Missionary and Orator. James Chrysostom Bouchard, whom history recalls as "The Eloquent Indian", was the son of a French woman, who captured by native Americans, was adopted into the Delaware tribe with the name of Monotowan, meaning White Fawn. Her marriage to a Delaware brave called Kistalwa resulted in the birth of a son who was named Watomika, or Swift Foot. After his father's death in a skirmish with the Sioux in 1834, Watomika was taken by a Protestant missionary to Marietta College, Ohio, where he studied for the Presbyterian ministry. While visiting St. Louis, Missouri, in late 1846 or early 1847, he was converted to Catholicism by the Jesuit missionary Arnold Damen. Entering the Jesuit Order at Florissant, outside St. Louis, in 1848, he was ordained priest by Msgr. James Oliver Van de Velde SJ., on August 5, 1855. at Saint Francis Xavier church in St. Louis, becoming thus the first American Indian to be raised to the priesthood. After serving in the mid-West for several years, Father Bouchard was happily assigned to California to help his Jesuit brethren there. He arrived in San Francisco via Panama on August 16, 1861 for what was to become a particularly influential priestly career, such that Msgr. Patrick Riordan, Archbishop of San Francisco would reserve the following words of praise at the time of the Indian priest's death in San Francisco on December 27, 1889: "To no man in all the West is the Church of God more beholden than to Father James Bouchard of the Society of Jesus. He kept the faith in the mining districts; he sustained the dignity of God's Holy Church in the midst of ignorance and misunderstanding and everywhere championed her rights. My debt to him, and I speak for my brother bishops, is incalculable". His oratorical abilities soon became famous across Los Angeles and all through California and Oregon as well as in Hawaii and Victoria, British Columbia. Called to preach among others at the laying of the first stones of Saint Vibiana's Cathedral of Los Angeles in 1876 and of Sacramento's Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament the following year, he preached mission from one city to the other, becoming an indefatigable missionary despite the inconveniences during the time of pioneer transportation meant at the period. Passing away of an overstrained heart in San Francisco at sixty seven years of age, his funeral in the Saint Ignatius Church then located at Hayes Street and Van Ness Avenue was the largest ever given to any priest in San Francisco up to that time. Clad in purple sacerdotal robes, his metallic casket was interred in the Jesuit plot at the Santa Clara Mission Cemetery. Father Bouchard, who sometimes signed himself as "Watomika, SJ!", who despite having Archbishop Charles J. Seghers of Portland insisting on him that he shave off his long beard, never did, led quite an interesting adventure, starting in a Kansas wigwam and finishing in the city by the Golden Gate as a Catholic priest.