Pictorial Index - Textual Index

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After reaching Taos at last, Pike accompanied another expedition to Santa Fe, but left that "city of mud" in 1832 for a trapping venture on the Llano Estacado of West Texas.

He found the beaver population negligible, however, and traversed the Caprock, crossed Oklahoma, and finally arrived at Fort Smith, Arkansas, having travelled 1,300 miles, 650 on foot, and experienced many hardships and exciting adventures.


Supplemental Information

Roman Catholic Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, baptised as Catherine Tekakwitha and wasinformally known as Lily of the Mohawks (1656 – April 17, 1680), was an Algonquin–Mohawk virgin and religious laywoman.

Born in present-day New York, she survived smallpox and was orphaned as a child, then baptized as a Roman Catholic and settled for the last years of her life at the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, south of Montreal in New France, now Canada.

Tekakwitha professed a vow of virginity until her death at the age of 24. Known for her virtue of chastity and corporal mortification of the flesh, as well as being shunned by her tribe for her religious conversion to Catholicism, she is the fourth Native American to be venerated in the Roman Catholic Church (after Juan Diego, the Mexican Indian of the Virgin of Guadalupe apparitions, and two other Oaxacan Indians).

She was beatified by Blessed Pope John Paul II in 1980 and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI at Saint Peter's Basilica on October 21, 2012. Various miracles and supernatural events are attributed to her intercession.