Jesuit Fr. Pierre Jean De Smet

Here's how the story goes:

In 1936 a Mrs. Henry James was digging in the yard of her home in the Bingham's Fort area of Ogden when she found what she claimed to be the grave of a Jesuit priest. In addition, presumably, to the body (though the report does not mention that), the grave contained a rosary, a Mass kit, a Jesuit habit, and a false tooth. Everything had been burned.

According to historian Anna Stone Keogh, who has the story from Mrs. James's son H. Brendan, the artifacts (minus the corpse, one hopes!) were loaned to the state of Utah for exhibit during the 1947 Centennial celebration. They were never returned, despite several attempts by the James family to recover them.

This bizarre story fairly bristles with questions and problems--problems that, like other urban legends, defeat any possibility of tracing it back to its source. In the first place, how could the discoverer of the grave, whom we could probably assume to be a Mormon, so confidently identify the habit as that of a Jesuit? And if that identification is correct, what Jesuit was it? The only Jesuit of whom we have record of being even in the proximity of Utah before 1951 was Fr. Pierre Jean De Smet who passed over part of the Oregon Trail with fur trappers in 1840-41, but probably never entered the area that is now Utah. And why was everything burned? And what became of the corpse? And how to explain the false tooth (assuming once again an accurate identification of such a strange item)? And finally, there is the frustration of the lost artifacts, which effectively defeat any further research (Ogden historian Justina Parsons-Bernstein searched the inventory of items exhibited in the Centennial celebration and found no mention of any of the grave items).

Urban folklore is tremendous fun. But history requires hard evidence of verifiable authenticity. Until, at the very minimum, the grave artifacts can be recovered and reliably associated with this grave, this story has to remain in the realm of folklore.