Religion: For the Tenth Man

A textbook engraving of Christopher Columbus discovering America would excite no special curiosity in most small girls, Victorian or modern. But one blue-eyed, chestnut-haired Philadelphia child gazed at it during the late 1860'sand wondered. What about those red Indians peeping through the forest at the white man? What about their souls?

Pretty Mary Katharine Drexel never forgot about those Indians. Her father Francis Anthony Drexel was busy helping build up the banking fortune started by his father, Anthony Joseph Drexel, but he found time, at the behest of Emma Bouvier, his French second wife,...