FR0M THE LIBR^RX OF 

TRO^TY COLLEGE 



THE GIFT OF 

St. John s Church, Troy, N. Y. 

From Bequest of 

Francis N. Mann, 

Auxiliary to the 

Bible and Common Prayer Book Society 
of Albany and its Vicinity. 



s OP 



***"" 

v vx 



THE CONQUEST OF 
THE CONTINENT 



BY 

HUGH LATIMER BURLESON 

Missionary Bishop of South Dakota 



"Like a mighty army 
Moves the Church of God." 



Sixth Edition 



MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
MILWAUKEE 



Copyright, 1911, by 
DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN MISSIONARY SOCIETY 



127C74 
JUL 8)988 



FOREWORD 

THIS book is the outcome of a course of 
lectures given in two succeeding sum 
mers at the Cambridge Conference for 
Church Work. Only because of the encourage 
ment there received does this volume now ap 
pear. The author finds himself under many 
obligations so many that it will be impossible 
to mention all the sources from which inspira 
tion and assistance have come. Particular ac 
knowledgment should be made of the help 
found in "The Territorial Growth of the Uni 
ted States," by Dr. W. A. Mowry, which is the 
basis of Chapter I. Many others have fur 
nished help and suggestion which, interwoven 
with the author s personal experience, give 
these pages whatever of value and vividness 
they possess. They have been penned in the 
hope that they may throw some light of interest 
and romance upon the neglected home mission 
ary and the domestic field, and that those who 
read them may see the Church as the great 
missionary agency, and the Gospel delivered by 
and in the Church as the supreme Missionary 
Message. 

3 



PKEFCE. 

IT is gratifying to know that a fifth edition of this 
book becomes necessary because it has been found 
to have permanent value in the thought and study 
of the Church. Issued first in September, 1911, as 
the Mission Study book for that year, it passed 
through four editions, a total of 20,000 copies 
during the first year. The author is conscious that 
this arises because the volume fills a real need rather 
than from any conspicuous merit in the book itself. 
Nevertheless he may be allowed to express here his 
feeling of deep gratitude to the large number 
throughout the Church who, by words and acts of 
generous approval, have helped the book to do its 
work. That it still has a work to do is cause for added 
thankfulness. 



CONTENTS 

\PTEB PAQB 

I. THE FIELD OP CONQUEST 11 

II. THE GATHERING OP THE FORCES ... 32 

III. IN THE LAND OP THE LAKES AND RIVERS 58 

IV. THE MARCH ACROSS THE PRAIRIES . . 82 
V. THE BATTLE AMONG THE MOUNTAINS . Ill 

VI. PLANTING THE STANDARD ON THE SHORES 

OP THE PACIFIC 142 

APPENDIX I. BIBLIOGRAPHY . . 187 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Title Opposite Page 

Frontispiece: Map Showing Territorial Expansions. 

Rt. Rev. William White, D.D 11 

The Tower of the Old Church on Jamestown Island 84 

Rt. Rev. John Henry Hobart, D.D 42 

Rt. Rev. Alexander V. Griswold, D.D 46 

Rt. Rev. Richard Channing Moore, D.D 60 

Rt. Rev. Philander Chase, D.D 64 

Bishop G. W. Doane 68 

Bishop C. P. Mcllvaine 68 

Bishop Kemper in his Youth 68 

Rt. Rev. Jackson Kemper, D.D 62 

Preaching Cross on the Site of Nashotah s First Altar 70 

Rt Rev. James H. Otey, D.D 78 

Ezekiel G. Gear 86 

James Lloyd Breck 86 

Mission House, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1850 86 

Henry Benjamin Whipple, First Bishop of Minnesota. ... 94 

Enmegahbowh and Bishop Whipple 98 

First Building of the Seabury Mission 98 

William Hobart Hare, Bishop of Niobrara and South Dakota 102 
Bishop Hare and the Pupils of One of His Indian Schools. 106 

Sunset Service on the South Dakota Prairies 110 

The Reverend St. Michael Fackler 114 

Daniel Sylvester Tuttle, Presiding Bishop of the Church. . 118 

The Main Street of Boise as Bishop Tuttle Found It 126 

St. Mark s Hospital, Salt Lake 134 

Franciscan Mission at Santa Barbara, California 142 

First Church Building on the Pacific Coast 146 

A Modern Saint Francis Charles Caleb Pierce 160 

Past and Present Leaders in the Far West 158 

William Ingraham Kip, First Bishop of California... 158 
Benjamin Wistar Morris, Second Bishop of Oregon. . 168 

Bishop Spalding, of Utah 158 

Bishop Nichols, of California 158 

Rev. John W. Chapman 166 

Rev. Octavius Parker 166 

Ice on the Yukon Breaking up 166 

Peter Trimble Rowe, First Bishop of Alaska 174 

Bishop Rowe Preaching on the Banks of the Yukon 182 

Anne C. Farthing Buried on the Battlefield 182 

Map Showing Dioceses and Districts and the Eight Mis 
sionary Departments 187 



PROLOGUE 



" UNTO THE UTMOST SEA " 

NARROW and strait the cradle of our race 
Lay by the border of the Eastern Sea. 
For that which once seemed wide enough domain 
While yet with childish feet the nation walked 
Between the ocean and the mountain wall 
That towered to westward, was a garden plot 
When restless, eager youth came on apace; 
And the new flag, but late unfurled to air, 
Yearned for an azure field wherein to plant 
The silver stars that told of states new-born. 

And so through mountain-pass and forest-aisle, 

Even before the din of war had ceased 

And minute-men had turned them to the plough, 

With wary feet and keen discerning eye, 

Grasping his ready rifle, but with face 

Set ever westward toward the lands beyond, 

The eager Leather-stocking took his way. 

And not in vain; for when in distant France 
Peace was concluded with the mother-land, 
Franklin and Jay and Adams claimed the realm 
Which to the nation gave the chance to live. 
No longer did the Alleghanies rise 
To place a barrier which we might not pass; 
But to that central river whose great flood 
Seeks with unerring course the Southern Sea 
The tide of conquest poured resistlessly. 
And thus the land of Lincoln and of Grant 
Was joined to that of Washington and Lee. 



The Conquest of the Continent 

But not for long did even this great space 

Content the Young Republic of the West. 

Beyond the flood in which De Soto sleeps, 

And on whose surface Indian canoe 

And French bateau, now journeying south, now north, 

Had carried warrior, trader, knight and priest, 

Lay Louisiana, reaching from the gulf 

To where Canadian boundary bars the way, 

And stretching wide through prairies limitless 

Until upon the far horizon line 

The frowning Rockies rear their snow-white crests. 

And lo! upon a day, Napoleon, 

By strife of old-world kingdoms keenly pressed, 

Bargained away an empire, for the gold 

Which, turned to arms and men, might give him power 

To work in Europe his ambition s dream. 

And thus once more the mountains marked our West; 

Yet beckoned still, and told of lands beyond. 

And next to Spain we turned that haughty land 

Whose power had fallen now on evil days 

Through Mexico, her late-revolted child. 

And from the mighty sovereignty which once 

Had boasted lordship of the great Southwest 

We wrested yet another wide domain, 

And set our flag beside the Western Sea. 

Not even yet was the great sum complete, 

Nor builded yet our nation s goodly home; 

For to the north, where rolls the Oregon, 

With England we contested sovereignty, 

And won; through sturdy Whitman, man of God, 

A Paul Revere whose scarce-remembered deed 

Was yet a thousand-fold more wonderful. 

Enough ! Enough ! " at last the people cried, 
"For us and for our children yet to be; 
Let conquest cease! estop the drum and fife! 
And call our goodly heritage complete." 



The Conquest of the Continent 

Not so thought Seward, as he northward looked 
To that forbidding land of snow and ice 
Where mediaeval Russia held her sway, 
A solecism on this continent. 
With treaty signed and purchase money given 
The Stars and Stripes at one great bound were set 
Within the silence of the Arctic night, 
Well-nigh upon the apex of the world. 

And so it came to pass, in God s good way, 
That Briton, French and Spaniard Russian, too 
Each for himself had grasped a goodly share 
Of what is now our land, but held it fast 
Only until our nation so had grown 
That each new part it could assimilate, 
When straight the ordering of His providence 
Placed each in turn within our hands, and made 
The good and spacious home wherein we dwell. 

Then praise to Him Who led our fathers forth! 
And praise to Him Who made the path so plain! 
Until, to east and west, to south and north 
Stretches the limit of our vast domain. 
Bless thou our nation, Lord, and grant that we 
May win it also for Thy Christ and Thee! 



THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK 

PROBABLY each one who reads this volume will 
miss some things which he would have liked to 
find. It does not aspire to be a history of the Church, 
nor even a complete record of her missionary progress 
in this country. An attempt to tell the whole of that 
great story would have been a task impossible of ac 
complishment in a single volume. The aim was rather 
to show how, from feeble beginnings and utmost dis 
couragement, the Church has been led to self-knowledge 
and wide opportunity. For this purpose differing types 
of missionary work were chosen. So far as possible 
each was exemplified in some conspicuous missionary 
leader, and so grouped as to form a chronological and 
geographical progression a picture of the Church 
marching onward across the continent. Many subjects 
of large interest and significance were necessarily 
omitted. Many persons whose work deserves equal 
praise with that herein set forth receive slight mention, 
or none at all. The early missionaries of the S. P. GL, 
the urgent religious needs of the Negro race, the mis 
sionary history of the South as a whole, are instances 
in point. The author wishes that he might have told a 
larger and more comprehensive story, yet hopes that 
the story as told will prove an inspiring one, and will 
perhaps stimulate other and abler pens to write of the 
broad fields herein untouched and of the heroic, wise 
and saintly men whose deeds are not here recorded. 




Rt. REV. WILLIAM WHITE, D.D. 



THE CONQUEST OF 
THE CONTINENT 



THE FIELD OF CONQUEST 

PKOFOUNDLY must the student of his 
tory be impressed as he notes the steps 
of that resistless progress by which our 
nation enlarged her borders. Led by the Di 
vine Hand in paths she had not sought going 
out oftentimes not knowing whither 
ltory she wentshe found herself march 
ing by giant strides toward the western sea. 
The Northwest Territory, the Louisiana Pur 
chase, the Mexican Cession and the Oregon Set 
tlement are the four great landmarks of her 
progress, and as one reviews them he finds him 
self thinking reverently, in the quiet of his own 
heart, concerning Him "who maketh the devices 
of the people to be of none effect and casteth 
out the counsels of princes." 

This is not a matter chiefly of metes and 
11 



12 The Conquest of the Continent 

bounds, of conventions, treaties and other such 
like dry and dusty affairs ; when studied closely 
there is in it a marvellous significance. Step by 
step wonderful developments were unfolding. 
Each brave exploration, each hardy colonizing, 
each hurling of the battle-gage or drafting of 
the terms of peace, was imperceptibly and un 
intentionally drawing the sundered parts of 
our country into great homogeneous sections, 
and placing them close at hand where, at the 
fitting time, and as her strength developed, the 
young Republic of the West might grasp them, 
one by one, and bind them on her as the jewels 
of a bride. 

None of the actors in these brilliant episodes 
of history dreamed what the end would be. 
They explored and colonized, they marched and 
fought, they plotted and traded and merrily 
robbed one another, for the glory of king and 
country; whether it were George, or Charles, 
or Philip Dutch, English, French or Spanish 
mattered little. Each waged his battle or 
played his game of diplomacy, casting his haz 
ard into the arena of the world s events, while 
all the time each act and word was building 
more broad and fair a spacious dwelling-place 
for that new nation whose form was even then 
dimly discerned, by those few who had the 
vision, behind the great curtain which veiled 
the future. 



The Field of Conquest 18 



Our acquisition of the Northwest Territory 
is full of vivid interest. 

Wolfe began it on the plains of Abraham. 

The fall of Quebec was a crisis in the world. 

u .. -^ It decided issues far larger than ap- 

The Northwest 

Territorj peared. It was a contest between 
races, languages, religions, and theories of gov 
ernment; between Eomance and Saxon ideals; 
between the constitutional rights of free peo 
ples and the absolutism of despotic monarchies. 
But it also brought under the hand of England 
not only Canada, but New France the terri 
tory of the Great Northwest.* 

On the day when England, "furiously im 
perious and * drunk with success, tore from 
France all her colonies, and divided between 
herself and Spain the great valley of the Mis 
sissippi, she was preparing an unwilling gift 
for those, her own colonies, as yet huddled 
close to the coast of the Atlantic, and scarcely 
caring what lay behind the barrier of the Alle- 
ghanies. Even then, in 1763, a far-seeing 
Frenchman foretold the issue. The Count de 
Vergennes exclaimed: "The consequences of 
the entire cession of Canada are obvious. I 

Mowry: The Territorial Growth of the United Statet, 
page 13. 



14 The Conquest of the Continent 

am persuaded that England will ere long re 
pent of having removed the only check that 
could keep her colonies in awe. They stand no 
longer in need of her protection; she will call 
on them to contribute toward supporting the 
burdens which they have helped to bring upon 
her, and they will answer by striking off all de 
pendence. 

John Adams and John Jay, Benjamin Frank 
lin and Henry Laurens carried on the work, 
when they, as commissioners of the United 
States, met in Paris at the close of the Revolu 
tion to negotiate with Great Britain the terms 
of peace. They had received strict injunctions 
to do nothing without consulting France, to 
which nation the United States at that time 
felt a particular sense of obligation. Discour 
aged and disheartened, England did not greatly 
care for the Northwest Territory, which she 
had never really colonized. Half-heartedly her 
commissioner suggested that the territory 
north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi 
should be regarded as a part of Canada. He 
was doubtless more or less prepared for Dr. 
Franklin s prompt answer: "No, sir! if you 
insist upon that we go back to Yorktown. At 
any rate he yielded as immediately and as 
gracefully as he could. 

But France, the professed ally of the United 
States, had plans of her own. Her statesmen 



The Field of Conquest 15 

threw their influence into the scale in favor of 
Spain, and her diplomatists plotted to shut up 
the young republic between the Atlantic and 
the Alleghanies, with practically no territory 
beyond that of the original states, while Spain 
quietly possessed herself of the central west, 
which had slipped through England s fingers. 
Almost we were betrayed in the house of our 
friends ; but John Jay, suspecting the scheme, 
revealed his suspicions to Dr. Franklin and 
suggested that they ignore France in the set 
tlement of the question. They sat before the 
fireplace smoking their long-stemmed clay 
pipes. Dr. Franklin exclaimed, "Sir, would 
you break with the positive commands of Con 
gress!" "As readily," replied Jay, dashing 
his pipe to fragments on the hearth, "as I 
break this pipe." His advice prevailed and 
the commissioners proceeded to settle the terms 
of peace directly with the British Commis 
sioner, without consulting the French minister, 
who found too late that he had missed a chance 
to influence the disposal of an empire. 

So on that thirtieth day of November, 1782, 
the articles were signed which, at a stroke of the 
pen, removed our western boundary from the 
Alleghanies to the Mississippi, and doubled the 
area of the republic. Thus did the tide of terri 
torial expansion sweep over the barrier of the 
mountains, and flow across the uplands and 



16 The Conquest of the Continent 

prairies, even to the great river of the central 
plain. 

This territory included the following states 
lying north of the Ohio River: Ohio, Indiana, 
Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and a third of 
Minnesota; south of the Ohio were Kentucky, 
Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. 

It was no mean heritage with which the na 
tion was thus dowered. When added to the 
area of the original states, this gave the United 
States 840,000 square miles a domain eight 
times that of Great Britain, five times that of 
France, and three times as great as the present 
German Empire. It was larger than Great 
Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, 
Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary and 
Transylvania combined.* 

It was indeed a goodly land which God then 
placed in our hands to colonize, civilize and 
Christianize for Him, that it might become a 
fit home for His children. 



n 

Not for long was Spain able to hold the coun 
try which England compelled France to cede to 
Th Lonisim* her after the fall of Quebec in 1763. 
For thirty-seven years she retained 

* Mowry : The Territorial Growth of the United States, 
page 39. 



The Field of Conquest 17 

this gigantic territory, which included every 
thing west of the Mississippi from the northern 
boundary of Mexico to the Canada line, with 
the exception of a square tract in the Pacific 
Northwest, called indefinitely the Oregon Ter 
ritory a sort of no-man s-land. Beset with 
increasing difficulties at home and sinking grad 
ually but surely from the position of a first- 
rate to that of a second-rate power, Spain could 
exercise no effective control over such a domain 
indeed, she never attempted to do so. In her 
poverty she was willing to entertain sugges 
tions of purchase, and in due time a buyer ap 
peared. 

Napoleon Bonaparte knew many other things 
besides the map of Europe, the handling of an 
invading army and the making and unmaking 
of kings. He was a student of the world and 
had studied to good purpose the geography of 
North America. He was not slow to realize 
the value of the tract called Louisiana, and his 
teeming brain conceived the idea of building up 
a French empire in the heart of North America. 
Here was a country fertile and delightful, four 
times as large as France, and easily accessible 
by water through the longest river in the world 
and its tributaries. He longed to regain the 
lost land which had been wrested from France 
in an evil hour, and in 1800, by a secret treaty, 
Spain re-ceded the province to France. 



18 The Conquest of the Continent 

But like other dreams of this great dreamer, 
the plan came to nought. Indeed this very act, 
which might so grievously have injured our 
nation, fell out entirely to her advantage. Eng 
land, raging with a hatred and fear of Na 
poleon which amounted almost to madness, 
heard of the secret cession and straightway 
planned to attack Louisiana. With her base in 
Canada and her command of the sea, she could 
do this far more easily than Napoleon could 
defend it. He was general enough to realize the 
hopelessness of such a struggle. 

Since within this territory was included the 
mouth of the Mississippi and the city of New 
Orleans, the question of its sale was of vital 
importance in the development of the Missis 
sippi Valley, which depended for its outlet 
upon the free navigation of the river. Already 
our statesmen had begun to realize that the 
empire of the middle west was largely useless 
unless there were an open and safe way to the 
Gulf. It was with this in view that a Com 
mission was sent to France to negotiate. 

They hoped for nothing more, and had no in 
structions beyond the securing of that bit of 
territory which would place the control of the 
mouth of the Mississippi in the hands of the 
United States, but by the time of their arrival 
in France certain things had happened which 
convinced Napoleon that he could not hope to 



The Field of Conquest 19 

hold any part of Louisiana; indeed, that he 
must hasten to be rid of it at a price, if he did 
not wish to lose it to the English by conquest. 
War with England he saw to be inevitable. 
England had twenty ships in the Gulf of 
Mexico, whose first move would probably be 
an attack upon Louisiana by the open water 
way of the Mississippi. To the utter astonish 
ment of the commissioners Napoleon offered to 
cede the whole territory to the United States 
without reservation. 

How greatly this fretted his proud spirit 
will never be fully known. The record of his 
statements concerning the matter show that 
he acted with the utmost reluctance. "I re 
nounce it," he said, "with the greatest regret, 
but to attempt obstinately to retain it would be 
absolute folly." Not because he loved the 
United States, but because he had seized upon 
something too great for him to hold, he made 
the offer. But in the midst of his bitter disap 
pointment he experienced a savage satisfaction. 
That he realized better than any other the 
wider significance of the thing which he was 
doing, is shown by his utterance after the sign 
ing of the treaty: "This accession of territory 
strengthens forever the power of the United 
States. I have just given to England a mari 
time rival that will sooner or later humble her 
pride." 



20 The Conquest of the Continent 

James Monroe and Bobert Livingston were 
men who could not fail to realize the value of 
the astounding opportunity which was offered 
them, and so it came about that the unexpected 
happened, and the territory which we had not 
thought to possess was fairly thrust upon us at 
a small price. 

For $15,000,000, on April 30, 1803, France 
surrendered a province bounded on the north 
by Canada, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, 
and extending east and west practically from 
the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. 
It included Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, 
Iowa, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kan 
sas, Oklahoma and the Indian Territory, the 
greater part of Minnesota, Montana and 
Wyoming, and one-third of Colorado. 

Thus at the end of twenty years came the 
second great wave of territorial expansion, 
which once more doubled the possessions of the 
United States, planted the flag of a nation upon 
the summits of the Rocky Mountains and gave 
us for the first time free access to the great 
Gulf southward. 

At that time the entire population west of 
the Alleghanies was less than half a million, 
and all the white men dwelling in the Louisiana 
province did not number 50,000; but the tide 
of immigration was already on its way, and the 
new territory offered a second challenge to the 



The Field of Conquest 21 

people of the United States to colonize and 
Christianize worthily to win and hold the 
country for the nation and for God. 

Ill 

In secretly ceding Louisiana to Napoleon, 
Spain had by no means given up all her pos 
sessions in the new world. Florida 

The Spanish 

Possessions was still held by her, together with 
the extensive territory which was called New 
Spain, and which had always been her strong 
est centre of power and influence. This in 
cluded the present republic of Mexico, Texas, 
New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Cali 
fornia and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. 
By treaty and purchase, in 1819, the United 
States became possessed of the Spanish prov 
ince of "East and West Florida," which em 
braced the present state of that name together 
with a narrow strip of land running along the 
Gulf of Mexico as far as the Mississippi River. 
In this treaty also the boundary line between 
the United States and Spain was carefully des 
ignated, and each of the contracting parties 
solemnly renounced and ceded to the other all 
its claims to territory lying on the farther side 
of that line. Before this boundary line had 
been surveyed, however, Mexico had revolted 
against Spain, and had set up an independent 



22 The Conquest of the Continent 

government in the year 1821, taking over to 
herself all the territory previously held by 
Spain, with boundaries as defined in the treaty 
of 1819 just mentioned. 

One approaches the consideration of our 
third territorial expansion with mingled feel 
ings. We must regret that it was coupled 
with so much of arrogance and aggression. 
The causes underlying the annexation of Texas, 
and the resulting war with Mexico which fol 
lowed, by which we wrested from her the ces 
sion of 1848, are so involved and form such a 
tangled skein of interlacing motives and poli 
cies, that it is difficult to judge them fairly, even 
from the vantage-point of years. 

Beyond doubt Mexico s claim to inherit the 
boundary line agreed upon with Spain was a 
sound one. Beyond doubt, also, the revolt of 
Texas in 1836 and its setting up of an indepen 
dent government under the "lone star" flag 
was encouraged by citizens of the United 
States. The question of slavery was already 
weaving its dark thread into all the policies 
and indeed into the whole fabric of our national 
life. A careful adjustment was sought to be 
maintained by the admission of a slave state 
and a free state in regular alternation, but the 
growing and expanding North, with its large 
territory and its boundless resources, was a 
danger with which the upholders of slavery 



The Field of Conquest 23 

were already being compelled to reckon. The 
only territory out of which new states favor 
able to slavery could be created lay beyond 
the international boundary in the Mexican pos 
sessions. It was perhaps only natural that 
Texas, with its great area which promised to 
furnish territory for at least five states, should 
be coveted by the South as a part of the Union. 

So annexation came, by which we broke our 
solemn pledge ; an army was marched upon the 
debatable soil, up to a new boundary line which 
we had ourselves decreed, but which Mexico 
had never accepted, and because its advance 
was withstood by the Mexicans, war was de 
clared if one can call it war. Our army had 
its own way with the Mexicans, and shortly 
planted our flag over their capitol, but no true 
lover of his country can feel great pride in 
the achievement. 

Doubtless it was better for the territories 
concerned that they should come under the rule 
of the American republic. Perhaps it is even 
true that Mexico was better oft without these 
possessions, and could devote herself more di 
rectly and singly to the solution of her impor 
tant problem and the consolidation of the con 
flicting elements out of which she was to engage 
in the seemingly hopeless task of forming a 
republic. But after all, the manner of the 
transfer was not edifying. 



24 The Conquest of the Continent 

Thus for a third time that which doubtless 
was inevitable happened, and at a bound we 
reached the Pacific. From sea to sea extended 
American dominion. By the treaty signed in 
1848 600,000 square miles were added to our 
continental area and the lands of the great 
southwest, including golden California, passed 
into our possession. These, added to Texas, 
comprised an accession as large as Louisiana, 
and larger than the area east of the Mississippi 
which fell to us after the war of the Revolution. 

IV 

North of California and west of the Eocky 
Mountains lay a debatable land which had 
_ _ been variously claimed by Spanish, 

The Oregon IT 

Territory French and English sometimes 

successively, sometimes simultaneously. Be 
yond question the first explorers of the Pacific 
Coast were Spanish. Balboa, Magellan, Cor- 
tez and others sailed along it and made explora 
tions upon it. France also may have penetrated 
it from the interior, in the person of some of 
her coureurs de bois, the wandering trappers 
and pioneers whom no rivers could stop nor 
mountains daunt. Whatever claim France pos 
sessed fell to us by the purchase of the Louisi 
ana territory, and Spain s cession in the treaty 
of 1819 of all her rights north of the great 



The Field of Conquest 25 

boundary line, transferred to us any claim she 
might possess. It was with England that the 
contest finally developed, and in what was 
known as the Oregon Country the last stand 
against British aggression was successfully 
made. 

The key to the country was the Columbia 
Eiver. Practically everything to the north 
was drained by it, and everything to the south 
by the Snake and its tributaries, which made a 
confluence with the Columbia at Walla Walla. 
When Captain Robert Gray, in 1792, discovered 
the obscure mouth of this great stream, past 
which explorer after explorer of many nations 
had sailed in ignorance, he established for our 
country the best claim to possession which any 
nation could allege. President Jefferson, in 
1804, followed this up by sending the famous 
exploring expedition under Lewis and Clark, 
and four years later John Jacob Astor for 
purposes of trade made the first settlement at 
Astoria. This was snatched from him during 
the War of 1812, but afterward restored at the 
insistence of his government. 

For years thereafter the possession of this 
large territory was in debate, the United 
States basing its claim upon five chief points : 
(1) The discovery of the Columbia by Captain 
Gray; (2) the exploration of Lewis and Clark; 
(3) the settlement at Astoria; (4) the transfer 



26 The Conquest of the Continent 

of titles to the United States by Spain and 
France; (5) on the ground of contiguity the 
United States had a stronger right to these 
territories than could be advanced by any other 
power.* 

It was not until 1846 that the question was 
settled, when the 49th parallel of latitude be 
came the boundary, England relinquishing her 
claim to the country south of it and we relin 
quishing our claim to the territory west of 
the Rocky Mountains between parallels 49 and 
54 40 . 

With this final winning of the Oregon ter 
ritory there is bound up a thrilling missionary 
story. Space does not permit its telling here 
further than in the briefest outline. 

It was in 1832 that four Indians of the Nez 
Perces, an Oregon tribe, suddenly appeared in 
St. Louis, having journeyed for months that 
they might ask for the white man s Book which 
showed the trail to the Happy Hunting 
Grounds. Through the exploring party of Lewis 
and Clark they must have heard of, and doubt 
less seen, the Bible. General Clark was at that 
time Indian Agent, with headquarters in St. 
Louis. He received his old friends cordially, 
but could do nothing for them. No Bible in 
their language existed, and no missionary was 

* Mowry : The Territorial Growth of the United States, 
page 148. 



The Field of Conquest 27 

at hand to return with them and teach them, 
so they went back disappointed. 

But the story of their coming travelled over 
the land, and Christian men felt the call to 
offer themselves in response to this pathetic 
appeal. Both the Methodists and the Presby 
terians sent out missionaries, prominent among 
the latter being Marcus Whitman, M.D. He it 
was who took the first wagon across the Rocky 
Mountains, and in it Mrs. Whitman and the 
wife of his comrade in the missionary under 
taking, the Eev. Mr. Spalding. Arrived in Ore 
gon, Dr. Whitman found the territory altogether 
under the domination of the Hudson s Bay Fur 
Co. It was to their advantage to keep it a wil 
derness. Vast profits were being made, and 
the company not only controlled the situation 
in Oregon, but also possessed the string of forts 
which formed the only link between it and the 
distant seat of government and civilization. 
Everything which could be done without pro 
voking retaliation was done to prevent the in 
coming of immigrants and the education of the 
Indians. The settlement of the country and 
the turning of its natives to agriculture meant 
death to the company by the destruction of 
its profits, and while the missionaries were out 
wardly welcomed the things for which they 
stood were covertly opposed. 

Yet the way had been opened, and the little 



28 The Conquest of the Continent 

trickle of immigration which was soon to swell 
to a resistless flood had begun. The English 
company foresaw the probable result and 
planned to bring in settlers from Canada to 
outnumber the Americans, and so wrest the 
country from them. While visiting one of their 
forts to minister to their sick, Whitman heard 
their boasts to this effect. This confirmed him 
in a course of action already determined upon. 
The same hour he rode back to his mission and 
the next day set out on his marvellous ride 
across the continent an exploit in itself. 

It was late in the fall of 1842 that he started, 
with only one companion, who midway of the 
journey was compelled to drop behind. Whit 
man pushed on through the bitter winter across 
the mountains and reached St. Louis, having 
endured untold hardships and having been 
again and again on the verge of disaster and 
death. 

Hearing that a treaty was being negotiated 
with England in which the Oregon boundary 
question would probably be included, he paused 
in St. Louis only long enough to arrange with 
others for the gathering of a band of colonists 
whom he promised to lead the following sum 
mer across the mountains to Oregon. Then he 
pushed on to Washington and made his repre 
sentations to the President and to Daniel 
Webster, the Secretary of State. He outlined 



The Field of Conquest 29 

the situation as he understood it, and told them 
of the dangers which threatened American 
sovereignty. 

How far the statements of Dr. Whitman in 
fluenced the final decision which gave to us the 
Oregon country can never be known, but the 
sudden appearance of this bronzed and fur- 
clad pioneer, bearing the marks of his tre 
mendous journey, speaking briefly and to the 
point, urging everywhere the importance of 
Oregon and the certainty of its great future, 
left an impress upon the capital which has come 
down in contemporary history. 

But Whitman was not the man to place his 
whole reliance upon the action of diplomatists ; 
he also took a hand in the affair, playing the 
game in his own way. Back to the west he 
hastened, finding there more than eight hun 
dred persons ready to take up their journey to 
Oregon. These, in spite of the opposition and 
dire prophecies of the Hudson s Bay officials, he 
led safely across the mountains and down into 
the plains of the new land, to form the nucleus 
of the hundreds of thousands who to-day in 
habit it; and Oregon was saved to the United 
States. 

Probably it was no unexpected thing to 
Whitman when, possibly through the machina 
tions of his unavowed enemy, the Hudson s 
Bay Company, he and all his were massacred 



30 The Conquest of the Continent 

by the Indians in 1847. Again and again he 
had cast his life into the hazard in the endeavor 
to save this great country to the United States, 
and although no eye-witness has told of his 
sharp and sudden end, he surely met it bravely 
and in the fear of the Lord. From his death 
followed the victory which he sought, and 
his blood sealed the future of the land for 
which he strove. Scarcely in history has there 
been a more conspicuous example of the mis 
sionary as the pioneer of civilization and the 
benefactor of his nation. 

By this fourth and last* continental expan 
sion 300,000 square miles were added to the 
previous territory of the nation. Idaho, Ore 
gon, Washington and parts of Montana and 
Wyoming came under the flag, and Puget 
Sound, with all that it means as a port of trade 
with the Orient and Alaska, was secured to the 
United States. 

Thus from coast to coast and from the Great 
Lakes to the Gulf there stretched, far and fair, 
the home of the American Eepublic. Within 
a little more than sixty years, from being shut 
up between the barriers of the Atlantic and the 

*The purchase of Alaska was, of course, a fifth expansion 
on this continent, but differed from the first four in not deal 
ing with contiguous territory; in effect it lies across the sea. 
The circumstances of its acquisition appear in Chapter VI. 



The Field of Conquest 31 

Alleghanies, tied to a single sea-coast and at 
the mercy; of powerful neighbors on every 
hand, she had, by four astonishing advances, 
carried her dominion literally to the end of the 
earth. Only the wide sea had stopped her 
progress.* The boast contained in the old coup 
let had been made good: 

"No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, 
But the whole boundless continent is ours." 



* Yet, as we know, the progress of our nation did not stop 
when she had traversed the continent and reached the great 
sea. In these latter days she has set her flag among its 
islands. Here, again, she was not seeking conquest. Hawaii 
knocked at our doors and was admitted into the family. A 
generous interference in behalf of a defenceless and oppressed 
people, brought to us, most unexpectedly, Porto Rico and the 
Philippines. To all these, the Church, following her patriotic 
duty, has gone that she may aid the state in making Chris 
tian citizens. Yet these lie beyond the scope of our volume; 
though they stand as signs of a world-mission laid upon our 
nation, in which, pray God, she may show herself generous 
and faithful! 



II 

THE GATHERING OF THE FORCES 

THE title of this book is not a declaration 
but a challenge. It is an inspiration, an 
ideal please God, a prophecy. This 
continent has not yet been conquered for 
Christ. Even these United States are not 
wholly and completely His. The efforts 
of all Christian forces combined have not 
achieved that result. The trumpet still sounds 

con nest not ^ e assem kly an ^ the charge, and the 
oompiet conflict is real and critical. 

Our own share in the battle has not been pre 
eminent, nor have our victories been over 
whelming. Our zeal and self-sacrifice have not 
been great. Christians who boasted no ancient 
lineage and who found their inspiration only 
in a personal loyalty to Christ, have again 
and again put us to shame. Vast tracts of our 
country we have left for others to evangelize, 
and where we did go our skirmish-line was often 
pitifully thin, with no reserves in sight and only 
the poorest of equipment. Yet in spite of all 
these things the mark which we have left upon 

32 



The Gathering of the Forces 33 

the country is an honorable one. We have had 
our great leaders, we have faced our great 
moments, and have seen some great successes. 

To-day this historic Church, which holds her 
commission through England and France, and 
the beloved disciple John,* from our Lord Him 
self, is exercising an influence and is being 
called to a leadership far in excess of anything 
to which our numbers or successes entitle us. 
Under such circumstances it is well to review 
the past, both for admonition and encourage 
ment ; to see from what small beginnings our ac 
complishments have resulted, and to learn how 
wide is still the gulf between these achieve 
ments and the work which is ours to do if we 
will. 

Not forgetful then, nor unappreciative, of the 
great contributions which other Christian 
bodies have made to the conquest of the con 
tinent, and thankful that where we did not or 
could not go they went before and hewed out 
a path for the coming of the Kingdom of 
Righteousness, we must nevertheless confine 
our attention to the missionary progress of our 
own Communion. 

* The succession of the English Church may be traced not 
only through the first Roman missionaries, but also through 
the ancient Celtic and early British Church, which derived 
their Orders from Gaul, which in turn received the Episcopate 
from Ephesus in Asia Minor, one of the Seven Churches men 
tioned by the Apostle St. John. 



34 The Conquest of the Continent 

In the previous chapter we have seen how, 
in four great enlargements, at different periods 
i n ner history, the American Kepub- 
^ G Became possessed of her wide do 
main. These were, successively, (1) The ac 
quisition of the Northwest Territory in 1783 
by the treaty which ended the Kevolutionary 
War; (2) the purchase from Napoleon of the 
Louisiana Territory in 1803; (3) the cession by 
Mexico of the Spanish country in 1848; and 
(4) the treaty with England in 1846 which es 
tablished the international boundary and 
acknowledged our title to the Oregon territory. 

Along the same lines, and curiously corre 
sponding with this civil conquest of the conti 
nent, has gone the religious conquest. Each 
new period of missionary enlargement has 
meant the establishment of the Church, suc 
cessively, in these great divisions of the land. 
We shall therefore be treading the path which 
the nation has trod as we attempt to follow the 
Church through the history of her progress, and 
we shall find our attention directed successively 
to each of these four territorial divisions. 



The first step in the conquest was made on 
Jamestown Island, when under the old sail 
ow i-int stretched between four trees the god- 

ly c h a pi amj Master Eobert Hunt, on 




TOWER OF THE OLD CHURCH ON JAMESTOWN ISLAND 

The site of our first altar in America 



The Gathering of the Forces 35 

that seventeenth day of May, 1607, voiced the 
thanksgiving of the newly landed handful of 
colonists in the familiar phrases of the Book 
of Common Prayer. The first permanent altar 
was the grain of mustard seed from which the 
life of the Church spread. Wherever the sons 
of the Church of England went the words of her 
liturgy were heard, and her influence for right 
eousness was felt. 

Yet under what almost inconceivable diffi 
culties! The affairs of the Church had been 
administered from across the sea. 

DifflenltiM 

xneonntand L^ e the Church of England, but 
much more hopelessly, she was at the mercy of 
the state. A plan for providing a bishop for 
her governance, and so completing the three 
fold order, had before the Revolution never 
been seriously undertaken even by the colonies 
themselves, still less by the people of Eng 
land. Confirmation had of necessity fallen into 
disuse. The affairs of the Church were admin 
istered through commissaries who represented 
the distant and somewhat shadowy over-lord 
ship of the Bishop of London. Clergy there 
could be none, except such as took the long and 
dangerous voyage across the ocean, made a 
more or less prolonged stay in England at their 
own charges, and returned as best they might. 
The only alternative was to bring over from 
England men already ordained, too many of 



36 The Conquest of the Continent 

whom proved to be lacking in scholarship, 
ability, or certain fundamental principles of 
manners and morals even more important. 

It would be difficult to imagine a more 
desperate situation than that of the Episcopal 

Misnndertand- Church at the close of the Revolu- 
inci without ^ on jj er menders were a seem 
ingly hopeless little band compared with the 
Puritan hosts about her. She was regarded, 
to use the quaint phrase of the late Bishop Wil 
liams of Connecticut, as "a piece of heavy 
baggage which the British had left behind 
them when they evacuated New York and Bos 
ton." No religious organization, with the pos 
sible exception of the Church of Eome, could 
have been more unwelcome to the rank and file 
of the people, or more severely condemned by 
the popular judgment of the period. She was 
the offspring of a State Church, and therefore 
to be suspected, however much she might pro 
test her separation from politics. The very 
features which constitute her abiding value and 
influence were unwelcome, if not abhorred. A 
bishop smacked of courts and crowns, of stately 
carriages and aristocratic pomp. No other kind 
could be imagined by the sturdy Puritans. 
Her liturgical worship was counted as deadly 
formalism or abominable hypocrisy, and all 
the order, beauty and glory of the Christian 
Year, of Feast and Fast and Sacrament, were 



The Gathering of the Forces 37, 

but so many rags of Popery ; from all of which, 
together with the Bishop of Eome, the stout 
Protestants of the day prayed that they might 
be delivered. 

Nor was the fault outside the Church alone. 
It was not a spiritually-minded age, and along 
devout faith and true spiritual- 
there doubtless existed much nar 
row formalism. Few there were who had 
any real conception of the Church s Catholic 
heritage, and the trials of the Eevolution 
had already sapped the vitality and loosened 
the bonds of such union as had previously 
existed. 

With such a past behind them and such a 
state of feeling around them, the little handful 
ne oonTtin f Churchmen met in Philadelphia 
ofl789 for the General Convention of 1789. 

One great thing at least had been gained. 
Bishop Seabury, after a long and fruitless quest 
of the episcopate in England, had received it 
at last from the non-juring bishops of Scotland* 

* Bishop Seabury could not receive consecration from the 
English bishops, because they were required in all cases to 
exact an oath of allegiance to the King of England. The 
Scotch Episcopate was under no such obligation. It repre 
sented those bishops called " non- jurors " because they felt 
bound to respect their oath of allegiance to James II and 
the House of Stuart. See Tiffany: American Church His 
tory Series, Vol. VII, page 318. 



38 The Conquest of the Continent 

in 1784. Bishops White and Provoost, after 
encountering almost equal difficulties, largely 
due to the character of the proposed prayer 
book put forth by American churchmen, had 
been consecrated at Lambeth Palace, in 1787. 
The episcopate, so long desired, was thus se 
cured to the American Church. The three bish 
ops necessary to a complete and regular conse 
cration were on American soil. 

Aside from this the outlook was discourag 
ing indeed. Two bishops, twenty clergymen 
and sixteen laymen constituted this General 
Convention a number no greater than would 
now be gathered by almost any missionary 
jurisdiction at its annual convocation. But ad 
mirable indeed was the work done by this hand 
ful of men. They ratified the Prayer Book, 
adopted the Constitution, and set the Church 
before the people of the land with reiterated 
claims to the possession of ancient faith and 
apostolic order. Yet what a hopeless task it 
seemed ! 

II 

We pass over twenty-two years, and in 1811 
find the Church again assembled in General 
TiwLeMi Convention. The years had brought 
her varying fortune everything, 
one might think, except good fortune. At 
times it had almost seemed as though God 



The Gathering of the Forces 39 

would indeed remove her candlestick out of 
its place, and that she would cease to exist as 
a national Church. The two bishops, twenty 
clergy and sixteen laymen of the Convention 
of 1789 had in 1811 become two bishops, twenty- 
five clergy and twenty-two laymen an increase 
in twenty-two years of no bishops, five clergy 
and six laymen !* 

To the modern Churchman the conditions 
under which the Church through these years 
continued to exist are almost unthinkable. 
Plainly she did not understand her own char 
acter or mission. Even the episcopate, sought 
and obtained with such great labor, does not 
seem to have been valued for its really perma 
nent and divine characteristics. Great con 
firmation classes were at first recorded, 250 
at one time by Bishop Seabury, over 300 in 
Trinity Church, New York, by Bishop Pro- 
voost. But the novelty of the rite soon passed 
away, and its importance was little empha 
sized. The Bishops were compelled to re 
main rectors of parishes, and the exercise 
of their office was contracted. Even the 
saintly and devoted Bishop White, during 
twenty years, averaged only six visitations per 
annum, outside of Philadelphia. Bishop Mad- 

* These figures show the increase in the membership of the 
General Convention, and only indirectly indicate the growth of 
the Church as a whole. 



40 The Conquest of the Continent 

ison of Virginia, after his first visita 
tion of his diocese, considered his duties as 
president of William and Mary College the 
more important, while the first Bishop of 
South Carolina never confirmed at all.* Bishop 
Provoost resigned in 1801 and busied himself 
for ten years with a new translation of Tasso 
and the study of botany, not even attending the 
services of the Church.f 

Such was the period of the great stagnation, 
or may we not better call it the dormancy of 
the mustard seed? Who could then 
Bu^Hta foresee the things which God had in 
store for His Church? Who can wonder at the 
despair which filled the minds of many, so that 
even a bishop could say that he doubted 
whether Episcopacy in America would not die 
with him? These things make more intelligible 
the astounding story told concerning Chief Jus 
tice Marshall, himself a faithful and life-long 
Churchman, who when approached for a gift 

* South Carolina had entered the Federal Church on con 
dition that no bishop be sent to her. Three years later she 
came to a better mind and elected the Rev. Dr. Robert Smith, 
who was consecrated in 1795 and died in 1801. No successor 
was chosen for eleven years. See Perry, Vol. II, page 189, 
note. 

t Conditions were more hopeful in Maryland, where Bishop 
Claggett (the first man consecrated on American soil, and the 
only one deriving from both the Scotch and the English lines) 
was doing a quiet and faithful work, too little known or appre 
ciated. Also, in Maryland, the Church was not despoiled by the 
State after the Revolution. 



The Gathering of the Forces 41 

toward the Theological Seminary at Alexandria 
made the gift indeed, like a loyal son of the 
Church, but at the same time declared that he 
doubted whether he were not doing a grave 
wrong in encouraging any young man to enter 
the ministry of the Episcopal Church, which in 
his judgment was destined to die out within a 
generation. 

Thus begins the history of the Church which 
first secured in America the Apostolic ministry 
in its three-fold order.* Losing on the one hand 
thousands of her members to Methodism, and 
on the other missing a chance to make lasting 
gains among the immigrant Lutherans, the 
Church seemed to slumber on, unconscious of 
her heritage and her calling. 

It would be unjust, however, to give the im 
pression that this period contributed nothing 
A p.nod of to the Church s growth. A really 
important development was going 
on. We must remember that everything, both 
in Church and State, was experimental. The 
republic was passing through the throes of 

* John Carroll, Roman Catholic Bishop of Baltimore, was 
not consecrated until 1790. At that date not only Seabury 
but Bishops White and Provoost had already been conse 
crated and were established in sees. They had received their 
Orders with entire regularity at the hands of three bishops. 
Archbishop Carroll, acting alone, consecrated other bishops. 
Through him the Roman Catholic Orders in this country have 
been derived. 



42 The Conquest of the Continent 

adaptation and learning how rightly to use lib 
erty under law. Even greater was the difficulty 
which the Church faced. In all English history 
there had been no such thing as lay representa 
tion in ecclesiastical bodies a principle fun 
damentally embedded in the new Constitution. 
It was an idea almost as revolutionary in char 
acter as that of a bishop who did not live in a 
palace and wear a wig! Then, too, the clergy 
had for one hundred and fifty years known 
nothing but a shadow of episcopal oversight. 
The whole question of the constitutional rela 
tions of bishops, clergy and laity with one an 
other and with the general Church, had to be 
worked out and adjusted. This was done fairly 
well during these first twenty-two years. The 
structural development was going on, and at 
the end of the period the general plan of the 
Church s law and order was thoroughly estab 
lished. 

The Church was finding herself. She was 
realizing her unity. This sense of unity took 
hold and flowered in a truer conception of the 
episcopate. The bishop of wigs and carriages, 
with much of the aristocrat and a little tinge of 
"my lordship" the prevailing English type of 
that day could not be successfully reproduced 
in America. More than ever, having at last 
obtained the episcopate, did the Church realize 
how essential it was to her unity and success; 




RT. REV. JOHN HENRY IIOKAKT, D.D. 



The Gathering of the Forces 43 

but more than ever also was she beginning to 
see that an adaptation was needed, and that an 
American type of bishop one who should be 
before all else a missionary must be de 
veloped. 

Thus did the Church, during this dark 
period of her history, develop her organization 
for conquest and readjust her ideals of leader 
ship. She emerged with a united front and a 
clearer vision; which was, perhaps, as much 
as could be expected under the circumstances. 

Ill 

In His good time God raised up three men 

and they raised up the Church. Hobart in 

New York, Griswold in New Eng- 

Le&ders 

Raiwduj land, and Moore in Virginia were, 
under God, the three personalities which ush 
ered in for the Church the period of internal 
growth. 

In 1811 Bishop Moore, the coadjutor of New 
York, was stricken with paralysis. Bishop Pro- 
voost had resigned his work ten years before 
and was devoting himself to the study of botany 
and the classics. The diocese of New York 
therefore proceeded to elect an assistant 
bishop, and the choice fell upon John Henry 
Hobart, the leading young High Churchman of 
his day. The difficulties surrounding his con- 



44 The Conquest of the Continent 

secration, which for a time seemed insuperable, 
were finally overcome, though in this transition 
from the old order to the new it is not generally 
realized by how narrow a margin the Church 
escaped the necessity of seeking once more her 
Orders from abroad. 

When Hobart was consecrated* there were 
only six bishops in the nation; three were nec 
essary for regular consecration. Bishop Moore 
was incapacitated by paralysis; Bishop Clag- 
gett of Maryland fell ill on his way north; 
Bishop Madison did not think it worth while to 
leave his college duties ; White of Pennsylvania 
and Jarvis of Connecticut were alone avail 
able, unless perchance Bishop Provoost would 
consent to join in the consecration. Happily he 
did leave his lexicons and herbariums long 
enough to come to Trinity Church for the ser 
vicea service which was to be long remem 
bered in the annals of American Church history, 
for it not only reinforced the seemingly waning 
episcopate, but also brought to the side of 
Bishop White vigorous coadjutors whose con 
structive ideals helped to recreate the Church. 
With Hobart and Griswold, little as they re- 

* Bishop Griswold also received consecration at the same 
time and place. For a suggestive treatise on the historical 
features of the incident see a sermon preached in Trinity 
Church, New York, by Bishop Kinsman on the one-hundredth 
anniversary of the consecration, published in The Living 
Church, June 10, 1911. 



The Gathering of the Forces 45 

alized it, began the evolution of an American 
type of bishop, better fitted for the needs of a 
new land. The men who, one after another, 
were now called to leadership in the Church, 
were bishops of a new sort. 

Bishop Hobart set himself earnestly to 
strengthen "the things which remained" in the 
diocese of New York, which sadly 
needed a guiding hand. The care 
lessness of Bishop Provoost and the feeble 
health of Bishop Moore had wrought much dis 
aster to the Church. It was a time of weak 
faith, lax morals and rampant infidelity, and 
the Church suffered sadly. 

From the beginning the new bishop took a 
prominent place in the Church s life. He was 
a moral and intellectual power. He loved the 
Church, he loved books, and he loved the souls 
of men. He was, above all things, a man of 
action, exhorting, organizing, rebuking, zealous 
for the honor of the Church and the salvation 
of mankind. He was also a missionary, 
and it was he who sent the Gospel to the Oneida 
Indians in the central part of the state. His 
life flamed like a fire in the midst of the preva 
lent laxity and inertia, and it was a fire which 
sometimes scorched. Doubtless he was not al 
ways wise, for he had the defects of his virtues. 



46 The Conquest of the Continent 

"Give me a little zealous imprudence, * was 
one of his favorite sayings. He went about his 
great diocese with energy and consecration of 
life; he stimulated and inspired everywhere. 
Called to the administration of the greatest dio 
cese in the American Church, for nineteen years 
he exemplified the words of the Psalmist; for 
"he fed them with a faithful and true heart, and 
ruled them prudently with all his power. It 
was while he was on a missionary visitation 
in a remote part of his diocese that the sum 
mons came which called him home a bishop 
than whom few have left a deeper impress upon 
their age, and a nobler memory of brave deeds 
well done.* 

For the Eastern Diocese, too as New Eng 
land, with the exception of Connecticut, was then 
called at the same time with Hobart, Alex 
ander Viets Griswold was advanced 
to the episcopate. He rekindled the 
flame of spiritual life which in many places had 
burned almost to ashes. Like Hobart in New 
York he seemed almost compelled to create the 

* Hobart College, Geneva, the General Theological Seminary 
and the New York Bible and Common Prayer Book Society 
owe their beginning to Bishop Hobart. He published the first 
religious periodical, edited a Family Bible, produced devo 
tional manuals and organized and stimulated Sunday School 
work a comparatively new thing in that day. He was also 
most active in Church defence, originating the phrase which 
has been so frequently used to define the Church s position, 
"Evangelic truth and Apostolic order." 




UT. REV. ALEXANDER V. GRISWOLD, D.D. 



The Gathering of the Forces 47 

Church anew, but his intense consecration and 
simple piety, combined with a faithfulness 
most conspicuous, produced their inevitable ef 
fect. Everywhere he journeyed, prayed and 
preached, and by sheer force of his own real 
goodness and loving self-sacrifice reawakened 
personal religion in the lives of thousands 
throughout the thirty-two years during which 
it was granted him to serve in the episcopate. 

In Virginia, too, conditions were no better. 
In a single generation the power of the Church 
had been swept away. The grants of the Eng 
lish crown were, of course, taken from her, and 
it was not strange that she became a mark for 
plunder. Glebes and other property were sold 
for a song, and the proceeds were to be used 
"for any public purpose not religious. " The 
act directing the sale excepted churches with 
their furniture, church-yards, and donations 
made for the use of the Church ; but the purpose 
was evidently a thorough-going disestablish 
ment and wrought serious hardship. Dis 
couraged and without support, the clergy in 
large numbers laid down their spiritual call 
ings. At the outbreak of the war they num 
bered ninety; at its close they were twenty- 
eight. At the Convention of 1812 only thirteen 
could be gathered.* 

It was even worse in 1814 when Eichard 

* See McConnell : History of the Episcopal Church, p. 287. 



48 The Conquest of the Continent 

Charming Moore was consecrated Bishop of 
Buhop MOO Virginia. He found in his diocese 
only five active clergy. When he 
died, after an episcopate of twenty-seven years, 
he left one hundred earnest clergy serving one 
hundred and seventy congregations. To Wil 
liam Meade, the tireless young bishop who as 
sisted Bishop Moore in his later years, is due 
much of this growth. 

These three bishops Hobart, Griswold and 
Moore were types of the new order. Other 
*hepriodof men f the same spirit carried on 

Intern*! Growth fl^ WQrk fa Q^QJ. p l aces . The 

Church expanded and prospered; churches 
were built; missions established; state after 
state elected its bishop, until, in 1835, twenty- 
four years after the consecration of Hobart and 
Griswold, the bishops in General Convention 
numbered fourteen instead of two; the clerical 
deputies had become sixty-nine instead of 
twenty-five; and the laymen fifty-one instead 
of twenty-two. The nine states represented 
had increased to twenty-one. 

rv 

This General Convention of 1835 which met 
in the city of Philadelphia was with the pos- 
Bible exception of the primary Con- 



QO Forward ven tion in 1789 the most momen- 



The Gathering of the Forces 49 

tous gathering which the Church has ever 
known, and it may justly be regarded as mark 
ing a supreme epoch in her history. It was 
then that the Church awoke and set herself 
about her great task. 

As yet the missionary idea had not taken 
deep root. Largely and necessarily concerned 
in previous years with the great problems of 
her own internal growth indeed of her very 
existence in the new land where circumstances 
had been so tremendously against her it was 
not strange that the American Church should 
not earlier have understood herself. She was, 
in the eyes of the Nation, and largely in her 
own eyes, a respectable and exclusive sect of 
English origin and Tory proclivities. Her mis 
sionary enterprises, such as they were, had 
been the efforts of a volunteer society embrac 
ing a small number of people ; a society which 
men joined as they might any other association 
for the promotion of a worthy enterprise. 
Loosely organized, a suppliant for the Church s 
casual bounty, such a society could not obtain 
a serious hold upon her consciousness. The 
vision was narrow and the results were 
meagre. 

But now two great things happened: first, 
the Church discovered that she herself was the 
missionary society; second, she created the 
missionary episcopate. 



50 The Conquest of the Continent 

A committee had been appointed at a previous 
convention to consider and report on mission 
ary reorganization.* It consisted of 
Bishop G. W. Doane, the represen 
tative High Churchman of his day, Bishop Mc- 
Ilvaine, the leading Evangelical, and Dr. Mil- 
nor, rector of St. George s New York. To 
them, in their deliberations, it came like a reve 
lation that there was a simple and vital basis 
for membership in the missionary society. 
They found themselves instantly agreeing to 
the suggestion of Dr. Milnor that the Church 
herself was such a society, and that every bap 
tized child of hers was a member thereof. A 
report embodying these principles was im 
mediately prepared and unanimously adopted, 
and the whole scope of the Church s missionary 

* Agitation looking toward the formation of a missionary 
society had begun as early as 1815. In 1817 the Eev. Joseph 
E. Andrus, of the Eastern Diocese, offered for missionary 
work among the heathen. As we had no organization under 
which he could be sent, he applied to the Church Missionary 
Society of England, who responded, suggesting the formation 
of a missionary society in the Episcopal Church of the United 
States, and offering by way of encouragement to pay $1,000 
into its treasury when established. In 1820 an abortive 
attempt was made, which was followed in 1821 by a regular 
organization bearing the present title and consisting of the 
members of the General Convention and such persons as paid 
at least $3.00 annually. The business was conducted by a 
Board of Directors who met annually and a smaller executive 
committee which met more frequently. There was a treasurer 
and two secretaries. 




RT. REV. RICHARD CIIANNIXG MOORE, D.D. 



The Gathering of the Forces 51 

enterprise was thereby transformed and en 
larged. Instantly the new conception took its 
place among the religious convictions of the 
Church, and with it there came an enlarged 
view of her responsibilities, which were seen to 
be not only nation-wide, but world-wide. 

The missionary sermon preached by Bishop 
Mcllvaine before the Convention sounded a 
note which has echoed throughout 



Church * Mission- ., -. . . .,, . ,. 

KJ society the years and is still a guiding prin 
ciple of our work- 

"The Church is a great missionary associa 
tion, divinely constituted, for the special work 
of sending into all the world the ministers and 
missionaries of the Word. But if such be the 
cardinal object of the whole Church, it must be 
alike the cardinal object and duty of every part 
of that Church, so that whether a section 
thereof be situated in America or in Europe, or 
the remotest latitudes of Africa, it is alike re 
quired to attempt the enlightening of all the 
earth ; and though it be the smallest of the local 
divisions of the Christian household, and 
though just on its own narrow boundaries there 
may be millions of neglected pagans swarming 
with the horrors of heathenism, still that little 
section of the Church is to embrace within the 
circle of its zeal, if not of its immediate labors, 
the destitute of all the earth." 

With such words as these echoing in their 



52 The Conquest of the Continent 

ears the members of the Convention adopted a 
Constitution for the guidance of the Church s 
Mission, in which it was declared that "This 
Society shall be considered as comprehending 
all persons who are members of the Church," 
and "for the guidance of the committees it is 
declared that the missionary field is always to 
be regarded as one The World ; the terms Do 
mestic and Foreign being understood as terms 
of locality, adopted for convenience. Domestic 
Missions are those which are established 
within, and Foreign Missions are those which 
are established without, the territory of the 
United States." 

At last the Church had begun to understand 
herself ! Thus she took her first step in a glori 
ous advance. 

The first question had involved principles 
and ideals ; the second was one of practical ef 
ficiency. If the words of her decla- 

2. A New Method , . , , TTI i 

ration were true, the Episcopal 
Church in America, as a national branch of the 
Catholic Church, immediately became responsi 
ble for planting her faith and order through 
out the nation and the world. How was this 
to be done? 

We must not fail to recognize that the situa 
tion was a difficult one. That which is the ulti 
mate strength of the Church was for the time 



The Gathering of the Forces 53 

her immediate weakness. An Episcopal Church 
without a bishop is like a body without a head. 
It is a marvel that under the conditions of Co 
lonial times the Church could grow at all. Only 
the distant and somewhat vague connection 
with the See of London served to fill the great 
void and create a technical sense of unity. Yet 
how was the episcopate to be established in 
distant places where priests and parishes were 
not? Such a thing had not been heard of. The 
only ideal of a bishop which existed was that 
of a man who ruled over parishes already es 
tablished, and controlled a Church already 
brought into being. It is not strange that the 
apostolic conception of a bishop as the first 
missionary, carrying with him to distant places 
the fulness of the Church s ministry of grace, 
had long been obscured. 

It is true that one or two had grasped this 
idea. Philander Chase, the born pioneer and 
sturdy man of God, had heard the 



BUhopi lonwT call of the wilderness and gone out 
into it. He had himself felt, and had inspired 
in others, a conviction of the futility of an 
Episcopal Church without a bishop. Going to 
Ohio in 1817 he was, in the following year, 
elected bishop by a so-called convention of two 
clergymen and nine laymen, and in 1819 was 
consecrated as bishop of that western wilder 
ness. After heroic labors and hardships not 



54 The Conquest of the Continent 

a few of these the results of his dominant and 
autocratic personality leaving behind him as 
a monument Kenyon College, which he estab 
lished at Gambier, he went on in 1831 to the 
Territory of Michigan, which then included 
practically all the known Northwest. Plung 
ing once more into the trackless forests, he re 
appears four years later in Illinois, where, in 
this memorable year of missionary awakening, 
1835, by a corporal s guard he is again elected 
bishop of a diocese which had, in all, four pres 
byters, one church building and thirty-nine com 
municants. 

James Hervey Otey had also, in 1833, been 
chosen by a convocation of five clergymen 
the entire number of clergy in that part of the 
country at that time as bishop of Tennessee, 
and was consecrated in the following year. He 
attempted to do for his state and the great 
southwest which lay beyond it some such thing 
as Chase had been doing in Ohio and Illinois 
with equal devotion and equal hardship. But 
of him we shall speak later. 

No doubt such men as these had uncon 
sciously been shaping the convictions of the 
Church. It could not but be seen how sharp 
was the dilemma. On the one side was the 
Church s responsibility certainly for the en 
tire nation, and after that for the world; on 
the other, the ineptitude of the Church unless 




RT. REV. PHILANDER CHASE, D.D. 



The Gathering of the Forces 55 

equipped with her apostolic ministry in its 
three orders. How, then, could the episcopate 
reach the United States and the world? Ohio, 
Illinois and Tennessee had solved the question 
by a most desperate resource by electing, in 
their feebleness, a man to whom they could give 
no support, and for whom there was not even 
a strong parish of which he could be rector. 
This plainly was an impossible burden, which 
only a few daring souls would take up. And 
no man so elected could hope to do his work as 
it should be done. 

It was at this time that there flashed upon 

the mind of the Church another solution. 

Bishops must be sent, not called. 

Bishops must be 

sent-HotciiM Students of ecclesiastical polity re 
minded themselves that the episcopate is com 
mitted not to a single man, but to a body the 
episcopatum in solidum. Not to the individual 
bishop, but to the House of Bishops was en 
trusted the preservation of faith and order, 
and therefore the jurisdiction over the national 
Church. 

If the jurisdiction lay with them, then the 
power of mission also was theirs. It was com 
petent for them to choose and create a bishop 
who should be their vicar, and represent the 
American Episcopate in places where its con 
stituent members could not go. And thus there 
emerges the Missionary Bishop, elected by the 



56 The Conquest of the Continent 

House of Bishops and exercising jurisdiction 
on its behalf in such places outside the limits 
of organized dioceses as it shall decree. 

This was a perfectly sane and logical solution 
of the problem and it was also a restoration 
of the primitive ideal of the episcopate. It was 
the opening of a door of opportunity so great 
that the Church of that day could not possibly 
have understood the consequences which were 
to follow.* 

Yet some forecast of that which God was 
doing through them must have stirred the 
hearts of these good fathers of the Church. 
Many of them had stood faithful in the sad day 
of disappointment and in the trying day of in 
ternal growth. Now their vision seemed sud 
denly enlarged, and the whole Convention 
breathed a hope and an enthusiasm such as 
had never been known in the Episcopal Church. 

At last the Church was awakening. Great 
trials, many disappointments, even sad discour- 
Th chnwh agements lay before her, but she 
FdaghM Tuk had taken up her task and faced her 
problem. The events of this memorable year 
had determined the ideals by which she was to 
be guided. She knew herself set to be a mis- 

* Some one has described this as one of the few occa 
sions when the Episcopal Church really acted as though she be 
lieved in episcopacy." 



The Gathering of the Forces 57 

sionary throughout the length and breadth of 
this land, and the lands beyond and she has 
never lost the vision. She was at last true to 
the commission of her Lord, and her reward 
came according as she was faithful. 



Ill 



IN THE LAND OF THE LAKES AND 
EIVERS 

THE Church assembled in her General 
Convention of 1835 had seen a new vision 
of herself as a host whose marching 
orders pointed toward the lands beyond. In 
spired by this conviction, a new adaptation of 
Th Reiponit primitive order had been made, and 
t, the cu a canon establishing the missionary 
episcopate had been passed. It remained to 
choose the fields and select their bishops. 

On the first day of September the announce 
ment came that the House of Bishops had 
elected men for the Northwest and the South 
west. These vague terms practically meant 
the old Northwest Territory and a newer 
Southwest lying beyond the Mississippi, whose 
bishop, to use a term borrowed from the 
weather bureau, was to be " central in Ar 
kansas. 

Thus the first application of the missionary 
episcopate was to our own land, and not to a 
foreign field. Perhaps the Church had not yet 
received her broadest vision; for it was nine 

58 




BISHOP KKMPKU IX HIS 
YOUTH 





BISHOP C. P. McILVAINE 



BISHOP G. W. DOANE 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 59 

years later that our first missionary bishop 
was consecrated for a foreign land, but from 
that time the expansion of the episcopate at 
home and abroad proceeded on an equal foot 
ing.* Probably a majority in this convention 
would not have been ready to send a bishop 
beyond the seas ; at any rate it was decided to 
try the new officer of missionary advance first 
in the home field. The need for him there was 
specially realized by these men whose children 
were looking, or it may be, already trooping, 
toward the west. 

So with solemn earnestness the House of 
Bishops responded to the call for a great ad 
vance and chose the Rev. Francis 
L. Hawks, D.D., as Bishop of the 
Southwest, and the Rev. Jackson Kemper, 
D.D., as Bishop of Indiana and Missouri, to 
which title was afterwards added that of Mis 
sionary Bishop of the Northwest. Both men 
were prominent clergy of the Church in their 
day, Dr. Hawks being rector of Calvary 
Church, New York, and Dr. Kemper of St. 
Paul s Church, Norwalk, Connecticut. 

Jackson Kemper was born in the year 1789, 
and was of German ancestry. He had received 
a liberal education and had enjoyed the ad- 

* Since Bishop Kemper B day practically one-third of the 
consecrations have been to the missionary episcopate. Of 
these bishops one-fourth have been sent to foreign lands. 



60 The Conquest of the Continent 

vantages of culture and refinement. The 
greater part of his ministry, which had ex 
tended over twenty-four years, was spent in 
Philadelphia in close association with Bishop 
White, whose faithful helper he was in all dio 
cesan matters. 

Dr. Hawks declined his election, and the 
Southwest had to wait for its bishop, but with 
soldierly promptness Jackson Kemper, having 
seen a duty, hastened to perform it. He ac 
cepted the office and was consecrated at St. 
Peter s, Philadelphia, on September 25th the 
last man upon whom the patriarchal Bishop 
White laid hands in consecration. In this act 
there also joined that bishop twice technically 
a diocesan, but really a veteran missionary 
Philander Chase. It was a good strain from 
which to derive one s spiritual lineage. 

The great sermon preached by Bishop 
Doane at the consecration of Bishop Kemper 
TheMweUng was a noble utterance. "What," 
he said, "is meant by a missionary 
bishop? A bishop sent forth by the Church, 
not sought for of the Church; going before to 
organize the Church, not waiting till the Church 
has partially been organized; a leader, not a 
follower, in the march of the Kedeemer s con 
quering and triumphant Gospel; sustained by 
their alms whom God has blessed both with the 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 61 

power and will to offer Him of their substance, 
for their benefit who are not blessed with both 
or either of them ; sent by the Church, even as 
the Church is sent by Christ. 

To every soul of man, in every part of the 
world, the Gospel is to be preached. Every 
where the Gospel is to be preached by, through 
and in the Church. To bishops, as successors 
of the Apostles, the promise of the Lord was 
given to be with His Church always, to the 
end of the world. . . . Open your eyes to 
the wants, open your ears to the cry, open your 
hands for the relief, of a perishing world. Send 
the Gospel. Send it, as you have received it, 
in the Church. Send out, to preach the Gospel, 
and to build the Church to every portion of 
your own broad land, to every stronghold of 
the Prince of hell, to every den and nook and 
lurking place of heathendom a missionary 
bishop ! 

Such was the ideal of the Church s Mission 
which we shall see worked out in the following 
The une chapters. Each chapter will suggest 
r Much a diff eren t problem, presenting it by 

the use of typical illustrations : 

(1) Kemper seeking the Pilgrim Children 
in the Land of the Lakes and Rivers. 

(2) Whipple and Hare on the prairies win 
ning the Foreigner and the Indian. 



62 The Conquest of the Continent 

(3) Tuttle in the mountains among the Pe 
culiar Peoples. 

(4) Kip and Scott, Morris and Bowe at the 
meeting-place of the East and "West, on the 
Shores of the Pacific. 

Many other problems were of course in 
volved, for every missionary bishop has faced 
a more or less complex situation. Life and 
growth can never be rigidly classified, and no 
arbitrary divisions, however broadly true, can 
be exclusively so. Yet it is true that with these 
special phases, which cover so many lines of 
missionary endeavor, the periods and persons 
of whom we shall treat were particularly con 
cerned. 

Within six weeks Bishop Kemper was on his 
way to his distant field. Not altogether as a 
Kemper-rint stranger did he go, for in company 
Mis.un.ar7 Bishop ^^ j) r Milnor he had, the year be 
fore, visited the Indian mission at Green Bay, 
and through his activity as a member of the 
Board of Missions* he was already familiar 
with such work as was being carried on in the 
West; while in the twenty years he had 
spent, not only as a parish priest in Phila 
delphia, but as an active missionary making 

* Bishop Kemper was a member of the first and all succeed 
ing missionary boards of the general Church. See note on 
u. 50. 




RT. REV. JACKSON KEMPER, D.D. 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 63 

yearly tours throughout western Pennsylvania, 
he had learned many lessons of border work 
and life. 

Consecrated for Indiana and Missouri (be 
tween which two jurisdictions lay the state of 
Illinois), Bishop Kemper found on arriving in 
his field that he was possessed of the following 
equipment: One clergyman, but no church 
building in Indiana; one church building, but 
no clergyman in Missouri ! And here he began 
to lay foundations. Accompanied by the Eev. 
Samuel Roosevelt Johnson, who had .come with 
him from the East, he traversed the southern 
portion of Indiana, visiting towns of a thou 
sand inhabitants which had no place of public 
worship. Across the southern part of Illinois 
they drove in an open wagon with the trunks 
serving as seats, and toiling through a swamp 
fitly named "Purgatory" arrived at St. Louis 
the middle of December. 

Already for years the increasing tide of im 
migration had been pouring into the new terri 
tory across the Alleghanies or mak 
ing its entrance by way of the Great 
Lakes. The population in 1835 may be roughly 
estimated at 830,000. Its area was over 
300,000 square miles. In every band of immi 
grants there had been some, at least, connected 
with the Episcopal Church, but almost never 



64 The Conquest of the Continent 

had that Church in any effective way accom 
panied first movements of the people. It 
was the Methodist circuit-rider, or the itinerant 
Baptist preacher, or the hardy Presbyterian 
minister who was to be found doing, as best he 
might, the pioneer work of the frontier. The 
allegation of the present day that the Episcopal 
Church only arrives with the Pullman car is 
not true, but it came much too near being true 
in the days when there were no Pullman cars 
and very few ox-teams when on foot, or at best 
on horse-back, or perhaps in some small boat, 
men found their way along the trails which led 
toward the west. 

Some beginnings had, of course, been made 
by the Church. We have seen how Philander 
Chase, in 1817, had been among the pioneers 
of Ohio and had early established a central 
Church influence there, becoming its first 
bishop; and how, in 1831, resigning Ohio, this 
indomitable pioneer had pushed on into Michi 
gan, and became four years later the Bishop of 
Illinois. Michigan had organized a diocese, but 
had no bishop. It boasted eight clergymen, in 
cluding a navy chaplain, ten parishes, two hun 
dred communicants and three church buildings. 
There was an Indian mission at Green Bay, 
Wisconsin, whither the Oneidas, deported from 
New York in 1823, had been followed by the af 
fectionate interest of Bishop Hobart. With 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 65 

these exceptions the Church was practically un 
represented in the great Northwest Territory, 
save as there might be a casual priest or dea 
con who for health or family reasons had 
chanced to join the pioneers; or where some 
army chaplain ministered to the people near 
his post. 

Probably there were not, in all the country 
lying west of the Alleghanies, more than thirty 
clergy and perhaps a score of church buildings. 
The actually recorded communicants numbered 
less than a thousand, though in every direction 
there were the scattered sheep who belonged 
to the Church s flock, but had none to rally or 
feed them. 

Such was the problem of our first missionary 
bishop. To follow his journeyings and to 
trace the history of his achievements would be 
impossible. We shall try rather to discover 
what were the difficulties he was confronting, 
what the personality of the man, and what 
measure of success was granted to him during 
this period of the Church s expansion. 

The performance of his work was beset with 
serious difficulties, some of which may be indi 
cated thus: (1) The vast territory 

His Difficult*** T , 

and trie means of communication. 
Bishop Kemper was not willing to be anything 
less than the bishop of all the people and of 



66 The Conquest of the Continent 

the whole country, but there was not a single 
railway west of the Alleghanies. Over a region 
comprising the present states of Indiana, Mis 
souri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and parts 
of Kansas and Nebraska, he was compelled to 
travel by stage coach or lumber wagon, in the 
saddle or on foot, except where he could use 
the Mississippi and its confluents. His greatest 
luxury was the cabin of a river steamer of the 
early day. 

(2) The lack of helpers. Enthusiastic as the 
Church had been in sending out her missionary 
bishops, they were very rarely followed by mis 
sionary priests. A few devoted men like 
Breck, Adams and Hobart, at Nashotah, or 
the little band that began pioneer work in Min 
nesota, were his chief reliance. For years, in 
many places, he was not only bishop, but the 
whole band of clergy. Failing to secure helpers 
in the east he turned with energy to the field 
itself, and in the hope of eventually developing 
a trained body of laymen and some future 
clergy within his own territory, he founded 
Kemper College, St. Louis, and persuaded 
Breck and his companions to give themselves 
for the establishment of an associate mission 
out of which grew Nashotah,* and later Sea- 

* For the history of Nashotah see a pamphlet entitled 
Nashotah House, by Bishop Webb. Church Missions Pub 
lishing Co. 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 67 

bury. But the clergy raised from the soil were 
still a long way off. 

(3) The Pilgrim Children. The settlement 
of the Middle West was largely from the East. 
The special problem was, as we have said, that 
of the Pilgrim Children. Literally so, for the 
vast majority were Puritans, or at least un 
familiar with the Anglican Church. The 
Church in the East had appealed chiefly to the 
more cultured and wealthier people. Few of 
these migrated to the West, which was much 
given over to extravagant forms of revivalism. 
The sect spirit was rampant. There were 
fine types of devoted Christian men among the 
border ministry of that day, but these were not 
common; more frequently the preachers were 
lacking in education, and sometimes in qualities 
more important for one who is to stand as a 
Christian example. Men living in a region 
burned over by the fires of religious sensation 
alism were repelled by the lack of correspond 
ence between religion and morality. Freed 
from the religious restraints of their earlier 
home, and eager chiefly to seize material op 
portunities and acquire sudden wealth, thou 
sands had grown careless or abandoned all re 
ligious practices. 

(4) The crudities and uncertainties of a new 
land. The material out of which, and the in 
struments by which, a religious life such as the 



68 The Conquest of the Continent 

Church inculcates could be formed were largely 
lacking. Schools we re few; churches there 
were none. Many of the settlers had little but 
their clothing and their optimism not much 
of the former but plenty of the latter, as is 
usually the case in a new land. Each little 
hamlet was certain that it would become a great 
metropolis. Each one of a thousand communi 
ties, far more promising than that frontier 
trading-post set in the mud at the foot of Lake 
Michigan, dreamed of itself as a Chicago. And 
how could one foresee the drift of the future? 
Who could know where railways would run 
and great cities spring up, or where the Govern 
ment would start its reclamation projects? 

So leaders of the Church of that day some 
times made mistakes of judgment. Occasion 
ally the wrong place was manned, or a school 
or church established in a community which 
did not fulfil the promise of its youth. The 
restlessness of a frontier people many of 
whom had come, not to build homes or make 
permanent settlements, but to wring a coveted 
fortune somehow, as quickly as possible, out of 
a new land made consecutive and constructive 
Church work most difficult; but the wonder 
here, as in every case where men have gone 
obediently trying to fulfil the command and 
spread the Kingdom, was that such great 
things were accomplished with such meagre 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 69 

resources and that the mistakes were so 
few.* 

(5) The lack of financial support. Probably 
there is no missionary enterprise which has not 
thus suffered, and does not continue to do so; 
and until sucji time as all shall recognize their 
duty to be either missionaries or the supporters 
of missionaries no doubt the lack of money will 
be a serious obstacle, but this was conspicu 
ously the case at the beginning of the Church s 
work in the middle west. The missionary 
contributions of that day amounted to only 
$30,000, and only one-half of that was available 
for domestic missions. Again and again Chase 
and Kemper, and the bishops who followed 
them, appealed to the Church for the pittance 
which, added to the sum received from their 
fields, would give the clergy a living support, 
but too frequently they asked in vain. Dis 
couraged by this failure and oppressed by the 
little he was able to accomplish in the face of 
the rapid increase in the population, we find 
even the sunny-hearted and trusting Kemper 
saying: Were it not for the sure word of 
prophecy and the precious promises of the Re 
deemer, I would wish to relinquish the post 

* Anyone who has seen the abandoned enterprises and de 
serted manufacturing and agricultural plants which strew our 
Western country, will realize how vastly they are in excess 
of any mistakes or failures which may be credited to the 
Church. Yet the former were projected by keen business men. 



70 The Conquest of the Continent 

which I sought not, and where I have almost 
thought at times that I commanded a forlorn 
hope. * 

Not only did he suffer disappointment from 
the general Church, but we find him also 
mourning over the niggardliness of congrega 
tions which might better support their clergy. 
His frequent appeal was for the inculcation of 
self-support that branch of teaching so often, 
through false modesty or sensitiveness, neg 
lected by the clergy. In one church we find 
him saying to a congregation where a mission 
ary of the Board had labored for five years 
without local remuneration, "You have no 
right to expect the Mission Board to sustain 
you forever. I desire to make this fact plain 
and clear to this congregation." Even this 
plainness of speech brought small response, 
for the gift of the following two years 
amounted to $65.00. 

Such was the task, but outweighing the diffi 
culties there were fundamental elements of suc 
cess. There was the certainty of 

His Encouragements ^n ,, . , . ,, ., 

Christ s promise to be with those 
who go in His name to win His children ; there 
was the bishop s supreme faith in his own apos 
tolic mission; and there were, scattered 
throughout the vast area over which he trav 
elled, the scores of faithful souls who still loved 




PREACHING CROSS ON THE SITE OF NASIIOTAH S 
FIRST ALTAR 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 71 

the Church of their early days, and whose 
touching gratitude for his ministrations made 
his pilgrimages and his hardships a joy. Out 
of this seed the Church .of the middle west was 
born, and by men who were worthy followers 
of this great leader her foundations in that 
great region were laid. 

We have said almost nothing about the man 
himself, partly because his was a complex na- 



Hii Pwsonaiit somew hat difficult to analyze, 

and partly because the man is best 
described by telling of his accomplishments; 
but the following estimate from the pen of a 
layman is worthy of reproduction. The writer 
was the Hon. Isaac Atwater, editor of one of 
the first papers in the Territory of Minnesota, 
published at St. Anthony Falls, afterward 
Minneapolis. He describes the bishop as he 
appeared when making a visitation to Minne 
sota in 1852 : 

"Bishop Kemper appears something over 
fifty years of age. Although his hair is as 
suming a silvery gray, time has in other re 
spects dealt lightly with him; for his frame is 
erect, his step is as firm and complexion as 
ruddy as thirty years ago. His countenance 
bears the unmistakable impress of benevolence 
and kindness of heart. You cannot look upon 
his bland, open face and portly frame, strong 



72 The Conquest of the Continent 

with vigorous health, without feeling that the 
heart within dwells in perpetual sunshine. 

"On a beautiful and quiet farm in the east 
ern part of Wisconsin, while not engaged in the 
arduous duties of his station, in unostentatious 
dignity and unaffected simplicity, he illustrates 
in his daily life all the Christian virtues of the 
Gospel which he so successfully and eloquently 
preaches. 

"In action he is not a disciple of the Demos- 
thenean eloquence. His gestures are few and 
not remarkably graceful, though generally ap 
propriate and well-timed. He has a voice of 
great sweetness, musical in its intonations, 
which he manages with skill and effect. There 
is something in the tone, inflections and volume 
of his voice as he reads a hymn or the sublime 
service of the Church, that convinces you there 
is heart, soul, feeling there. 

"His sermons are logical, instructive and 
practical. Some of them are beautiful speci 
mens of elegant composition, but in general 
would not receive as much attention in print 
as when falling from the author s lips. Much 
of their power consists in delivery in the 
speaker s earnestness, sincerity and unaffected 
goodness. He preaches to the heart rather than 
to the head; appeals more to the moral senti 
ments and warm sympathies of the soul than 
to the intellectual and reasoning faculties. He 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 73 

is always elevated, solemn and impressive. He 
never lets fall a trifling remark, or one calcu 
lated to raise a smile on the countenance of his 
hearers. Nor does he pause to entertain his 
audience with touches of fancy or flights of 
imagination. 

" Bishop Kemper displays in his sermons 
nothing of the subtle metaphysician. It re 
quires no careful thought or intense applica 
tion to follow him in his train of reasoning. 
Sentence after sentence, big with important 
truth, rolls from his lips, and falls with most 
irresistible persuasion and convincing elo 
quence on the heart of the sinner. He does not 
inform the intellect and leave the heart un 
affected. 

"In the social circle Bishop Kemper is at 
once dignified and affable, frank and open in 
conversation, perfectly at ease himself, and 
possessing the happy faculty of making all 
within his influence feel the sunshine of his 
presence. It is in the interchange of the gentle 
courtesies and sweet amenities that some of 
the loveliest and most striking traits of his 
character are displayed. In him are blended 
the varied characters of the faithful minister, 
the kind neighbor, the disinterested friend, the 
patriotic citizen and the refined gentleman." 

Such was the man who went up and down the 
western valleys, visiting feeble missions and 



74 The Conquest of the Continent 

presiding at convocations and councils. Said 
a prosperous western man, pointing to Bishop 
Kemper: " Yonder is the richest man in Wis 
consin. * "To the worldly, " says Bishop 
Whipple, "he showed the beautiful simplicity 
of a life of self-denial; yet he was always and 
everywhere the bishop. In the lumberman s 
camp, in the Chippeway lodge, in the log-cabin 
or the city home, men saw in the simple gran 
deur of his holy life the sign and seal of his 
apostleship. 

For nearly thirty-five of the sixty years dur 
ing which he served at the altar, Bishop Kem 
per traversed the land to which he 

Hi.A.hier,m,nt ha( j been gent Qne flfter anot h e r, 

dioceses were erected out of his vast jurisdic 
tion, and at last, when in 1859 the election of 
Bishop Whipple was approved by the General 
Convention, he reluctantly surrendered the title 
of missionary bishop which he had so nobly 
borne, and became the diocesan of Wisconsin. 
"What had been accomplished! Twenty- 
four years had passed away, and by God s 
blessing on the Church he now saw Missouri a 
diocese, with its bishop and twenty-seven 
clergy; Indiana a diocese, with its bishop and 
twenty-five clergy; Wisconsin, his own diocese, 
with fifty-five clergy; Iowa a diocese, with its 
bishop and thirty-one clergy; Minnesota an or- 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 75 

ganized diocese, with twenty clergy; Kansas 
but just organized as a diocese, with ten clergy; 
and the territory of Nebraska not yet organ 
ized as a diocese, with four clergy; in all six 
dioceses where he began with none, and one 
hundred and seventy-two clergymen where he 
at first found two."* 

As though this were not enough, he devoted 
himself for another ten years to the adminis 
tration of his diocese. He was spared to see 
his eightieth birthday, on Christmas Eve, 1869, 
but with the coming of the new year his 
strength began to fail. Still for several weeks 
he discharged his official duties, oftentimes 
writing his own letters, and to the end which 
came on May 24th he was serving the Church 
to which he had already given a service almost 
unparalleled in Christian history. His body 
rests in the cemetery at Nashotah, surrounded 
by many who were his stanch helpers in that 
early day ; and of him his biographer has justly 
said: 

"The Napoleon of a spiritual empire had 
passed away and who would not prefer Kem- 
per s crown to Bonaparte s? The missionary 
bishop of a jurisdiction greater than any since 
the days of the apostles and St. Paul himself 
had not travelled as widely and as long, for 

* Greenough White : An Apostle of the Western Church, 
page 177. 



76 The Conquest of the Continent 

Kemper had gone 300,000 miles upon his 
Master s service was gone to his reward. 
Well had his life borne out the meaning of his 
name: * Kemper: A Champion. With the 
great Apostle to the Gentiles he could say: I 
have fought a good fight; I have finished my 
course; I have kept the faith. "* 

Preeminent above all others stood our first 
great missionary bishop. He had no equal in 
otT-The raith- n i s own ^ a 7 an( l nas na( i none unto 

fnlklow-libom thig time> but there ig another who 

should be mentioned as next in honor, with 
whom, through many years, he labored in 
faithful cooperation and loving comradeship 
the pioneer of the Church in the old South 
west Territory. 

James Hervey Otey was a six-foot-three 
giant, son of a Virginia farmer, who graduated 
at the University of North Carolina and joined 
the stream of emigration which was flowing 
toward the west, landing in Tennessee. While 
working as a pioneer school-teacher he came 
into contact with a passing priest of the Church 
and was baptized. Going to North Carolina 
he was ordained by Bishop Ravenscroft and 
returned to Tennessee, the only one of our 
clergy within the state, or within two hundred 
miles of his place of residence. A Church his- 

* Greenough White: An Apostle of the Western Church, 
page 231. 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 77 

torian says of him : * His office was despised by 
the people among whom he lived, and his 
Church was held in contempt. Curiosity drew 
the people to hear the Episcopal minister 
pray, and his wife jaw back at him in the 
responses. When they had come, however, 
Otey s splendid character and deep earnestness 
retained them. He was a man of the back 
woodsman s own sort. Once when he was asleep 
in a rude tavern a local gambler waked him 
roughly and demanded possession of the bed. 
When the sleepy man demurred the gambler 
threatened to throw him out of the window. 
Then the sturdy priest thrust from under the 
cover a brawny arm, worthy of the Holy Clerk 
of Copmanhurst, and said : * Before you try to 
throw me out of the window please feel that. 
His stalwart Christian manliness and sweet 
devotion made him and his Church respected. 
He was tireless and successful in laboring for 
its growth. In 1829 he, with two other clergy 
men, met in Nashville and organized the 
Protestant Episcopal Church of Tennessee. 
When their number grew to five (1833) they 
chose Otey bishop, and a new state was ad 
mitted to the federal Church. The churches in 
Mississippi put themselves under Bishop Otey s 
care. Like Chase in Ohio he dreamed of a 
theological school. He was a teacher by in 
stinct and habit. He labored for years to es- 



78 The Conquest of the Continent 

tablish Christian education. He left his im 
press upon the public schools of his own state 
and Mississippi. He founded a school for girls 
and another for boys. But his own dream did 
not come true for many a year, when it was 
realized in the University of the South. In the 
first five years of his episcopate the clergy of 
his diocese increased from five to twenty-one. 
But a whole generation had meanwhile been 
lost to the Church."* 

Kemper and Otey were close and life-long 
friends. Though far separated and each re- 
Aciredtin sponsible for a vast territory, in 
purpose and sympathy they fought 
shoulder to shoulder. In the fall of 1837 
Bishop Otey wrote urging his brother of the 
north to accompany him on a tour of the south. 
To Kemper the invitation came as a constrain 
ing call, and accordingly, in January, 1838, he 
dropped down the great river to Memphis, 
where news reached him that Otey, prostrated 
by an attack of fever, begged him to make the 
visitation in his stead. "If possible I shall 
gratify him," Kemper wrote home, "for I am 
much attached to him and I belong entirely to 
the Church. So began a magnificent tour 
which, taken in connection with his other activi 
ties, affords a most impressive spectacle of the 

* McConnell : History of the Episcopal Church, page 307. 




RT. REV. JAMBS H. OTEY, D.D., LL.D. 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 79 

expansion of the Church throughout the land 
at the opening of the second generation of the 
nineteenth century. His route lay through 
Natchez, New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, 
Tallahassee, Macon, Columbus (Georgia), 
Montgomery, Greensboro, Tuscaloosa, and Co 
lumbus (Mississippi), and terminated at Mo 
bile and New Orleans, whither he returned in 
May. He could report that in about four 
months he had visited nearly all the parishes in 
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and 
Florida, confirming in nearly all; that he had 
consecrated eight churches and advanced two 
deacons to the priesthood ; and that he had be 
come a living witness to the Church at large of 
the wants, claims and prospects of the south 
west.* 

Even the above resume does not do full jus 
tice to the work of Bishop Otey. He felt him 
self responsible for the lands and the peoples 
which lay beyond the Mississippi, and tried to 
penetrate as far as possible toward the west. 
With two such men on the skirmish line the 
Church was at least occasionally heard of and 
known to exist but the line was two thousand 
miles long. What would have been the result 
had the men and the equipment been forthcom 
ing to carry on worthily the campaign of the 

* Greenough White : An Apostle of the Western Church, 
page 00. 



80 The Conquest of the Continent 

Church on that great frontier when the day of 
opportunity was present! 

In studying the land of the lakes and rivers 
we have concentrated our thought very largely 
Kimptr Typ upon a single figure, but not because 
he stands alone. Work of the same 
sort and under similar conditions was done by 
the bishops who followed him, some coming to 
take up portions of his original territory and 
others pressing farther on. Of Chase in Illi 
nois and Otey in Tennessee we have already 
spoken, but Polk in Arkansas, Hawks in Mis 
souri, Upfold in Indiana and Lee in Iowa, were 
faithful and efficient leaders in the campaign 
of conquest. Of them the same things were 
true, to a lesser degree, which were true of 
their distinguished predecessor. 

We are reluctantly compelled to admit that 
the Church did not fulfil the promise of her 
GO din* great missionary convention in 1835. 
Comments she made a good beginning, but per 
mitted other considerations to paralyze her 
hands and divert her attention. She sent out 
her missionary bishops, but failed to back them 
up. The men and the money were never pres 
ent to seize a tithe of the opportunities which 
lay open to these pioneers. Her weakness in 
the middle west to-day is the heritage of the 



In the Land of the Lakes and Rivers 81 

Church s inertia. In some measure she has 
learned her lesson though not so well as one 
might wish. 

The life of Bishop Kemper clearly shows 
that the methods and the equipment available 
and effective under settled and stable condi 
tions are impossible to be had in the mission 
ary work of a new land. The bishop who is 
himself his greatest and most active archdea 
con, a band of itinerant clergy, a willingness 
to carry the Church and her sacraments to 
places where there is any kind of roof to 
cover them, or perchance not even that ; an in 
terested and cooperating body of Churchmen at 
the home base are the essentials of success. 



IV 
THE MARCH ACROSS THE PRAIRIES 



THE greatest event of the twenty years 
following 1860 was the discovery of the 
land of the prairies. Long after prac 
tically normal conditions of settlement had 
been reached along the Mississippi the plains 
The undis- which lay beyond it were largely an 

covered Country un di scovere( J country. 

It is true that Lewis and Clark, sent by Pres 
ident Jefferson, had canoed and marched to 
Oregon in 1804 through the country just pur 
chased from Napoleon, but they were simply 
following the water-way the line of least re 
sistance. It is true that across the plains 
trooped those thousands, presenting one of the 
most marvellous spectacles of history as they 
went to exploit the gold lands of the Pacific. 
It is true that the great transcontinental lines 
pushed their gleaming rails over prairie and 
desert, but they were only seeking the shortest 
and easiest way to the coast. Cattlemen began 

82 



The March Across the Prairies 83 

to pasture their great herds on the plains from 
which the buffalo had been ruthlessly slaugh- 
ered, but to none of these did the thousands 
upon thousands of acres which lay between 
the Mississippi and the mountains present 
themselves as a home for future millions and 
a mine of wealth for human need. Vast spaces 
therefore lay untenanted except by the roving 
Indian, who was allowed to remain where no 
one cared to settle, and here the Church found 
him when she came to win the land. 

Even as late as 1870 a map was shown upon 
which, across western Nebraska and Kansas, 
eastern Montana and North and South Dakota, 
where are now the great fields of wheat and 
corn which feed a large part of the earth s 
population, was written the legend, * The Great 
American Desert." "When the Northern Pa 
cific Railway projected its line toward Oregon 
a benevolent government assisted it by a gift 
of forty miles on either side of its right-of- 
way and doubtless smiled behind its hand 
after it had signed the bond. What that eighty- 
mile strip, hundreds of miles long, is now 
worth it would take a practical real estate 
expert with a large knowledge of figures to 
compute. 

Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and eastern Kan 
sas were early recognized as possible habitable 
portions of the globe. People also were known 



84 The Conquest of the Continent 

to exist in Arkansas, and of course someone 
was living in Texas; but in the estimation of 
the average eastern American these constituted 
the utmost limits of civilization, or even of 
sustenation. 

1. Doubtless the discovery might have come 
earlier had it not been for the engrossing and 

debilitating influences of the Civil 

Three Causes ^^ ^^ . 

of Discovery War. We were too much occupied 
in fighting out the conflict to have time for set 
tlement, even if men could have been spared 
for the purpose. But with the close of that 
terrific struggle another great wave of expan 
sion may be said to have begun. One cause of 
this was the war itself. Thousands of men re 
turned to find their places taken, or themselves 
unfit or unwilling to fill the places. Unrest 
seized them; they had seen larger things than 
the narrow farm or village where they were 
born; they had been men of the march and of 
the camp. The government offered them free 
land in the great West. They loved the life of 
adventure, and turned to it. 

2. The transcontinental railways, while not 
devised for such a purpose, also became the 
promoters of settlement. Large parts of their 
land grants were sold to settlers. Stations 
were necessary not that people might leave or 
board trains, but that there might be at cer- 



The March Across the Prairies 85 

tain intervals a water-tank and a telegraph 
operator. Given the stations, the people came. 
Wheat was sown by some foolhardy individual 
who did not listen when old farmers assured 
him that the season in that northern land was 
too short for it to mature. They were right 
and wrong. They had forgotten that in North 
Dakota, Minnesota and Montana the sun 
shines for seventeen hours a day in midsum 
mer, and that wheat grows as long as the sun 
shines on it; and they scratched their grizzled 
heads with astonishment when it developed that 
the cold springs and falls and the short sum 
mer of long sunshine were creating wheat of 
such wonderful quality that men had to invent 
a new name by which to classify it. "Hard 
wheat" was the highest title that had before 
been known; "No. 1 Hard" came from the new 
lands and commanded the highest prices. 

3. To these was added the great impulse of a 
foreign immigration. The Civil War had done 
much to injure, but some things to help the na 
tion. It had brought her before the eye of the 
world. The abolition of slavery had proclaimed 
in the most convincing way that America was 
the land of freedom, and the serf and the peas 
ant of Europe sought her out. Into the west they 
went by train loads ; the Scandinavian and the 
German, the Eussian and the Pole, the Lithu 
anian and the Hun almost all the northern na- 



86 The Conquest of the Continent 

tions of Europe contributing to the great in 
coming tide. 

Here, then, were the elements of an as 
tounding population, and the land of the 
prairies and plains soon ceased to be the per 
quisite of the cowboy, or the dreary pilgrimage 
of the traveller to the far west. Men rubbed 
their eyes as they saw new commonwealths 
spring into being in a decade, and new states, 
carved out of the great wilderness, knocking 
at the door of the Union and proving not un 
worthy to take their place beside New York, 
Massachusetts and Virginia. 

II 

What was the Church doing? Some begin 
nings had early been made in this vast domain. 
As far back as 1805, while Lewis 

What was the 

church Doing? an( j Clark were making their famous 
reconnoissance through the northwest, the 
Christian pioneer and Churchman, Philander 
Chase, was establishing far to the south in 
New Orleans the first congregation of our 
Church within the boundaries of the Louisiana 
Territory under the oversight of the Bishop 
of New York ! 

Others had followed. Bishop Kemper had 
been chosen for Missouri as well as Indiana, 
and had made his first home beyond the Mis- 




EZBKIEL G. GEAR 



JAMES LLOYD BRECK 

As he looked while serving 
in Minnesota 




MISSION HOUSE ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, 1850 



The March Across the Prairies 87 

sissippi. In Iowa, Minnesota and parts of 
Kansas and Nebraska he had travelled, carry 
ing the Church s message. Bishop Otey also 
had penetrated the southern part of the 
Louisiana Purchase. Leonidas Polk had been 
consecrated Missionary Bishop of Arkansas, in 
1838, but after two years had been transferred 
to the Diocese of Louisiana. Tardily enough 
came the missionary bishops into the land of 
the prairies, and still more tardily the men and 
the means to equip their work, but never again 
was a great section left to care for itself as 
best it might, and discover if perchance there 
were such a thing as an Episcopal Church. 

Let us choose four men as types of all : Gear, 
the army chaplain ; Breck, the missionary edu- 
FOUT Types cator ; Whipple, the bishop of the 
of iWUip races; Hare, the apostle to the 
Indians. 

As early as 1839 the Eev. E. G. Gear, lovingly 
known as Father Gear, army chaplain at Fort 
Snelling, Minnesota, had begun to 
preach the Church, in season and out 
of season, to all whom he could reach. Towns 
as yet there were none, but in scattered ham 
lets and in the fort ho baptized and preached 
and gave the sacrament of the Holy Com 
munion. He writes with joy in 1840: "At our 
last Communion fourteen partook, among them 



88 The Conquest of the Continent 

a native Chippewa" John Johnson Enme- 
gahbowh, afterward our first Indian priest. 

For twenty-seven years, during which he 
served under the government in different Min 
nesota forts, he was instant in the service of 
the Church; a counsellor, helper and friend of 
Bishop Kemper and his little band, as also of 
Bishop Whipple and those who aided him. In 
1875, at the age of eighty years, then the senior 
presbyter of the Church in the United States, 
he was buried in the soil of the state for which 
he had done so much, and in the eulogy which 
Bishop Whipple pronounced on that occasion 
he repeated these words of the departed saint, 
which were the key-note of his life: "We have 
nothing to do with results ; we must do the work 
for God, and we shall find the fruit in the resur 
rection. 

Somewhere and somehow should worthily be 
told to the Church the story of Ezekiel G. Gear, 
army chaplain.* 

Then, too, there was James Lloyd Breck, the 
missionary educator. His ten years at Nasho- 
jwnes Lioyd tah had done great things for the 
Churchmen of Wisconsin, but in 
some respects they had brought disappoint 
ment to Breck. His plan of an associate mis- 

* For further details concerning the Church a pioneers in 
Minnesota, see Tanner: History of the Diocese of Minne 
sota, 1857-1907. 



The March Across the Prairies 89 

sion, which was to be practically a monastic 
establishment, had never been fulfilled. He 
loved hardship, and above all things he was a 
pioneer. Life grew too easy and neighbors too 
near, and he received permission from Bishop 
Kemper to found a new associate mission in 
the territory of Minnesota. 

Hither he came in 1850, in company with the 
Eev. Timothy Wilcoxson afterward through 
long years the well-known itinerant missionary 
of Minnesota and the Eev. J. A. Merrick. 
Landing June 26th on the site of the present 
city of St. Paul, under a spreading oak they 
celebrated the Holy Communion. From this 
beginning there sprung the Diocese of Minne 
sota, with its conspicuous ministry to the In 
dians, and the present splendid schools of the 
Seabury Foundation Shattuck, St. Mary s and 
the Divinity School. 

Here he and Wilcoxson repeated the labors 
undertaken by the Nashotah band of the early 
day, walking for hundreds of miles and min 
istering to the scattered people, establishing 
Sunday-schools, gathering congregations and 
encouraging them to erect log churches in 
which they might worship. The record of the 
first full year of the associate mission tells its 
own story. The three men had officiated in 
seventeen different places, holding three hun 
dred and sixty-six services, celebrating the 



90 The Conquest of the Continent 

Holy Communion sixty times, travelling a total 
of 6,400 miles, 3,400 of these on foot. 

But not content with this, and moved by the 
needs of the unevangelized Indians round about 
him, Breck removed in 1852 and established 
among them the mission of St. Columba, at 
Kahgeashkoonsekag (in English, Gull Lake), 
the first church work among the Mississippi 
Valley Indians. Here was erected the first 
Christian church in Minnesota west of the Mis 
sissippi, and here was laid the foundation upon 
which Bishop Whipple and Bishop Hare built 
up the most successful work among Indians 
ever undertaken by any Christian body. An 
other mission station was at Kahsahgawsquah- 
jeomokag, and still another at Nigigwaunowah- 
sahgahigaw ! 

Soon after this he married. A change, in 
deed, for the young ascetic who left the semi 
nary to found a monastic institution in the far 
west. But however much he changed in this 
regard, his love of the wilderness and his in 
fatuation for pioneering remained. When the 
Indian troubles compelled the temporary 
abandonment of the work among them, he re 
turned to the associate mission and built up 
the schools in Faribault. 

But again civilization and the quiet life were 
coming too near. In 1867 he moved on to north 
ern California, there to found his third edu- 



The March Across the Prairies 91 

cational institution at Benicia, and to fall 
asleep by the shores of the Pacific. Later his 
hody was brought back to Nashotah with rever 
ent love, and laid to rest beside that of Kem- 
per in Nashotah s hallowed spot, amid the 
thanksgivings of the whole Church represented 
in the missionary council of 1897. 

Around these pioneers others had gathered, 
forming the band of twenty-one, who, together 
with a la F representation from 
twenty-one parishes, met in 1859 at 
the call of Bishop Kemper. The outcome of 
this convention was the election of Henry Ben 
jamin Whipple as first Bishop of Minnesota. 

It is not necessary to describe a person so 
well known as Bishop Whipple. Not only in 
this country, but throughout the Anglican Com 
munion, he had a reputation such as few Amer 
ican bishops have attained. This was in part 
due to his unique personality, his striking ap 
pearance, his winning manners, and his loving 
heart ; but also to the conspicuous part he took 
in one of the most interesting and dramatic 
episodes of missionary history the evangel 
ization of the Indians. 

His choice as bishop of the new diocese was 
utterly unexpected both to himself and to those 
who elected him, and in it all were glad to 
recognize the moving of the Spirit which guides 



92 The Conquest of the Continent 

the Church. For forty-two years he stood as a 
great figure in the life of the Church in the 
west, and gathered about him a remarkable 
band of men. He was able also, as few bishops 
have been, to secure from the Church the means 
with which to carry on the great work which 
he had projected. 

It would be fair to characterize Bishop 
Whipple as the Bishop of the Eaces. He was a 
man of unusually broad sympathies and clear 
vision. Not only did he seek the wandering 
Churchman, and minister to the transplanted 
Easterner. He conceived of the Church as 
capable of offering a home to all peoples, of 
whatever race or color. He shared Muhlen- 
berg s ideal of her comprehensiveness, and 
was eager to bring her message equally to the 
men of his own race and traditions, to the 
Scandinavian from Northern Europe, and to 
the red Indian of the prairies, in such a way as 
would win them to her love. He knew neither 
"barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; but Christ 
was all and in all; * and the Church was His 
witness to them. 

The story of his journeys and labors would 
be a repetition, upon a smaller scale, of those 
which we have noted in the case of Bishop 
Kemper. His diocese, while not one-eighth the 
size of the territory under Kemper, was rap 
idly multiplying its population, and only the 



The March Across the Prairies 93 

exercise of the greatest energy and ability 
could keep pace with its needs. 

Ill 

The problems which Bishop Whipple en 
countered were in the main those of every 
The Foreign bishop in a new land, but there was 
Immigrant also the foreign immigrant an ele 
ment heretofore unreckoned, which now became 
a most important factor. 

Founded by people from the East, Minnesota 
had the transplanted Easterner just as the 
middle west had had him previously. Some 
times he was the same man moved a little fur 
ther on. Dr. Breck was by no means the only 
one who loved the outskirts of civilization, or 
who chose to be always in the advance-guard of 
the pioneers. Sometimes the motive was a 
love of adventure and variety, sometimes the 
inability to succeed under settled and hum 
drum conditions; sometimes it was the pleas 
ure of laying new foundations and doing larger 
things. 

But not for long, if ever, was it true that 
the majority of the population was American- 
born. Minnesota was from the beginning a 
Mecca for Scandinavians, particularly for the 
Swedes, and the very earliest history of 
the Church in Minnesota tells of work in 



94 The Conquest of the Continent 

their hehalf. The records of the associate mis 
sion under Dr. Breck speak in 1851 of a service 
for Norwegians which was held in St. Paul 
every third Sunday night. In almost every 
place where a company of worshippers was 
gathered communicants of the Swedish or Nor 
wegian Churches would be among the number. 
Our clergy ministered to these people as oc 
casion offered, although it was not until 1874 
that an organized work began among them. 

Thus we find at this period and throughout 
this section a new problem of adaptation pre 
senting itself that of the foreign immigrant. 
In Minnesota, where probably more than one- 
half the people were foreign-born, and the ma 
jority of these foreigners were from Scandi 
navian nations, the question was particularly 
pressing. 

The Swedes, because of the similarity of 
their religious customs, have always presented 
a most hopeful opportunity for the Church, 
and the diocese of Minnesota has in many ways 
been a pioneer in this work. There are to-day 
in that diocese many parishes, rural and urban, 
which began as Swedish congregations. Some 
have in course of time and by the logic of 
events become thoroughly Anglicised; a few 
still conduct their services in the Swedish lan 
guage and observe many of the customs of their 
national Church. 




HENRY BENJAMIN WHIPPI^E 
Firs* Bishop of Minnesota, 1859-1901 



The March Across the Prairies 95 

The closest point of contact with foreigners 
is through the children in social work or Sun- 
The Point day-school. Particularly is this true 
of contact among people who, like the Swedish 
Church and the Lutherans, have preserved in 
some form the practice of confirmation. A 
great opportunity offers for the Church to 
bring this gift to the children in a language 
which has become their own. Many parishes 
in Minnesota, where faithful Sunday-school 
work has been done, careful confirmation in 
struction given and young communicants fol 
lowed up, count to-day among their best mem 
bers scores of Scandinavian birth. The same 
thing is measurably true in other places 
throughout the West where Lutherans have 
been reached at this critical period. 

Such work cannot be easily treated as a 
separate and distinct phase of missionary en 
deavor. It was not usually the purpose to es 
tablish coordinate congregations, but to employ 
the regular parochial machinery, coupled with 
the peculiar attractiveness of the Church s 
faith, liturgy and order, to win these foreign 
ers to feel that the Church was their home, and 
to make of them integral parts of her congre 
gations. Thus the Swedish work in time be 
came an English work, and the statistics of its 
growth soon merge with those of parochial 
advance. It does, however, suggest certain 



96 The Conquest of the Continent 

general lines of action which apply to the 
problem of the foreign immigrant elsewhere. 

The experience gathered in the Swedish 
work, while not absolutely applicable to the 
The Attitude case f a H foreign peoples, is at 

f the Foreigner j eagt measuraD ly go> an( J ma y be 

stated thus: 

(1) The first generation, born abroad and 
emigrating to America, are not as a rule dis 
posed to ally themselves with the American 
Church as usually presented to them. Lan 
guage and customs constitute a natural bar to 
intermingling. Many of these peoples are par 
ticularly clannish, and in religious matters 
above all others men are loth to change. 

(2) The second generation, including the 
young people who have come to this country 
at an early age or have been born here, unless 
they have been taken in hand very strongly by 
their elders, manifest a decided unwillingness 
to belong to a foreign Church that is, to one 
in which the ministrations are not in the Eng 
lish tongue. They wish to be American in their 
religion as well as in the other customs of their 
lives, 

(3) The attractiveness of the Church, if 
rightly presented, is stronger with many of the 
European people than the appeal made by 
other types of American Christianity. 



The March Across the Prairies 97 

Minnesota in the 60s and 70s was feeling 
only the first pressure of this problem. The 
AFM-ReMhing tides of immigration which then 
problem flowed so naturally toward the free 

and open lands of the west have set backward 
upon the east, and at the same time the flood 
has enormously increased. Four are coming 
now where one came during that former period ; 
and they are not scattering themselves upon 
the farm lands of the west to be quickly ab 
sorbed and Americanized. New York and New 
Jersey, Pennsylvania and New England are 
being inundated. More than a million a year 
pass within our gates, and nearly three-quar 
ters of these remain on the Atlantic seaboard. 
Our factories and mines are a babel of foreign 
tongues, and in our great cities are localities 
as utterly foreign in character and speech as 
though they had been cut bodily out of Naples 
or Moscow, Athens or Prague. Only the 
buildings once inhabited by Americans remain 
and the occasional policeman; all else is of 
the land whence they came. Here live men and 
women who for half a lifetime have not gone 
beyond the borders of their colony, nor heard 
the English tongue except from their children 
as they returned from school. 

The winning of these people to our Ameri 
canism and our Christianity is an overwhelm 
ing task, but for that reason it all the more 



98 The Conquest of the Continent 

needs to be done. What they brought with 
them of education and religion is, as a rule, not 
enough to meet their needs in a new life of 
added responsibility and enlarged opportunity. 
And even if these newcomers are satisfied, 
their children will not be. 

Who is to lead and guide and help? Has 
the Church which likes to speak and think of 
herself as peculiarly "the American Church" 
any conspicuous part to play in the social and 
spiritual training of these new Americans? 
In many a diocese and parish earnest and ef 
fective work is being done, but not every bishop 
and priest has Bishop Whipple s vision, or 
thinks of the foreigner whom he passes on the 
street as one whom he has been sent to win. 
Most of us see only an alien for whom the 
Church can have no message, either because 
the quantity and quality of religion which he 
already possesses is sufficient for him, or be 
cause the Church can no longer speak the lan 
guage of Pentecost. Bishop Whipple did not 
so believe, nor did Minnesota s experience so 
indicate. 

This whole matter of the stranger within our 
gates is a challenge to our faith in humanity 
and our conception of the Church. Its vital 
relation to the extension of Christ s Kingdom, 
and to this nation as a factor in that extension, 
would amply justify a more prolonged con- 




Bishop Whiyplc and Enmeyahboirh at the door 
of fit. CoJumba x Church, White Earth 




FIRST PUILniNO OF THE SKAW KY MISSION 



The March Across the Prairies 99 

sideration. But encountering it here in the 
Louisiana Purchase as we march with the 
Church toward the western sea, we can only 
tarry to trace its broad outlines for those men 
and women who own Christ as Lord, and who 
seek to find and serve Him in those whom He 
is not ashamed to call His brethren.* 

Bishop Whipple also nobly strove to solve 
the problem of a people who are in the truest 
The Problem sense native Americans, and yet, to 
r the indin our mo( jes of life, aliens and for 
eigners the North American Indians. 

The problem of the Indian differs from any 
other in many respects : 

(1) It deals with a people inferior, not in 
characteristics, ability or religious understand 
ing, but in civil rights and privileges and the 
estimate which popular opinion has placed 
upon them. 

(2) It is the ministration of the conqueror 
to the conquered always a difficult matter. 

(3) It is complicated everywhere by govern 
ment control, and the question as to how far 
government officials may or will cooperate for 
religious ends. 

(4) It cannot result in the formation of a ra 
cial branch of the Church, and it is scarcely 

* Those who wish to follow this subject further will find 
Aliens or Americans, by Dr. Howard B. Grose, an excellent 
text book. 



100 The Conquest of the Continent 

possible that congregations formed among these 
people can become entirely self-supporting. 

(5) It is, nevertheless, in a peculiar sense a 
duty and an act of justice to those from whom 
much has been taken, that at least we shall give 
them the Christian message. 

Something was done in Colonial days by the 
S. P. G. among the Indians of the Atlantic sea 
board. Later, in the early part of the nine 
teenth century, the indefatigable Bishop Hobart 
undertook work among the Iroquois resident 
in his diocese, the fruits of which have con 
tinued to this day. When, in 1823, the Oneida 
tribe was removed to its reservation in North 
ern Wisconsin, there went with them a priest 
of the Church who was no doubt a native Iro 
quois, but who believed himself, and was 
believed by others to be Louis XVII, the lost 
Dauphin.* In the midst of the reservation 
where 2,400 of these Indians live to-day there 
stands a great stone church named in memory 
of Bishop Hobart, with a communicant roll ex 
ceeding five hundred. 

But it remained for Bishop Whipple and 
even more for Bishop Hare, who inherited a 
Biifctp wwwu i large portion of the task to build 
dSM to * up, to the lasting honor of the 

* For life of Eleazar Williams see The Oneidas, by J. K. 
Bloomfield, page 145 and following. 



The March Across the Prairies 101 

Church, the most successful work among In 
dians which this country has seen. Bishop 
"Whipple has often been called the Apostle to 
the Indians. That title more properly belongs 
to Bishop Hare, but Bishop Whipple did for 
them what few men could have done, and what 
then needed doing. He was the Champion of 
the Indians in a time of stress and trial when, 
misunderstood and abused, they were goaded 
to an outbreak of rebellion which, but for the 
Bishop of Minnesota and other peacemakers 
like himself, might have led to the practical ex 
termination of many tribes and the still deeper 
disgrace of our nation. 

The abandonment of the work begun by Dr. 
Breck at Gull Lake, and the Indian outbreak 
which followed, threatened for a 
time to quench the spark of Chris 
tianity which had begun to glow among them. 
It was in these dark days after the first begin 
nings and during the first discouragements, 
that our first Chippewa priest, Enmegahbowh, 
proved of what sterling stuff his Christianity 
was made. In these trying times he was a 
tower of strength to his own people and to the 
bishop, and was largely instrumental in saving 
the Indian work from annihilation. But the 
praise does not belong to him alone; White 
Fisher, Good Thunder, Wabasha and Taopi, 
with scores of others, showed how real was 



102 The Conquest of the Continent 

their Christianity; many suffered persecution 
and death at the hands of their savage tribes 
men. In the Sioux massacre of 1862, when the 
withdrawal of the troops, the indiscriminate 
sale of liquor and the non-fulfilment of govern 
ment promises, let loose the flame of savage 
war on the Minnesota border, Christian In 
dians stood faithful to their pledges, warning 
the missionaries and settlers, and unquestion 
ably saving the lives of hundreds. "The only 
gleam of light on the darkness of this un 
paralleled outbreak," says Bishop Whipple, 
"is that not one of the Indians connected with 
our mission was concerned in it. It is due to 
their fidelity that the captives were saved." 

But the shadow passed and a noble work was 
built up in Minnesota, with which were asso 
ciated such honored names as those 

The Shadow 

passes of the Bev. E. Steele Peake, the Rev. 

Samuel D. Hinman, and the Bev. J. A. Gilfillan. 
These and others gave themselves unreservedly 
to their red brothers, and achieved the success 
which is certain to come, in some way or an 
other, to those who love much. 

The Indian work conducted under Bishop 
Whipple soon attracted the attention of the 
entire country and became known abroad. He 
exerted a far-reaching influence, and his ad 
vocacy protected and uplifted tribes which he 
never saw. Not only in his own diocese, but 




WILLIAM IIOISAKT HARE 
af \hiln-ara and Routh Dakota, 1873-1909 



The March Across the Prairies 103 

in general societies and in the councils of the 
nation, he was always the champion and de 
fender of his red brethren, and with them his 
name will be forever associated. 

Those who were privileged to attend the 
funeral of Bishop Whipple, in September, 1901, 
will long remember the presence there of the 
Indian deputations, their profound grief at the 
loss of the great man who had stood as their 
friend through so many years, and the sweet 
pathos of the hymn sung in the Indian language 
beside the open grave where these, peculiarly 
his mourners, gathered nearest to utter the 
expression of their love. 

The temptation is great to tell the story of 
the further work in Minnesota and of the pio 
neers who accomplished it under the leadership 
of Bishop Whippje, and his well-loved coadju 
tor, Bishop Gilbert. Something of its character 
and flavor the reader will find in the books 
which have been prepared to accompany this 
course. We must now confine ourselves to a 
consideration of the second peculiar problem 
of this region the evangelization of the In 
dian tribes, as carried out by Bishop Hare. 

IV 

When, as a result of the Indian outbreak and 
the serious conditions brought on by the Civil 



104 The Conquest of the Continent 

Niobrr and War, the government removed large 
itiB r ?ih a o P " bodies of the Indians out of the 
state of Minnesota, Bishop Whipple s heart 
and prayers went with them. He could not for 
get that they had been and were still peculiarly 
his children, and in large measure through 
his influence the Indian missionary district of 
Niobrara was created by the General Conven 
tion of 1868. To it Bishop Whipple was 
elected, but he felt that he must decline this 
honor and remain at his post in Minnesota. It 
was then that the Church called to be Bishop 
of Niobrara the last of the men upon whom 
in this chapter we are fixing our attention, 
William Hobart Hare, at that time the young 
secretary of the Foreign Committee of the 
Board of Missions in New York. 

This action of the Church was most signifi 
cant. It was the first and only instance of a 
Th choice of racial episcopate that is, the con- 
BishopHare secration of a bishop for a distinct 
race of people rather than as the administrator 
of a certain territory and the spiritual father 
of all the people therein. Personally consid 
ered it was also a most unusual choice which 
had been made. Great was the regret ex 
pressed by the friends of Bishop Hare. He 
was distinctly a man of fineness and cultiva 
tion, peculiarly fitted to take an honorable 



The March Across the Prairies 105 

place in an intricate and highly organized 
civilization. Possessed of scholarly tastes and 
in the best sense a man of the world because 
he was also a man of another world many felt 
that he was being sacrificed needlessly. It is 
recorded that one of the bishops, as he left the 
meeting where the choice was made, exclaimed : 
"The Church is always making the mistake of 
setting her finest men to do her commonest 
work ! She is continually using a razor to split 
kindling. 

Yet how his record refuted all these predic 
tions and forebodings! From the beginning 
he became a father in God to his red children, 
touching their hearts and influencing their lives 
as no other man has ever done, and writing by 
his activities one of the stirring pages of the 
Church s missionary history. 

On arriving at his jurisdiction the new 
bishop found that in the area of 80,000 square 
miles which his field included there were in 
all nine stations and two sub-stations. These 
he set out to visit, travelling in frontier fashion 
over the broad expanse of the prairies. Sit 
ting on a roll of shawls by the side of his little 
tent, as his Indians were making a camp for 
the night, he wrote to some friends in the East : 
" There is not a human being except our own 
little party within forty miles. The sun has 
just gone down. The twilight is fast creeping 



106 The Conquest of the Continent 

on. There is no sound except the howling of 
a pack of prairie wolves. It is a time to think, 
and thinking, my thoughts turn to you, and it 
occurs to me that you will want to hear of the 
Indian schools which you are helping to sup 
port." 

This last sentence gives the key-note of the 
bishop s labors. He realized supremely the 
value of a Christian education in the develop 
ment of a race. 

Travelling thus across the broad prairies, 
ministering sympathetically and affectionately 
The prinoipiM * these primitive people, the con- 
fHiwork spicuous success which he achieved 
was largely due to two facts: First, that the 
aroused conscience of the Church brought him 
the means with which to do his work ; secondly, 
that he had grasped clearly certain funda 
mental principles of action : 

(a) He saw that the children must be taught, 
and through them their parents. The hope of 
the Indian lay in the right sort of education. 
The buffalo was gone; the forests were going; 
the lands had been seized upon; the nomadic 
life of the tribes was no longer possible. How 
ever unwelcome it might be to them, they must 
live under the white man s conditions if they 
were to live at all. Therefore they must be 
able to meet him with some measure of equal 



The March Across the Prairies 107 

understanding and information. The great 
success of the boarding schools established by 
Bishop Hare, and still continued by his suc 
cessor, grew out of the great need which they 
alone could meet. 

(b) Again, Bishop Hare realized how in 
jurious to the Indian character had been their 
position as wards under tutelage, fed by the 
hand of the government. It was sapping their 
independence and making them mere beggars 
and hangers-on. A like pernicious system had 
been followed by several religious teachers 
among them. The Indians were expected to do 
nothing and to receive everything. Their cus 
tom of exchanging gifts, which had its attrac 
tive significance and proper place, had been 
made use of by those who desired to buy their 
allegiance, and in many a Christian mission it 
was taken for granted that the Indians were 
to be cajoled and treated as children rather 
than trained as men. The last thing to be ex 
pected was that they should support themselves 
or give to others which way of thinking con 
tinues even to this day. Against this Bishop 
Hare set his face. He did much for the In 
dians; he gave them many gifts; he supplied 
their crying needs, but he taught them to be 
self-respecting, independent and responsible, 
to give as they were able, and to look forward 
to still larger exercise of that which to the 



108 The Conquest of the Continent 

Indian is joy and not grief the pleasure of 
bestowing. 

At the time of his death, of the 25,000 In 
dians resident in South Dakota over 10,000 
were baptized members of our Church. There 
were nearly 100 Indian congregations, 26 na 
tive clergy, over 4,000 communicants, and the 
gifts of these red men of the plains, in pro 
portion to their ability, were greatly in excess 
of the white man s record. 

After thirty-seven years of service, by a 
most painful path of disease and suffering, 
Death of Bishop Hare passed to his reward. 

Bishop Hn nig body rests in the land to which 
he went as a stranger, but his work goes on, 
and in the hearts of thousands of our red 
brethren, next to the Master whom they serve, 
is enshrined the memory of him who gave him 
self so unreservedly for them, and lifted them 
out of darkness into light. 

The issue of this great life of loving heroism 
and joyful sacrifice proved the truth of certain 
missionary principles: (a) That the best is 
none too good for the mission field, and no man 
can be either too fine or too wise to carry the 
message of the Gospel to any people, no mat 
ter how rude and savage, (b) That no race is 
so ignorant or hopeless but that it may be 



The March Across the Prairies 109 

raised up by faithfulness, devotion, Christian 
sympathy and the example of a saintly life, 
(c) That the Christian education of the 
younger generation and the presentation of the 
Gospel by the lips of their own people are the 
two greatest avenues of approach to the heart 
and life of a race. 

In telling of his work among the Indians we 
have only touched a part of this fine life. With 
the admission of South Dakota as a state the 
Indian district of Niobrara disappeared; the 
missionary district of South Dakota was estab 
lished and Bishop Hare was placed in regular 
charge of both the white and Indian work. 
After this his activities proceeded along lines 
common to other missionary bishops, and 
among the incoming settlers he found a great 
opportunity to render service to his Master, 
and plant the Church among the growing com 
munities of a great state; but the story of 
these successes we may not now tell. Their 
history was in a large measure that of other 
pioneer work in the new West. 

Here we must conclude our study of the 
Louisiana Purchase with its two peculiar 
problems the foreign immigrant and the 
American Indian. Everywhere these are to be 
found, but they were particularly the burden 



110 The Conquest of the Continent 

of those days when the tide of settlement 
flowed over the land of the prairies, and when 
God raised up men such as those whose lives 
we have been studying, to aid in the solution 
of these problems. 




gf 



THE BATTLE AMONG THE MOUNTAINS 

OUT in the centre of Nebraska, on the 
banks of the Platte River, two hundred 
miles west of where it enters the Mis 
souri, there rose, soon after the Mexican War, 
an army post called Fort Kearney. One day 
The Great ^ * ne spring of 1849 a sentinel of 
Bmer ^hat fort saw creeping up the valley 

from the eastward a curious white speck. An 
other followed, and still another. They were 
" prairie schooners" the white-covered emi 
grant wagons which marked the beginning of 
the gold rush to California that stampede of 
humanity which beat a trail deep into the prai 
ries and strewed the passage across the plains 
with the wrecks of a marching host. It swept 
the buffalo from their grazing grounds and 
effectually overawed the lurking Indians, stop 
ping for nothing, except perchance to bury its 
dead in their desert graves, as it rolled on 
ward toward the Land of Gold. 

For years this was typical of the history of 
much of this section. It was a territory to be 

111 



112 The Conquest of the Continent 

gotten over, and its mountains a barrier to be 
broken through as speedily as possible. It 
was, in popular estimation, and largely in fact, 
a desert land, concerning which those who over 
passed it thought not at all, except to fret that 
there was so much of it. Indeed, for a dozen 
years after California and Oregon had made 
their name and attracted their scores of thou 
sands, the great land east of them was left 
chiefly to the roving Indian, the hunter or the 
herdsman. 



The Eocky Mountain region is not homo 
geneous either in character or history. The 

the Rooky southern part was for many genera- 
Kounuin Region tiong under the dominion o f Spain, 

and the section upon which our interest will 
chiefly be concentrated lies within that third 
domain of territorial expansion the Spanish 
grants of 1848. But to the north it formed the 
eastern part of the Oregon country, claimed 
both by England and ourselves. Unusually di 
versified in character and climate, it has also 
been composite in its population. It has al 
ways been in some sense the home of the pe 
culiar peoples. 

Eoughly speaking, it may be said to begin 
west of the Missouri and the Arkansas Rivers, 
where the land, though still in the nature of a 



The Battle Among the Mountains 113 

plain, is rising steadily to form the foothills 
of the Eocky Mountains. We shall look west 
ward across the mountains into the great basin 
between the Rockies and the Coast Ranges, 
thus including Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, 
Western Colorado, Utah and Nevada, Arizona 
and New Mexico. 

1. Its aridity. It was not to be expected 
that this section would be among the first 
its chief chosen as a land for building homes, 
chincteristic. Throughout the greater part of it 
the scanty rainfall had failed to awaken the 
fertile forces of nature which lay hidden in the 
soil. Its vast plains were practically treeless ; 
its mountains rugged and forbidding; its cli 
mate, to say the least, strenuous. There were, 
of course, along many of its rivers and in the 
great plateaus of the mountains, fair and fer 
tile spots, but it was as a whole almost too 
grand and forbidding to arouse at first sight 
the interest of those who sought a land to dwell 
in, where they might plant a civilization and 
acquire wealth. 

2. Its extent. Its very vastness was a dif 
ficulty. One must learn to love the stupendous 
outreach of the desert or the up-flung crests 
of the mountains. Those who had come from 
smaller things and narrower surroundings felt 
it hard at first to live with so much grandeur. 
They would perhaps echo the words of the 



114 The Conquest of the Continent 

little child who, in travelling with her mother 
along one of our transcontinental railways, 
after having gazed for hours at the passing 
landscape, turned and said: "Mama, why do 
you s pose God made such a lot of room with 
nothing in it?" 

The reader of these pages, though perhaps 
a graduate of some noted college or university, 
is not likely to have really conceived the vast- 
ness of the region at which we are looking. 
Some comparisons will be illuminating: Mon 
tana, which was only a part of the original jur 
isdiction of Bishop Tuttle, has 143,000 square 
miles that is to say, one could make out of 
it thirty-eight Connecticuts or three New 
Yorks. New Mexico and Arizona, over which 
for many years we asked one bishop to travel 
as our representative, has 236,000 square miles 
equal to five Pennsylvanias. When the good 
bishop wished to go by rail from the northeast 
ern to the southwestern corner of his district 
he travelled 934 miles the distance from New 
York to Chicago. Then there is Texas. You 
could put all the population of the world into 
the State of Texas and there would not be ten 
people to the acre! Nor have we said any 
thing at all about Utah and Nevada, Idaho and 
Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska and Kansas, 
North and South Dakota ! Yes, the Great West 
is at least great in size. 







THE REV. ST. MICHAEL FACKL.ER 
Our flrftt mixftionarii in Oregon and Idaho 



The Battle Among the Mountains 115 

3. Its resources. As we now know it is 
great also in its possibilities. The man of the 
range who dotted with his herds of cattle and 
sheep the plains left bare by the slaughtered 
buffalo, found it great as many a modern for 
tune testifies. The prospector and miner, as 
the ebb-tide rolled back again from California, 
found in its gold and silver and copper an allur 
ing opportunity, and the end of these is not yet. 
The hunter and the trapper and the tourist dis 
covered its wealth of forests and game, its Big 
Horn Mountains and Salmon Eiver, its Yel 
lowstone Park and Grand Canyon, the ancient 
pueblos of the prehistoric races, and the still 
more ancient mountains reared by the Cre 
ator s hand. It was a great country to visit! 

Nor was it long before stalwart and hopeful 
men found it a great country in which to live. 
Locked up in the soil there were in- 
Irrigation exhaustible treasures of fertility. 
The lush grasses and the exuberant vegetation 
along its streams proved this. In fertile spots 
agricultural settlements began; creeping out 
ever more and more into the surrounding des 
ert; cutting short the lucrative but somewhat 
lawless life of the ranchmen, and planting cen 
tres of civilization. Soon it was realized that 
the most forbidding of the land needed only 
water to be transformed, and before long the 



116 The Conquest of the Continent 

stern mountains which had added only grand 
eur to the landscape were called upon to supply 
this great necessity. The day of irrigation had 
begun. 

Later on we shall turn our attention not with 
unqualified praise to the Mormons, but here we 
the Tint ma y make acknowledgment of their 

MMMtaoi service as pioneers in the far west. 
They first demonstrated that it was a land to 
be lived in, trooping across the prairies under 
the lead of that indomitable, shrewd, somewhat 
unscrupulous leader of men, Brigham Young. 
In 1847, before Mexico ceded the land to us, 
they settled in a desert valley of Utah, and 
made it, through their industry and the far- 
seeing sagacity of their leaders, a very garden 
of Eden for pleasantness. With all its unde 
sirable and repugnant features Mormonism set 
the men of the West a conspicuous example. 

II 

Doubtless we should place first among the 
leaders of the Church in this section Leonidas 
_ v _ Polk, the soldier-bishop, standing 

Church Work 

in the Region nex f; to Jackson Kemper in the great 
line of domestic missionary bishops and con 
secrated for Arkansas and the Southwest in 
1838. After three years service in that field 
he was transferred to Louisiana, and died as 



The Battle Among the Mountains 117 

a general in the Confederate Army, fighting 
at the battle of Pine Mountain. In 1844, while 
Bishop Kemper was laying his foundations in 
the North, Bishop Freeman was sent in suc 
cession to Bishop Polk, to Arkansas and the 
Southwest. But the field was a hard one and 
even his faithful tillage, which closed with his 
death on the eve of the Civil War, produced 
little in the way of material results. The foun 
dations which he laid seemed to be swept away 
in the strife that followed. 

Meanwhile, to the northward, small begin 
nings had been made in various places. Ne- 
Buhop braska, the great point of departure 

j. o. Ttibot f or wa g 0n trains to California, which 
on their march traversed the entire length of the 
state, had become recognized as an effective 
centre for work. Thither in 1860 the Church had 
sent Joseph C. Talbot, who inherited the title of 
Missionary Bishop of the Northwest, which 
Bishop Kemper had laid down the year before, 
and with it the remainder of that Northwest 
which had been nominally under his charge. 

What a remainder it was ! Nebraska, North 
and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and 
Idaho, Colorado and Utah, New Mexico, Ari 
zona, and Nevada ; altogether a diocese of about 
a million square miles. Bishop Talbot went to 
the West as a sort of ecclesiastical residuary 
legatee. To him was assigned "all the terri- 



118 The Conquest of the Continent 

tory within the United States not embraced 
within the jurisdiction of some other bishop," 
and he used laughingly to call himself "The 
Bishop of All Outdoors." 

Promptly he paid a visit to Nebraska and 
Dakota, and was planning a long journey to 
Salt Lake when the Civil War broke out and 
prevented him. Taking advantage however of 
a temporary quiet in that troubled region, in 
1863 he made a tremendous tour of 7,000 miles 
through Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Ne 
vada. Here he was greatly oppressed by the 
growth of Mormonism. Thousands of converts 
from the British Isles crossed the plains every 
year. They were, he says, "firm in the faith 
of their abominable heresy," but all seemed 
childlike and deeply imbued with religious 
veneration. A missionary at Omaha who saw 
them pass testified, "I have never yet con 
versed with a lay Mormon whom I believed to 
be a hypocrite." 

Nothing could be done in Utah. Out-door 
preaching was forbidden, and no house could 
be rented in Salt Lake. "Outwardly," says 
Bishop Talbot, "it is the most moral, orderly 
and quiet city I have ever seen. No saloon, 
gambling den or evil house exists in this com 
munity of 15,000 souls; yet its inner life is 
most shocking to the Christian sense." 

Two years later, in 1865, Bishop Eandall was 




DANIEL SYLVESTER TUTTLE 
Presiding Rishop of the Church 



The Battle Among the Mountains 119 

consecrated for Colorado and took the over 
sight of the extreme western portion of this 
field; and after Bishop Talbot s election to In 
diana the remainder was further divided. 
Bishop Clarkson was chosen for Nebraska in 
1865; Bishop Tuttle was sent to Utah, Idaho 
and Montana in 1867; Bishop Whittaker to 
Nevada in 1869. 

The great missionary figure of this region, 
and the one whose work will stand for us as 
the type of what others were doing 
in other places, was Daniel Sylvester 
Tuttle, consecrated May 1, 1867, for Mon 
tana, with jurisdiction over Idaho and Utah. 
The General Convention of the previous Oc 
tober had elected him, not knowing that he 
lacked several months of the canonical age, 
being little more than twenty-nine. But the 
House of Bishops were so confident that they 
had the right man for the place that the elec 
tion was held to be valid and the consecration 
delayed until after his thirtieth birthday. 

Fortunately for the Church, Bishop Tuttle 
has told his story in a book of reminiscences.* 
It is vivid with the atmosphere and color of 
the pioneer life of the then far west. It tells 
of the preaching in little towns and camps, the 
talks with simple, sturdy men, the building of 

* Reminiscences of a Missionary Bishop, by Daniel Sylvester 
Tuttle: Thomas Whittaker, New York. 



120 The Conquest of the Continent 

plain churches, the starting of institutions and 
the bare-fisted grappling with elementary con 
ditions, and it has for its setting the peculiar 
prairies, bogs and streams of the Eocky Moun 
tain region. Of course the great value of this 
book is its tale of the planting and progress of 
the Church in that part of our land, but anyone 
who wants a vivid glimpse of, and some inti 
mate acquaintance with, the pioneer life so 
swiftly vanishing and in some aspects already 
gone, can find it in these reminiscences. Would 
you know what Indian troubles were to the 
early settlers? Would you see the real stage 
driver of the Eockies, or walk through the old- 
time mining camp, or know those strange peo 
ple the Mormons one of the peculiar problems 
of our Western work? Here they are. 

The territory to which Bishop Tuttle was 
sent in 1867 comprised 340,000 square miles, an 
area more than forty times the size 
of Massachusetts. Into Montana no 
clergyman of the Church had ever gone, so far 
as is known. The Eev. St. Michael Fackler 
had preceded Bishop Tuttle by three years, and 
had built a plain frame church at Boise City, 
Idaho. Once Bishop Scott had set out from 
Oregon to visit this place, but was compelled 
by illness to turn back. In Utah the Eev. 
Messrs. Foote and Haskins had been at work 



The Battle Among the Mountains 121 

about two months. This was the sum total of 
the Church s record in the entire region with 
its population of more than 150,000 people. 

For thirteen years Bishop Tuttle travelled 
over this territory, establishing strong centres 
His Methods ^ pl aces like Helena, Boise and Salt 
rfWork Lake. The methods which he used 

in the different parts of the field were quite 
distinct, and proved themselves to have been 
wisely chosen. In Utah there was no welcome 
for the Gentile, and still less for his religion. 
It was a work which required great patience 
and kindly sympathy. A ready wisdom 
was needed in seizing whatever opportunity 
offered to present the Message without hope 
lessly antagonizing the people. The stress was 
therefore wisely laid upon the point where the 
most immediate and quiet helpfulness could be 
shown in aiding Utah to solve its educational 
problem. For Christian work among a Mor 
mon population the two day schools for boys 
and girls, and Eowland Hall, the boarding 
school for girls, were admirably adapted; at 
three other points in Utah like schools were 
opened. Another far-seeing plan for evangel 
ization in ministration to an immediate need 
was followed out in the founding of St. Mark s 
Hospital in Salt Lake. At that time such a 
thing as a hospital was unknown, and there 



122 The Conquest of the Continent 

were only three physicians among 15,000 
people. 

The strongholds of Mormonism then, as now, 
represented essentially the problems to be 
found in a foreign land. The only point in 
which the work was notably easier was in the 
fact that there was already a common lan 
guage. This was perhaps more than counter 
balanced by the prejudice and animosity felt 
toward the Gentiles and the United States Gov 
ernment. The special characteristics of the 
Mormons and the further development of the 
Church s work among them we shall consider 
at the close of this chapter. 

In Montana and Idaho the methods followed 
were largely evangelistic. Here, in marked 
contrast to Utah, the desire for the Church s 
services was wide-spread and eager. The ed 
ucational work was not neglected, but stress 
was placed upon the founding of missions and 
the development of parishes. It was thirteen 
years before Montana was set apart as a sep 
arate jurisdiction. During that time within its 
borders the bishop had himself ministered in 
fifty-one places. Very many more had been 
reached by his band of clergy. Thus were the 
foundations laid upon which Bishop Brewer, 
who succeeded Bishop Tuttle, built up the pres 
ent Diocese of Montana, which in 1911 num 
bered nearly 4,000 communicants. 



The Battle Among the Mountains 123 

For six years longer, rounding out a service 
of twenty years as missionary bishop, this de 
voted man remained in charge of Idaho and 
Utah. Then for the second time he was called 
to be the diocesan of Missouri and felt con 
strained to accept. Beyond doubt his decision 
was a wise one, although the grief at his going 
was universal. In his twenty years as mis 
sionary bishop he had confirmed more than 
1,200 persons and had held nearly 4,000 ser 
vices. The miles which he had travelled the 
country over, on foot and by stage, on horse 
back and by buckboard, had made him a figure 
known and loved everywhere. The three com 
municants in Salt Lake had become more 
than 300, and in the schools he had established 
there over 3,000 boys and girls had been taught. 
Such was, in part, the fruitage of a life sown 
in the midst of what people called a desert, giv 
ing itself unsparingly to reproduction after its 
kind. 

Perhaps in no one thing was Bishop Tuttle s 
wisdom more clearly shown than in his treat- 
BihopTntti m ent of the Mormons. Uncompro- 
nd the Monnonj migingiy opposed to them and their 
doctrines, desiring above all things to plant the 
faith of the Church, he nevertheless won the 
universal regard of those whom he stoutly op 
posed, so that the official Mormon paper of Salt 
Lake City, when the news came in 1886 that 



124 The Conquest of the Continent 

Bishop Tuttle had accepted his election to Mis 
souri, could say of him: 

"Pronounced in his opposition to the Mor 
mon faith, Bishop Tuttle has not been an enemy 
of the Mormon people. He has not, like many 
of his cloth, used his ecclesiastical influence 
toward the oppression and spoliation of the 
Latter Day Saints. He has not only been 
frank to express his dissent from the doctrines 
of the Mormons while among them, but brave 
enough to speak in defence of that unpopular 
people when in the midst of their enemies. 
Bishop Tuttle by his consistent course has 
gained the esteem of the Mormons without los 
ing the respect of his own class and denomina 
tion. We bid him farewell with best wishes for 
his welfare. We do not agree with him in re 
ligious belief, but we are in accord with that 
spirit which in any society promotes fairness, 
friendship and good-will among men; which 
encourages morality and right conduct, and 
which breathes charity and peace." 

So he went from them, ceasing nominally to 
be a missionary bishop, but always in heart and 
service bearing the same splendid witness for 
his Master which had won him in the land of 
the mountains and hills the regard and rever 
ence of all sorts and conditions of men, and by 
which he stands forth upon the pages of the 
Church s history as a typical missionary 
bishop. 



The Battle Among the Mountains 126 



III 



We have already called attention to the fact 

that the problem which faced the Church in 

this new section was that of the pe- 

The Problem or * 

the Peculiar Peoples cu ij ar peoples. The American and 
the foreign immigrant were there, of course, as 
was also the Indian. Bishop Tuttle and Bishop 
Ethelbert Talbot, who followed him into 
Wyoming and Idaho, met and won them to the 
Church.* The character of the work among 
them has been dealt with in preceding chap 
ters. We shall therefore confine our attention 
to that portion of the population which, either 
by their occupation or their affiliations, were 
especially difficult of access and required un 
usual treatment. 

1. The first of these is the cowboy, embrac 
ing under that term the cattlemen of all 
grades. Theirs was a transient and 

TheCowboy . . 

passing, even though a picturesque, 
occupation. The machine which turned out the 
first roll of barbed wire sounded the first 
stroke in the knell of the cowboy. So long as 
the plains, or some large portion of them, be 
longed to him or at least to no one else the 

* Bishop Ethelbert Talbot has told his experiences in a 
book of vivid sketches entitled My People of the Plains: 
Harper Brothers, New York and London. 



126 The Conquest of the Continent 

old type of cattleman continued. With the com 
ing of the settler and the fencing of the lands 
he was compelled either to disappear from the 
scene, or to become himself a ranchman and 
turn his cowboy into a " hired man." But 
while they lasted they were a splendid and 
dashing type which has deservedly captured 
the imagination of many people, and will live 
in fiction and the drama for many years to 
come. Outside of a Wild West show no cow 
boy of the old type now exists. But once he did 
exist in large numbers, and was a religious 
problem. 

Though the cowboy has passed the ranch 
man remains, and shares somewhat of his char 
acteristics. The Church must still adapt her 
self to his needs, and by some form of itinerant 
ministry, such as has been so successfully con 
ducted in Kearney * and other districts, must 
reach these scattered people with the message 
of the Church. Wherever this has been se- 

* In the sand hills of northwestern Nebraska, among a 
people destitute of religious opportunities, a lay missionary 
to the ranchers within six months presented 100 for confirma 
tion. A letter from Bishop A. E. Graves tells how within a 
fortnight he had driven 259 miles, held 34 services, delivered 
20 sermons or addresses, baptized 69, confirmed 59, and ad 
ministered the Holy Communion to 97 people. The heaviest 
day s work involved 27 miles in the wagon, with 6 services 
and 5 sermons or addresses. Not a single service during the 
fortnight was held in a church. And all this was in one man s 
"parish." 



The Battle Among the Mountains 127 

riously and wisely undertaken the results have 
been extraordinary. 

2. This second class is waxing greater 
rather than passing away. In the mountains 
and foothills of this region are vast 
stores of mineral wealth. The 
greatest industry to-day in the State of Mon 
tana is mining. Colorado is in like case, and 
Nevada, after its years of depression, has 
sprung to a foremost position among the pro 
ducers of the country. All this means a com 
plicated question, for the problem of the miner 
is a difficult one. Not only do we allude to the 
miner himself, buried in his unnatural work 
underground, to whom night and day, Sundays 
and week-days are much the same ; not only are 
we thinking of the families in mining communi 
ties, but also of the sudden wealth, the vulgar 
riches, the elements of political corruption, 
the unrestrained animosities between employer 
and employed, and that feverish, gambling 
spirit which is so frequently associated with 
this occupation. 

Another feature of the work among miners 
is the problem of the dead camps. Of them 
Bishop Spalding says: " These have always 
seemed to me most pathetic and appealing com 
munities. All over the mining country are little 
groups of people holding on and hoping for a 
new strike and a new home. Those who struck 



128 The Conquest of the Continent 

it when the camp was founded have moved 
away years ago, but they have left behind 
them those who missed it, who live God only 
knows on what for hopes and memories are 
not a substitute for bread and butter. People 
in these old survivals of camps are really glad 
to see the missionary." 

3. But the great problem of this region is 
the Mormon. Here we encounter a people pe 
culiar indeed, but not distinct by 
n. Mormon nationality. They are gathered 
from all over the world. They are Welsh and 
English, Bohemian and Swede; discouraged 
men and women from the south and east. It 
is claimed that 1,200 were " shipped" from the 
Liverpool office alone in 1910 and nearly a thou 
sand converts baptized in the east and south. 
Everywhere Mormon missionaries travel, and 
by immigration as well as by multiplication 
upon the soil, the 35,000 who left Illinois sixty 
years ago have become the 350,000 of to-day. 

IV 

Students of missions are accustomed to 
speak of Mohammendanism as the one great 
Th Missionary missionary religion which is actively 
MoJ2Jm of opposing the progress of the Chris 
tian faith, but Mormonism in its missionary 
aspects has Mohammedanism discounted ten 
fold. Every young man who has reached a 



The Battle Among the Mountains 129 

certain age may, and probably will, receive 
notice from the Church authorities that he is 
expected to go for two years as a missionary 
into such part of this or another country as 
they may choose to send him; and what is 
more, he will go and return at his own expense. 
They furnish him with nothing but injunctions 
and a volume of Biblical proof texts for con 
troversy. In 1835, when the Mormon Church 
was only five years old, they sent their 
preachers to England, and twice each year new 
bands are sent out to the British Isles, Den 
mark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, 
Honolulu and the various parts of this coun 
try. Two thousand young Mormon mission 
aries go out each year. "The missionary s 
outfit," says Bishop Talbot, "consists of a 
Prince Albert coat, a white necktie, a Mormon 
Compendium of Ready Reference Scriptural 
Texts, a great deal of courage and self-assur 
ance, tempered with enough religious zeal to 
arouse the attention of the most careless." 

But if the Mormon Church seems niggardly 
to its missionaries, it is generous to its con- 
Treatment verts. At the very outset it estab 
lished a perpetual immigration fund, 
which by tithes and special contributions has 
reached enormous figures, and out of which 
the expenses of those who come to Utah are de 
frayed. Not only so, but they have the promise 



130 The Conquest of the Continent 

of land and an outfit for working it, absolutely 
free of charge. Not much stress is laid upon 
the fact that the repayment of this amount will 
be their first business when they are settled 
in Utah. Is it any wonder that half-educated 
and weak-willed and half-hearted people seize 
upon an opportunity painted in such glowing 
colors ? 

Yes, it is a wonderful missionary religion, 
but you will have already perceived that there 
is nothing very spiritual about it. Cash paid 
for services rendered so much for so much 
is a fundamental principle of its theology. At 
least it is fair to say that the financial side 
bulks large. 

There has been a tendency to make both too 
much and too little of Mormonism. It cannot 
The strength be disposed of either by thundering 
of Monnomsm denunciations or by an off-hand dis 
missal. It is true that there are less than half 
a million Mormons, but it is also true that they 
have multiplied many times as rapidly as has 
the nation itself. An organization so reproduc 
tive and so dominating as "The Church of 
Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" which is 
its correct title must have signal elements of 
strength. What are they? 

It claims to be the Christian religion in an 
improved and enlarged form. According to 



The Battle Among the Mountains 131 

the Book of Mormon Christ, after 
Christian Eeiigion jjj s Ascension, descended again in 
America and appointed twelve apostles, who 
founded the original Mormon Church, the rec 
ords of which were found by Joseph Smith upon 
the golden plates hid in the hill of Cumorah, 
near Palmyra, New York. Mormons claim to 
have six sources of revelation: (a) The Old 
Testament; (b) The New Testament; (c) The 
Book of Mormon; (d) The Book of Doctrine 
and Covenants (the revelations hitherto made 
to the head of the Church mostly from the 
prolific pen of Joseph Smith) ; (e) "The Pearl 
of Great Price," by Joseph Smith, Jr. ; (f ) The 
oral revelations which may be made from time 
to time by the President of the Church, who is 
"Prophet, Seer and Eevelator of the Lord." 

Mormons, then, will listen to all you say, and 
will admit all you claim for the Old Testament 
and the New, declaring that they hold for them 
a respect and reverence equal to your own; 
then they will invite you to consider these 
further sources of Divine illumination which 
they possess. The half-instructed or merely 
nominal Christian finds himself at a loss to 
reply. 

Mormonism has what has been described as 
the most perfect and thorough organization 



132 The Conquest of the Continent 

8 Itg Wonder . which the world has ever seen. Pres- 

fnl Organization ^^ ApostleS) High p r i eS ts, ScVCn- 

ties, Bishops, Elders these are only a part of 
the Mormon hierarchy. Each boy fourteen 
years of age is baptized and becomes a deacon ; 
at eighteen he becomes a priest. Just what 
these terms may mean does not appear, but 
Brigham Young was wise enough to know that 
men love to hold office, and also that there is no 
better way of testing loyalty and devotion than 
by conferring authority and responsibility. Out 
of 144 who made the first party to cross the 
plains, 113 were officers of some sort, leaving 31 
to belong to the rank and file. 

Mormon cities are divided into wards. There 
are twenty-four of these in Salt Lake. Each 
ward has its bishop and its meeting-house. In 
Utah there are probably 400 bishops. Each 
bishop has his counsellors under him. Some 
times the presence of quite so many bishops 
produces delicate situations for the man 
who is our bishop in Utah. Bishop Tuttle re 
lates how, at the time of one of their September 
conferences, when multitudes were assembled 
in the town, a person came to his door and 
asked, "Is the bishop in?" "No." "Then is 
the bishop s wife in?" "No." "Well, are 
any of his wives in?" 

The organization of the Mormon Church is 
not a matter of officials only. The Church has 



The Battle Among the Mountains 133 

its hand and a vigorous one upon every act 
and condition of human life. Tithes are uni 
versally expected, and free-will offerings in ad 
dition. All these went into the hands of Brig- 
ham Young to be spent exactly as he chose 
without rendering an account to any one. Even 
the theatres and other amusements are under 
the control of and managed by the Church. The 
Church tells a man not only what he must be 
lieve and what laws he must obey, but it prac 
tically dictates the details of his daily life and 
business. Inquisitors go periodically from 
house to house, two by two for the Mormon 
Church never sends one man alone, be he mis 
sionary or city official and ask the most 
searching questions, which must be answered; 
and those answers will be repeated to the secret 
council of the priesthood. Brigham Young was 
undoubtedly one of the greatest organizers and 
leaders of men which this country has pro 
duced. 

Another strength of the Mormon Church is 
its appeal to sacrifice. It demands much of its 
3. its Appeal people, and it is a significant trait of 
to sacrifice human nature that we love best that 
for the sake of which we have been called to 
suffer. There were no more determined up 
holders of polygamy than the Mormon women 
who personally suffered most by it. They had 
been taught it as a religious duty, and felt in 



134 The Conquest of the Continent 

it a call to self-sacrifice. An illustration of 
this is found in the fact that the United States 
Government at one time granted universal suf 
frage to Utah, expecting that the wronged 
women of Mormondom would arise and banish 
polygamy. Just the reverse was the case, and 
the suffrage was later withdrawn. 

The Mormons claim an Apostolic Succession 
not only of the New but of the Old Testa- 

4. iti "Apo- ment. They say that John the Bap- 
uii. Bu..e3.n. tist appear ed to Joseph Smith and 

Oliver Cowdery and admitted them to the 
"Aaronic priesthood." Thereupon Joseph 
baptized Oliver by immersion and Oliver in 
his turn immediately baptized Joseph. Later 
Saints Peter and James and John appeared to 
the two men aforesaid and admitted them to the 
Melchisedec priesthood. Joseph then ordained 
Oliver an elder and Oliver ordained Joseph. 

Crude and sacrilegious as all this may seem, 
it is very real to the devout Mormon, and con 
stitutes a fountain of priestly authority which 
13 already fortified against all counter claims 
which may be adduced. 

They have an infallible fountain of revela 
tion. The Pope himself must yield precedence 
to the president of the Mormon 

5. Its Never- 
failing Revelation Church, for the Bishop of Rome is 

infallible only in faith and morals, while Brig- 
ham Young was not only infallible when he 




o ~ 

3 "e 



The Battle Among the Mountains 135 

spoke on these, but when he issued directions 
about the care of children, the rotation of crops 
and the raising of hogs. 

The Mormons are taught the constant duty 
of prayer. Formal to a considerable extent it 
e KB Practice ma y ^ e materialistic in conception 
of Prayer ^ undoubtedly i g ; hut public and pri 
vate worship, prayer in the family, prayer at 
meals, and even prayer at social dances is en 
joined and practised. 

Such are some of the elements of the strength 
in Mormonism. Its weaknesses are also many, 
weaknesses cf Chief among them are : 

1. Polygamy. This has in large 
measure passed away in practice, but the stigma 
of its promulgation remains a reproach upon 
the Mormon Church. It is the opinion of the 
most careful observers that polygamy is 
doomed; not because of the law of the state, 
but because it is opposed to the better educated 
moral judgment of the young Mormon men and 
women of to-day. But that such a thing could 
have been inculcated and practised by a re 
ligious body calling itself Christian is an in 
fallible sign of vital weakness within. 

2. The Mormon faith is utterly material 
istic. Their idea of God and of the spiritual 
world is more than anthropomorphic, it is 
hopelessly "of the earth, earthy." A Mormon 



136 The Conquest of the Continent 

elder said to a Christian missionary, "God is 
certainly a man, for the Bible says that he 
shaved his beard with a hired razor!"* God 
to them is a somewhat enlarged Adam, and the 
future life, in which the "saints" will them 
selves have become gods, has all the sordid and 
material elements, while it may lack the sen 
sual glow of the Mohammedan paradise. 

A missionary tells of visiting the house 
of a Mormon bishop and finding his wife 
engaged in making up the tithing reports. 
"This," she said, "is the Book of Life, and out 
of it the Mormons will be judged." It is un 
doubtedly true that a Mormon expects a quid 
pro quo, a thousand-fold increased, for the good 
works which he practises here. 

An example of the crass materialism of their 
doctrine, and also of the unscrupulous shrewd 
ness of their leader may be found in the follow 
ing story: 

"It is said that a Welshman with one leg 
had been converted on the promise that Brig- 
ham could cause a new leg to grow. He 
reached Salt Lake, and forthwith presented 
himself at the Zion House Office, and was con 
fronted by the great man. 

" And so you want a new leg, do you? said 

* A grotesque misunderstanding of Isaiah 7 : 20, where God, 
through the prophet, threatens to destroy Judah by the kings 
of Assyria. 



The Battle Among the Mountains 137 

Brigham. Well, I can give it you, but re 
member that all the attributes you have in this 
life will be resurrected at the last day. Now, 
you have already had two legs, and if I create 
for you a third, in eternity you will be a mon 
strosity, and will have three legs. Besides, 
you are already old and cannot live much 
longer. Choose therefore between a new leg 
here and three in heaven. 

* The poor fellow naturally decided to try to 
be content with one leg here that he might have 
only two hereafter." 

3. A third weakness of the Mormon religion 
is its utter intolerance of any other. At a time 
when these people could be kept separate from 
the rest of the world this was an element of 
strength rather than weakness, but as they go 
out and come into contact with the results of a 
Christian civilization, as they take advantage 
of the opportunities for a higher education, the 
contrast must make it increasingly hard for 
Mormon young men and women to maintain 
their sincere and simple faith in the alleged 
revelations of their Church. Mormonism 
brooks nothing but absolute submission, and 
this it grows more and more difficult for edu 
cated persons to give. 

These are some of the weaknesses. Many 
others might be added. Bishop Tuttle in his 
Reminiscences has given an exceedingly dis- 



138 The Conquest of the Continent 

criminating and sympathetic chapter on the 
Mormons, the study of which will throw many 
valuable side-lights upon the question. He 
summarizes the impressions there recorded in 
the following words : 

"If one considers the religious earnestness 
that belief in revelation begets, an earnestness 
nourished and perpetuated by prayer and at 
tendance on divine ordinances, and made deep 
and strong by self-sacrifice in the giving of 
tithes of money, of time, and of strength in mis 
sionary work, one will not be surprised to find 
in Mormonism an amazing vigor, even though 
for forty-four years it crucified the nature of 
woman, for thirty-four years defied the laws 
of the land, and in all its existence has seemed 
little more than a laughing-stock to the intelli 
gence of mankind." 

How may the Church help these people! 
Bishop Spalding gives the following clear 
Methodiofwork statement of the policy pursued by 
Among Mormons ug j n d ea ii n g w jth the Mormons : 

* l Three methods are in vogue of dealing with 
the Mormons. One has been tried by the de 
nominations, who seek to batter Mormonism 
down with opprobrium. The second is that of 
the Eomanists the plan of building a majestic 
cathedral on a commanding site in Salt Lake 
City and leaving the front door open. The third 



The Battle Among the Mountains 139 

is the course adopted by our Church, of avoid 
ing politics and polemics, preaching positively 
the historic gospel. 

"The last we believe to be the best method. 
The Roman Church contributes nothing to the 
solution of the difficulty. The Protestants, by 
their numbers, their energy, and the financial 
backing they enjoy, have done very much 
through their mission schools; but their mili 
tant and derisive attitude has compromised 
their evangelical message. . . . The Lat 
ter Day Saints do not get, as a rule, the sym 
pathy extended to members of other mistaken 
religions ; they are made to feel that there is a 
gulf fixed between them and orthodox Chris 
tians. . . . It is the aim of our Church to 
avoid this spirit of suspicion and hostility and 
to confine itself to positive and constructive ef 
fort. By this means it hopes to accelerate the 
natural process of Mormon evolution from the 
state of mind which accepts Blood Atonement 
and polygamy up to that which is only satis 
fied with the Christian standards. Mormonism 
during the past fifty years has been changed, 
developed, uplifted by outside influences; and 
it is now assuming the likeness of an ordinary 
Christian sect. Our Church realizes the trans 
formation, and, welcoming it, seeks to push it 
to its consummation. No other policy appears 
to promise results." 



140 The Conquest of the Continent 

Before leaving the Mormon problem we must 
remind ourselves that year after year the num- 
ourDutyto Der ^ Gentiles grows in Mormon 
the -Gentiles" states ; that more and more the pop 
ulations of the West are being fused, and while 
this will act beneficially in breaking down many 
of the barriers of Mormonism, it means also 
that thousands of Christian men and women 
are living where they have no religious oppor 
tunities save those which Mormonism offers. 
Our first and our largest duty is to them. What 
can there be for children brought up in com 
munities overwhelmingly Mormon, and com 
pelled, if they are to receive any religious in 
struction, to receive it in a Mormon Sunday- 
school? Or, perhaps to find husband or wife 
in a Mormon boy or girl? It was a shocking, 
but no doubt a true thing which one woman so 
circumstanced said to a missionary: "I don t 
believe in Mormonism, but I send my children 
to their Sunday-school, and when they come 
back I tell them that everything they heard is 
untrue ! 

The possibilities of the land of the mountains 
and hills are as yet unwritten and in a measure 
The Future unknown, but it is no idle dream 
of tiui Lnd which sees in the future a mighty 
population covering this wonderful region. The 
United States Government touches it with the 



The Battle Among the Mountains 141 

fairy wand of irrigation, and behold, a garden 
of Eden blossoms where was once only sand 
and sage brush. Its riches of gold and silver, 
copper and iron, exhaustless as they seem, are 
not perhaps its greatest wealth. 

If the Church is to exercise among these fu 
ture millions her beneficent influence, we must 
sow widely and cultivate carefully, bearing in 
our hearts and upon our consciences the words 
uttered as praise, but still more as prayer: 
"0 ye Mountains and Hills, bless ye the Lord: 
praise Him, and magnify Him for ever." 



VI 



PLANTING THE STANDARD ON THE 
SHORES OF THE PACIFIC 

IT is said in California that if by any chance 
Columbus could have made his landfall on 
the Pacific rather than the Atlantic coast, 
Boston would not yet have been discovered ; but 
it would seem that this statement gives too little 
Boston and credit to the pioneer spirit of the 
California American people, and possibly a 
trifle too much to the climate of California, At 
any rate, even Californians will doubtless be 
thankful that Boston thus providentially es 
caped oblivion. 

It is interesting in this connection to read 
what Boston once thought of the Pacific Coast. 
After Marcus Whitman had opened a trail to 
Oregon and John C. Fremont had pushed 
through the Salt Lake Valley to California, it 
was proposed in the United States Congress to 
establish a mail route from Independence, Mis 
souri, to the mouth of the Columbia River. 
Daniel Webster, in a speech before the Senate, 
expressed the popular estimate: "What do we 

142 



On the Shores of the Pacific 143 

want," he said, "with this vast worthless area, 
this region of savages and wild beasts, of des 
erts, of whirling sands and whirlwinds of dust, 
of cactus and prairie dogs f To what use could 
we ever hope to put these great deserts, or 
those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable, 
and covered to their very base with eternal 
snow? What can we ever hope to do with the 
western coast of 8,000 miles, rock-bound, cheer 
less, uninviting, and not a harbor on it? Mr. 
President, I will never vote one cent from the 
public treasury to place the Pacific Coast one 
inch nearer to Boston than it now is." 

It is easy to smile at such an opinion ex 
pressed by such a man, but perhaps some of 
the judgments which we are forming to-day 
will within a generation need quite as thorough 
a revision. 



Though Columbus did not, yet in a sense the 

Church did make her landfall on the Pacific 

Coast. The first Christian service 

An Ancient 

L " d held there by Master Fletcher, 

chaplain of Sir Francis Drake in 1579 was in 
the language of the Book of Common Prayer, 
and is commemorated by a cross in Golden 
Gate Park, San Francisco. Civilization, too, 
may be said to have found its first foothold 
here. The oldest house in the United States 



144 The Conquest of the Continent 

is not in Jamestown nor Plymouth, but in 
Santa Fe. Ancient also is this land as a field 
of missionary endeavor, where the devoted 
Franciscans founded their missions and con 
ducted that marvellous Christianizing of the 
Indians, beginning at San Diego in 1769. 

Shut away beyond its barrier of mountains, 
more directly in contact with Asia than with 
American * ne eas tern part of the United 

colonization States, twice as remote from the 
Atlantic seaboard by the shortest route as 
was England, California in 1840 was untouched 
by American influence. The first company of 
immigrants arrived in the Sacramento Valley 
in 1841. They found there, already long estab 
lished, the rule of the Spaniard, who had no 
welcome for them. A few scattered Americans 
had preceded them, and with these they asso 
ciated themselves. So weak was the hold of the 
Mexican government upon its distant province 
that glad as it would have been to dispossess 
the gringos it could not do so. In a few years 
there were four or five thousand of them scat 
tered through the valleys and over the plains 
of California. It was not long before the evil 
rule of Mexico forced California to declare her 
independence, with the result that Mexico was 
the more willing to cede her rebellious terri 
tory to the United States in 1848. 

In Oregon also, ten years earlier than in 



On the Shores of the Pacific 145 

California, an American settlement had been 
begun. Marcus Whitman, who by his remark 
able ride to the East at the time when the Ore 
gon boundary question was about to be settled 
probably saved a large and valuable territory 
to the United States, brought back with him the 
first great immigrant train over the "Oregon 
trail." 

But the results of normal effort to secure im 
migration were as nothing compared with the 
immigration which came of itself 
after James W. Marshall, in Janu 
ary, 1848, had picked up some shining bits of 
yellow metal in the tail-race above Sutter s mill. 
The thing has scarcely been paralleled in the 
history of the world. The inhabitants of the 
country flocked to the Sacramento and its tribu 
taries armed with pans and shovels. In San 
Francisco and the other towns business was at a 
standstill. Ships stood in the harbors aban 
doned by their crews. Picks, shovels and pans 
commanded fabulous prices. Oregon was al 
most deserted by its men. That fall and winter 
the news covered the land and ran around the 
world. The following year strings of wagons 
began to gather at the Missouri, and by the 
early summer 25,000 had moved toward the 
West. Some went by the old Oregon trail, but 
this was too long for the eager, fretting spirit 
of most, and a new pathway to California was 



146 The Conquest of the Continent 

broken through Nevada and the Sierras. Two 
years after the discovery of gold California had 
nearly 100,000 people, and San Francisco had 
become the commercial centre of the West. 

With the Forty-niners went a clergyman of 
the Church, the Eev. Flavel Scott Mines, who 
oar Tint ^ad the distinction of erecting our 
church fi rs t. building on the Pacific Coast 

Trinity Church, San Francisco, which was 
opened on October 28, 1849. It was a rude 
little building, whose picture is shown in an 
old missionary periodical. Three women are 
at the door about to enter. They were put into 
the picture because they represented the entire 
female membership of the congregation at that 
time. Mr. Mines had the unique experience of 
ministering to a congregation where the men 
were always in excess of the women. Bishop 
Kip says of him: "He was a man of energy 
and talents, and nothing but his failing health 
and early death prevented the accomplishment 
of all his hopes." 

Things moved rapidly in those days, and in 
1850 we find the first convention of the Church 
The pint in California in session at San 

Francisco, with six clergy present. 
They did not regard themselves as necessarily 
a part of the Church in the United States ; they 
ignored the name "Protestant Episcopal," 




IBM! a 






5 

u o 

5C 



* 2 

t* * 






On the Shores of the Pacific 147 

calling themselves "The Church in California," 
and they seriously considered asking for the 
episcopate from the Greek Church in Alaska 
which indeed was much nearer to them in that 
day than was the Church in the East. 

At the end of two years those swift changes 
which marked the gold country had swept away 
The Tint the little band of clergy. Some had 
Bishopi removed, some were smitten with 

the gold fever, some had died among whom 
was the Eev. Mr. Mines. The vestry of Trinity 
Church wrote to friends in the East seeking a 
successor, and among others the suggestion of 
a removal to California was made to the Rev. 
William Ingraham Kip, rector of St. Paul s 
Church, Albany. The idea fascinated him. He 
even went so far as to consult his old friend 
and preceptor, Bishop Whittingham, upon the 
matter. "Yes," said the bishop, "you must 
go to California, but not as a presbyter. We 
must send you in another capacity." Doubt 
less it was this which resulted in Dr. Kip s 
election at the convention of 1853 to be the mis 
sionary bishop of California. At the same time 
Thomas Fielding Scott was sent as missionary 
bishop to Oregon. Thus the Church on the Pa 
cific Coast received its bishops more promptly 
than had been the case in other parts of the 
country, but too long after other important 
Christian bodies had established themselves. 



148 The Conquest of the Continent 

Bishop Kip in his interesting volume, * l Early 
Days of My Episcopate, tells the story of his 
journey to California by way of the 
Isthmus. It is full of incident, end 
ing with the shipwreck in the harbor of San 
Diego of the " Golden Gate," the vessel on 
which he sailed from Panama. They trans 
ferred to another vessel and reached San Fran 
cisco on the fortieth day after leaving New 
York. Two church buildings and one clergy 
man represented the entire equipment in Cali 
fornia. 

Within three hours of his arrival Bishop Kip 
was officiating and preaching in Trinity 
Church, San Francisco, and from that time, 
through an episcopate which covered nearly 
forty years, he was the champion and the up- 
builder of the Church in his great field. His 
successor in the episcopate says of him: "His 
noble character has left its impress at many 
points upon the diocese to which, under God, 
he gave shape, and in his commanding and 
genial presence the Church was blest with the 
power to confront and overcome many diffi 
culties which beset her in those early days." 

An amazing growth of population followed 
the arrival of Bishop Kip. The feverish and un- 
rea ^ conditions of the earlier days 
were in time adjusted. Men still 
made fortunes, but not with the sole thought of 



On the Shores of the Pacific 149 

returning to the East to spend them; nor did 
they make them in mines alone. The example 
set by the old monks who founded the early 
missions was followed by many who turned 
themselves to the cultivation of the soil and the 
establishing of homes. The wonderful agricul 
tural possibilities of the country came to be 
understood. 

The very success of California in material 
things made the success of the Church more 
difficult. With the small means at hand and 
the few clergy available, anything like proper 
ministration to the incoming hoards was well- 
nigh impossible. In 1857, however, four years 
after Bishop Kip s arrival, California declined 
longer to be a missionary district and a pen 
sioner upon the Church. A diocese was organ 
ized and Bishop Kip was elected as its first dio 
cesan. 

In 1874 California s one thousand miles of 
coast line was divided and the northern part 
A Missionary was se ^ ^ as a missionary district. 



District created rpj^g new ^strict, known as North- 
ern California, included the greater part of the 
mining and lumbering region of the state. Its 
only important city is Sacramento, the state 
capital, and the greater part of its area is 
made up of the rugged and beautiful but dif 
ficult country of the Coast Range and the 



150 The Conquest of the Continent 

Sierras, between which lies the valley of the 
Sacramento Biver. In such a country of min 
ing and lumber camps and small market towns 
the growth of the Church was slow. Though 
the land produced much wealth, it kept little, 
for the men who owned the mines and cut the 
forests lived in San Francisco or St. Louis or 
New York. 

But Bishop Wingfield, when he came to his 
district, found there two men whose memories 

An oid Friend are a l esse d heritage to the Church. 
Moredwest Tlie firgt wag j ames Lloyd Breck. 

Here at Benicia, on the straits of Carquinez, 
he had planted St. Augustine s College, a school 
for boys, and St. Mary s Hall for girls, to 
which he gave the last nine years of his re 
markable life. He laid excellent foundations, 
but in this third venture he did not soon enough 
obtain, as he had done in the two preceding 
ones, the adequate support of the Church. His 
death, which occurred two years after Bishop 
Wingfield s arrival, was a staggering blow to 
the new district. The schools, not yet on a suf 
ficiently firm footing, were sold for debt at 
public auction. Bishop Wingfield bought them 
with his own money and carried them on at 
great self-sacrifice. In 1889 the wanton mur 
der of the bishop s son, who was head-master 
of St. Augustine s, brought the schools to an 
end and forever clouded the life of his father. 





Sunday Ready for Service Monday Ready for a tramp 




Placermlle., the Home of Charles Caleb Pierce 
A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS 



On the Shores of the Pacific 151 

Breck s last work stands dismantled and aban 
doned, a reminder of how the Church has some 
times failed her great leaders in their hour of 
need. 

Wisconsin, Minnesota and California Na- 
shotah, Seabury and St. Augustine s ! What a 
record for one man ! That one of these is dead 
argues no lack of wisdom or faith or courage 
in this great pioneer.* 

But Northern California is the scene of still 
another story not so tragic, but equally touch- 
A Modem ^S- ^ shows what given the man 
st. Francis fa e Church may do among re 
mote and scattered people. But always, given 
the man! 

Charles Caleb Pierce, whom Bishop More- 
land calls "a modern St. Francis," devoted 
himself to the needs of the scattered people in 
a rough and sparsely settled part of the state. 
Without private means and refusing a salary, 
believing that the people whom he served would 
provide for him, for forty-two years he tramped 
from hamlet to hamlet and camp to camp 
through El Dorado County. Sundays found 
him in his parish church in Placerville, reading 
the familiar services and performing his 
priestly duties. Monday morning he packed 
his bag with religious literature, particularly 

* For a more intimate study of Dr. Breck see his life written 
by his brother, Charles Breck, D.D. 



152 The Conquest of the Continent 

books of the Bible bound separately, and took 
his way along the trails, a familiar and a 
loved figure everywhere. Unmarried and in 
vigorous health, he was able to spend six days 
of every week walking over the country. His 
circuits were known beforehand and averaged 
sixty miles weekly. Every house was his home. 
At noon or evening there was a place at the 
table or a bed for his repose wherever he hap 
pened to be. His charity was unbounded and 
he was friend and helper of all. Other min 
isters came and went, but Father Pierce stayed 
on. He sought no large sphere, and larger 
spheres after a time ceased to seek him. With 
this he was content. Indeed, during the latter 
days of his life it was his boast that only twice 
in the forty-two years had he been outside the 
county limits, and then against his will. 

"We may imagine what it meant when the 
news flashed through the county, "Father 
Pierce is dead ! " On the day of his funeral the 
mayor of Placerville issued a proclamation 
closing all places of business. The windows 
of the stores held the dead pastor s portrait 
draped in black, and across the locked doors 
of the saloons appeared this legend: "Closed 
on account of the funeral of Brother Pierce. " 
The local newspaper issued an extra supple 
ment with his picture and a poem entitled, 
"Come, El Dorado, and Bury Your Dead. * 



On the Shores of the Pacific 153 

Here was a type of service unique and beau 
tiful. Other men in other ways have led 
equally Christ-like lives and rendered perhaps 
greater service, but this man appealed to the 
popular imagination. Here was one who 
seemed to reproduce the method of the 
Saviour s life. He went about doing good; he 
had not where to lay his head; and for them 
El Dorado County had become a twentieth cen 
tury Palestine, hallowed by the footsteps of a 
devoted follower of the Master. 

These things a man may still do in poverty, 
in obscurity, in remote and narrow places 
may do them to his own high honor and the 
glory of the Church, if he will forget himself, 
remember his Master and love his fellow-men. 

"We may not pause to speak at greater length 
concerning California. It must suffice to record 
that a new e cclesiastical division in 



the growth of the Church made necessary the 
setting-off of the southern diocese of Los An 
geles. At the General Convention of 1910 two 
more changes took place; the old missionary 
district of Northern California became the dio 
cese of Sacramento, while a new missionary 
district of San Joaquin was erected out of the 
eastern part of the central diocese. 



154 The Conquest of the Continent 

II 

We now take our way up the coast to the 
old Oregon Territory into which Bishop Scott 
Oregon and came in 1854. The Oregon of that 
day was an immense region. It in 
cluded the present state of that name together 
with Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana 
and Wyoming. The Church in Oregon had al 
ready been organized by a convention of three 
clergymen and seven laymen. Among the 
clergymen was the Rev. St. Michael Fackler, 
who had held the first church service in Ore 
gon when he arrived in 1847. He afterward 
opened the first work in Boise City, Idaho, 
where he welcomed Bishop Tuttle to his juris 
diction. Twice it was the lot of this pioneer 
priest to prepare the way for and to welcome 
a missionary bishop. Mr. Fackler, like so many 
of the earlier clergy of the Pacific Coast, came 
thither seeking health. Unlike many others, he 
found it and used it through many years to 
spread the Kingdom. 

Bishop Scott s episcopate covered thirteen 
years. They were years of toil, and, we 
Buho goott may fear, of disappointment. As 
one of his successors remarks, * The 
Church calmly requested Bishop Scott to look 
after this vast empire without a single mile of 
railroad. When a man is asked to spread him- 



On the Shores of the Pacific 155 

self out so thinly over such an area, not much 
of him is left in any particular place." He 
died in 1867, remembered for his great earnest 
ness, energy, and personal holiness. He had 
fought the overwhelming conditions of his im 
mense field, had struggled with the scarcity of 
men and resources, and while it was not given 
to him to leave behind the record in material 
things which other more fortunate bishops have 
done, he at least had faithfully planted the seed 
which sprung up and bore fruit for later 
reapers. 

After the death of Bishop Scott in 1867 this 
northern country was without episcopal over 
sight until in 1869 Bishop B. Wistar 

Bishop Morris 

Morris reached the field, where for 
thirty-seven years he gave himself to laying 
foundations and extending the borders of the 
Church. Bishop Morris will always be grate 
fully and lovingly remembered in the far North 
west. His name was a household word among 
the pioneer families of the state. He was pe 
culiarly fitted for the work of a pioneer bishop, 
who must be in journeyings oft and in labors 
most abundant. St. Helen s Hall for girls and 
the Good Samaritan Hospital, the thriving 
parishes and missions in Portland and other 
cities, and the little churches which he built 
everywhere throughout his jurisdiction bear 
testimony to his faithfulness. 



156 The Conquest of the Continent 

In Washington as well as Oregon the in 
fluence of Bishop Morris s care was manifest. 
Something had been done in Bishop 
Scott s day. Two or three faithful 
clergy had labored there, conspicuous among 
them the Rev. P. E. Hyland, who for years 
rendered the noblest kind of pioneer service. 
When Seattle was but a village of a few hun 
dred inhabitants it had built a church and called 
a rector, and through Mr. Hyland s influence 
in old Tacoma, a mere village, a little church 
was put up in three days, some of the mill men 
giving their labor and some their money, while 
the mill furnished the lumber. Close by this 
church of St. Peter s stood a noble fir tree 
which was sawed off about thirty feet from the 
ground and an open turret built thereon, in 
which was placed a bell given by the Sunday- 
school of St. Peter s, Philadelphia. The rings 
of the tree were counted and showed it to be 
two hundred and seventy-five years old. St. 
Peter s, Tacoma, therefore claims to have the 
oldest bell-tower in the United States. 

Another honored name is that of the Eev. 
Dr. Nevius who, in 1873, resigned the rector- 
A Noted sm P f Trinity Church, Portland, 

the largest parish in Oregon, in 
order to give himself to the work of a pioneer 
missionary. In places where no other mission 
ary of the Church had ever gone he worked for 



On the Shores of the Pacific 157 

forty years, opening new fields wherever the 
opportunity presented itself. He was the first 
Church clergyman to reside beyond the moun 
tains in the present district of Eastern Oregon. 
Six of its first eleven churches were built by 
him. In 1879 he passed over into Washington 
and did a like work there, where six other 
churches and many missions begun by him bear 
testimony to his zeal for the extension of the 
Kingdom. In the fiftieth year of his ministry 
he retired from active missionary work and be 
came, curiously enough, the priest in charge 
of old St. Peter s Church with its fir tree bell- 
tower, built by his faithful predecessor fifty 
years before. 

To lives such as these is due whatever of sta 
bility and power the Church possesses in these 
new lands. But the day of opportunity is by 
no means past. In some places it is just 
dawning. 

The present problem, though slightly differ 
ent, is not less formidable than that of an 
The Present earlier day. Then it was a matter 
of ministry to the scattered and of 
planting the Church in little hamlets which 
hoped to become great cities but as yet pos 
sessed little to foretell their future. To-day it 
is a question of meeting and winning the in 
coming thousands in localities about whose fu- 



158 The Conquest of the Continent 

ture importance there can be but little doubt. 

Bishop Wells, of Spokane our missionary 
district in Eastern Washington gives in 
stances of this. "I went," he says, "a few 
years ago to a place called Northport, which 
was a hamlet just coming into being. They 
asked for a church and a clergyman. I said: 
Don t you have services here? They said: 
No, there never had been a minister of any 
kind here until you came. But, said I, the 
town is too small for a clergyman. A few 
years from now, when it grows larger, I will 
try to send you one. The next year I went up 
and they claimed to have a thousand inhabi 
tants and did have a Presbyterian minister. 

"A man whom I knew was on the cars with 
me one day. I asked him where he was going. 
He said : To Zillah. Zillah ; where is Zillah ? 
I asked. He replied: Oh, there isn t any such 
place, but I am going to start a town by that 
name and I want you to come and build us a 
church and send us a minister. Well, I said, 
how many people are there now? Oh, he 
said, there isn t anybody now, but we will have 
them there soon enough. The train stopped in 
the middle of the prairie, where there was no 
house in sight as far as the eye could reach; 
the man gathered up a great bundle of stakes, 
shouldered a surveying instrument and got off. 
A year from that time I met the same man 




William Ingraham Kip. first Benjamin Wistar Morris, second 
Bishop of California Bishop of Oregon 




Bishop Nichols of California Bishop Spaldiny of Utah 
PAST AND PRESENT LEADERS IN THE FAR WEST 



On the Shores of the Pacific 159 

again going to Zillah. Well, I said, how is 
your town getting along? Oh, it is first rate. 
Don t you want a clergyman there now 1 No, 
he said, you are too late. Other people are 
going to build us a church and send a minister, 
and we don t want more than one at present 
until we get larger. And so the opportunities 
come and go, and the bishop has to turn his 
back upon them because he cannot get help 
enough to send clergymen and build churches, 
even in the larger and more important cities 
of his jurisdiction." 

It would be impossible to tell here the story 
of the Pacific Coast. "We can only say that 
Bnmmwyof there are (1911) five dioceses and 
Results three missionary districts, with 

eight bishops, 300 clergy and 35,000 communi 
cants, where Bishop Kip, a little more than 
half a century before, found one clergyman and 
thirty-nine communicants in California, and 
Bishop Scott three clergymen and twenty com 
municants in Oregon. 

m 

This increase in half a century is not out of 
proportion to the growth of the country; in 
deed we have not kept pace with it. The 
Church is by no means a dominant factor on 



160 The Conquest of the Continent 

the Pacific Coast. The reasons for this will be 
found in certain characteristics which are in 
a sense peculiar to this country and which may 
be stated thus: 

(1) It is a land of marvellous beauty and 
diversity, with its plains and mountains, its 
Ardent mighty forests and its great sea. It 

Miteniiism ig a land o f vealtla. and plenty. The 

gold dug out of its rocks and rivers is the least 
of its resources. It is a land of eager and ag 
gressive people. It is also a land of idols. It 
has worshipped, and still loves to worship, the 
Golden Calf; by which we mean that perhaps 
more than any section of the West the Coast 
country is the country of ardent materialism. 
The claims of religion sit lightly upon its eager 
throngs. Material opportunity, physical well- 
being, the love of pleasure and the lure of gain 
are always before their eyes; which of course 
only makes it the more urgent that the message 
of the Church shall reach them. 

This is not a difficulty on the Pacific Coast 
alone. Wherever a community has sprung up 
under such conditions if ever before there 
were conditions quite so striking the god of 
this world has blinded its eyes, and the re 
ligion of Christ has found great and serious 
work to do. 

It is sometimes said that the Pacific Coast 



On the Shores of the Pacific 161 

has looked too much to the Church in the East 
for its support. Men ask and it is not sur 
prising that they do ask why the Golden West, 
which claims so much for herself, has not 
sooner cared for herself religiously and become 
a greater factor in the prosecution of the 
Church s campaign elsewhere. No doubt there 
is ground for such a question, but only those 
who are familiar with conditions can fully 
realize under what difficulties even the present 
achievement has been made. It is also true 
that the Coast country and the Church estab 
lished therein is realizing its better self. Every 
year sees it grow in this knowledge. The day 
is not far distant when the general Church will 
feel, as in some measure she is already feeling, 
the returning wave of gratitude and coopera 
tion which shall recompense her for all that she 
has done on the shores of the Pacific. 

(2) The Pacific Coast has a peculiar char 
acter because it is the meeting place of the 
The influence ^ast an( * West. In California the 
of the orient flavor of the old Spanish occupation 
still lingers. It seems in some ways scarcely 
a homogeneous part of our country. To this 
is added the influence of a close touch with the 
Orient. The great East is just at hand, and 
from it there come to take their places in the 
daily life of the people influences and problems 
which are peculiarly Oriental. To these the 



162 The Conquest of the Continent 

Pacific Coast is exposed as the Atlantic has 
never been. There is no barrier of kindred 
peoples like the European nations interposed 
between the West and the East as they face 
one another on the shores of the Pacific. The 
Orient, with all that it means of opportunity 
and difficulty, of inspiration and danger, is 
brought by the tides of commerce and the great 
harbors of trade to the very doorway of our 
Pacific ports. Such an environment has a real 
influence upon the American type which is 
there being produced.* 

(3) Already the Pacific Coast has, and it will 
increasingly have, the problem of the great 
cities. They are and will be great, 
not only because of the country 
which lies about them, but of the countries 
which lie beyond. Conspicuously they will be 
the ports of the nations. Like Asher of old 
their "dwelling is upon the sea-shore and they 
are for a haven of ships." Into them come the 
silks, teas and spices, the art and handicraft of 
the East, together with the fish and the furs, 
the gold and other mineral products of Alaska. 
The human tides also which flow through these 

* It is at Point Loma, California, that Mrs. Tingley, the 
successor of Mmes. Blavatsky and Besant, has planted her 
school of theosophy, and it is in Los Angeles that Baba 
Bharadi, the Eastern "Holy Man," finds the most congenial 
atmosphere for teaching the worship of Krishna in Christian 
America. 



On the Shores of the Pacific 163 

gateways are more varied than anywhere 
else in our country. How to assimilate and 
coordinate these elements and build out of 
them a homogeneous people owning allegiance 
to the Kingdom of Christ is a problem 
indeed. 

(4) Attention should be called to another 
problem which the great forests and the min- 
Men of the era ^ resources of the coast lay upon 
wiidemesi the Church ministration to the 
lumbermen and the scattered miners. "We have 
already spoken of the mining problem in con 
nection with the Rocky Mountain region, but 
the miner of the coast presents a different 
phase of the life. Particularly in Alaska he is 
still an independent person seeking his own 
fortune, wandering at will and prospecting 
where he chooses. The man who tries to win 
the miner and the lumberman migratory, pre 
occupied and rough-living men that they are 
faces no easy task. 

(5) The seamen of the Pacific Coast present 
a great opportunity. Its limited number of 
The Men of ports and its marvellous shipping 

interests call for ministry to * those 
who go down to the sea in ships and occupy 
their business in the great waters." Because 
of the conditions prevailing such ministry was 
greatly needed. Through the Seaman s Insti 
tute a noble work of rescue, helpfulness and 



164 The Conquest of the Continent 

cheer is under way, and deserves the sympathy 
and cooperation of the entire Church. 

(6) There is also the problem of the Ori 
ental in the West, which as yet the Church has 
. . . . . scarcely touched. Whatever influ- 

The Onentl * 

in th west ence the immigration laws may have 
in the future, it is true that the Pacific Coast 
to-day has foreign missions of perhaps the 
most difficult type. We ought to be able to take 
these Chinamen and Japanese, Hawaiians, Ko 
reans and others, who have come to a Chris 
tian land, and mark their lives with the Chris 
tian sign. But it is all very intricate and dif 
ficult. Easier and more straightforward is the 
work in the country villages of China and 
Japan. This has been, thus far, one of the 
Church s failures. We have these people at 
our very doors; if not members of our house 
hold they are at least inhabitants of our prem 
ises, and we have not yet devised an efficient 
and aggressive means of bringing them to 
Christ. 

How great a thing might be done toward 
helping to Christianize the Orient could we lay 
hold upon these Orientals ! Might we not thus 
establish in this land a base from which to sup 
ply Christian influence and the Christian men 
and women who, going back to their own peo 
ple, would accomplish more with them than 



On the Shores of the Pacific 165 

foreigners can ever hope to do? The Church 
of the Pacific Coast should be aided and en 
couraged in- its wish to perform such service. 

The waters of the Pacific placed a boundary 
to a certain phase of our domestic mission work 
Following The the task of following the emigrant. 

Emigrant The ^y wag en( J e d ; when the 

Church made her next advance upon this conti 
nent it was by way of the sea, and she sought, 
not her own scattered children, but a strange 
people. It is profitable, therefore, to look back 
ward from this point for a moment and take 
some account of the long march. 

We know no better summary of the matter 
than that given by Rev. Dr. McConnell, in his 
History of the American Episcopal Church: 
"The Church s forces moved out under the new 
leaders to win the mighty West. To trace in 
detail the steps by which they covered the prai 
ries, climbed the Eocky Mountains and went 
with the gold-hunters to the Pacific, would re 
quire a volume. The roll of the missionaries 
names would fill a book. The Church simply 
followed the emigrant, often lagging far be 
hind him, but keeping him in sight while her 
strength would hold out. When he had built his 
cabin she sought him out in it. When the great 
cities sprang up in the wilderness she entered 
into them and built her house. When the sav- 



166 The Conquest of the Continent 

age Indian was restrained and fixed to a per 
manent abode she did her share to make him 
human and Christian. She met a various wel 
come for her proffered gifts. Peoples who 
knew neither her nor her fathers founded new 
communities, and she could not speak their 
speech nor win their friendship. Other 
churches entered the new field beside her, be 
fore her and behind her. She often failed 
where they succeeded. She often succeeded 
after their success had changed to failure. 
It may fairly be said of her that she has 
striven with an honest heart to do her share 
in making and keeping the new America 
Christian. 

IV 

And now we turn for the remainder of our 
chapter to the latest, the most unique, and from 
AiMk-"Th a missionary point of view, the most 
oreat Country" interesting of our territorial expan 
sions the well-known, unknown, forbidding, 
fascinating land of Alaska. 

For twenty years after the acquiring of Cali 
fornia and the Oregon Territory no further ad 
vance in territorial expansion was made or 
dreamed of. The nation was perfectly satis 
fied with its boundaries and was even averse 
to any enlargement of them. It was not by 
any popular demand, but rather against the 




Rev. John W. Chapman Rev. Octavins Parker 




Ice on the Yukon breaking up. Archdeacon Stuck reconnoitrino 



On the Shores of the Pacific 167 

tide of public opinion, that Seward in 1867 
bought Alaska from Eussia. The inner his 
tory of this transaction is not known. Only 
Seward could have accomplished it. There are 
historians who think it to have been a round 
about way of paying Eussia for moral support 
given, and material aid which she stood ready 
to furnish, during the Civil War. A bill for 
such services could not be presented to Con 
gress and would not have been allowed by that 
body, but a distant and undesirable territory, 
which Eussia felt to be a burden on her hands, 
could be taken for a consideration. Perhaps 
some motive of this sort, rather than the far- 
seeing wisdom with which they have been cre 
dited, moved Seward and Sumner to urge the 
purchase. It is certain that nine-tenths of the 
nation were against it. It was ridiculed as 
Seward s folly "a country fit only for a 
polar bear garden. But now, in a single year, 
the products of its mines and fisheries alone 
are almost four times the $7,200,000 for which 
it was purchased. 

Lying in a far corner of the map it is hard to 
realize how fully Alaska justifies its name, 
Graphical which means "the great country. " 
Its area is more than two-thirds 
that of the United States east of the Missis 
sippi, and with this accession of territory the 



168 The Conquest of the Continent 

centre of our possessions, measured from east 
to west, was removed from Omaha, Nebraska, 
to a point in the Pacific Ocean a full day s sail 
west of San Francisco. 

Because of its geographical features and its 
means of communication the territory of Alaska 
falls naturally into three divisions: (1) South 
eastern Alaska, the narrow strip lying along 
the Pacific coast and almost touching the north 
ern boundary of the United States. This has a 
climate not so severe as that of New England. 

(2) Then there is the great Yukon basin 
drained by that wonderful river and its tribu 
taries. The way into this region is along the 
waters or over the frozen surface of these 
rivers, which furnish a waterway of 3,500 miles. 

(3) Off to the north, stretching to the Polar 
Sea, is Arctic Alaska, the home of the Esquimau 
and the Indian, where for the most part sleds 
and snow-shoes furnish the means of trans 
portation. 

The Eussian Church was naturally the first 
to minister in this one-time Russian territory. 
Mission work Several of their quaint and pictur- 
in Alaska esque buildings remain in the towns. 
Their chief missionary efforts most admir 
able, and still in evidence were confined 
to the centres where their military posts ex 
isted. The Presbyterians, coming in 1877, are 



On the Shores of the Pacific 169 

well represented in the mission work of Alaska, 
while the English Church, through its bishop 
of the McKenzie River and its mission of the 
C. M. S. conducted by William Duncan at Metla- 
katla, began work before our arrival. 

It was not until 1886 that the Eev. Octavius 

Parker of Oregon offered himself as our first 

missionary to Alaska. That fall he 

Our Work * 

Begins went, under appointment of the 

Board, as a Government teacher and mission 
ary to open work among the Indians of that 
country. St. Michael s Island, at the mouth 
of the Yukon in Norton Sound, was his land 
ing-place, and here he spent the greater portion 
of the winter. It was a post of the Alaska 
Commercial Company, which in that day held 
the same relation to the country that the Hud 
son s Bay Company had to the Northwest at an 
earlier period. On St. Michael s Island his 
tory repeated itself. The treatment which 
Whitman and other missionaries received at 
the hands of the Hudson s Bay Company was 
meted out to this pioneer. Mr. Parker says: 
While outwardly we were treated with cold 
civility we found ourselves practically prison 
ers on sufferance, unable to leave the island. 
The attitude and tactics of the Company were 
everywhere evident. To educate the Indian 
was to make him too wise, so that he would 
know the difference between eleven cents worth 



170 The Conquest of the Continent 

of provisions and the $1.25 which ought to be 
paid for a fox-skin." The chief agent of the 
Company was overheard instructing his factor 
as follows : The Rev. Mr. Parker and family 
will disembark here to-morrow. He has let 
ters of credit on the Company. You will there 
fore supply him with what he needs and show 
him every courtesy" a pause "but you will 
spare no expense and leave no stone unturned 
to crush him." 

Mr. Parker was not a man to be crushed. He 
accepted an invitation from the Indians at An- 
ThKwt y ik an d broke away from St. Mich 

ael s, risking his life freely among a 
people none too steadfast in their friendship, 
whose minds had been poisoned with evil re 
ports concerning him circulated by men of his 
own race. Perhaps the fact that he was the 
only doctor within a stretch of 2,000 miles may 
have saved him from an end like Whitman s. 

It was a hard winter. Somehow it was lived 
through, and in June of the following year he 
was joined by the Rev. John W. Chapman. To 
gether they established at Anvik the mother 
church of Alaska. Mr. Parker says of Mr. 
Chapman, "He was as fine a selection as the 
Church ever made; fit for the Master s service 
physically, mentally and spiritually" which 
has been proved by his long years of fruitful 
service in Anvik. 



On the Shores of the Pacific 171 

In 1888 Alaska was made a missionary dis 
trict, but no bishop was elected. Mr. Parker 
out of Dirk- retired from the work and for a year 
nwt-into Light j^ r> Chapman was our only mission 
ary in Alaska. From this first precarious foot 
hold large results have followed. The patient 
life of one man and his steadfast influence in a 
single community have wrought a wonderful 
transformation. In seeking Christ s children 
he has brought them literally * out of darkness 
into marvellous light" out of their under 
ground hovels into the open air and sunshine; 
out of their superstition and ignorance into 
healthful knowledge and a wider life. This 
people of mixed blood Esquimau and Indian 
a hybrid race near enough to the coast to fall 
under the evil influence of the earlier voyagers 
and Russian convicts, presented as hard a prob 
lem in civilization as any Christian missionary 
has ever faced. They lived in underground 
hovels, in darkness and dirt. "The whole 
place was a human sty, says a member of the 
first United States Geological Survey. "Most 
of the people whom we saw had the appearance 
of being diseased. Whole rows of men, maimed 
and halt, blind and scrofulous, sunned them 
selves at the openings of their underground 
houses. We were glad to turn away from the 
most dismal and degraded set of human beings 
it had ever been my lot to see." "To-day," 



172 The Conquest of the Continent 

says Archdeacon Stuck, "the natives live in 
substantial cabins of logs or lumber, sit on 
chairs and eat at tables. Around numbers of 
the cabins are carefully tended vegetable 
patches. A transformation has come upon An- 
vik, and it is the work of Mr. Chapman and his 
assistants." 

This is a fair sample of what the Church has 
done in scores of places among the Indians of 
Alaska ; but this of course is only the outward 
change. It has been accompanied by an in 
ward transformation even more absolute. The 
centre and soul of all that was accomplished in 
Anvik is the little church, erected in 1894 by 
the United Offering of the Woman s Auxiliary. 
From it the light of the Gospel has shown forth 
into all the land. 

Far to the north, inside the Arctic Circle, 
two hundred miles beyond Bering Strait, on a 
onr -rarthest bleak cape which juts out into the 
north" Arctic Ocean, the Church next 

planted her standard ; and it was a layman who 
for nineteen years kept it displayed. Lieu- 
tent-Commander Stockton of the United States 
Navy, an earnest Churchman, had in one of his 
cruises been sadly impressed by the degraded 
and hopeless condition of the Esquimau natives 
at Point Hope. Not only were they bearing the 
blight of primitive ignorance, but they were 



On the Shores of the Pacific 173 

exposed to the vicious influence of white men 
from the crews of whaling vessels. Com 
mander Stockton urged the Board of Missions 
to send there a medical missionary, and Dr. 
John B. Driggs of Wilmington, Delaware, of 
fered his services. 

In July, 1890, he was landed with his small 
stores upon the beach, among a strange and bar 
barous people of whose language he knew not a 
syllable; without companion, house, or contact 
with civilization; knowing that he was cut off 
from the world until the vessel should return a 
year later. Here somehow he made his home, 
and lived on through the long winter of inter 
minable darkness and the short summer of un 
ending sunshine, for nearly twenty years, alone 
at the top of the world. Only twice during all 
this period did he come out on furlough. On 
the last of these occasions Mr. E. J. Knapp vol 
unteered to supply his place, which he did most 
admirably. When Dr. Driggs retired from the 
work, the Rev. A. B. Hoare was sent to build 
upon the foundations laid by him and Mr. 
Knapp. The results were marvellous. During 
a visitation in 1909, extending over five days, 
Bishop Rowe confirmed eighty persons. He 
writes as follows concerning his experiences 
there : 

"It was a surprise and a joy to hear that 
congregation of Esquimaux able to say or sing 



174 The Conquest of the Continent 

the responses of all the usual services, the can 
ticles, psalter, and about fifty or more hymns. 
I don t know whether it would be possible to 
find another congregation anywhere so well 
trained. I heard this congregation repeat the 
catechism from the beginning to the end al 
most perfectly. I confirmed eighty and it was 
interesting to know that a whole village of 
adults, with very few exceptions, received the 
Holy Communion." 

Two vantage points had thus been gained in 
Alaska, both in the coast region. The vast in- 
Theomt terior had not been touched by us, 
and not to any considerable degree 
by others. The next move of the Church was 
a wise and timely one. A mission was planted 
at Tanana, six hundred miles up the river in 
the very heart of the Yukon district. Its po 
sition at the mouth of the Tanana River, on 
which a little later the great gold discoveries 
around Fairbanks were made, gave it strategic 
importance. Here the Rev. Jules L. Prevost 
was for fifteen years both priest and physician 
of the surrounding Indian tribes. On foot, in 
canoe, and later in his little missionary launch, 
he traversed the hills and the streams, winning 
a great company to Christ and His Church. 
This mission has baptized more than 3,000 In 
dians, living over many hundred miles of coun- 




PETER TRIMBLE ROWE 
First Bi-xhop of Alaska 



On the Shores of the Pacific 175 

try. Some have been known to come five hun 
dred miles that they might spend a few weeks 
at the mission and have the advantage of the 
Church s ministrations; and they have brought 
their dead one hundred and fifty miles for 
Christian burial. 

These three men were the staunch pioneers 
of our work in Alaska, and the staff over which, 
on St. Andrew s Day, 1895, Peter Trimble 
Eowe was consecrated bishop. 

The Church historian is at a loss how 
he may tell the story of Bishop Rowe with 
Trimble truth, and at the same time with 
* moderation. All men love a hero 



the better if he be a modest hero and the 
well-informed Churchman would not hesitate 
if asked to name the Church s most conspicuous 
hero. 

Bishop Rowe had unusual preparation for 
his work. Five years on an Indian reservation 
in Ontario and nine more at the Sault Ste. 
Marie in Michigan, gave him a varied experi 
ence. The following of the trail in the wilder 
ness, contact with pioneers and savages, canoe 
travel and snow-shoeing, the camp under the 
open sky he knew them all. The zest of con 
quest was born in him and he welcomed hard 
ship in his Master s service. 

With the coming of Bishop Rowe to Alaska 



176 The Conquest of the Continent 

a great enlargement of the work began. 
Hitherto we had ministered only, or 

On the Trail 



chiefly, to the natives; all our mis 
sions were planted with that in view. But gold 
had been discovered in the Klondike region 
and at once Alaska became to the imagination 
of the country what California had been fifty 
years before. Vastly more difficult of access 
and many times larger in area, it was not 
flooded as California had been, but thousands 
were pouring in the great majority of them 
to meet, alas ! only danger and disappointment, 
if not death. This was a compelling call to the 
Church; it was the cry of our own race and 
blood. These followers of the trail the Church 
must follow; she could not, without peril of 
unfaithfulness, permit these seekers after gold 
to forget the eternal riches of Christian love 
and grace. 

And so, while still pushing forward the work 
on behalf of the native peoples, the bishop also 
turned his attention to the physical and 
spiritual needs of the white explorers and 
settlers. Hospital after hospital sprang up, 
nurses and teachers came. Where the need 
was greatest the bishop and his helpers might 
always be found. He cheered and inspired; 
men believed in and admired him, and there 
was no better name to conjure with than that 
of Bishop Eowe admittedly "the best musher 



On the Shores of the Pacific 177 

in Alaska,"* conspicuous for courage in a land 
of brave men. 

A gold strike was made at Nome, and with 
the first rush of eager prospectors went in Mr. 
Prevost, sent by the bishop, who soon followed 
and aided with his own hands in the building 
of the church. Fairbanks was manned and 
equipped. Another rush into Cordova, and 
though the saloon men were bidding for the 
only available lumber, the bishop got it first 
to build a clubhouse for men, destined to be the 
only competitor of fourteen saloons. 

So he goes back and forth across his great 
district, up and down its rivers in the short 
summer time formerly by boat or canoe, but 
now in his launch, the "Pelican." In the win 
ter he is away across the trackless wilderness, 
a thousand or two thousand miles, behind his 
dogs, cheerily facing his hardships and making 
light of his dangers, but none the less carrying 
his life in his hand as he goes about his daily 
work. 

Here is a sample trip unusually short and 
uneventful taken in the spring of 1911. The 
. , account is in the bishop s own words 

A Sample 

journey f rom a private letter : 

* To mush, in Alaskan parlance means to hit the 
trail. " It is derived from the call to the dogs : Mush on ! " 
which is doubtless a corruption of the French voyageur s com 
mand "Marchons!" 



178 The Conquest of the Continent 

Paul Williams, a native, came from Nenana with a team of 
six dogs and met me at Gulkana. There we loaded up with sup 
plies for a six weeks journey. Our course was off the ordi 
nary travel, so we had to break trail. We cached food for 
the dogs and ourselves in a tree at each camping-place so as 
to have some upon our return, but wolverines in some places 
got away with our caches and we went hungry. The wolverines 
are foxy robbers and nasty fellows to meet. We saw nine at 
comfortable distances, but left them alone. The snow-shoeing 
was fierce " ; I went ahead and broke trail for the dogs. Soon 
one instep got inflamed and I had trouble. Every night I 
used a snow bandage to lessen the inflammation. 

We camped at night had a tent and stove. One day Paul 
broke through the ice into a swift, deep, dangerous river. He 
had his snow-shoes on at the time and an axe in his hand, 
which he lost. I kicked off my snow-shoes and with pole in 
hand crept to Paul s rescue. I got him out, though I was 
afraid that I would go in. It was cold, but I built a fire and 
he changed his clothes. Some days after we would have had 
trouble again, but being ahead I sounded the ice, found it bad, 
backed off, and together we built a bridge. Several times we 
just escaped snow-slides. 

The days passed with all sorts of experiences and always 
hard work. We made the places we wished to make 1,000 
miles in all. I buried a man who had frozen to death. In 
some places the Indians were so ill and poor that their 
condition is pitiable. The Government is the only friend which 
can meet their needs, and our Government treats the question 
with a neglect as barbarous as would a barbarian nation. 

We made as much as forty miles some days, then we went 
down to about fifteen miles. But a trip of that sort takes 
all the unnecessary fat out of you, and you get as strong as 
a mule and as hungry as a bear. 

The world has lavished its praise upon a man 
who discovered the North Pole. He deserved 
the applause, though at best it was a some 
what barren exploit. But how many Church- 



On the Shores of the Pacific 179 

men realize that for more than fifteen years a 
man in the far north has been making journeys 
longer and more dangerous, not for gold or 
glory, but for the love of Christ and his fellow- 
men? 

Such heroism attracted others to share in 
the bishop s labors. Especially have noble and 
devoted women offered themselves as nurses 
and teachers some splendid men also, but far 
too few. Every worker in Alaska would agree 
that the life which should be quoted as most 
typical of the recent work is that of a woman. 

Annie Cragg Farthing, sister of the Bishop 

of Montreal, was the heart and brain of our 

work at St. Mark s Mission, Nenana. 

Gods Gentle- 7 

woman n 1S a supreme power which is in 

herent in a gentlewoman when it is consecrated 
by love. That power she possessed and used 
it to guide and save many a one, both young and 
old. 

The mission began in a small log cabin. 
When at the end of three years she was sud 
denly called to rest from her serving, she left 
behind the largest native mission under the 
Church s care in Alaska, and from the small 
beginning which she made in taking two little 
Indian children into her own home, there had 
grown Tortella Hall, where thirty-five Indian 
boys and girls were gathered and given the in 
fluence of a Christian home. Literally she gave 



180 The Conquest of the Continent 

her life for her people. It was after three days 
and nights at the bedside of one of her chil 
dren, acting as nurse in the effort to spare 
others, that the sudden call came to her. She 
had but time to ask that her love be given to 
her children and to pray that God would send 
some one to care for them. 

It was the heroic end of a most devoted and 
consecrated woman. Strangely enough, Bishop 
Bowe, in New York City, on the day before her 
death was saying to a great gathering of 
women: "A Church which can produce such a 
woman as Miss Farthing has proved that it is 
divinely inspired." 

They dug her grave there in the Arctic wil 
derness where Mount McKinley looks down 
from afar. "But," says Archdeacon Stuck, "I 
think the influence of the life of this great gen 
tlewoman will outlast the mountain itself, and 
be active in the world when the mountain is 
level with the plain ; for the influence of a holy, 
self-sacrificing life never dies." 

Such was one of the women but only one 
of the many who have rallied to Bishop Eowe s 
help. Much has been demanded of them by the 
conditions under which they have lived, and 
nobly have they answered the demand. 

Stanch and true men are also aiding the 
bishop, whose stories would be worth telling 



On the Shores of the Pacific 181 

some officers did space permit. We might travel 
the trail with Archdeacon Stuck as 
he goes to his ministry in the North. We might 
tell of the little rectory in Valdez, or the * Bed 
Dragon" at Cordova both of which are open 
havens of hospitality for young men facing the 
temptations and loneliness of the far North. We 
might visit Betticher, the indefatigable mis 
sionary the eager, tireless human force which 
directs the splendid work in the Tanana Val 
ley, with its hospital and reading rooms, its 
schools and mission churches, its distribution 
of tons of literature in the lonely mining camps. 
Those who really desire to know fully the story 
of the Alaska mission must acquaint themselves 
with these things and with others not less ad 
mirable in spirit and service. 

Whoever does so will be amply repaid, for 
who can study the missions in Alaska without 
Th. Ld whi.h bein ? fascinated by the picture! The 
casts aspen Arctic nights and rosy dawns; the 
mighty rivers and primeval forests; sturdy 
miners wresting from the earth her golden 
store ; traders and Esquimaux and Indians ; the 
new-sprung towns with their wild license, or 
the lonely camp shut in by the wilderness of 
trackless snow ; the dog-teams and the reindeer ; 
the sturdy sons of the free North whose hands 
are so hard, but whose hearts are frequently so 
soft, and whose friendship is so steadfast ; and 



182 The Conquest of the Continent 

moving among them all ministering to them 
with what toil and pain, under what discour 
agement and difficulty the brave nurses and 
faithful clergy (alas, how pitiful a handful!) 
and our heroic, hard-pressed bishop ! 

So does Alaska by its sheer power to inspire 
and enlist the Church for missionary enter 
prise repay a hundred-fold that which has been 
given her. 

This is a fitting place to close our survey 
of the Church s progress on this continent 
here in the far North, where she is proving her 
power to minister to the manifold needs of 
mankind, and where she seems to have reached 
the very limit of the world. On every side 
stretches the utmost sea which marks the 
boundary of our continent, yet to her it is not 
a barrier but a highway. And she girds her 
self for yet other conflicts as she looks steadily 
westward where, beyond the sea, lies Asia 
native land of the Conquering Christ. 



F 




Bishop Roicc, Preaching on the Hanks of the Yukon 




Anne C. Farthiin/ Buried on the Battlefield 



A LAST WORD 

WE have come a long journey, following 
the Church in her endeavor to conquer 
the continent for her Master. Not al 
ways was she instant in action, not always vic 
torious in her campaigns ; but at least we may 
feel that she has not been altogether forgetful 
of her mission, and may be stimulated to aid 
her to a more adequate fulfilment. 

Never so widely as now has the path of con 
quest opened before the Church. For no other 
Christian body in this land does the promise of 
the future seem more bright. The contribution 
which we may bring to the solution of the re 
ligious problem in the nation will be unique 
and valuable if we ourselves understand it. 

This is the greatest lesson of the preceding 
pages. The impulses which sent the Church 
forward came from a source deeper than -she 
herself clearly understood. When her acts were 
aligned with the Catholicity of a primitive 
Christianity they were effective in expanding 
her borders. Wherever she was humbly yet 
steadfastly true to her origin and her princi 
ples, she succeeded; wherever she ignored or 

183 



184 The Conquest of the Continent 

forgot them she failed. Out of her parochial 
ism, into some realization of herself as a na 
tional Church, God brought her in the Conven 
tion of 1789; out of her presbyterianism to a 
truer conception of the episcopate she was 
brought in the opening years of the last cen 
tury ; and out of her diocesanism to some vision 
of her world-wide mission she was brought in 
the Convention of 1835, when she knew herself 
to be The Missionary Society, and sent mission 
ary bishops into the lands beyond. 

Yet all these were simply returns to primi 
tive ideals. Imperfectly as the Church grasped 
them, ineffectively as she sometimes used them, 
they were nevertheless the vital springs of 
whatever lasting results have been accom 
plished. This sense of what the Church is and 
may give, inspired her missionary leaders. The 
treasures and the powers which lay within her, 
the conviction of her divine character and mis 
sion, were the effective stimulus which kept 
them brave and faithful under manifold discour 
agements. That they sometimes accomplished 
little, compared with the opportunities they 
faced and the achievements of other Christian 
bodies about them, was due to the fact that the 
Church at large did not yet believe in herself. 

Does she yet believe 1 That will be proved by 
the issue. If she has a mission to become any 
thing more than a respectable little sect, she can 



A Last Word 185 

fulfil it only when she rises to a sense of what 
she is and what she is called to do. If she has, 
as she believes, a Catholic heritage if she is, 
as she claims to be, a national Church her best 
contribution to the religious needs of America 
and the world will be made when she acts on 
these beliefs; when, following the best tradi 
tions and suggestions of the past she aspires to 
become in the future a more perfect represen 
tative of New Testament Christianity. 

To such a mind, and to such a service, may 
God bring us all! 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX Bibliography 

So manifold are the sources from which material for this 
course might be gathered that the author finds the prep 
aration of a bibliography exceedingly difficult. Dealing as 
the course does with the missionary problem in the light of 
Church history, anything which has to do with the history 
of the Church would doubtless be of some value to students 
of this course. It is necessary, however, to limit the list, 
and the following books are therefore mentioned. 



Suggestions for Leaders in Teaching "The Conquest of the 
Continent, 10 cents. 

An Officer of the Line: a story of a typical Western mis 
sionary life. 75 pps., paper, 25 cents. Church Missions 
Publishing Company. 

An Apostle of the Western Church: by Greenough White. 
A reprint of a most valuable historical work. 230 pps., 
paper, 35 cents. 

The Conversion of Mormonism: an outline of Mormon his 
tory and of our work among these people. 75 pps., 25 
cents. Church Missions Publishing Company. 

Conquerors of the Continent: a junior course following 
the lines of "The Conquest of the Continent," dealing 
with conspicuous missionary leaders. 25 cents. 

Followers of the Trail: four stories of missionary enterprise. 
(For young people.) 75 pps., 35 cents. Church Missions 
Publishing Company. 

Nelly and Gypsy, the Missionary Ponies. (For children.) 
10 cents. Church Missions Publishing Company. 
All of these can be secured by addressing The Educa 
tional Secretary, Board of Missions, 281 Fourth Avenue, 

New York. 

187 



188 Appendix 



BOOKS OF REFERENCE 

History of the United States: John Fiske. Houghton-Mif- 
flin Company. 

A standard history of the Episcopal Church: Coleman s, 
McConnell s or Perry s. 

Three Hundred Years of the Episcopal Church in America: 
George Hodges, D.D. George W. Jacobs & Co., Phila 
delphia. 

In Connection With: 

Chapter I. The Territorial Growth of the United 
States: Dr. William A. Mowry. Missionary Educa 
tion Movement. 

Chapter II. Life of Bishop Chase. Church Missions 
Publishing Company. 

Chapter III. Nashotah House. Church Missions Pub 
lishing Company. 

Chapter IV. Lights and Shadows of a Long Episco 
pate: Bishop Whipple. The Macmillan Company. 

History of the Diocese of Minnesota, 1857-1907: 
George C. Tanner, D.D. Published by Eev. W. C. 
Pope, St. Paul, Minn. 

The Life and Labors of Bishop Hare, Apostle to 
the Sioux: M. A. De Wolfe Howe. Sturgis & Walton 
Company. 

Chapter V. Reminiscences of a Missionary Bishop: 
Bishop Tuttle. Thomas Whittaker, New York. 

My People of the Plains: Bishop Talbot. Harper 
& Brothers, New York. 

Chapter VI. Early Days of My Episcopate: Bishop 
Kip. (Out of print.) 



INDEX 

Adams, John, U. S. Peace Commissioner, 14-15 

Alaska 

Its purchase, 167 ; geographical features, 167-168 ; missions, 
Russian, English and Presbyterian, 168-169 ; Rev. Octavius 
Parker at St. Michael s and Anvik, our first missionary, 169- 
170; Rev. J. W. Chapman at Anvik, 170-172; Dr. J. B. 
Driggs at Point Hope, 173 ; B. J. Knapp, 173 ; Rev. A. R. 
Hoare, 173 ; Rev. J. L. Prevost at Tanana, 174 ; Bishop 
Rowe, 175-179 ; Miss A. C. Farthing at Nenana, 179-180 ; 
Ven. Hudson Stuck, 181 ; Rev. C. B. Betticher, Jr., 181 

Andrus, Rev. J. R., 50 

Apostolic ministry first secured in America, 41 

Arkansas 

Bishop Polk, 87, 116 

Articles of peace, 14-15 

Benicia, California 

St. Augustine s College and St. Mary s Hall, 150 
Betticher, Rev. C. E., Jr., in Alaska, 181 

Breck, Rev. J. L., at Nashotah, 88 ; in Minnesota, 89-90 ; In Cali 
fornia, 90-91, 150-151 ; portrait, opp. 86 

California 

First Christian service, 143 ; ancient missions, 144 ; independ 
ence declared, 144 ; gold discovered, 145 ; first church, built 
by Rev. F. S. Mines, 146 ; Bishop Kip, 147-149 ; divided, 
149, 153 ; Bishop Wingfleld, 150 ; Rev. C. C. Plerce s work in 
Northern California, 151-153 

Chapman, Rev. J. W., at Anvik, 170-172 ; portrait, opp. 166 

Chase, Right Rev. Philander, forerunner of missionary bishops, 53- 
54, 86 ; portrait, opp. 54 

Church, General Convention, 1789, 37-38 ; 1811, 38-39 ; growth in 
1835, 48 

Clarkson, Right Rev. R. H., in Nebraska, 119 

Colorado 

Bishop Randall, 119 

Cowboys, 125-126 

Doane, Right Rev. G. W., sermon at Bishop Kemper s consecration, 

60-61 ; portrait, opp. 58 
Driggs, J. B., M.D., at Point Hope, 173 

Eastern Diocese 

Bishop Griswold, 46-47 
Enmegahbowh, Rev. J. J., first Indian priest, 88 

Fackler, Rev. St. Michael, In Oregon and Idaho, 120, 154 ; portrait, 

opp. 114 

Farthing, Miss A. C., at Nenana, 179-180 
France, acquires Louisiana tract, 17 ; cedes same to U. S., 19 



189 



190 Index 

Franklin, Benjamin, U. S. Peace Commissioner, 14-15 
Freeman, Right Rev. G. W., Arkansas and the Southwest, 117 

Gear, Rev. B. G., in Minnesota, 87-88 ; portrait, opp. 86 

General Conventions, in Philadelphia, 1789, 37 ; in New Haven 

1811, 38-39 ; in Philadelphia, 1835, a missionary awakening, 

48-52 

Gilbert, Right Rev. M. N., in Minnesota, 103 
Gilflllan, Rev. J. A., in Minnesota, among Indians, 102 
Gold discovered, 145 
Good Samaritan hospital, Portland, 155 
Green Bay, Wisconsin 

Oneida Indian mission, 64 
Griswold, Right Rev. A. V., bishop of the Eastern Diocese, 46-47 ; 

portrait, opp. 46 

Hare, Right Rev. W. H., bishop of Niobrara and of South Dakota, 

104-109 ; portrait, opp. 102 
Hawks, Rev. F. L.. declines election as bishop of the Southwest, 

59-60 

Hinman, Rev. S. D., in Minnesota, among Indians, 102 
Hoare, Rev. A. R., at Point Hope, 173 
Hobart, Right Rev. J. H., bishop of New York, 42-46 ; portrait, 

opp. 42 

Hunt, Rev. Robert, holds first Episcopal service at Jamestown, 34-35 
Hyland, Rev. P. E., in Washington, 156 

Idaho 

Bishop Tuttle, 119-124 
Illinois 

Bishop Chase, 54 

Indians, Nez Percys ask for Bible, 26-27 ; Oneida Indian mission at 
Green Bay, Wisconsin, 64, 100 ; first Indian priest, Enme- 
gahbowh, 88, 101 ; the problem, 99-100 ; work in Minnesota 
under Breck, 90 ; under Bishop Whipple, 100-103 ; under 
Bishop Hare, 104-109 ; loyalty of Christian Indians, 101-102 

Jamestown, first altar in America, 34-35 
Jay, John, U. S. Peace Commissioner, 14-15 

Johnson, Rev. S. R., accompanies Bishop Kemper across Indiana and 
Illinois to St. Louis, 63 

Kearney, Missionary District of, 126 

Kemper, Right Rev. Jackson, bishop of Indiana and Missouri, and of 
the Northwest, 59-60, 62-76, 86-87 ; Mr. Atwater s descrip 
tion, 71-73 ; portrait, opp. 62 

Kip, Right Rev. W. I., in California, 147-149 ; portrait, opp. 158 

Knapp, E. J., at Point Hope, 173 

Laurens, Henry, U. S. Peace Commissioner, 14-15 
Louisiana, purchase, 16-21 ; Bishop Polk, 87, 116 
Louisiana Territory, Church first established in New Orleans, 86 

Mcllvaine, Right Rev. C. P., Missionary Convention sermon, 51 ; 

portrait, opp. p. 58 

Marshall, Chief Justice, expected death of the Church, 40-41 
Merrick, Rev. J. A., in Minnesota, 89 
Mexico, independence, 21 ; war, 22-23 
Michigan 

Bishop Chase, 54, 64 
Milnor, Rev. James, suggestion of the Church s being the missionary 

society, 50 



Index 191 



Miners, 127-128 

Mines, Rev. F. S., in San Francisco, 146 

Minnesota 

Rev. E. G. Gear, 87-88 r Rev. J. L. Breck, 89-91 ; Rev. Timothy 

Wilcoxson, 89 ; Rev. J. A. Merrick, 89 ; Bishop Whipple, 

91-93, 100-103 ; foreign immigrant problems, 93-99 ; Indian 

problem and work, 99-104 
Missionary episcopate, created, 49, 55 ; first bishop, Right Rev. 

Jackson Kemper of the Northwest, 59 
Missionary society, organized in 1821, 50 
Montana 

Bishop Tuttle, 119-122 ; Bishop Brewer, 122 : miners problem, 

127 

Moore, Right Rev. R. C., Virginia, 48 ; portrait, opp. 50 
Mormons, 116, 118 ; missionary character, 128-130 ; strength, 130- 

135 ; weakness, 135-138 ; our methods of work among them, 

138-139 
Morris, Right Rev. B. W., in Oregon, 155 ; portrait, opp. 158 

Nashotah, beginning of, 66 
Nebraska 

Bishop Clarkson, 119 
Nevada 

Bishop Whitaker, 119 

Nevius, Rev. R. D., in Oregon and Washington, 156-157 
New England 

Bishop Griswold, 46-47 
New Orleans 

First establishment of Church in Louisiana Territory, 86 
Nichols, Right Rev. W. F., portrait, opp. 158 
Niobrara, Indian missionary district of, Bishop Hare, 104-109 
Northwest Territory, acquisition, 13-16 ; Bishop Kemper, 64-74 ; 
Bishop J. C. Talbot, 117-118 

Ohio 

Bishop Chase, 53 
Oregon 

American settlement, 144-145; Bishop Scott, 147, 154-155; 

Bishop Morris, 155 ; Rev. R. D. Nevius, 156-157 
Oregon territory, acquisition, 24-30 

Otey, Right Rev. J. H., bishop of Tennessee and Mississippi, 54, 76- 
80 ; portrait, opp. p. 78 

Pacific coast, Webster s speech, 142-143 ; first Christian service, 

143 ; problems, 160-165 

Parker, Rev. Octavius, in Alaska, 169-170 ; portrait, opp. 166 
Peake, Rev. E. S., in Minnesota, among Indians, 102 
Philadelphia, first General Convention, 1789, 37 
Pierce, Rev. C. C., in Northern California, 151-153 ; portrait, opp. 150 
Polk, Right Rev. Leonldas, Arkansas and the Southwest and of 

Louisiana, 87, 116 
Portland, Oregon 

Good Samaritan hospital, 155 ; St. Helen s Hall, 155 
Prevost, Rev. J. L., at Tanana, 174 
Provoost, Right Rev. Samuel, consecrated, 38 ; confirmations, 39 

Ranchmen, 126 

Randall, Right Rev. G. M., in Colorado, 119 

Rowe, Right Rev. P. T., in Alaska, 175-179 ; portrait, opp. 174 

St. Helen s Hall. Portland, 155 
Scandinavians, in Minnesota, 93-96 



192 Index 



Scott. Right Rev. T. F. ( in Oregon, 147, 154-155 

Seabury, Right Rev. Samuel, consecrated, 37-38 ; confirmations, 39 

Smith, Right Rev. Robert, no confirmations, 40 

South Dakota 

Bishop Hare, 109 

Spalding, Right Rev. P. S., portrait, opp. 158 
Spanish possessions, 21-24 

Spokane, Missionary District of, Bishop Wells, 158*159 
Stuck, Yen. Hudson, in Alaska, 181 

Talbot, Right Rev. J. C., Bishop of the Northwest, 117-118 
Talbot, Right Rev. Ethelbert, in Wyoming and Idaho, 125 
Texas, annexation, 22-23 

Tuttle, Right Rev. D. S., in Utah, Idaho and Montana, 119-124 ; in 
Missouri, 123 ; portrait, opp. 118 

Utah 

Bishop Tuttle, 119-124 ; Mormons, 116, 118, 128-139 

Virginia 

Low spiritual state, 47 ; Bishop Moore, 48 

Washington 

Rev. P. B. Hyland, 156 ; Rev. R. D. Nevius, 157 
Webster, Daniel, speech concerning the Pacific Coast, 142-143 
Wells, Right Rev. L. H., in Spokane, 158-1B9 
Whipple, Right Rev. H. B., Bishop of Minnesota, 91-93, 100-103 ; 

portrait, opp. 94 
White, Right Rev. William, consecrated, 38 ; few confirmations, 39 ; 

portrait, frontispiece 
Whitman, Dr. Marcus, arrives in Oregon, 27 ; rides to Washington, 

28 ; leads colonists to Oregon, 29 ; massacred, 29-30 
Whitaker, Right Rev. O. W., in Nevada, 119 
Wingfield, Right Rev. J. H. D., in Northern California, 150 
Wisconsin 

Bishop Kemper, 74-76 



BV 2775 B87^ 
Burleson 



1911 TRIM 
Latx-ei , 



The 



eson, 
conquest ol 



BV 2775 B87 1911 TRIN 

Burleson, Hugh Latimer, 

The conquest of the continent