
The original bell of Our Lady of Good Help Church hangs high in the
Cathedral’s south tower.
Unlike the peal of six bells installed in 1994, which are controlled by
a computer,
the Our Lady of Good Help bell can still be rung only by hand.
South Tower, St. James Cathedral
Seattle’s pioneer priest, Father F. X. Prefontaine, is memorialized
in Prefontaine Place, a rather untidy triangle in the Pioneer Square
district, with a fountain that is seldom turned on. All but forgotten
today, Father Prefontaine was famous in Seattle’s early days. He was not
only Seattle’s pioneer priest: he was one of Seattle’s pioneers, who,
alongside the likes of the Yeslers and Dennys, helped to transform the
settlement into a city.
Francis Xavier Prefontaine was born in Longueil, Quebec, in 1838. He
was ordained in 1863 and just three weeks later set out to join Bishop
Blanchet in Vancouver. Though Prefontaine spoke almost no English, he
agreed to preach in English when the Catholics at Fort Stevens begged
for some instruction in their own language. The following Sunday, the
church was packed. Father Prefontaine gave his homily—“perspiring
copiously during its delivery,” he later remarked—only to be told
afterwards that not a word of it was intelligible! Within two years
Prefontaine was fluent not only in English, but also in Chinook jargon,
and proved to be a remarkably effective communicator.
Soon, Bishop Blanchet assigned Prefontaine to Puget Sound. The vast
territory for which he was responsible required much travel in wild
conditions, and Father Prefontaine later loved to recount some of the
dangers he had faced in those early days. On one occasion, he set up
camp only to be flooded by rising water in the middle of the night.
Climbing to higher ground, he settled down and slept. Only on waking did
he find that he had passed the night in an Indian burial ground. On
another occasion, two Native Americans urgently sought his assistance
for what he understood to be a funeral. Only upon his arrival did he
discover that he was to preside not a funeral, but at a wedding, which
was disrupted when shots were fired through the window by a jilted
lover—not an unheard-of occurrence in those days, since women were few
and prospective bridegrooms were many!
In December, 1867, Prefontaine made his first visit to Seattle. It
was an unprepossessing settlement at that time—of the 600 inhabitants,
just ten were Catholic, and only three of those attended the Mass he
offered on Sunday. Bishop Blanchet discouraged Father Prefontaine,
famously dismissing Seattle as “a lost cause,” but the young priest
persevered. He made lifelong friends among the pioneers of Seattle and
used his own money to purchase a plot of land at 3rd and Washington for
a church. To save money, he cleared the ground with his own hands, and
was himself the “superintending architect, carpenter, painter and
decorator,” as an early biography describes it. The Church of Our Lady
of Good Help was completed in the fall of 1870. A year or two later,
Father Prefontaine proudly hung a bronze bell in the church tower, cast
by the Troy Bell Foundry of New York.
Meanwhile, Prefontaine proved triumphantly right about Seattle. It grew
slowly at first, but then exponentially. Between 1880 and 1890, the
population leapt from 3,533 to 42,837—an increase of 1125.5%! Father
Prefontaine was ready for the change. In 1877, he purchased an old soap
factory, which the ever-resourceful Sisters of Providence converted into
a hospital. In 1880, he invited the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus
and Mary to open a school for girls in Seattle, and thus Holy Names
Academy was established. In 1891, he started a school for boys which he
soon handed over to the Jesuits—the beginnings of Seattle University.
Growth had other consequences, too. An economic recession in the
1880s led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, suspending all
immigration from China to the United States. Acts of violence directed
against the Chinese increased. In 1885, 28 Chinese immigrants were
murdered by vigilantes in Wyoming, and the wave of violence swept west:
in November of the same year, a mob drove out Tacoma’s Chinese
residents, and in February, 1886, it happened again in Seattle. The mob
dragged several hundred Chinese residents of Seattle out of their homes,
and dragged them towards the waterfront, insisting that they board the
steamer Queen, bound for San Francisco. When the authorities realized
what was happening, the bells in the city began to ring—including the
bell of Our Lady of Good Help—summoning the Seattle Home Guard and the
Seattle Rifles to restore order. But these small forces were ill
equipped to deal with the mob, which had swelled to nearly 2,000.
Martial law was imposed for ten days, and the stand-off ended with
little loss of life—one of the rioters was killed, and several were
injured. But the Chinese continued to suffer. Those who had not been
forced aboard the Queen were offered passage on another outward-bound
ship. Only a handful remained in Seattle. When the economy rebounded in
1887, the white settlers quickly forgot the descent into violence and
prejudice—but not the Chinese. It would be twenty years before the
Chinese population again reached the numbers of the early 1880s.
Eventually, inevitably, Seattle outgrew Our Lady of Good Help Church.
When Bishop O’Dea was consecrated in 1896, Father Prefontaine wrote
urging him to move his episcopal seat to Seattle. Prefontaine hoped that
the ground he had cleared with his own hands would become the site for a
great city’s great cathedral. But Bishop O’Dea did not think it
advisable to build his cathedral across the street from the “sporting
house” of the notorious local madam Lou Graham. The land was sold, and a
new lot purchased at 9th and Columbia. Thus the pioneer church did play
a role in the building of a new St. James Cathedral—but not quite the
role Father Prefontaine had expected.
Corinna Laughlin, Director of Liturgy
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