing of a possible epidemic in Grand Portage in 1846, Father Baraga and a Native guide attempted a 40-mile shortcut across Lake Superior from the Apostle Islands to the North Shore, shortening a trip that would have take a month by foot. A violent storm erupted as they paddled across the lake. After much prayer, they arrived at the mouth of the Cross River, where they put up a small cross in thanksgiving for their safe passage.
Another trip across the lake in early spring left Baraga and a companion adrift on an ice flow being blown out to sea. According to Phillips, he said, “We will be safe.” Suddenly the wind shifted and drove them to shore. “See, we have traveled a great distance and have worked very little,” he said.
Remembering his work
“The good Lord has blessed us with a much nicer day than the one on which Father Baraga landed,” said Bishop Paul Sirba of the Duluth Diocese under warm sunshine at the ceremony on August 5. With a parish of 80,000 square miles, Bishop Sirba said, Father Baraga would travel 100 miles just to baptize someone.
According to Yul Yost, who helped bring attention to the site’s need for refurbishment, St. Elizabeth’s Church in Duluth has one of numerous stained glass windows commemorating Baraga’s life and ministry. Yost wants more people to know the story of Father Baraga. “The Father Baraga Cross is a magnificent structure on a most picturesque spot,” he wrote. “It is a historic landmark in Gitche Gumee. We can make it a destination and not merely a roadside curiosity.”
The legacy continues
Father Baraga was eventually consecrated a bishop and spent the end of his life ministering out of Marquette, Michigan. He died on January 19, 1868 at the age of 70. According to one source, the day of his funeral was declared a day of mourning in the city of Marquette, and despite blizzard conditions, St. Peter Cathedral (where he is buried) was filled to capacity. The Bishop Baraga Association & Archives was established in 1930. He is now in the process of being considered for sainthood.
In the introduction to his biography of Father Baraga, Bernard Lambert called him “a truly remarkable, exceptional man. …He cast aside his wealth and life in upper European society to make the Indians his greatest concern. He acted with courage and skill to stand up and fight that they receive justice and mercy….”
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