By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Editor’s note: This is part one of a three-part series about how the Holy Cross Sisters were the face of the Notre Dame community in the Wild, Wild, West.)
The Holy Cross Sisters brought wonderful things to my home state when they arrived 150 years ago in 1875. One of them was Notre Dame.
The Sisters came to Utah while the most fabled moments of the old American West unfolded around them.
A few years earlier, Irish and Asian workers completed the transcontinental railroad 60 miles northwest of Ogden, my hometown. Jesse James was just starting to rob trains, Wyatt Earp was a new deputy Marshall in Dodge City, and a doctor had just penned lyrics for a folk song called “Home on the Range.”
Just a few years later, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse would ambush General George Custer at the Little Big Horn, a fellow gambler would shoot “Wild Bill” Hickok during a poker game in South Dakota, and a Utah teenager named Robert LeRoy Parker would adopt the nickname “Butch Cassidy.”
And although statehood would not arrive for two more decades, Brigham Young—the Latter-day Saint Lion of the Lord—was busy making the desert bloom in what then was known as the Utah Territory.
Traveling by train and stagecoach from their convent in Notre Dame, Indiana, Sister Augusta (Amanda) Anderson and Sister Raymond (Mary) Sullivan arrived in Salt Lake City on June 6, 1875. More sisters would follow.
Utah Irish priest Father Lawrence Scanlan (who soon would be the first local bishop) invited them. Scanlan hoped the hardworking members of the religious order founded in France—but now brimming with Irish women—would help meet the needs of the small but growing Catholic community.
With their trademark energy and industriousness, in just months the Holy Cross Sisters started both a school and a hospital in Salt Lake. Over the next century and a half, they would also create a dozen other Utah schools, found two other hospitals, start an orphanage, form a school of nursing, build a college, and start numerous other social service ministries.
And their guidance, friendship, and love proved invaluable to at least three members of the fledgling Notre Dame family living far from the shimmer of the Golden Dome. This post tells the first of those three stories.
Sister Augusta and Florian DeVoto
Sister Augusta (later called “Mother” when she led the entire order starting in 1882) was perfectly cast as the first Holy Cross sister to make the pioneer trek out west.
Born in 1830 in Virginia, she moved to Ohio with her family via prairie schooner at age 4. She grew up on her uncle’s farm, riding horses and making friends with the Native Americans living nearby.
She joined the Holy Cross Sisters in 1854 and started teaching. The Civil War, however, transformed Augusta and many of her religious colleagues into nurses in 1861 when Indiana’s governor asked them to help care for wounded soldiers.
The Sisters did so well in this unexpected calling that President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War asked them to take on additional assignments. Augusta later wrote in her journal, “We were not trained as nurses, but our hearts made our hands willing, with God’s help we did much to alleviate the dreadful suffering.”
Augusta managed two Union army hospitals during the Civil War so capably that General Ulysses S. Grant reportedly remarked, “What a wonderful woman she is! She can control the men better than I can.”
One of her first assignments was at the Mound City military installation near Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. After an 1842 visit to the same site, the English writer Charles Dickens had called it a “detestable morass.”
Augusta’s journals describe even more appalling conditions two decades later when she and her team arrived there: “Although we were tired and sick for want of sleep, there was no rest for us. We pinned up our habits, got brooms and buckets of water, and washed the blood-stained walls and scrubbed the floors. Dr. Burke sent some men to carry away the legs, arms, and other pieces of human bodies that were lying around. We had no beds that night, but we slept as soundly as if we had feathers under us. The hospital was full of sick and wounded, but after some days we succeeded in getting it comparatively clean.”
By the end of the Civil War, about 80 Holy Cross sisters had served as battlefield nurses and, in the process, redefined the profession with a strict focus on proper staffing, sterile conditions, and using the right equipment and supplies.
Notre Dame President Father William Corby—himself the chaplain of the Irish Brigade that famously fought at the Battle of Gettysburg—once described the full measure of their devotion: “The labors and self sacrifices of the Sisters during the war need no praise here. Their praise is on the lips of every surviving soldier who experienced their kind and careful administrations.”
By the time General Grant made peace with Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, children of the war also were quite grateful for the care and devotion of the Holy Cross Sisters. This includes a future resident of Ogden, Utah named Florian DeVoto and his older sister Rose.
According to DeVoto family lore, the two children descended from an Italian cavalry officer and his wife, the daughter of a Roman aristocrat. Reminiscent of the Capulet/Montague feud from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the young couple’s families were unhappy with the marriage. The newlyweds fled to the United States.
The Italian cavalry officer started what turned into a prosperous business along the Mississippi River, but which later was disrupted by the Civil War. When the couple suddenly died, they left behind their young children Rose and Florian. Mother Augusta took them in.
The 1870 census indicates the young folks lived with the Holy Cross Sisters in Cairo before Mother Augusta brought them to her convent at Notre Dame. Once there, Rose attended Saint Mary’s school and college while Florian earned several degrees from nearby Notre Dame, his first in 1876.
Mother Augusta and Notre Dame’s founder—Holy Cross priest Father Edward Sorin—served as their joint legal guardians. “[W]e knew no other home [besides Notre Dame],” Rose told the Omaha World-Herald in 1927, “Every blade of grass and every stone on the place is dear to me…”
Eventually, both DeVoto children followed their foster mother Augusta to Utah. Rose taught music at Saint Mary’s Academy, the Salt Lake school Augusta started. When Father Scanlan offered a high requiem mass after the death of Pope Pius IX in 1878, Rose led the choir while Florian sang basso.
Rose married a doctor named Victor Coffman and moved to Omaha in 1879. Augusta stayed close to the family, and visited when in the area. One time Augusta and Victor shared Civil War stories and learned they had treated wounded on the same battlefield together without ever meeting.
According to my less-than-scientific survey, Florian DeVoto (1856-1935) is the first local-resident-and-Notre-Dame-alum mentioned in a Utah newspaper. News archives indicate that he was appointed as the first teacher at the first Catholic school in Ogden.
Florian served in that role from 1877 to 1878, eventually turning the school (a version of which I attended many years later) over to the Holy Cross Sisters. He later worked in the Weber County Recorder’s office and as a title abstractor. His clients included large railroad companies.
In 1895, DeVoto married Rhoda Dye, the Latter-day daughter of a Mormon pioneer and hardworking local farmer. Two years later they had a son whom they named Bernard Augustine DeVoto.
Bernard admired and eulogized his Mormon grandfather in a 1933 essay: “The earth was poisoned, and [he] made it sweet. It was a dead land, and he gave it life. Permanently. Forever. Following the God of the Mormons, he came from Hertford [England] to the Great American Desert and made it fertile. That is achievement.”
Wallace Stegner’s 1974 book—The Uneasy Chair: a Biography of Bernard DeVoto—describes Rhoda as “intelligent beyond her training.” He says she gave Florian “the kind of steady affection that let him live with his own cynicism and misanthropy” and “gave her brilliant, ambivalent, anxiously cocky son an adoration that could hardly have been greater.”
In contrast, Stegner calls Florian a “vagrant Catholic intellectual” who was “small” in stature and “contentious” in nature. He was a “bitter anti-Mormon” who once possessed “inherited money” but had lost it “in land and mining speculations.” Yet, Florian must have done something right too.
His neighbors nominated him for elected office in 1902. One old newspaper describes him as a “nationally prominent Utah man of letters.” Florian poured his Notre Dame education into his son, and at least indirectly helped launch Bernard into a remarkable literary career capped off with the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for history.
Stegner says Bernard was not born into either of his parents’ faiths but rather “into the area of conflict between them; and since any conflict between a good Mormon and a faithful Catholic may be expected to end in a draw, it was predictable that [Bernard] would adhere to neither.”
As a result, Bernard rejected his father’s overtures to attend Notre Dame. Instead, he studied for a year at the more secular University of Utah in Salt Lake City, served in the military during World War I, and graduated in 1920 from Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Like his father, however, Bernard eventually had his own profound interactions with Holy Cross and Notre Dame, in the form of a kindred Utah spirit and fellow writer named Sister Madeleva Wolff. Watch for that story in my next post.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
