Gonzaga, the Jesuits, and the Mission City

In eighteen eighty-seven, a Sicilian-born Jesuit priest named Joseph Cataldo opened a school on three hundred twenty acres of land north of the Spokane River, purchased for nine hundred thirty-six dollars. Father Cataldo had come to the Pacific Northwest in eighteen sixty-five as a missionary to the indigenous peoples of the region. He named the new school after his fellow Italian Jesuit, Saint Aloysius Gonzaga. Seven boys enrolled in its first year, taught by seventeen faculty members, nearly all of them Jesuit priests and scholastics in training.

The institution grew steadily. By the turn of the century it had become the largest Catholic college in the Pacific Northwest, with two hundred forty-four students, a new church, and a four-story brick hall. In nineteen twelve it became Gonzaga University and opened a school of law.

Gonzaga is inseparable from the broader story of how religious institutions shaped the Inland Northwest. Father Cataldo had already established missions across Idaho, Montana, and Washington before founding the college. The Coeur d'Alene Mission at De Smet, Idaho, which he also helped build, is among the oldest standing structures in the Pacific Northwest. The Jesuit network was a system of education, land acquisition, and cultural exchange that operated across enormous distances in an era before reliable roads or railroads.

Gonzaga's most famous alumnus never actually graduated. Bing Crosby, born in Tacoma in nineteen oh three and moved to Spokane with his family at age three, attended Gonzaga for three years before dropping out to pursue a career in music. He went on to sell hundreds of millions of recordings worldwide and win the Academy Award for best actor in nineteen forty-four. The university awarded him an honorary degree in nineteen thirty-seven. His childhood home, a modest Craftsman house at five oh eight East Sharp Avenue on the Gonzaga campus, is now a museum.