Bears' Hill, (formerly known as Hobbema but now as Maskwacis) preventing hostilities during the Riel rebellion.(Father Lacombe had been granted 1000 dollars for his activities among the Blackfoot.) In November 1885, he asked to be allowed to return to the Oblates and Bishop Grandin sent him to the Oblate noviciate in Tewksbury, near Lowell, Massachusetts, USA for rehabilitation and to renew his vocation. He failed to complete his novitiate there so Bishop Grandin ordered him to go to yet another novitiate Lachine, Quebec but instead Scollen went to see Bishop Tache in St Boniface (Winnipeg). Tache sent him to St. Laurent, Manitoba to stay with his old tutor, Fr Fourmond, pending a decision on his readmission. He spent a year there as a secular priest, among the Irish, French and Métis people at St Laurent and at Duck Lake. In the United States In February 1887, having had his application to rejoin the Oblates rejected and having largely recovered from his breakdown but not the chronic rheumatism and tuberculosis, he crossed into the US to work among the native peoples of the Great Plains for the next 10 years, on already established missions. During 1887 and 1888 he was among the Turtle Mountain Chippewa people at St. Michael Mission, St. John, North Dakota and became a citizen of the United States, during this period. 1889 to 1892 saw him among the Arapaho and Shoshone peoples at St Stephen Mission, near Arapahoe, Fremont, Wyoming (Wind River Indian Reservation) It was here that he carried out the first detailed scholarly study of the Arapaho language and produced a written form which was used by subsequent Catholic missionaries. (In 1889, the Welsh Episcopalian missionary, Rev. John Roberts, along with an Arapahoe catechist on the same reservation, wrote a translation of the Lord's Prayer into Arapahoe.) Between 1892 and 1894 he was at St John the Baptist (now Holy Name Mission) Sheridan, Wyoming, then St Joseph's in Buffalo, Wyoming and St Patrick's in Rawlins, Wyoming. 1895/1896 at St Mary, Orleans, Nebraska. 1897/1898 at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Concordia, Kansas. He then left the "Indian" missions and stayed a few months at St. Joseph's in Chicago. After a period on parish missions in New England, his three final years were spent working in the parishes of St Joseph, Dayton, Immaculate Conception, Kenton, Ohio and St Mary, Urbana, Ohio (late 1899 – 1902) and conducting