The Priest With a Bad Temper

Maumee Valley’s First Priest Couldn’t Get along with Anybody by Alan Borer

Imagine the scene. General Anthony Wayne, the scourge of the Native Americans of the Old Northwest. During the delicate negotiations following the American victory in the Battle of Fallen Timbers and which brought about the Treaty of Greenville, Wayne made a speech to a group of Indians. After lambasting a pro-British chief, he stated:

“I hate very much that priest who is at the River Raisins [Monroe, Michigan]. I will go and take him…as I pass by and hang them [the priest and the chief] on two trees.”

Wayne, who was called “Mad” by contemporaries, may have just taken a dislike to the priest. But he had his reasons. Why was the hero of Fallen Timbers taking a verbal shot at a Catholic priest?

The object of his dislike was one Father Edmund Burke (1753-1820), the first English-speaking missionary to work in what is now northwest Ohio. Edmund Burke was born in Ireland. He emigrated to Canada in 1787, where he worked as a parish priest and a teacher at the Quebec Seminary. In August of 1794, the Governor of Canada asked the Bishop of Quebec for a priest who could work with Indians and settlers in Michigan. Father Burke was given the job.

In October of 1794, Burke arrived at the River Raisin. He immediately incurred the dislike of the men who were involved in the Indian trade, who were pro-American and had requested a priest of American leanings, Thomas LeDru, who Burke described as a “vagabond.”

Father Burke apparently did not understand that after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the future of Michigan lay in American hands. In a tirade, he described the traders as

“the most profligate and contemptible characters on earth, wretches destitute of every principle of common honesty or even humanity, equal to any crime, fearing nothing but a halter…”

At other times, Father Burke called his opponents “peasants,” “a horde of banditti,” and other choice phrases.

Father Burke’s main problem was his own loyalty to the British crown in an area rapidly changing sides to the Americans. In January of 1795, a letter that he had written to some Catholic Wyandots fell into the hands of General Wayne. Wayne also had a colorful vocabulary:

“This caitiff renegade Irish Priest…was sent from Quebec, late last fall…to try the effect, or Trick of priest craft, in poisoning the minds of the Indians…to dissuade them from treating with the United States…”

Father Burke wandered throughout the Great Lakes country, always looking for converts to his faith and his British loyalty. In 1795 or 96 he spent some time in a cabin near Fort Miamis in the Maumee Valley in what is now downtown Maumee, just upriver from Toledo. There he carried on the work of a priest, distributing food and parlaying with Ottawa, Chippewa, and Pottawatomie tribesmen. He appreciated Ohio’s fine climate, but called the valley “the last and most distant parish inhabited by Catholics on this earth,” a place where “You never meet a man, either Indian or Canadian, without his gun in his hand and his knife at his breast.” Burke thought about extending his travels to Michilimackinac, but never made it that far. Meanwhile, his fellow priests were taking a dislike to him. One wrote:

“He is causing trouble everywhere…He follows no ecclesiastical rule or regulation, hardly ever wearing his habit. There are many other things that I don’t want to mention that lead to much public slander.  Nearly all the people I meet speak ill of him…

Father Burke’s temper continued to get him in trouble. He argued about church pews with a priest in Detroit. The French Canadians mistrusted him, and his British superiors were wary of him. In 1796, when Michigan finally became American territory, he left for Windsor. In 1818 he became bishop of Halifax, Nova Scotia. True to form, he got into a controversy with the Protestant clergy of Halifax.

American Bishop John Carroll summarized Father Burke’s problem. Carroll wrote of Burke’s troubles with Anthony Wayne:

“The general and all his officers detest Father Burke for the alarm that he caused among the Indians…It’s a good thing he has gone away…”

It is interesting to speculate on what an even-tempered priest might have accomplished. But Father Burke’s bad temper and antagonistic ways make him worthy of remembering, if only as a cautionary tale.

[Notes: Edmund Burke’s life is recounted most completely in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. IV (Toronto, 1979). His activity in the Maumee Valley is discussed in George Houck, A History of Catholicity in Northern Ohio (Cleveland, 1903).
Other sources used are Thomas Hanley, ed., The John Carroll Papers (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1976), Richard C. Knopf, ed., Campaign Into the Wilderness: The Wayne-Knox-Pickering-McHenry Correspondence (Columbus, 1955), and Ernest J. Lajeunesse, ed., The Windsor Border Region: Canada’s Southernmost Frontier (Toronto, 1960).]

http://www.umanitoba.ca/colleges/st_pauls/ccha/Back%20Issues/CCHA1940-41/Dooner.html