by a general discharge of gtins in honor of the infant Saviour, and three hundred voices rose spontaneously from the midst of the forest and intoned in the language of the Pend d'Oreilles, the beautiful canticle, 'Du Dieu puissant tout announce la gloire.' A grand banquqt, according to the Indian custom, follow^ed the first Mass. The union, the contentment, the joy, and the charity which pervaded the whole assembly might well be compared to the agape of the primitive Christians." On the same Christmas morning, the entire tribes of Flatheads and Coeur d'Alenes received Holy Communion in a body at their respective missions. "The Christmas of 1844, was therefore," concludes Father DeSmet, "a great and glorious day in the Rocky Mountains."
The paschal time, 1845, Father DeSmet spent among the Flatheads at St. Mary's mission in the Bitter Root. As the snow began to disappear with the coming of spring, he set out for Vancouver, and the mission of St. Francis Xavier, on the Willamette. He went by canoe down the impetuous Clark's River, to Father Hoeken's mission of St. Ignatius, among the Kalispels. After selecting a site for a new establishment of St. Ignatius, "in the neighborhood of the cavern of New Manresa and its quarries, and a fall of water more than two hundred feet, presenting every advantage for the erection of mills," he hastened to Walla Walla, where he embarked in a small boat and descended the Columbia as far as Fort Vancouver.
At Vancouver he found Father Nobili, who ministered during the absence of Father Demers to the Catholic employees of the Fort and to the neighboring Indians. Of his visit to the Willamette settlement, DeSmet writes: "Father Nobili accompanied me in a Chinook canoe up the beautiful river of Multnomah, or Willamette, a distance of about sixty miles, as far as the village of Champoeg, three miles from our residence of St. Francis Xavier. On our arrival, all the Fathers came to meet us, and great was our delight on being again reunited after a long winter season. The Italian Fathers
