Five Years in America

In the course of a sojourn in North America between 1857 and 1862 the Capuchin priest Antoine Marie Gachet from Fribourg spent nearly three years among the Menominees of Wisconsin. As part of his pastoral and missionary work he engaged in ethnographic and linguistic studies resulting in a Menominee grammar, a diary account of his labors, and an ethnographic collection. This unusually well documented collection, preserved by the association ProEthnographi©a in Fribourg, is here published for the first time in its entirety together with a selection of Gachet’s hitherto unpublished drawings held by the Capuchin Friary in Fribourg. Placed in the contexts of Catholic missionary ethnographic collecting and of Menominee historical ethnography of the mid-nineteenth century, these material and visual documents offer valuable insights into the lifeways of a Native American people of the western Great Lakes region during a period of cultural change and adaptation.