Miners in Alta's Reed and Benson Mine, the highest in Utah, must have been flabbergasted to see two nuns climbing the path into their camp, and even more surprised when the sisters asked for donations for a Catholic school in Salt Lake City.
But doing surprising things was what Mother Mary Augusta did best.In the mid-1870s, the Catholic Church in Utah was a small island in a continuing tide of Mormon settlement. But Mother Augusta had been prepared by a singular background to serve the needs of Catholics on the Mormon frontier.
Born Amanda Anderson in 1830 in Alexandria, Va., she was the youngest of the four children of a bank clerk and his wife. When she was 4, her mother died and the grieving father decided a change of location was advisable. He joined a party headed for Kansas.
As they crossed Ohio, 8-year-old John was kidnapped by a roving band of gypsies, an event that changed not only his life, but that of his little sister. The frantic father found his son and paid a ransom to get him back, but the kidnapping had indelibly affected John and little Amanda. When the family reached the home of relatives in Lancaster, Ohio, Anderson agreed to leave the little girl with an aunt, a Mrs. Lilly, to avoid exposing her to any more frontier perils.
At her aunt's house, the girl learned about the charitable work of the Catholic Church. A visiting priest conducted regular meetings in the small Ohio town, and Amanda would ride horseback to a nearby Indian reservation to alert the Indians to services. She also visited the poor and sick with her aunt and on occasion baptized people in critical situations when the priest was unable to be present, a history kept by the Catholic Diocese of Utah says.
By the time she was a young woman, working with the poor and downtrodden had become an engrained habit and her vocation as a nun accepted. She asked admission to the Community of Marianites in June 1854 and on Nov. 26 was named Sister Mary of Saint Augusta. At the end of her novitiate, she was sent to Holy Name School in Chicago, where she taught for two years. She volunteered her after-school hours in doing charitable work among the needy.
During a typhoid epidemic, she went to Notre Dame with a supply of sheets and linens and stayed to help care for the ill.
She was received into her profession March 19, 1858. Civil war was looming as she began her work as a nun, and when hostilities broke out, she was quickly involved. She was sent to Cairo, Ill., the dividing line between North and South, and put to work as a nurse for General Ulysses S. Grant's Union soldiers.
Before they could even begin caring for the sick, she and her companion had to wash blood-spattered walls and floors and clean sickroom debris from the area.
"We were not prepared as nurses, but our hearts made our hands willing and our sympathy ready," she wrote in a letter. "And so we, with God's help, did much towards alleviating the dreadful suffering." Grant himself once commented, "What a wonderful woman she is! She can control the men better than I can."
For a time, she worked in a hospital in Memphis, Tenn. When she returned to Cairo near the end of the war, a small building was made available for her and her sister worker, but before they could occupy it, they had to ask that amputated arms and legs and other gory evidences of the war be removed.
Sister Augusta often befriended children who had been orphaned or dislocated by the war and found homes for many of them. Among those with whom she developed a special relationship was Bernard DeVoto, who later became an eminent American writer.
In 1870, she was named stewardess at St. Mary's, across from Notre Dame. She was the first Mother General of the Congregation of The Sisters of the Holy Cross, leading the order through difficult formative years. During 25 years of her leadership, much of the "City of Holy Cross" was built to accommodate the order's programs. She was involved in five different mission areas of the church, from Pennsylvania to Utah. Ultimately, the Sisters of the Holy Cross opened 26 missions and opened six hospitals, among them Holy Cross of Salt Lake City.
Mother Augusta's call to Utah Territory came in 1875, when a pioneering priest, the Rev. Lawrence Scanlan, begged for someone to come help him found a school. Mother Augusta and Sister Raymond were the answers to his prayers. They came by train but stopped in Green River because the Salt Lake priest was a bit uncertain of their reception in the City of the Saints. Accompanied by Father D. Keily, the two nuns continued their trip to the territorial capital, arriving June 6.
They lived in the home of Territorial Judge Thomas Marshall, a prominent Catholic who was instrumental in furthering the church's development in the territory. The Marshalls' St. Bernard dog adopted the two nuns, following them around the city on their money-raising forays.
One of Mother Augusta's first orders of business was to call on pioneer leader Brigham Young. He welcomed them cordially and wished them well in their ambitions, although he said he couldn't donate any money to their cause. Often afterward, when he saw the black-habited women, he would stop his carriage and inquire after their health.
Monday through Saturday of every week, money-raising was the single-minded goal of the nuns. They traveled throughout northern Utah, hitting the major mining camps in Park City and Eureka, begging for their school. The quest ultimately took the sisters as far as California. Father Scanlan purchased a piece of property on Salt Lake City's east bench, and the cornerstone of St. Mary's of the Wasatch was laid on Aug. 8, 1875.
Mormon leaders warned that parents who enrolled their children in the Catholic school would be excommunicated. However, despite the small Catholic population of the city - fewer than 10 families - the school opened with 100 students, most of them from Protestant backgrounds. St. Mary's antedated by about 15 years Utah's comprehensive school system, established in 1890, although education had been fostered by the LDS Church from the earliest beginnings of the territory.
With the school a reality, Mother Augusta turned her attention to another pressing need - a hospital. Miners in particular felt a void in medical care. The sisters opened a 12-bed facility in 1882 in a rented home on 500 East and 100 South. The hospital has been an important component of Utah's health-care community for more than 100 years.
One of Mother Augusta's last services to her Utah school was to train the cast for "Isabella," which was presented at the school's third commencement.
Recalled to the mother house, Sister Augusta again became embroiled in a struggle by the Holy Cross sisters to gain autonomy from the Fathers of the Holy Cross Order. At one juncture, she submitted a letter of resignation to her bishop, but it was not accepted. Eventually, the sisters prevailed.
A series of strokes weakened Sister Augusta, but she maintained her beauty and dignity to the end, her biography says. On Dec. 24, 1907, she died in the mother house in Indiana, leaving widening ripples of influence far to the west in Utah.