UGANDA MARTYRS PARISH: ONE HUNDRED YEARS IN OKLAHOMA

By Henry L. Harder

Oklahoma railroads date back to 1871 (36 years before Oklahoma officially became a state) when the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, long known in late years as The Katy, entered Indian Territory (as it was then known) heading south to connect to New Orleans. The railroads became a factor not just in commerce, such as getting cattle to market but also by migrants hoping to settle when land within the territories became available. Following the Land Run of 1889 and passage of the Organic Act in 1890, migration of European Americans to Oklahoma Territory increased dramatically, raising the territory's status on the national scene.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823019644

Henry L. Harder

The author, a great-grandson of August and Louise Harder, has had unfettered access to Augusts handwritten family history. Through exhaustive search of the public documents, interviews with Augusts daughter and with several grandchildren, and the cooperation of many family members who provided information and images, the author has compiled a comprehensive account of the Harder family from its time in Wismar, Germany to its roots in Arkansas to its present dispersion throughout the USA.

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UGANDA MARTYRS PARISH: ONE HUNDRED YEARS IN OKLAHOMA

Henry L. Harder

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© 2024 Henry L. Harder. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse  12/22/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1962-0 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1963-7 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1964-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023924439

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CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Christianity Comes to Oklahoma

Chapter 2 Catholicism Comes to Okmulgee

Chapter 3 African Saints come to Okmulgee

Chapter 4 The Spiritans come to Uganda Martyrs

Chapter 5 The Depression, the War, and the Recovery

Chapter 6 Retrenchment, Redemptorists, Renewal

Preface and Acknowledgements

Though I could depend on knowledge gained eleven years ago when I wrote of another Oklahoma parish’s centennial, Saint William’s in Durant, the Okmulgee parish presented new opportunities. Only two generations from slavery and still maintaining French ethos, a group basically from a single area (Saint Landry Parish) of Louisiana sought their American dream in the Indian Territory newly opened for settlement. One hundred years after they succeeded in getting their own parish, the past echoes still ring.

Describing language used over a long time with cultural differences, I did not attempt to make my text mirror one of the preferences in current use; I used the language that the documents of the time had. The result is that at times it will look like I can’t make up my mind which century I am in or that I have a predeliction for a particular social use of language. I realized that my linguistic choices might need an explanation, so I have given one.

One always is in need of support and assistance in accomplishing worthwhile tasks. Father Kenneth Harder, pastor of Uganda Martyrs, was ever helpful in important ways and in small ways as well. Others whose help made my work pleasant include Theresa Thomasson, Joey Spencer, Mildred Dalcour, Catherine Williams, Paula Moen, Angela Williams, Clarence LeBlanc, Patricia Wilson, Carolyn Calip, Louise Porter, and deeply to the published and unpublished work of Larry Biddle. To all of these I express my sincere thanks. Further, I acknowledge that without the constant support, help, encouragement, and love of Ramona Harder all these years I would have not had the courage to begin this project.

"Who could have predicted to the famous African confessors and martyrs such as Cyprian, Felicity, Perpetua and—the greatest of all—Augustine, that we would one day add names so dear to us as Charles Lwanga and Mathias Mulumba Kalemba and their twenty companions? Nor must we forget those members of the Anglican Church who also died for the name of Christ.

These African martyrs herald the dawn of a new age. If only the mind of man might be directed not toward persecutions and religious conflicts but toward a rebirth of Christianity and civilization.

Africa has been washed by the blood of these latest martyrs, the first of this new age (and, God willing, let them be the last, although such a holocaust is precious indeed). Africa is reborn free and independent."

The Liturgy of the Hours

Office of Readings

from the Second Reading

from his homily at the canonization of the martyrs of Uganda by Pope Paul VI, October 18, 1964

The Parish at Mass in prayer

Chapter One

Christianity Comes to Oklahoma

Whoever placed the famous Heavener Runestone notwithstanding, the first contact with Christianity in the area which would become Oklahoma was when two Spanish explorers made more-or-less simultaneous expeditions, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado coming from Mexico and Hernando de Soto coming from Cuba in 1539-42. Though the primary aim of both was a search for precious minerals- gold, both carried priests with them whose duty was to say Mass, hear the confessions of the soldiers, and preach the Gospel to the natives. When Coronado was in Kansas, de Soto was only a few hundred miles away in Arkansas.

Hernando de Soto was born October 27, c. 1500 at Jerez de los Caballeros, Badajoz, Extremadura, Castile, Spain. On April 7, 1538, de Soto and 700 men set sail from Seville, Spain to La Habana Cuba; while there, they were delayed by helping the city of Havana recover after the French sacked and burned it. They departed from there on May 18, 1539 for Florida and arrived a week later. De Soto landed nine ships with over 650 men and 220 horses and a large herd of pigs on the west coast of Florida at the Amerindian chiefdom of Ocita, probably in the Tampa Bay area. He named the land as Espíritu Santo after the Holy Spirit.

Historian Robert S. Weddle has suggested that de Soto landed at either Charlotte Harbor or San Carlos Bay. The expedition included knights, foot soldiers, artisans, priests, boatwrights, scribes, craftsmen, engineers, farmers, and merchants; some from Cuba, most from Europe and Africa. Few of the men had traveled before outside of Spain, or even away from their home villages.

On May 8,1541, de Soto’s troops reached the Mississippi River. De Soto and his army continued their travels and arrived in early November at Autiamque located on the south side of the Arkansas River between Little Rock and Pine Bluff. Here they spent another bitterly cold winter, during which they were completely snowbound for a month. By now 250 of his men were dead, and 150 horses had died. Their interpreter Juan Ortiz also died that winter. The westmost area that de Soto reached was the Fort Smith area, where they looked for gold. This would have put them at the border of Oklahoma. I remember as a youth being shown a gravesite in a Van Buren cemetery where one of de Soto’s men was buried according to local legends.

There were twelve priests with de Soto, of whom at least four were still living when de Soto died. We surmise, however, that they did not say Mass in Oklahoma, because by the time they reached Fort Smith, they had run out of wheat, which they had to grind for flour to make bread for the Eucharist.¹

Eventually, the Spaniards returned to the Mississippi River. De Soto died of a fever on May 21, 1542, in the native village of Guachoya (historical sources disagree as to whether de Soto died near present-day McArthur, Arkansas or Ferriday, Louisiana) on the western bank of the Mississippi. De Soto had encouraged the local natives to believe that he was a deity, specifically an immortal Son of the Sun as a ploy to gain their submission without conflict. Some of the natives had already become skeptical of de Soto’s deity claims, so his men were anxious to conceal his death. The actual site of his burial is not known. According to one source, de Soto’s men hid his corpse in blankets weighted with sand and sank it in the middle of the Mississippi River during the night.

During the three years of this expedition, the Spaniards traveled over 5,000 miles, not in a straight line, of course. Of the recorded 700 participants at the start, between 300 and 350 survived (311 is a commonly accepted figure). Most of the men stayed in the New World, settling in Mexico, Peru, Cuba, and other Spanish colonies.

A proposed route for the De Soto Expedition, based on Charles M. Hudson map of 1997.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (c. 1510-1554) born into a noble family in Salamanca, Spain; Coronado was a younger son, and as such did not stand to inherit the family title or estate. He decided to seek his fortune in the New World. In 1535, he traveled to New Spain (as Mexico was then known) with Antonio de Mendoza, the Spanish viceroy, whom his family had ties with from his father’s service as royal administrator in Granada. Vázquez de Coronado became the Governor of Nueva Galicia, a province of New Spain located northwest of Mexico City and comprising the contemporary Mexican states of Jalisco, Sinaloa, and Nayarit.

In 1539, he dispatched Friar Marcos de Niza and Estevanico on an expedition north from Compostela, the capital of Nueva Galicia, toward present-day New Mexico. When de Niza returned in 1540, he told of a city of vast wealth, a golden city called Cíbola. Though he did not claim to have entered the city of Cíbola, he mentioned that it stood on a high hill and that it appeared wealthy and as large as Mexico City.

A larger expedition composed of about 400 European men-at-arms (mostly Spaniards), 1,300 to 2,000 Mexican Indian allies, many horses, pigs, ships, and cattle, four Franciscan friars and several slaves, both natives and Africans. Coronado led an advance group of cavalrymen to the first city of Cíbola, which, in reality, was the Zuni Pueblo town of Hawikuh, located in what would become New Mexico. When the Indians resisted Spanish efforts to subdue the town, the better-armed Spaniards forced their way in and caused the Zunis to flee; Coronado was hit by a stone and wounded during the battle.

Vázquez de Coronado and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza invested large sums of their own money in the venture. Mendoza appointed Vázquez de Coronado the commander of the expedition, with the mission to find the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. This is the reason he pawned his wife’s estates and was lent 70,000 pesos. Mendoza sent Melchior Díaz, commander of the Spanish outpost at San Miguel de Ciliacán, to investigate Friar de Niza’s findings; he reported that initial investigations into Friar de Niza’s report disproved the existence of the bountiful land he had described. Díaz’s report was delivered to Viceroy Mendoza on March 20, 1540, after Coronado’s departure.

One component of the expedition carried the bulk of the expedition’s supplies, traveling via the Guadalupe River and Gulf of California under the leadership of Hernando de Alarcón. This group discovered the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. The other component traveled by land, along the trail on which Friar Marcos de Niza had followed.

Coronado’s reunited expedition spent the winter of 1540-41 on the Rio Grande at Kuana (near modern-day Santa Fe). They fought off several Indian attacks, and in the spring of 1541 moved into Palo Duro Canyon, in modern-day Texas. Coronado himself then led a smaller group north in search of another rumored store of riches at Quivira (now Kansas), only to be disappointed again when all they found was another Indian village. The evidence is not conclusive to tell us whether Coronado’s trip to Kansas went through Oklahoma or Texas, but his return was surely across the Oklahoma panhandle.

Coronado returned to Mexico in 1542 and resumed his post in Nueva Galicia, but his wealth had been greatly depleted and his position was far more tenuous than before. Mendoza publicly dismissed the expedition as a failure, and two separate investigations were opened into Coronado’s conduct as its leader. He was largely cleared of all charges but was removed from his governorship in 1544 and spent the last decade of his life as a member of the city council of Mexico City.

The Coronado Expedition (1540–1542) from Mexico north through the future U.S. of

Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

When Coronado and his men returned to Mexico, one priest and two lay brothers chose to remain behind. Fray Juan Padilla and his companions had found that the Wichita Indians, just east of Great Bend, Kansas were receptive to his preaching of the Gospel through an interpreter. However, when he wanted to preach to a neighboring tribe, the Wichita thought he was going to share his magic with their enemies; so they killed him. His death in November 1542 is regarded as the first Christian martyrdom on the American mainland.²

Both Coronado and de Soto were not successful in achieving their search for wealth, and they did not leave a marked increase of Christianity either. Neither