Lac La Biche - History - Religious Communities

Education/Schools/Students | Nuns | Oblates

OBLATES

Fifty Years In the Land of Snow – Part III

Naturally, all of this work required more personnel at the Mission. While the personalities changed over the years, Bishop Faraud was sometimes assisted by a coadjutor, and almost always by two priests and several lay brothers. To this number must be added a variable workforce composed of local men, usually Métis.

While building construction and maintenance of the farm took much of their time, more personnel were also better able to serve the needs of the congregation. Most of that congregation remained lakeside Métis, as the need for freighters and boat crews continually increased. But the Mission also served the outlying people, such as the Cree of Beaver Lake, the Chipewyan of Heart Lake, and the Métis of Egg Lake, through the establishment of outlying missions which were visited on an increasingly regular basis. Beginning in the late 1870s, Father Émile Grouard furthered this work by setting up a small printing press at the Mission, on which he produced prayer books, catechisms and other volumes in the Cree and Chipewyan languages.

These unprecedented Mission activities, which continued through the 1880s, elevated Our Lady of Victory to a place of prominence within the missionary west. Its importance as a transportation entrepôt had unquestionably given it distinct advantages. One account, from 1879, recorded that.

En effet, à Notre-Dame des Victoires, nos Pères peuvent manger du pain presque habituellement; ils peuvent recevoir plus facilement et plus souvent des produits de pays civilisées; tandis que leur Frères du Nord n'ont cette facilité qu'une fois chaque année, et ils ne peuvent recevoir l'objet attendu que trois ans après en avoir fait la demande.

Lac La Biche had, by virtue of its role as an entrepôt, become well integrated into the emerging trade and communications network of the west. Its amenities were typical, not of northern missions, but of the communities that were being founded with astonishing rapidity on the prairies and parklands to the south. Ironically, reliance on these amenities for sustained development would prove the Mission's downfall.

The Decline of the Mission

After two decades of steady growth, Our Lady of Victory declined rapidly. There were two principal causes. One was the rise of steamboat traffic on the North Saskatchewan River in the 1870s. In its efforts to banish free traders from the northern fur fields, the Hudson's Bay Company threw its considerable financial clout behind steamboats as a more efficient means of transporting furs to eastern markets. This move made many active transportation corridors obsolete. The second cause was the Dominion government's imposition of an Indian reserve system which freed more land for farming by centralizing the native population of the region. Eventually this harmed the Mission's educational programs irreparably. Together, these developments were injurious in the extreme to the Mission's prospects.

The effect of the steamboat traffic was felt first. In 1875, the Hudson's Bay Company cut a new 90-mile overland trail from Fort Edmonton, the terminus of steamboat traffic on the North Saskatchewan River, to Athabasca Landing, where scows waited to carry northern goods down the Athabasca River. Initially, this new route had a modest impact on Lac La Biche, but after steamboats were placed on the Athabasca in 1887, little freight moved north via the traditional portages and cart trails.

As it had to in the interests of efficiency and cost, the Mission bowed to the new means of transport: the last two Our Lady of Victory barges headed north in the spring of 1889. In the same year, Bishop Faraud retired to St. Boniface, confident that his work as an organizer of northern transport was completed. What he perhaps did not foresee was the direct and immediate impact that the new shipping system would have on Our Lady of Victory. The employment possibilities of steamboat traffic were so momentous that Lac La Biche Métis relocated to Athabasca Landing in droves. As early as 1890, Father Grandin reported that:

La population catholique de la mission a beaucoup diminuée; il y a un exode de la plupart des families métisses vers 1'Athabasca-Landing, où elles trouvent plus facilement du travail.

With the freight for northern missions bypassing Lac La Biche altogether, the well-rutted cart trails of the region swiftly fell into disuse and became impassable.

The Mission attempted to compensate somewhat for the loss of part of its congregation by using Dominion government funds to establish and Indian Industrial School, which the Grey Nuns administered. This school, which was one result of the Indian and Métis rebellion of 1885, was intended to prepare Native children for industrial trades. The school opened in 1893. Although the facts are unclear, it seems that the school was housed in the old convent, while the nuns, their orphan charges, and their residential students occupied Bishop Faraud's former residence. It was perhaps at this time that Faraud's residence was considerably modified.

Unfortunately, few of the industrial schools could survive without federal funding. When, in about 1896, officials from the government discovered that the old convent was dilapidated, they notified the Sisters that they wished to see the school services relocated to the Saddle Lake Indian Reserve. This decision rankled local people who did not wish to see the nuns depart, and they temporarily withdrew their children from classes as a protest to the Church. Despite this action, the bishop directed that the Sisters relocate.

Not many years after classes recommenced, the residents of the Mission learned that the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway had been incorporated to construct a line from Edmonton to Waterways, near the confluence of the Clearwater and the Athabasca. Surveys were conducted in 1909 and 1910, and by the fall of 1914, track was laid as far as Venice and Hylo. Father LeGoff wrote to Grandin:

Vous n'ignorez pas que le Lac La Biche commence a sortir de sa torpeur - a peu près toutes les terres libres dans les environs du Lac sont prises. Maintenant nous attendons le chemin de fer, qui va un peu révolutionner le pays...

Homesteaders flocked into the district by the hundreds and, by 1915, the Mission had become the site of a post office and a sub-agency of the Dominion Lands office.

LeGoff's trust in the railway as the Mission's salvation quickly proved to be misplaced. By 1914, the railway had created a new town, called Lac La Biche Station, at the Hudson's Bay Company's reserve on the opposite lakeshore. In the same year, Bishop Legal of Edmonton decided that a new Roman Catholic Parish - St. Catherine's - was needed at Lac La Biche Station to serve the incoming settlers and once again "the center of activities was taken from the Mission of Our Lady of Victory." It would remain primarily a mission to the local Métis community and to the outlying Native settlements.

Our Lady of Victory was subjected to a further blow in the summer of 1921, when a tornado inflicted extensive damage upon the site. While it left the convent/boarding school and the old rectory largely untouched, it totally destroyed Brother Bowes' gothic church, two warehouses, one barn, and splintered the roof of another barn. Despite the inadequacy of the Mission's insurance coverage, Father LeGoff decided to rebuild the church at once and, in the process, to construct a new rectory as well.

By virtue of the excellent building skills of Brother Hayes, the Mission erected the new church and rectory at low cost, using locally-sawn pine and as few commercial fittings as necessary. No documentary evidence is available about the initial layout of the church, but presumably it did not differ greatly from the present arrangement of space. More is known about the new two-and-a-half story rectory, which had a parlor, a chapel, an office and two bedrooms on the main floor, six bedrooms on the second, and a library in the attic. The construction work on both buildings took place during the years 1923 and 1925.

By 1925, then, Our Lady of Victory had regained much of its original building concentration. In addition to the convent/boarding school, the old rectory and the new structures, the Mission site proper is known to have possessed three stables, nine sheds and a house belonging to Brother Sylvèstre Bourque, located downhill from the present church. Across the road, to the south of the Mission site proper, was another house belonging to the Langevin family, three stables and two hen-houses.

Increasingly the convent-boarding school was the Mission's reason for continued existence. At one point in 1923, probably near the beginning of the school term, it housed 23 residential students, with five more expected. Yet it was in surprisingly poor condition. According to Father LeGoff,

…son défaut principal, qu'il traînait toujours, était d'avoir passé trop vite de 1'état de résidence épiscopale à 1'état de sa destine présente sans avoir subi les améliorations que nécessitait une école résidentielle: pas de salle recréation convenable, pas d'eau courante, pas d'égouts, pas de chauffage central, seulement quelques poêles d'où danger continuel de feu... au début, on s'était contente de prendre cette vielle résidence à peu près telle qu'elle était parce qu'on espérait que sans trop tarder, elle serait mieux aménagée et rendue plus confortable.

This lamentable state of affairs was, it turns out, the result of a dispute between the Oblate order and the diocese. Although the convent-boarding school was used exclusively for Oblate purposes, it was actually on diocese land. As such, the Oblates were reluctant to invest in maintenance of a property whose use they could lose at any time. The diocese, on the other hand, claimed to lack the funds necessary for renovations. This stalemate persisted until 1939, when the Provincial Father of the Oblates offered to purchase the building from the diocese at a nominal price. While the diocese spurned this offer, it soon undertook the needed changes at its own expense.

Beginning in 1941, the convent-boarding school was fitted with a new foundation, central heating, an exterior porch that gave access to the new furnace, new wood floors, running water, better drainage, a water reservoir, and indoor toilets. The interior was also painted and rearranged. It is thought that the foundation of the rectory was re-done at the same time. Just two or three years later, the Mission also acquired a diesel-powered electrical generator, which was housed in the 1937 bakery annex of the laundry building.

Even at this stage of investigation, it is evident that many other changes to the Mission site occurred in the 1940s and beyond. In the main, these were individual, pragmatic responses to changing conditions at Our Lady of Victory, such as the introduction of motorized vehicles or the deterioration of exterior cladding, and not the result of some grand plan for the Mission.

The changes included the addition of fire escapes to the convent (various dates, c. 1941-), construction of a new gambrel-roof barn (1946), a machine shed (1947), and a vehicle garage/welding shop (1948), relocation of the hip roof rectory to the farm area north of the convent (1950s), installation of central heating in the new rectory (1952), the addition of asphalt siding to the church and rectory (1954), and razing of one of the original convents (unknown date) and the Bourque house (unknown date).

While most changes in this era merely modernized some aspect of the Mission, one in particular represented a pointed effort to reinforce the traditional values of Our Lady of Victory. This was the addition of two-frame school-houses to the site in 1960. Moving these buildings to the Mission reaffirmed, in no uncertain terms, the importance that education continued to hold in the daily life of Our Lady of Victory. Even as late as 1960, the Mission school had 22 residential pupils. Ultimately, only the fire marshal’s condemnation of accommodation offered by the convent-boarding school brought an end to a century of teaching at the Lac La Biche Mission.

Conclusion and Thematic Assessment

This overview of the site's history leaves no doubt about the significance of the Lac La Biche Mission in the development of western Canada. Our Lady of Victory was, from its foundation in 1853, inseparable from several of the most pronounced themes in the development of western Canada. This was particularly so in the 19th century, when the resident missionaries were impelled by faith and compelled by necessity to initiate actions that had a decisive impact on the maturation of the region. It was less true in the 20th century, however, when the Mission tended to be on the periphery of current events, more influenced by them than an influence upon them.

Four predominantly 19th-century themes stand out as deserving of special emphasis in the history of the Mission site. These are, in no particular order:

the impact of religion on the society of the North West in the 19th century;
the development of pre-railway transportation systems for the movement of goods and people;
the evolution of an educational system that addressed both spiritual and secular concerns, and its impact on indigenous peoples of the North West, and;
the introduction of industrial skills such as commercial agriculture, mechanized milling of timber and grain, printing, boat construction, and lime burning into a fundamentally pre-industrial society.