We Are Yet Alive

United Methodists in the History of North Dakota and South Dakota

by Stephen Perry

Draft of Chapter Two

Anoka, Minnesota, on the left bank of the Rum River near the place of the old mills January 17, 2019

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Copyright Reserved to the Author

Permission is given to The Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church to reproduce and circulate this draft as long as (1) credit is given and (2) no price is charged.

Stephen Perry is the Project Historian for the Dakotas Conference Commission on Archives and History’s update of conference history. He may be reached at [email protected].

All comments about this draft will be gratefully received, especially specific comments about historical accuracy.

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

Back East 7 The Road to Bristol, 1771 page 7 Château de Joux, April 7, 1803 page 15 Traverse des Sioux, Minnesota Territory, July 23, 1851 page 21 Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia, Confederate States of America, July 4, 1863 page 28 Evangelische Gemeinschaft, Yellow Bank Township, Lac Qui Parle County, Minnesota, May 4-7, 1883 page 35 Albert College, Belleville, Ontario, Dominion of Canada, Spring Semester 1886 page 43 The Organized Frontier (1860-1890) 52 Cherokee, Iowa, September 28, 1878 page 52 Highmore, Dakota Territory, July 15, 1885 page 77 Sioux Falls and Bismarck, Dakota Territory, July 4, 1889 page 127 Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála, Christmas 1890 page 138 West River & The Second Frontier (1890-1920) 148 The Funeral of Martha Canary, Deadwood Methodist Episcopal Church, August 4, 1903 page 149 Mother’s Day, May 9, 1909 page 164 Samuel A. Danford on Trial, October 14-15, 1915, First Methodist Episcopal Church, Fargo, North Dakota page 177 Letcher Methodist Episcopal Church before the Supreme Court of South Dakota, June 2, 1921 page 200

The Great War and The Great Depression (1920-1939)

A New Earth (1939-1968)

Centennial (1968-1993)

We Are Yet Alive (1993-2012)

Time Line 215

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Index

Abbreviations Footnotes help a reader to look at the same sources that the author studied, to verify the author’s accuracy, to assess the validity of the author’s interpretations, and to obtain more information on a topic of interest. In this draft, abbreviation has been limited to a shorter, intuitive version of the original citation that should lead back easily to the original, complete citation.

I Am Coming, Lord by Lewis Hartsough (1 John 1:7) I hear thy welcome voice, That calls me, Lord, to thee; For cleansing in thy precious blood, That flow’d on Calvary. I am coming, Lord! Coming now to thee! Wash me, cleanse me, in the blood That flow’d on Calvary. Though coming weak and vile, Thou dost my strength assure; Thou dost my vileness fully cleanse, Till spotless all, and pure. Chorus ’Tis Jesus calls me on To perfect faith and love, To perfect hope, and peace, and trust, For earth and heaven above. Chorus And he the witness gives To loyal hearts and free, That every promise is fulfilled, If faith but brings the plea. Chorus All hail! atoning blood! All hail! redeeming grace! All hail! the gift of Christ, our Lord, Our strength and righteousness. Chorus

Winnowed Hymns: A Collection of Sacred Songs, Especially Adapted for Revivals, Prayer and Camp Meetings, ed. C. C. McCabe and D. T. Macfarlan, New York and Chicago: Biglow & Main, Nelson & Phillips, National Publishing Association for the Promotion of Holiness, 1873, Number 86 (“by permission of Philip Phillips”), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112065893858

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Chapter Two THE ORGANIZED FRONTIER

Cherokee, Iowa, September 28, 1878

Lewis Hartsough came fresh from a family victory to Cherokee and the 1878 Northwest Iowa Annual Conference of Methodist Episcopal preachers. Once there, he contributed to an organizational victory.

His bishop had ruled that Fort Dodge District Conference, over which Hartsough presided, violated church law when it granted a local preacher’s license to Isabella Cornish Hartsough. As a woman, Lewis Hartsough’s wife could not be allowed to serve as a pastor or to move beyond this first step toward ordination. But the Methodist Episcopal Church needed local preachers in frontier areas where the supply of ordained members of an annual conference willing to go anywhere did not keep up with the demand for pastors.

Hartsough’s colleagues found a way to work around the bishop’s ruling when they unanimously voted to welcome his wife into any pulpit in Fort Dodge District. The New York Times, which did not usually report religious news from Iowa, took brief notice in its issue of August 11, 1878. Eventually, Isabella Cornish Hartsough would receive a local preacher’s license from Sioux Falls Methodist Episcopal Church after she conducted revivals and helped to organize congregations in Dakota Territory. At the end of the territorial period, the Dakota Annual Conference elected her to be reserve lay delegate to the General Conference of 1888.1

Lewis Hartsough’s contribution to organizational victory began on September 28, 1878, when he met during the Northwest Iowa Annual Conference’s session at Cherokee with commissioners from the Minnesota Annual Conference and fellow

1 New York Times, August 11, 1878, p. 10; Northwestern Christian Advocate (Chicago), January 3, 1883, p. 5, col. 1; John G. Palmer, Palmer's Directory of the Methodist Episcopal Church for Dakota Conference, Huron, Dakota: Huronite Printing House, 1888, pp. 90, 107-108; Official Journal of the Thirty-fourth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.: I. M. Hargett and J. M. Hunter[, 1918], pp. 298-299; Official Journal of the Thirty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.: H. P. Eberhart and G. T. Notson[, 1919], pp. 398-399, 407. Hartsough brought the issue of local preacher’s licenses for women and laity rights for women before the General Conference of 1880, Journal of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Held in Cincinnati, Ohio, May 1-28, 1880, New York: Phillips & Hunt and Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, 1880, pp. 131, 239-240, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433082253240 on December 4, 2017. But the General Conference rescinded licenses previously granted to women, Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt, The Methodist Experience in America, 2 vols., Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2000-2012, 1: 244. -52- Draft on 1/17/2019 commissioners from his own conference. The bishops of the two conferences appointed the commissioners to decide on a boundary between the work of each conference in Dakota Territory. A boundary would determine how limited national mission funds would flow thru the two conferences as well as which conference would supply pastors to a particular concentration of congregations in the vast Territory.

The Joint Commission recommended the 46th parallel of latitude for the boundary. During the 1880’s, division of the Territory at the 46th parallel became a matter of consequence for the statehood movement, and it very closely approximated the boundary that Congress prescribed in 1889 when it divided the Territory into North Dakota and South Dakota.2

When the Joint Commission made its recommendation in the fall of 1878, probably no one envisioned either statehood or annual conferences independent of Minnesota and Northwest Iowa anytime soon. Although members of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Dakota Territory outnumbered members of other United Methodist ancestors—the Methodist Protestant Church, the Evangelical Association (Evangelische Gemeinschaft) and the United Brethren in Christ—they were still few in actual number. Only three areas had any concentration of congregations: the southeast corner of the Territory across the Big Sioux River from Sioux City, Iowa, the “L” on its back from Fargo west along the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad to Bismarck and from Fargo north down the Red River Valley, and the Black Hills. Within five years, however, tens of thousands of immigrants were pouring into the Territory, the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Association had formed new conferences, and 186 congregations of these denominations had opened. This number amounted to 74% of the 253 congregations that belonged to the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church in 2012.3

2 Minutes of the Minnesota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-Fourth Session,…, Saint Paul: Miller & Rich, 1878, pp. 25, 28, 36; Minutes of the Minnesota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-Fifth Session,…, Saint Paul: Miller & Rich, 1879, p. 37 (“Report on Conference Boundaries”); Bennett Mitchell, History of the Northwest Iowa Conference, 1872-1903, Sioux City: Perkins Bros. Company, 1904, p. 77 viewed at https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE217281 on September 15, 2016. Congress made the Seventh Parallel of the United States Rectangular Land Survey the legal boundary between North Dakota and South Dakota. This turned the United Methodist Church of Ellendale, North Dakota, into the only congregation to have been a congregation of the Dakota Annual Conference (later the South Dakota Annual Conference) during the territorial period and the North Dakota Annual Conference following statehood. 3 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1878, New York: Nelson & Phillips and Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, no date, p 163, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435019443365 on December 4, 2017, reported a total of 336 full members for the Sioux City District of the Northwest Iowa Annual Conference at Elk Point, Vermillion, Yankton, Richland and Portlandville, Bon Homme and Scotland, Canton and Beloit Circuit, and Grand Forks. Minutes of the Annual Conferences, conference journals (or minutes), and the Dakotas Annual Conference Statistical Database (1974-2012), September 18, 2013, are the sources for the counts of congregations. Notice that these figures do not mean that 74% of the congregations open in 2012 were founded by -53- Draft on 1/17/2019

In hindsight at least, the report of the Joint Commission marked a new beginning for the Methodist Episcopal Church in Dakota Territory. Because the commissioners did not record their thoughts or conversations on that fall day in 1878, we cannot know what they expected to happen next. But what happened to them next, what had already happened that brought them to Cherokee, and what would happen in later years as their lives diverged from each other illuminated the meaning of the organizational effort that they helped to rekindle. The seven biographies of Hartsough, Thomas Melancthon Williams, Bennett Mitchell, Archibald Jamieson, and Harrison D. Brown from Northwest Iowa and Ezra R. Lathrop and Oliver Williams from Minnesota demonstrated the planning and coordination that an organized frontier required.

These seven commissioners were born in the 1830’s with the exception of the oldest, Hartsough, whose life began in 1828, and the youngest, Brown, born in 1846. Their births took place in Ontario, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Iowa.4

Compared to people described in chapter one, most of the commissioners were born before Walter Minty and William Hyde but about the same time as Charles C. McCabe, Rebecca (Peters) McCabe, and A. D. Traveller. This meant that they heard their call to ministry and entered adulthood in the 1850’s and early 1860’s as the United States was breaking apart. The Civil War probably had a greater impact on them than any other historical event of their time.

The two Minnesota commissioners, Ezra R. Lathrop and Oliver Williams, fought for the Union as soldiers. Lathrop came from a Baltimore family that had freed its slaves long before the Emancipation Proclamation, and he served as a chaplain. Williams

1883. Some congregations open in 1883 closed before 2012, and other congregations open in 2012 opened later than 1883. The figures mean, instead, that what is now the Dakotas Annual Conference achieved, by 1883, about three- quarters of its present size as measured by number of congregations. See below p. 69n55 for references on the very small number of United Brethren congregations in Dakota Territory. 4 Official Journal of the Thirty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1919], pp. 398-399 (Hartsough); Minutes of the Dakota Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Third Annual Session, Oct. 12-15, 1882…, Sioux City, Iowa: Perkins Bros., 1882, pp. 23-24 (T. M. Williams); “Bennett Mitchell,” The Annals of Iowa, 14 (1924): 469; Minutes of the Thirty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference, n.p.: G. D. Brown and J. M. Hunter[, 1917], pp. 189-190 (Jamieson), viewed at https://archive.org/stream/31162303.1917.emory.edu/31162303_1917 on September 18, 2016; J. Gordon Melton, Religious Leaders of America, second edition, Detroit and other places: Gale Group, 1999, p. 86 (Brown); John E. Lathrop, “The Rev. Ezra R. Lathrop, D.D.,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 9, 1916, p. 789, cols. 1-2, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015084595571 on December 4, 2017; Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, n.p.: G. D. Brown and J. M. Hunter[, 1911], pp. 65-66 (O. Williams); Chauncey Hobart, History of Methodism in Minnesota, Red Wing[, Minnesota]: Red Wing Printing Co., 1887, p. 396, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015064392684 on December 4, 2017 (O. Williams). According to Minutes of the Minnesota Annual Conference, 1878, p. 25, three additional commissioners from Minnesota were named, but, according to Minutes of the Minnesota Annual Conference, 1879, p. 37, they did not attend the meeting at Cherokee, Iowa. -54- Draft on 1/17/2019 never received the official designation of chaplain, but he, too, preached to the troops. Hartsough, like Chaplain McCabe after his release from prison, joined the United States Christian Commission as a delegate. They both helped to organize medical and spiritual care for Union soldiers and sailors and to raise large sums of money for this purpose.5

Military victory in the Civil War and success at charitable enterprises like the United States Christian Commission gave the generation of the 1830’s experience and confidence that it later applied to organizing people into congregations and conferences in Dakota Territory. When the Minnesota Annual Conference met in 1878 just before the Northwest Iowa Annual Conference, McCabe attended and represented the Board of Church Extension of the Methodist Episcopal Church. This national board was providing financing to construct church buildings in Dakota Territory and surely had an interest in dividing the labor of the two conferences efficiently.6

As a former prisoner of war who dramatized his own life and inspired audiences across the nation, McCabe embodied the greatest and deadliest event of his time and represented for the commissioners the larger purpose of the Church. Bennett Mitchell, who would later write the history of the Northwest Iowa Conference, agreed with McCabe that a new statement should be added to the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe in the conversion of the world.”7

The biographies of Hartsough, Archibald Jamieson, and Harrison D. Brown definitely placed them alongside McCabe in the late 19th-century holiness movement of American Methodism. The holiness movement emphasized sanctification and defined it as an experience of the Holy Spirit that, at a definite point in time, perfected an individual in love for God and neighbor—just as conversion brought repentance for sin at a definite point in time.8

Hartsough wrote hymns and composed music, including “I Am Coming, Lord” (“I Hear Thy Welcome Voice”), for the holiness movement, and some of his work appeared in a hymnal edited by McCabe for the National Publishing Association for

5 Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 9, 1916, p. 789, column 2; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference, 1911, pp. 65-66; Lemuel Moss, Annals of the United States Christian Commission, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1868, pp. 620, 645, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015069442864 on December 4, 2017. 6 Minutes of the Minnesota Annual Conference, 1878, p. 22; Mitchell, History of the Northwest Iowa Conference, p. 77. 7 Benjamin F. Shambaugh, Biographies and Portraits of the Progressive Men of Iowa, 2 vols., Des Moines, Iowa: Conaway and Shaw, Publishers, 1899, 2: 329, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433067286892 on December 4, 2017. 8 Melvin E. Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century, Metuchen, New Jersey, and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1980, pp. 107-108, pointed out the importance of the holiness movement for the Evangelical Association. -55- Draft on 1/17/2019 the Promotion of Holiness.9 Jamieson participated in the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness.10 In the early 20th century, Brown left the Methodist Episcopal Church to become a district superintendent for the Church of the Nazarene.11

Most of the commissioners who met in 1878 gained leadership experience in the Methodist Episcopal Church soon after the war. Hartsough spent about a year from 1869 to 1870 with the Colorado Annual Conference organizing missions for Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah and opening a long conflict with the Church of the Latter- Day Saints (the Mormons) on its own ground.12 At the same time, Mitchell started a congregation at Canton in Dakota Territory and became Presiding Elder of the Des Moines Annual Conference’s Sioux City District, which extended to all of the very small number of congregations in the Territory. As presiding elder, he preached the dedication sermon for a new church building at Elk Point.13

In 1873, Brown pastored the Methodist Episcopal Church at Vermillion when it opened a new church building at a cost of about $2,000.14 Recognizing the growing importance of the southeast corner of the Territory, the Northwest Iowa Annual Conference met in Yankton that same year. It “admitted on trial” Archibald Jamieson. Like William Hyde in a slightly later generation, Jamieson had immigrated to the United States in 1872 from northeast Ontario.15 This session also created a new Dakota District from the Sioux City District of the Northwest Iowa Annual

9 Winnowed Hymns: A Collection of Sacred Songs, Especially Adapted for Revivals, Prayer and Camp Meetings, ed. Rev. C. C. McCabe and Rev. D. T. Macfarlan, New York and Chicago: Biglow & Main (Successors to Wm B. Bradbury), Nelson & Phillips, 805 Broadway, New York, National Publishing Association for the Promotion of Holiness, No. 921 Arch Street, Philadelphia, [1873], Number 86; Albert Christ-Janer, Charles W. Hughes, and Carleton Sprague Smith, American Hymns Old and New, 2 vols., New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, 2: 419. 10 Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference, 1917, p. 190. 11 Melton, Religious Leaders of America, p. 86. 12 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1870, New York: Carlton & Lanahan, San Francisco: E. Thomas, and Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, no date, pp. 125, 157, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433069134868 on December 4, 2017; Henry Martin Merkel, History of Methodism in Utah, Colorado Springs, Colorado: Dentan Printing Co., 1938, pp. 55-57; Connie Fife, “Methodists in Utah,” Utah History Encyclopedia, viewed at http://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/m/METHODISTS_IN_UTAH.html on September 16, 2016. 13 Minutes of the Annual Conferences for the Year 1870, p. 172 (Des Moines Annual Conference); History of Southeastern Dakota, Sioux City, Iowa, 1881, pp. 177, 194. 14 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1873, New York: Nelson & Phillips, Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, no date, p. 121, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435019443415 on December 4, 2017; History of Southeastern Dakota, p. 212. 15 Minutes of the Annual Conferences, 1873, p. 121; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference, 1917, p. 189. Palmer’s Directory, p. 98, stated in 1888, “Rev. A. Jamieson, the pastor [of Canton in 1888], was the first Methodist preacher ordained in Dakota, having been ordained by Bishop Bowman at a session of the Northwest Iowa Conference held in Yankton, Dakota, in September, 1873.” The previously cited Minutes contradicted this statement. -56- Draft on 1/17/2019 Conference, which itself had just been carved out of the Des Moines Annual Conference.16

Thomas Melancthon Williams joined Bennett Mitchell as one of the first presiding elders of the Northwest Iowa Annual Conference when it organized in 1872. He took over Sioux City District in 1876 when the conference folded Dakota District back into Sioux City after Methodists had actually started leaving the southeastern corner of the Territory. He remained in this position until the General Conference of 1880 created the “Dakota Mission.”17 General Conference wanted to fund frontier clergy and congregations directly thru its Missionary Society and Board of Church Extension, encourage neighboring annual conferences like Northwest Iowa to supply clergy, and help the missionary clergy to act together like a conference even before they became self-supporting. Lewis Hartsough proposed and promoted the formation of new missions, including the Dakota Mission, on the floor of General Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.18

Suddenly in August of 1882 while administering his duties as Superintendent of Dakota Mission, Williams became the first of the seven commissioners of 1878 to die. This blow came at a crucial time, and, when the mission’s conference met in October, its bishop took swift action. He divided the mission into two districts, Yankton District, embracing the older congregations of the southeastern corner, and Huron District, the large area of the James River Valley north of Yankton which was receiving most of “the immense tide of immigration pouring into Dakota.”

The bishop appointed Lewis Hartsough to be presiding elder for Huron District. Hartsough continued to serve as a presiding elder for one district or another once the

16 Minutes of the Annual Conferences, 1873, p. 121; Mitchell, History of the Northwest Iowa Conference, p. 1 17 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1872, New York: Nelson & Phillips, Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, no date, p. 96, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433069136566 on December 4, 2017; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1876, New York: Nelson & Phillips, Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, no date, p. 153, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435019443381 on December 4, 2017; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1880, New York: Phillips & Hunt, Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, no date, p. 239, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433082254396 on December 4, 2017; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1881, New York: Phillips & Hunt, Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, no date, pp. 266, 303, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433082254396 on December 4, 2017. 18 Journal of the General Conference, 1880, pp. 237, 245, 263, 288, 369; The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church. 1880, New York: Phillips & Hunt, Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, 1880, pp. 59-60, 167-168, 261-262, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112101746276 on December 4, 2017; Wade Crawford Barclay and J. Tremayne Copplestone, History of Methodist Missions, 4 vols., New York: Board of Missions and Church Extension of the Methodist Church, 1949-1973, 3: 226-260 (“domestic foreign missions”), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89077011351 on December 4, 2017. -57- Draft on 1/17/2019 Dakota Mission began meeting as the Dakota Annual Conference in 1885. He retired to Mt. Vernon, Iowa, when statehood finally came in 1889.19

During South Dakota elections in the 1890’s, Archibald Jamieson ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor and the United States House of Representatives as a candidate of the Prohibition Party. Bennett Mitchell also supported national prohibition of alcoholic beverages as well as woman suffrage when he ran for Governor of Iowa and lost in 1893.20

In 1890 Ezra R. Lathrop wrote candidly about how the task of preaching the gospel changed during his lifetime. Fifty years before—meaning the time his generation grew up—debate about religion took place among denominations and had to do with subjects like Calvinism. Preaching in that era assaulted “open sinners” directly and, by sheer eloquence, brought them to repent of their “positive wickedness.” In the meantime, however, agnosticism, materialism, and higher criticism (historical analysis of the Bible) spread and produced indifference toward religion. “The modern sinner scarcely consents that he is a sinner.” “He either does not know, or believes that death ends all;….” Pulpit oratory had to change and did change to take account of this, but it could no longer “have the effect upon the masses of men that it once had.”21

Harrison D. Brown’s path out of the Methodist Episcopal Church may have started from a similar assessment of the approaching century that led him both to honesty about the prospects for “the conversion of the world” and to a growing conviction that the Church would have to draw a definite boundary between the world and itself so that it could gather together a holy people from that world. In 1885 Brown served as presiding elder for the Bismarck District of the North Dakota Annual Conference and, the next year, pastor at Valley City. He then moved farther west and became a Methodist Episcopal pastor in Seattle, Washington. There, he and his wife founded the Washington Children’s Home Society. This involved them in a new, social work approach to the care of homeless children and orphans. The Society advocated and

19 Northwestern Christian Advocate, September 6, 1882, p. 3, col. 3 (obituary of Williams by Hartsough); Minutes of the Third Session of the Dakota Mission Conference, 1882, pp. 23-24; Hartsough, “Dakota Conference,” in Palmer’s Directory, p. 7; Mitchell, History of the Northwest Iowa Conference, p. 109; G. T. Notson, “The Methodist Episcopal Church in South Dakota,” in Doane Robinson, History of South Dakota, 2 vols., Aberdeen, South Dakota: Bowen & Co., 1904, 1: 547, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101060825039 on December 4, 2017. 20 Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference, 1917, pp. 189-190; Shambaugh, Biographies and Portraits of the Progressive Men of Iowa, 2: 329. About 1910, when Ezra R. Lathrop was eighty years old, the citizens of Hastings, Minnesota, elected him to be their mayor, Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 9, 1916, p. 789, cols. 1-2. 21 Ezra R. Lathrop to N. Lathrop, Sacred Poems of Rev. Richard Hargrave: With a Biography of Himself and Biographical Sketches of Some of His Coadjutors, ed. William P. Hargrave, Cincinnati: Cranston and Stowe, 1890, pp. 141-142. -58- Draft on 1/17/2019 organized permanent adoptions after thorough investigation and supervision of adopting families.22

While in Washington, Brown renewed an old Methodist acquaintance from 1850’s Iowa, Phineas F. Bresee. In the early 20th century, they organized the Church of the Nazarene.23

Oliver Williams remained a pastor throughout his life from the Civil War to 1911, and this may explain why his life is more difficult to document than the lives of his fellow boundary makers who became presiding elders. After serving congregations in Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, he transferred to the Dakota Annual Conference and died during retirement in Mitchell, the same year as Walter F. Minty.24

Archibald Jamieson probably spoke for all of the seven commissioners of 1878 as they approached the end of their lives when, sometime toward the end of his own life, he gave a title to his brief and now apparently lost pamphlet, Changed Not Exchanged Or the Fact and Nature of the Resurrection Body.25 ******* When the seven commissioners met at Cherokee, Iowa, in the fall of 1878, they had little reason to hope that drawing a boundary between two parts of Dakota Territory would help to organize a major geographic expansion of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Seventeen years had gone by since Dakota Territory came into legal existence at the beginning of the Civil War. The political leadership of the territorial government had held power for a long time, and it had little incentive to take the territory into statehood and lose power by transforming federal appointments into elective offices. The first infants to be baptized in the Territory were now turning into adults, and yet they, along with other inhabitants, were few in number and lived only in a few parts of the Territory.

22 Northwestern Christian Advocate, November 11, 1885, p. 5, cols. 5-6; Minutes of the North Dakota Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Second Session…, Fargo, Dakota: Republican Steam Printing House, 1885, p. 13; Minutes of the First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, Minneapolis: Harrison & Smith, Printers, [1886,] p. 20; Melton, Religious Leaders of America, p. 86; Patricia Susan Hart, A Home for Every Child; The Washington Children's Home Society in the Progressive Era, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2015, pp. 13- 15, 41-42, 229n3-4, 250n2. 23 Ernest Alexander Girvin, Phineas F. Bresee: A Prince in Israel, Kansas City, Missouri: Pentecostal Nazarene Publishing House, 1916, pp. 157-158, viewed at https://books.google.com/books?id=SaQ_AAAAYAAJ&pg on September 22, 2016; Carl Bangs, Phineas F. Bresee; His Life in Methodism, the Holiness Movement, and the Church of the Nazarene, Kansas City, Missouri: Beacon Hill Press, 1995, pp. 91, 118-119, 249-254, 298n43. 24 Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference, 1911, pp. 65-66. 25 Worldcat.org cataloged Jamieson’s pamphlet as OCLC 24896890 but listed no library that held it on September 22, 2016. I infer from the place of publication, Correctionville, Iowa, that Jamieson published it toward the end of his life (1917) because he lived in Correctionville for about the last twelve years of his life according to Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference, 1917, pp. 189-190. The title of the pamphlet suggested that it advocated the truth of bodily resurrection. -59- Draft on 1/17/2019

Just two years before the commissioners met in Cherokee, Bishop Randolph S. Foster, presiding at the 1876 session of the Northwest Iowa Annual Conference, showed that he was not impressed. Bennett Mitchell recalled a sharp exchange between the bishop and John Webb, presiding elder of North Dakota District as well as pastor of both Fargo and Bismarck. Webb reported that, at one place, he had doubled subscriptions to the denominational newspaper, the Northwestern Christian Advocate.

“How many were taken last year?” Bishop Foster wondered.

“One,” Webb had to reply.

“Then you gained one. Why didn’t you say so, and we would have understood you.”26

Before the end of conference, Webb received “supernumerary” status so that the bishop did not appoint him anywhere for the following year. The bishop returned the congregations of both North Dakota District and Dakota District in the southeastern corner of the Territory to the care of Sioux City District.27

Remembering this many years later in 1904, Mitchell asked whether Foster’s actions amounted to a retreat for the Church. He concluded that they did. The bishop, he wrote, “seemed not to have a clear vision of the coming growth and glory of the Dakota land.”28

But hindsight in 1904 did not highlight the same things that it might have in 1876.

The original entry in a manuscript book entitled, “General Records for Dacotah Mission,” would have taken the pastor who made the entries for 1876 back to October 12, 1860, when Septimus Watson Ingham of the Upper Iowa Conference waded his horse and himself across the Big Sioux River from Sioux City. Rising from the river, he asked whether there were “any religious persons in the neighborhood”

26 Bennett Mitchell, History of the Northwest Iowa Conference, 1872-1903, Sioux City: Perkins Bros. Company, 1904, p. 59 viewed at https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE217281 on September 15, 2016. 27 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1876, p. 153. Although the Minutes did not include Webb in the list of supernumeraries, they did not list him in the appointments either. Mitchell, History of the Northwest Iowa Conference, p. 58, listed all the supernumeraries in the Minutes but also added Webb. 28 Mitchell, History of the Northwest Iowa Conference, p. 59. -60- Draft on 1/17/2019 but soon discovered that he was not to be greeted “by the friendly group, and smile of kindred spirits.”29

Ingham remounted. Riding westward with only saddle bags and umbrella, he traveled up the north bank of the Missouri River, past the four log cabins that comprised Elk Point, and, after sunset, reached his intended destination, the small river town of Vermillion. Today, the driver of an automobile could spend less than an hour to make a trip that took Ingham all day. Not until the Dakota Southern Railroad connected Sioux City and Vermillion in 1873 could a passenger expect a short traveling time.30

Ingham stayed the night in Mulholland’s tavern but could not pay his bill in full the next morning. Mulholland accepted ninety cents with a promise to pay the remaining dime when Ingham received his next “Missionary draft.” That turned out to take two months. In fact, his presiding elder in Iowa had been able to send him across the Big Sioux River only by reallocating a percentage of conference funds promised to other pastors in Sioux City and Woodbury District, including himself.31 Their salaries financed Ingham’s mission to “an unexplored region of country” where “the number and disposition of the inhabitants, and consequently, the probabilities of success” were “altogether unknown.”

Ingham started immediately to inquire whether any Methodists were living in Vermillion. Mulholland told him that he himself was not a Methodist and that he knew of none. By the following Sunday, however, Ingham had met up with former acquaintances and newly arrived Methodists. He arranged for room and board for himself, again on credit, and preached to a group of about 20 people in the dining room of Mulholland’s tavern. He drew his text from Romans 1:16, “For I am not

29 “General Records for Dacotah Mission. Bought April 1861,” Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, The George and Eleanor McGovern Library, Dakota Wesleyan University, Mitchell, South Dakota. This unpaginated, bound volume was originally a blank columnar record book printed at New York with episcopal approval. In addition to baptismal, marriage, class, probationer, and membership records, it contains several narratives written across the columns in various hands, some signed and some not. The dates of the records and the narratives range from 1861 to about 1882. Because there are no page numbers, it is difficult to cite precisely. However, the narrative by Septimus W. Ingham, which I have used extensively in this chapter, comes at the beginning of the record book, and the other narratives are easy to identify among the lists of records. Ingham signed and dated his narrative on August 22, 1863, although he probably began it earlier since the ink varies in color and thickness throughout his narrative. Official Journal of the Thirty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1919], p. 353, gave an account of how “General Records” came into the possession of the Dakota Annual Conference. 30 Neither did Ingham have the benefit of the federal wagon road between Sioux City and Fort Randall that Congress authorized in 1865, Herbert S. Schell and John E. Miller, History of South Dakota, fourth edition, Pierre, South Dakota: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2004, pp. 80-82, 113. 31 Ingham’s presiding elder was George Clifford who later, at the General Conference of 1864, helped to establish the Church Extension Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. -61- Draft on 1/17/2019 ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (King James Version).

The next Sunday, Ingham preached to five men and two women upriver in the Yankton office of John Blair Smith Todd, who soon became the first delegate from Dakota Territory to Congress. He read from Mark 16:15, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” As he wrote in “General Records for Dacotah,” he would have had a larger number of listeners, but most of the town had gone down to the river to meet an incoming steamboat. The number could not have been much larger, however, because Ingham counted only three log cabins and two frame houses in the entire place.

On Wednesday, he left Yankton for Bon Homme but got only as far as Sherman’s tavern on Snatch Creek. He described Sherman as “…not religious, as might be easily inferred from the amount of liquor he sold,…” and the “contemptuous answer” he gave when Ingham asked him about religion. But he turned out to be the first man who would put Ingham up for the night without charge.

Ingham reached Bon Homme the next day, performed a wedding, found two former Methodists, and preached on Sunday to about 25 people. Then, he started back down the Missouri and arrived at Vermillion in time to preach again there on his fourth Sunday out from Sioux City. This completed his “first round” or circuit.

Although Ingham developed several points on his circuit and kept visiting them, his account of his first year in “General Records for Dacotah Mission” made clear that he concentrated on Vermillion. Even here, however, he did not organize a formal congregation. On January 13, 1861, he and his presiding elder, who came over from Sioux City, formed a “class,” the smallest unit of Methodist organization. During the course of a two-day meeting, they celebrated what they believed was the first sacrament of the Lord’s Supper ever offered above the Big Sioux River. “Brother Metcalf,” one of two men with a Methodist Episcopal local preacher’s license residing in the Vermillion area at the time, preached on Proverbs 13:12, “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: But when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.”32

32 M. D. Metcalf served as the first chaplain of the Dakota Territory House of Representatives, House Journal of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Dakota, Yankton, Dakota Territory: Josiah C. Trask, 1862, p. 7, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951002487267i on November 28, 2017. Ingham served as the first chaplain of the Dakota Territory Council, Council Journal of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Dakota, Yankton, Dakota Territory: Josiah C. Trask, 1862, p. 6, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/chi.095881035 on November 28, 2017. See also “Methodism's Introduction in Dakota,” Minutes of the First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1886, p. 38; Methodist Pioneer (Grand Forks), March 1888, p. [8,] col. 2; Palmer’s Directory, p. 114. -62- Draft on 1/17/2019 Six adults became members of Class Number 1 at Vermillion, the first step toward a congregation and full membership in the Methodist Episcopal Church.

As spring approached, Ingham and a Methodist Protestant pastor, A. P. Eckles, held a “protracted meeting” in Vermillion. They intended this revival to last several days and to result in conversions. But March rains came, and, “from the darkness of the nights and the nature of our roof,” they had to stop their praying and preaching.33

Toward the end of the narrative he wrote in “General Records of Dacotah Mission,” Ingham described the rude building in which they conducted worship. Presbyterian mission funds had paid for it, and the Presbyterian minister, based in Covington, Nebraska, opened its pine door to Methodist meetings. Cottonwood logs stacked only nine high provided the walls. A framework of three beams supported the poles, hay, and shingles that formed both the ceiling and the roof. Mud filled the gaps in the structure. Inside, people sat on benches without backs and put their feet on a floor of cottonwood lumber, “loosely laid.” Dirt tended to fall on the seats and the floor, and, during storms, the roof admitted the rain.34

The first “quarterly meeting” took place on May 16, 1861. The presiding elder came over from Iowa to take this next step toward creating a congregation at Vermillion. With improving weather, Ingham explored farther up the Missouri River on his circuit riding. In June he baptized the infant daughter of John Blair Smith Todd at Fort Randall. Todd, a former United States Army officer and a cousin of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, was earning his living as sutler to Fort Randall and as an Indian trader at the Yankton Agency.

Ingham provided few details about his second and final year in the southeastern corner of Dakota Territory. During the summer of 1862 he ventured up the Big Sioux River as far as its falls and found about twenty inhabitants. To them he preached what he described as the second sermon ever given in the place that would become the city of Sioux Falls. He conceded that a Lutheran pastor had preached the first sermon, but he distinguished the Methodist style of preaching by pointing out that his own sermon was “the first extempore discourse upon religion.”

33 The Methodist Protestant Church separated from the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1830 over long-contested issues of democracy in the church. 34 The building was about 18 feet by 24 feet according to another narrative that appears to derive from Ingham in Minutes of the First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1886, p. 38. Covington lay in the vicinity of today’s South Sioux City, Nebraska. -63- Draft on 1/17/2019 About August 10, 1862, just before he started for conference in Iowa, he organized another class near where Brule Creek entered the Big Sioux River. This laid a foundation for Richland Methodist Episcopal Church.

Back in Iowa, Ingham learned that “a party of between seventeen to twenty two Yanktonnais Sioux” attacked a James River ferry point above Yankton on September 6, 1862. Whether or not this had anything to do with the war that had broken out between the Santee and settlers in the Minnesota River Valley, the two combined in the fear-stricken minds of settlers in Dakota Territory. Most of them fled immediately in what Ingham’s successor called a “stampede.” Many did not return, and those who did came back only gradually.35

Did this one day destroy Ingham’s two years of traveling and organizing? At the end of conference, “Dacotah” was left unsupplied, and the bishop appointed Ingham to Sioux City and Woodbury. His presiding elder soon found another man who entered the Territory with a loaded revolver and took up residence closer to Iowa at Brule Creek, not Vermillion.36 But he served less than a year before the work fell back, once again, into the hands of the presiding elder. Several trips to Vermillion helped to restart the tiny congregation there, and, the presiding elder emphasized, Indians were nowhere to be seen.37

Immigration to Dakota Territory and total population remained low throughout the 1860’s. Toward the end of the decade, membership in the Methodist Episcopal Church stood below 200 with the largest number in the congregation at Elk Point, close to Sioux City.38 C. W. Batcheller, a serving pastor during these years, tried to promote the Territory in a series of articles for the Northwestern Christian Advocate.39 He minimized the threat from Indians and proposed a Methodist mission to them,

35 The narrative of J. L. Paine, describing the 1862 attack, appeared in “General Records for Dacotah Mission” immediately following Ingham’s signed narrative, which Ingham dated August 22, 1863. 36 J. L. Paine, “From Dacotah Territory,” Brule Creek, February 23, 1863, Northwestern Christian Advocate, March 18, 1863, p. 86, cols. 3-4. 37 Daniel Lamont’s narrative, “General Records for Dacotah Mission.” 38 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1868, New York: Carlton & Lanahan and Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, no date, p. 151 (Des Moines Conference), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433069134876 on December 4, 2017. 39 C. W. Batcheller, “From Dacotah Territory,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 12, 1868, p. 262, cols. 3-4; “Dakota,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, February 24, 1869, p. 62, cols. 2-3; “From Dakota Territory,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, March 10, 1869, p. 78, cols. 3-4. Batcheller served as pastor at Bon Homme (Bonhomme) from 1868 to 1869, Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1868, p. 153 (Des Moines Conference). Some sources spelled “Batcheller” as “Batchellor” or “Batchelder.” -64- Draft on 1/17/2019 pointing out that Mrs. H. M. Conger, a Methodist and the wife of the Indian agent at the Yankton Agency, had, for some time, been teaching the “Yancktons.”40

“Dakota bears acquaintance,” Batcheller wrote, “the longer people stay, the better they like it.” He compared the Territory favorably to the conditions for settlement in northern Illinois during the 1830’s. It was true that “immense clouds of grasshoppers” sometimes attacked farmers’ crops, but “they usually stay but a short time,” and, happily, “they do not eat sorghum.” Anyway, the grasshopper threat could not long continue because nature itself, he believed, was “remedial, economical and remunerative.”41

Against this forecast, however, the grasshopper population increased during the 1870’s to Biblical proportions, and the plague devastated agriculture in Dakota Territory as well as large parts of Minnesota and Iowa. By 1876, when Bishop Foster folded North Dakota District and Dakota District back into the Sioux City District of the Northwest Iowa Annual Conference, Methodists were leaving the Territory once again.42

Instead of pleading the undetermined capacity of Dakota Territory to produce stock and crops as Battcheler did, instead of pleading “the coming growth and glory of the Dakota land” as Bennett Mitchell did in hindsight, and instead of pleading the number of subscriptions to the Northwestern Christian Advocate as John Webb did before interrogation from his bishop, a more persuasive argument for the Methodist Episcopal Church to pay attention to Dakota Territory might have been made from a story reported in that newspaper on May 20, 1863. The previous winter, a woman nearly sixty years old walked three miles thru falling snow and crossed the Missouri River on ice too thin to support a wagon team in order to hear the Methodist preacher at Vermillion. Far from her residence and even farther from wherever she

40 Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 12, 1868, p. 262, cols. 3-4. Batcheller made efforts to learn the Dakota language, turning to the Presbyterian missionary, “Rev. Mr. Williamson,” for help. This was probably John Poage Williamson. See Bruce David Forbes, “Presbyterian Beginnings in South Dakota: 1840-1900,” South Dakota History, 7 (1977): 115-153. Mrs. Conger’s surname was spelled “Congor” in the Northwestern Christian Advocate, but the surname was spelled “Conger” in reference to the Yankton Indian Agent, Patrick Henry Conger, in the Congressional Serial Set, P. H. Conger to A. J. Faulk, September 7, 1868, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1868, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1868, p. 188, viewed at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.AnnRep68 on November 28, 2017. 41 Northwestern Christian Advocate, February 24, 1869, p. 62, cols. 2-3; Northwestern Christian Advocate, March 10, 1869, p. 78, cols. 3-4. 42 Schell, History of South Dakota, pp. 119-122. The Panic of 1873 contracted agricultural credit in the United States for most of the remainder of the decade. It began with the failure of Jay Cooke’s enterprises, which included the Northern Pacific Railroad that had just reached Dakota Territory. -65- Draft on 1/17/2019 had grown up back east, she shook his hand after hearing the sermon and said, “it was so good to hear Jesus preached again.”43

During the 1870’s Methodists immigrated to two more areas of Dakota Territory in addition to the southeastern corner: first, Fargo and its hinterlands north down the Red River Valley and west to the Missouri River and, then, the Black Hills.

Construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad, a transcontinental chartered by Congress in 1864, reached the tent city of Moorhead on the eastern side of the Red River by the beginning of 1872. When spring came, a young Methodist named William H. White, the son of a Vermont railroader, delivered lumber for building a bridge to what became Fargo. Once rails were laid on this bridge, White, unlike Septimus Ingham at the Big Sioux River a decade earlier, crossed over high and dry. Soon, he brought more lumber. He put it on flatboats bound down the river to build Grand Forks and loaded it on cars taking the rails west to raise Bismarck. He established lumber yards at Fargo, Bismarck, Grand Forks, and Pembina, the first in a system that eventually consisted of twenty-seven facilities across northern Dakota Territory.44

He also started the first Sunday School in Fargo even before a congregation had been organized. In 1871 and 1872, James Gurley of the Minnesota Annual Conference occasionally showed up at Moorhead and Fargo while traveling a circuit that began 250 miles east at Duluth and followed the Northern Pacific Railroad west from Lake Superior. White may have met him for the first time midway at Brainerd in 1871. He later credited Gurley with founding the work of the Methodist Episcopal Church in North Dakota and had equally generous words for Gurley’s successor from the Northwest Iowa Conference, John Webb.45

From 1873 until conference in 1876, Webb resided in Fargo but preached up and down the west side of the Red River Valley and east and west along the Northern

43 J. L. Paine, “From Dakota Territory,” Fort Randall, May 2, 1863, Northwestern Christian Advocate, May 20, 1863, p. 155, col. 1. 44 Clement A. Lounsberry, North Dakota; History and People; Outlines of American History, 3 vols., Chicago: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1917, 2: 5-10, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.319510021883632 on November 28, 2017; Carroll L. Engelhardt, Gateway to the Northern Plains: Railroads and the Birth of Fargo and Moorhead, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, pp. xiv, 89-90. 45 William H. White, “History of Methodism in North Dakota,” Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck: Tribune, 1906, 1: 310-318, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044100154475 on November 28, 2017; White, “History of Methodism in North Dakota, in Lounsberry, North Dakota, 1: 538-548, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.c3332328 on November 28, 2017; Engelhardt, Gateway to the Northern Plains, pp. 116- 117. Reading White, Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1: 310, together with Lounsberry, North Dakota, 2: 5, suggests that White and Gurley met at Brainerd in 1871. According to White, Matthew Simpson, an antislavery bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, helped Gurley to enter the ministry in Ohio and Pennsylvania. -66- Draft on 1/17/2019 Pacific Railroad from Fargo to Bismarck. When he was in Fargo, he preached at Pinkham’s Hall. The enterprising mayor of Fargo, a hotel proprietor and saloonkeeper who was already leading Fargo in a competition with Moorhead, promoted Pinkham’s Hall as a preaching point in order to get the Methodist Episcopal Church to locate in Fargo. According to a story published in the early 20th century, the mayor paid fifty cents to anyone in “the floating population” of Fargo and Moorhead who would come hear Webb preach. White confirmed the tenor of this story when he recalled, about the same time, that Webb’s congregations in Pinkham’s Hall “…included many not supposed to frequent places of divine worship” and that contributions to the offering plate from faro dealers were not refused. They were received and applied because the “aggressive and progressive work” of the Church in those early days left no time to think about the use of what some might later call “tainted money.”46

On July 20, 1874, Webb, White, and five other men and women organized the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Fargo and proceeded with construction of their first church building. White was the only lay member of the Methodist Episcopal Church among them. As he later wrote, the congregation started “practically without a membership,” but the Northern Pacific Railway donated land for the building, many citizens contributed to pay construction costs, and the whole town benefited when the Methodists opened their building to the worship services of other denominations. When they replaced this first building in 1880, the old building was moved to a new location where it became the first Catholic cathedral in Dakota Territory north of the 46th parallel.47

So really, according to White, the membership of the Methodist congregation “…comprised the entire town as far as sympathy, interest and aid was concerned.” This remark expressed White’s own broad understanding of the Church. The esteem in which he and his congregation were held throughout his lifetime also implied that he played a very important role in providing continuous Methodist presence in the community while the small number of frontier clergy in the 1870’s was being spread thin over the Territory.48

46 History of the Red River Valley Past and Present, 2 vols., Grand Forks: Herald Printing Company and Chicago: C. F. Cooper & Company, 1909, 1: 476 (by William H. White), 493, viewed at https://archive.org/details/historyofredrive01chicuoft on September 5, 2016; White, Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1: 310-311; Engelhardt, Gateway to the Northern Plains, pp. 76-77(Mayor Jasper B. Chapin). 47 White, Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1: 311-312; History of the Red River Valley, 1: 426. 48 White, Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1: 312. In addition to Lounsberry, North Dakota, 2: 5-10, White’s reputation may be inferred from History of the Red River Valley Past and Present, 2: 1147-1148; and Minutes of the Thirty-First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., 1916, pp. 41, 73, 84-87. -67- Draft on 1/17/2019 On July 2, 1874, a few weeks before White and his friends organized Fargo First and across the Missouri River from Bismarck, George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry of the United States Army set out from Fort Abraham Lincoln to explore the Black Hills. Although this expedition was originally intended to identify a site for a military post to punish and prevent Indian raids into Nebraska, it excited the whole country with the prospect that the Black Hills might contain gold. Newspapers back east gave extensive coverage to it. A graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University reported for the St. Paul Daily Pioneer and served as the expedition’s botanist.49

Two summers later in 1876, thousands of United States citizens were mining for gold in the Black Hills or trying to make a living from those who did. The Methodist Episcopal Church was, as yet, making no organized effort to establish congregations. Once the news of Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn River reached the east, the prospect would not have seemed bright.

Even so, at least two Methodist preachers had already arrived, one a Union veteran and the other a former Confederate officer from Georgia.50 They both preached in the saloons and on the streets of Deadwood and supported themselves. After leading worship in Deadwood on Sunday morning, August 20, the Union veteran, Henry Weston Smith, left for Crook City to preach on the text, “So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also” (Romans 1:15).

Before he got there, Preacher Smith was shot dead along Whitewood Creek. The sheriff never found the killer, but many citizens suspected Indians.51 ******* Two months later when the Northwest Iowa Annual Conference assembled at Le Mars under Bishop Foster, the outlook for the Methodist Episcopal Church in Dakota Territory could not have looked promising. Nor, given all the history going back to 1860, could anything very different have been said two years later when the seven commissioners at Cherokee drew the boundary that divided the labor of the clergy in the Territory into north and south. The labor and the distances remained great while the numbers of pastors and people remained small. In 1870, only 256 full

49 Donald Jackson, Custer's Gold; The United States Cavalry Expedition of 1874, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1972, pp. 14, 51, 59-60 (A. B. Donaldson, botanist). 50 John S. McClintock, Pioneer Days in the Black Hills, ed. Edward L. Senn, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000, pp. 146-147, named the Confederate officer from Georgia as “W. L. Rumney” but indicated that, writing in 1939 about people of 1876, he was not certain of the initials. The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Database of the National Parks Service at https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/soldiers-and-sailors-database.htm does not allow for definitive identification. Most likely, Rumney would have been a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. 51 The Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church holds papers found on Smith’s body and a letter of Seth Bullock, the sheriff. -68- Draft on 1/17/2019 members of the Methodist Episcopal Church had been reported to live in Dakota Territory.52

In 1880, however, just two years after the boundary commission met in Cherokee, Iowa, 1,581 English-speaking members were reported, and, in 1890 following statehood, the number had grown to 12,417.53 This represented 2.4% of the combined population of North Dakota and South Dakota—certainly a small percentage in the shadow of the Catholics and Lutherans who have dominated Christianity in the Dakotas—but a much larger actual number than the membership in the youth of Septimus Ingham.

Today, of course, 12,417 adult, English-speaking members may still seem to be an insignificant number.54 Even when adult members of the Evangelical Association, the United Brethren in Christ, and the German and Norwegian congregations of the Methodist Episcopal Church are added to the English-speaking members of the Methodist Episcopal Church and even when children and other affiliated persons are taken into account, the resulting number may, even so, seem to be an insignificant one—except for three qualifications.55

First, the membership increase took place in the midst of an even larger increase in the general population of Dakota Territory from 14,181 in 1870 to 135,177 in 1880 to 511,527 in 1890 after statehood.56 This gave Methodists an opportunity to influence a

52 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1870, p. 179 (Sioux City District, Des Moines Annual Conference). 53 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1880, New York: Phillips & Hunt, Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, pp. 397 (Dakota Territory congregations in Red River District, Minnesota Annual Conference), 433 (Black Hills Mission, Dakota Mission), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433082254396 on December 4, 2017; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1890, New York: Hunt & Eaton, Cincinnati: Cranston & Stowe, pp. 520 (Dakota Annual Conference), 534 (North Dakota Annual Conference), 556 (Black Hills Mission), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433069136277 on August 22, 2016. 54 Louis Hartsough, “Dakota Conference,” in Palmer's Directory, pp. 5-8, regarded the numerical growth of the 1880’s as very significant. This implied that church statistics may not have as objective a meaning as often thought. 55 “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association]”, trans. Mrs. Arend Arends and ed. Mrs. Richard Lunde, typescript carbon copy, 1890, p. 27, showed 2,329 Evangelical Association members in the Dakota Conference. “Conference Journal of the Elkhorn Annual Conference of the United Brethren in Christ [Elkhorn and Dakota Conference, 1883-1892],” Ninth Annual Session, 1890, p. 246 (General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church, Microfilm HS-104), recorded 554 members on 11 circuits in northern Nebraska and South Dakota. The South Dakota or Redfield District of the North-West German Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1890, p. 552, reported 473 members. The Norwegian and Danish Conference (Minneapolis District and St. Paul District) reported (now somewhat illegibly) in the same source, p. 438, about 200 members for North Dakota and South Dakota congregations. Minutes of the Fifth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, Fargo, North Dakota: Nugent & Brown, 1890, p. 48, recorded 698 probationary members. 56 Statistical Abstract of the United States. First Number. 1878, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1879, p. 144; Statistical Abstract of the United States. 1881. Fourth Number, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1882, p. -69- Draft on 1/17/2019 much larger society even though most of the general population never joined the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Second, in 2010, 3.5% of the general population of North Dakota and South Dakota belonged to The United Methodist Church—just about the same percentage that belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1890.57 This means that The United Methodist Church achieved its relative size in the Dakotas during the 1880’s. All subsequent efforts to maintain or to expand that size have had the ultimate effect of continuing the denomination’s presence at about the same level compared to the rest of the population.

Third, the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church—at 35,717 full members in 2016—stood, by this measure, as the most successful descendant of the domestic missions that the Methodist Episcopal Church started in the American West following the action of General Conference in 1880 on Louis Hartsough’s proposal to use this form of organization.58

147; Statistical Abstract of the United States. 1891. Fourteenth Number, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892, pp. 246-249. On November 28, 2017, the Statistical Abstracts were available at https://www.census.gov/library/publications/time-series/statistical_abstracts.html. 57 On November 28, 2017, the Association of Religion Data Archives provided 2010 data for North Dakota at http://www.thearda.com/rcms2010/r/s/38/rcms2010_38_state_name_2010.asp and for South Dakota at http://www.thearda.com/rcms2010/r/s/46/rcms2010_46_state_name_2010.asp. It measured “adherents” to The United Methodist Church, which meant “all full members, their children, and others who regularly attend services.” In 1920, just before the population decline of the next two decades, the relative size of Methodists in the Dakotas remained about the same as 1890. See Minutes of the Twenty-fifth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, n.p., 1920, p. 77, which recorded 13,294 full members, and Official Journal of the Thirty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., 1920, p. 107, which recorded 22,429 full members. 58 See Graphic 2.1 derived from Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the decade of the 1880’s (for the list of missions) and the General Council on Finance and Administration of The United Methodist Church, http://www.umdata.org, viewed on November 10, 2017 (for the membership numbers in 2016). One objection to the list is that it may exclude certain other domestic mission efforts, but this would not change the overall conclusion because these missions were smaller. The Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference, as its name indicated, began as a “mission conference,” not a “mission,” a distinction made in the Minutes. In 2016, it reported 6,057 members. Another objection might be made to the 2016 geographical groupings used to define the “descendants” of the 1880’s missions. In every case, however, these groupings include at least the areas of the 1880’s missions if not more so that any bias in the numbers is against the Dakotas Annual Conference. Also, it is true that the New Mexico and Arizona conferences together have more members than the Dakotas Conference, but, although they are contiguous, they had not, as of 2016, merged. -70- Draft on 1/17/2019

1880's MEC Mission by Rank in 2016 2016 UMC Conference/District

1 Dakota, North Dakota, Black Hills Dakotas Conference 2 New Mexico (English, Spanish) New Mexico Conference 3 Arizona Desert Southwest Conference 4 West Nebraska Great Plains Conference: Elkhorn Valley District, Gateway District, Great West District

5 Nevada California-Nevada Conference: Great Northern District; Desert Southwest Conference: North District 6 Montana Yellowstone Conference 7 Utah Rocky Mountain Conference: Utah/Western Colorado District

8 Wyoming Rocky Mountain Conference: Wyoming District; Yellowstone Conference: Big Horn District

Given the high bar to any growth in membership before 1880, what happened that would explain both the growth after 1880 and the small size of the Methodist share of the general population in 1890?

Before 1880, the presence of Native Americans in Dakota Territory deterred immigration. The war of 1862 in the Minnesota River Valley and indiscriminate, punitive military expeditions that extended into Dakota Territory suppressed the

-71- Draft on 1/17/2019 likelihood of further resistance from the Santee, the Yankton, and the Yanktonais.59 But the Lakota-speaking Teton peoples remained defiant and independent.

Settlers had been afraid of Indians in 1862 during the early days of Septimus Ingham’s ministry, and a subsequent generation of settlers in the James River Valley during the 1880’s was still afraid of Indians even though fellow immigrants were pouring into the region. In 1882, a leading Methodist family in Faulkton built their house with an underground hiding place in case of Indian attack.60 Recruiting clergy to serve in the Black Hills during the 1880’s required the Superintendent of Mission to offer reassurances about Indians.61

The turning point had already come, however, as the Army avenged Custer’s 1876 defeat at the Little Bighorn River. Only two years later, Teton bands were being confined to reservations, and the Army was establishing a permanent garrison near Sturgis that became Fort Meade.

In addition to the peoples of the land, the land itself proved to be a formidable obstacle to growth and one that could not be removed or confined. Native Americans had learned over centuries how to make a living for their small societies by means of small-scale hunting and agriculture. European American settlers came to Dakota Territory with fixed ideas formed back east about how large numbers of people could make a living and even a fortune by means of hard work and individual property holding. Eventually, they had to adapt their ideas to their new environment.

The publication of John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States in 1878 marked another turning point, at least for the development of new ideas on adapting to the environment. Powell, the son of British Methodist immigrants to the United States, became a geologist and an explorer of the American West instead of a Methodist preacher like his father. At the time of his report, he was working for the United States Department of the Interior. He contended that farmers and ranchers near or beyond the 100th meridian would need to own much larger parcels of land to survive than they needed back east. Successful agriculture would require irrigation to overcome lower and more variable rainfall. Control of water would determine who benefited from economic development, and only a larger scale

59 Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant, 20 vols. planned, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978- , 13: 781. 60 Faulk County Historical Society, Pickler Mansion [brochure], undated; Jeff Natalie-Lees, “Faulkton-area Landmark Dates to 1880’s,” Aberdeen American News, July 2, 2012, quoting Jody Moritz, President, Faulk County Historical Society, viewed at http://articles.aberdeennews.com/2012-07-02/news/32512887_1_faulk-county-historical-society-pickler- mansion-john-pickler on August 23, 2016. 61 Northwestern Christian Advocate, January 24, 1883, p. 5, col. 4, an article by J. D. Searles, Superintendent of Black Hills Mission. -72- Draft on 1/17/2019 of planning and cooperation could organize the kind of irrigation that would keep a large population of small operators employed in agriculture. 62

A similar set of issues about the scale of organization affected the expansion of the Methodist Episcopal Church and other ancestors of The United Methodist Church in Dakota Territory. In the southeastern corner of the Territory, Septimus Ingham tried to expand the Church the way that Methodist itinerant preachers had used since the 18th century. He developed a circuit of preaching points, gathered people into small groups called “classes,” and formed congregations out of classes. He traveled by navigating the watersheds of rivers and knew the land by noticing its streams and the direction of their flows. When he came to an inhabited place, he looked specifically for people who were already Methodists much like Paul, according to the New Testament, worked out from Jewish synagogues that were already established in the Gentile world.

But how could such methods succeed when immigrants started to spread out over a much larger area, one that would be difficult to encompass by horse or horse and buggy? And who would pay for the large number of clergy that it would take to cover a much larger area than the southeastern corner of Dakota Territory?

The Black Hills sharpened this point. Preachers like Henry Weston Smith who had to work at other jobs to survive found themselves in a position similar to the thousands of young men looking for gold. Neither possessed the resources to do what needed to be done over a long period of time. Homestake Mining Company took most of the gold out of the Black Hills, not individual prospectors.63 In order to expand its presence there, the Methodist Episcopal Church, too, would have to develop a larger scale of organization than individual preachers working on their own, no matter how willing they were to risk their lives.

In the 1870’s, only Fargo gave a glimpse of what this larger scale of organization would eventually look like. William H. White came west with a broad understanding

62 John Wesley Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, ed. Wallace Stegner, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962; Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Powell (1832-1902) was born and lived about the same time as the seven boundary commissioners of 1878. He addressed the North Dakota Constitutional Convention of 1889 on irrigation, George W. Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory...., 5 vols., Chicago: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1915, 2: 1926, all volumes available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008699195 on November 29, 2017; Lounsberry, North Dakota, 1: 412; Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the First Constitutional Convention of North Dakota, Bismarck, North Dakota: Tribune, State Printers and Binders, 1889, pp. 401, 406, 410-412, 423, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015030831872 on November 29, 2017; see also The Dakota Farmer (Huron), August 1889, p. 9. 63 Rodman W. Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880, New York and other places: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963, pp. 176-196. -73- Draft on 1/17/2019 of the Church that might have encouraged community-based rather than denominational congregations, but the community spirit that nurtured First Methodist Episcopal Church of Fargo did not and probably could not have gone very far in this direction given the denominational rivalries of the 19th century. White did personify, however, the churchman who acquired enough wealth from business enterprise to help sustain a congregation and to act in concert with others to build community institutions.

White operated his business enterprise at a scale and a scope proportionate to the railroads that would bring large numbers of immigrants to Dakota Territory during the 1880’s. With lumber yards at many locations, he supplied growing demand for raising whole towns as well as building bridges.

The construction of the rail network from which White’s business derived and the human habitations that grew up alongside that network required such a large mobilization of resources that the federal government had to begin the process. From the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the United States claimed the land of Dakota Territory. During the Civil War, Congress decided to loan money to railroad companies and grant land to them along the routes that it wanted to be built. The railroad companies then issued bonds with land, track, and traffic as security or sold land or gave it away to promote settlement along their tracks as the Northern Pacific did when it donated land for First Methodist Episcopal Church in Fargo.64

The extension of the American railroad network into Dakota Territory enabled the large immigration of the 1880’s. When some of the immigrants finally got away from the tracks and the railroad towns to establish homesteads, they relied again on older means of navigating the land by rivers and streams. But as long as they rode the rails, they needed to pay no attention to the land because, while they sat, a steam engine hauled them over earth that stood hardened with iron. As long as their destination lay in or near a railroad town, distance could not break the continuous series of ties that bound them to the east.

A Methodist or Evangelical conference that sent preachers into a railroad network to organize Christian congregations could recruit them from across the nation and the globe, but, like the railroads themselves, this, too, would require a large mobilization of resources, especially if the preachers were to be paid and new church buildings constructed in a reasonable amount of time after settlement. Like the

64 “Investing Money,” Advertisement of Jay Cooke & Co., Sixth Annual Report of the Church Extension Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, for the Year 1871, Philadelphia: Methodist Episcopal Book Room, no date, p. [114], viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433075927156 on December 4, 2017; James W. Ely, Jr., Railroads and American Law, Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2001, pp. 51-59. -74- Draft on 1/17/2019 transcontinental railroads, this mobilization began in the 1860’s, but it did not achieve full strength and converge with both the extension of the rail network into Dakota Territory and the confinement of the Teton peoples until about the time that the seven boundary commissioners met in 1878.

“Church extension” turned out to be the principal innovation for getting congregations started in Dakota Territory during the 1880’s. Clergy salaries could be raised by a combination of local congregations paying their pastors and conferences distributing missionary funds raised from inside and outside the conference. But most congregations in a frontier area could not afford to construct a new church building without taking on too much debt or making costly, uninformed decisions about location, architecture, and property law. Because, it was widely believed, a congregation could not attract a large number of people without a church building, construction became the next step after meeting at Mulholland’s Tavern in Vermillion or Dooley’s Saloon in Groton or Pinkham’s Hall in Fargo. But how could a small congregation take that step without endangering its financial health?

At the beginning of the Civil War, many congregations in the Upper Iowa Annual Conference faced foreclosure on their buildings because of the war and a national credit crisis created by the Panic of 1857. Alpha J. Kynett, one of the conference’s presiding elders, developed a conference “church extension society” to solicit gifts for debt reduction. The effort succeeded and contributed to Kynett’s election as a delegate to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1864. Joined there by another presiding elder, George Clifford, who had financed Septimus Ingham’s mission to Dakota Territory out of his own pocket, they proposed a church extension society for the entire denomination.65

General Conference agreed because, as federal victory and the end of war approached, church extension promised to finance construction of new churches in Unionist and African American communities of the South.66 So, the Church Extension Society organized in Philadelphia.

65 Journal of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Held in Philadelphia, PA., 1864, New York: Carlton & Porter, 1864, pp. 78, 96, 130, 145, 161, 191, 210, 226, 266, 269, 491-494, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433069134736 on December 4, 2017; Alpha J. Kynett, “Church Extension,” Methodist Quarterly Review, 54 (1872) (Fourth Series, Vol. 24): 268-294, especially 281-283, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89067563031 on December 4, 2017; Stephen N. Fellows, History of the Upper Iowa Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1856-1906, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1907, pp. 65-67, 124, viewed at https://archive.org/details/cu31924010556540 on August 30, 2016. 66 Reginald Hildebrand, The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 76, 91. -75- Draft on 1/17/2019 Back in Iowa, Kynett developed another church extension concept: a revolving loan fund to build new churches. When fully funded, the loan fund would finance new church construction indefinitely into the future as long as the loans were paid back and the money loaned again. Since Methodists themselves would set terms for the loans, they could set reasonable terms, and congregations would be much more likely to pay their debts. They would no longer have to resort exclusively to banks or to send their pastors out of the parish on expensive fundraising trips to other congregations and other conferences.67

Meanwhile in Philadelphia, church extension was not working well. Too many applications for assistance resulted in too many drafts on the Society’s treasury and too little oversight. When the Corresponding Secretary who headed the Society died suddenly in 1867, Alpha J. Kynett was recruited to become the new secretary. He began fundraising for a national loan fund thru annuity contracts as well as outright donations. As time went on, Kynett and his board, working with similar agencies in the annual conferences, required oversight, strategic location, architectural planning, and compliance with law in return for financing. He hired Charles C. McCabe to be the Society’s agent, concentrating on the West.

The General Conference of 1872 turned the Society into the Board of Church Extension, guaranteed lay participation in its governance, and required election of board members by the General Conference. Enormous sums of money came under the Board’s control, and accountability became a matter of concern at this and other times. But Kynett’s management remained unassailable, and he died in office in 1899. During his stewardship, the Board helped almost 11,000 congregations and accumulated nearly $6,500,000.68

67 Kynett, Methodist Quarterly Review, 54 (1872): 291-294; Fellows, History of the Upper Iowa Conference, pp. 66-67. 68 Fellows, History of the Upper Iowa Conference, p. 124. Kynett’s biography and the work of his board are documented in the Board’s annual reports, the Manual of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York), and the Board’s little magazine, Christianity in Earnest (Philadelphia), especially the memorial issues in volume 11 following Kynett’s death in 1899. All are available at hathitrust.org. Kynett (1829-1899) was born and lived about the same time as the seven boundary commissioners of 1878. On staff for the Governor of Iowa during the Civil War, he recruited regiments and organized relief for Iowa soldiers. Kynett, Methodist Quarterly Review, 54 (1872): 268-294, surveyed the work of other denominations on church extension as well as the Methodist Episcopal Church and indicated his awareness of early developments in British Methodism. His book, The Religion of the Republic, and Laws of Religious Corporations, Cincinnati: Cranston & Curts and New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1895, summarized his expertise on American church law. The Board of Church Extension and several other 19th-century missions agencies eventually became the General Board of Global Ministries of The United Methodist Church. See also American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, 24 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 13: 8-9. On Kynett’s long friendship and collaboration with Charles C. McCabe, see Frank M. Bristol, The Life of Chaplain McCabe, Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham, New York: Eaton & Mains (copyright 1908 by Fleming H. Revell Company), pp. 233-241, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015034756869 on November 29, 2017. -76- Draft on 1/17/2019 By 1879, under the oversight of the Northwest Iowa Annual Conference, national church extension loan funds had already begun to flow into Dakota Territory. The small Methodist Episcopal congregations at Bon Homme, Central City, Sioux Falls, Vermillion, and Yankton owed the Board of Church Extension a total outstanding debt of $1,831.69 A great deal more money to build churches in the West was now gathering in Philadelphia just as a large number of prospective church members prepared to travel by rail from the east.

Highmore, Dakota Territory, July 15, 1885

At sunset on Wednesday, July 15, 1885, a monstrous wind fell out of the sky. Immense, thunderous light intermittently exposed the prairie and the small town but disappeared into darkness. The new Methodist Episcopal Church building at Highmore blew up. The wind hurled its large timbers into the air like splinters and broke the table of its sanctuary like a reed. All around its ruins, businesses and houses collapsed. Out in the country, hail and high winds attacked unripe crops as a gigantic scythe might swath thousands of acres.

On Thursday morning, something like two hundred people had no home, no food, and no clothing.70

On Monday, John T. Blakemore arrived in Minneapolis to appeal for help. He had already visited the Dakota Territory towns of Huron, Brookings, and Watertown without success because, according to the St. Paul Daily Globe, “the places are all small.” He met with the Minneapolis Board of Trade, which appointed a relief committee and dispatched railroad cars full of provisions and supplies to Highmore.71

69 Church Extension Annual Including the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Board of Church Extension, of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1879, Philadelphia, 1880, p. 99, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433075927172 on December 4, 2017. The history of the Evangelical Association provides a measure of the importance of nationally funded church extension. It did not establish a board of church extension until 1900, Verhandlungen der Siebzehnten Jahressitzung der Dakota Conferenz der Evangelischen Gemeinschaft,…, Cleveland, Ohio: Druck von Thomas & Mattill, 1900, p. 25, and it had organized far fewer congregations than the Methodist Episcopal Church. The United Brethren in Christ did not start raising funds from existing congregations for “church erection” until the end of Dakota Territory in 1889, The Yearbook of the United Brethren in Christ 1908, Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, [1908,] and it never developed a large presence in the Dakotas. 70 St. Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, Minnesota), July 17, 1885, p. 5, col. 1 (datelined Miller, Dakota, July 16) viewed at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn90059522 on September 7, 2017; John B. Perkins, History of Hyde County, South Dakota, n.p., 1908, pp. 97, 145-149, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89072939879 on September 7, 2017. 71 St. Paul Daily Globe, July 21, 1885, p. 3, col. 1; Bismarck Weekly Tribune (Bismarck, North Dakota), July 24, 1885, p. 4, col. 3; p. 5, col. 3, viewed at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042588/ on September 7, 2017. -77- Draft on 1/17/2019 By the end of the week, Blakemore was being sucked into the politics of Dakota statehood. The Dakota Press Association, an organization of Territorial editors, was meeting in a hotel on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis at the same time that he made his appeal to the Board of Trade. The editors “…declared the appeal altogether unnecessary” because the people of Dakota could help themselves, and the disaster at Highmore was not severe enough to justify outside help. Some of the editors would soon contend that Blakemore had given the Territory a bad name—as if it were “a vast wilderness and a desert” that could not sustain itself. Dakota did not need this kind of publicity at the very time that Congress was debating whether to admit it to the Union.72

At Highmore, a large group of local government officials and businessmen wrote to the Minneapolis Board of Trade to defend Blakemore’s representation of the facts and to repeat the urgent need for help. Several members of the Methodist Episcopal Church and its pastor signed the letter.73

The project to provide the Methodist Episcopal congregation with the building that the tornado destroyed on July 15 began when John T. Blakemore himself was serving as its pastor. Blakemore had since become a Hyde County lawyer, and he was representing the Sixth District in the Legislative Assembly of Dakota Territory at the time he organized relief for Highmore.

Blakemore’s journey to Dakota Territory began in Alabama where he was born in 1849. During the 1870’s he headed the Alabama Conference’s Seminary, what would be called a high school today. The Board of Church Extension singled him out in its annual report for 1875 to show that the Methodist Episcopal Church was addressing the needs of impoverished white youth in the South as well as African Americans. After the federal government withdrew troops from the South in 1877, Blakemore moved to Indiana and then to Dakota Territory about the same time that A. D. Traveller arrived from Canada.74

72 St. Paul Globe, July 28, 1885, p. 3, cols. 1, 2; Bismarck Weekly Tribune, August 7, 1885, p. 4, quoting Pierre Journal favorably. 73 St. Paul Globe, July 28, 1885, p. 3, col. 1. 74 Church Extension Annual including the Tenth Annual Report of the Board of Church Extension of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1875, Philadelphia, 1876, p. 18-19, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433075927172 on September 7, 2017; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Spring Conferences of 1880, New York: Phillips & Hunt, Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, 1880, p. 74 (North Indiana Conference), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433082254396 on September 7, 2017; History of Elkhart County, Indiana, Chicago: Charles C. Chapman & Co., 1881, p. 1074, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hx3rz1 on September 7, 2017; Palmer’s Directory, p. 43. -78- Draft on 1/17/2019 In the Legislative Assembly, Blakemore worked with another Methodist, John A. Pickler from Faulkton, on political reform, including woman suffrage. One of the same newspapers that criticized Blakemore’s trip to Minneapolis, The Bismarck Weekly Tribune, had also, earlier in the year, ridiculed his effort to give women the right to vote.75

Now, Blakemore’s former congregation had to decide, along with the town, whether to rebuild and how to finance new construction. As the only church in Hyde County, the congregation very quickly voted to rebuild, but financing took longer. In October, the Dakota Annual Conference endorsed a financial campaign, and, by Christmas, a request for special collections had appeared in the Northwestern Christian Advocate published at Chicago.76

Rebuilding a wood-frame church did not require a lot of time, but, three years later, the congregation remained heavily in debt. As its new pastor, John G. Palmer, wrote, the debt grew “…out of having only one building and two to pay for.”77 Palmer renewed the congregation’s campaign to extinguish the debt by enlisting his own and every other congregation in the conference to produce a membership directory which sold for 50 cents a copy throughout the Territory. When published in 1888, the directory gave the names of over seven thousand members and probationary members of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the Dakota Annual Conference and displayed advertisements from many businesses and other organizations.78

Few copies of Palmer’s Directory survive, but this is only the first of several reasons to consider it a rare book today. Nothing like it survives for the Evangelical Association, the United Brethren in Christ, or other conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church active in Dakota Territory during the 1880’s. It gives us rare ability to understand in a concrete way the meaning of “conference” for denominations of the Church like the Methodists, Evangelicals, and United Brethren who organized themselves this way. It also gives us a rare opportunity to understand what congregations of the Church were really like during the last years of North Dakota’s and South Dakota’s territorial period.

Formally, a conference educated and regulated its clergy and determined who was eligible for a bishop to appoint as a pastor. By means of the clergy, it also raised

75 The Bismarck Weekly Tribune, February 6, 1885, p. 5, cols. 1, 3. 76 Northwestern Christian Advocate, December 23, 1885, p. 6, col. 6. 77 Palmer’s Directory, p. 43. 78 For Palmer’s biography, see James Miller Guinn, A History of California and an Extended History of Its Southern Coast Counties: Also Containing Biographies of Well-Known Citizens of the Past and Present, 2 vols., Los Angeles, California, 1907, 2: 1823, viewed at https://books.google.com/books?id=sMJQAQAAIAAJ&dq on September 7, 2017. -79- Draft on 1/17/2019 funds and distributed funds. So, a congregation might very well see its conference as a taxing authority whose taxes had to be paid in return for getting a pastor.

Surely, this was not the case at Highmore in 1885. The Dakota Annual Conference became for the congregation at Highmore a source of long-term credit that saw it thru the construction of one building and the construction of a second when a tornado destroyed the first. The conference kept on sending pastors to live in the community, and they used their connections and their organizational experience to feed, clothe, and shelter the homeless. They successfully called on their conference and their denomination for help long after newspapers stopped taking notice. Years later, when parents no longer lived to tell the details of the disaster, their children, without perhaps quite remembering why, would look to the conference as they might lift their eyes toward someone who neither slumbered nor slept.

What were congregations connected to conferences really like during the last decade of Dakota Territory? Not enough evidence remains to recover biographies or see faces for most of the seven thousand people listed in Palmer’s Directory, but the names themselves enable their congregations to be described in specific ways.

Simply counting the number of names for each congregation demonstrates the difference between congregations of the 1880’s and 21st-century congregations. In the middle of that decade, no congregation had more than 200 members. Of course, numerous children and adults who were not members attended worship at these congregations, but, today, clergy would definitely consider a congregation of under 200 members to be a small congregation.

In 2012, 13% of all congregations in the Dakotas Annual Conference accounted for half of the total membership, and each one of this small number of large congregations had many more than 200 members. The significantly smaller memberships of the other 87% of the congregations, the ones that accounted for the other half of the membership, clearly distinguished them.

In other words, the congregations of the 1880’s not only had fewer members per congregation. The range in numbers between the smallest and the largest was much narrower than today, and so, pastors, who moved about every two years in the late 19th century, could move almost anywhere in the conference and care for a congregation of approximately the same size as one they had already experienced. 79

79 See Graphic 2.2 computed from Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1890, pp. 439, 497, 518-520, 533-534, 552, 556; “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association],” trans. Arends, 1890, p. 26; “Conference Journal of the Elkhorn Annual Conference of the United Brethren in Christ [Elkhorn and Dakota -80- Draft on 1/17/2019

Examining the surnames listed in Palmer’s Directory reveals another difference. Each of the seven thousand church members had a surname that, reasoning from the European American practice of perpetuating the last name of the husband, gave each named person a higher probability of family relationship to any other person in a congregation with the same surname. Divide the number of different surnames in a congregation by the total number of surnames in that congregation, and the relative significance or insignificance of families in the life of the congregation shows up.

Most congregations of the 1880’s fell into a range of 40 to 60 different surnames per 100 members whereas most of today’s congregations have more than 60 different surnames per 100 members. So, family ties bound the congregations of the 1880’s much more intimately than they do today. Congregations closely followed the lives of their few families from birth to marriage to death. Memory, joy, and grief combined to connect those families to their congregations.80

Conference, 1883-1892],” Ninth Annual Session, 1890, p. 246; and Dakotas Annual Conference Statistical Database (1974-2012), September 18, 2013. 80 See Graphic 2.3 computed from Palmer’s Directory and the Spring 2008 Newsletter Mailing List of the Dakotas United Methodist Foundation. The Newsletter Mailing List did not include every member of a United Methodist congregation in the Dakotas, and it listed those it did include by zip code. But the number of names it listed amounted to more than half the total number of full members in 2008, and zip codes are reasonable stand-ins for congregations since no single membership directory for all Dakotas United Methodists existed in 2008. -81- Draft on 1/17/2019

Also, the families in a congregation of the 1880’s typically raised more children than families do today. Palmer’s Directory did not reveal this, but the annual statistical reports of Methodist, Evangelical, and United Brethren conferences did. As measured by the number of children baptized per 100 members, mothers bore many more children. So, raising large numbers of children also made the life of small congregations very different from what it is today.81

81 Graphic 2.4 computed from Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1890, pp. 520, 534, 556; “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association],” trans. Arends, 1890, p. 26; and Dakotas Annual Conference Statistical Database (1974-2012), September 18, 2013. -82- Draft on 1/17/2019 Graphic 2.4: What Is the Difference between Baptizing 7 Children Every Year (1890) and 2 Children Every Year (2012) Graphic 2.4:in a WhatCongregation Is the Difference of 100 Members? between Baptizing 7 GraphicChildren 2.4: a Year What (1890) Is the and Difference 2 Children between a Year Baptizing(2012) 7 Childrenin a70 Congregationa Year (1890) andof 100 2 Children Members? a Year (2012) Childrein a Congregation of 100 Members? 70n Childre70 Children n 20 Childre 7 Baptisms 2 Baptisms 20n Childre20 7 Baptisms 2 Baptisms Children 7 Baptisms 2 Baptisms n 100 100 100 100 Member Member Member Member s s s 100s 100 100 100 Member Member100 Member100 Member100 100 s Members Members Members Member s s s s

1890 10 Years 2012 10 Years Later Later 1890 10 Years 2012 10 Years 1890 Later10 Years 2012 Later10 Years Later Later

******* The different time that Palmer’s Directory recorded remains inscribed on the land itself. Most of the congregations listed in the directory met near a railroad network that was expanding during the 1880’s. Today, a large number of rails, ties, and spikes have been torn up, leaving only embanked land that used to connect the dots of small towns. But nine primarily east-west highways still trace the routes of the railroads that once brought congregations their early members. Understanding these congregations in terms of their locations on their old railroad routes provides a way of thinking about the distinctiveness of each congregation as well as another way of thinking about what congregations connected to conferences were really like.82

82 See Graphic 2.5. The geographic information on this map and the succeeding smaller maps in this chapter comes from “Official railroad map of Dakota issued by the railroad commissioners, November 1st, 1886,” Second Annual Report of the Board of Railroad Commissioners of the Territory of Dakota (Grand Forks, Dakota 1886) available at https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4171p.rr002750/. See also James F. Hamburg, “Railroads and the Settlement of South Dakota during the Great Dakota Boom, 1878-1887,” South Dakota History, 5 (1975): 165-178; Mark Hufstetler and Michael Bedeau, South Dakota’s Railroads: An Historic Context, Pierre, South Dakota: South Dakota State Historic Preservation Office, 1998, revised 2007; Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, North Dakota State Rail Plan, Bismarck, North Dakota: North Dakota Department of Transportation, 2007. -83- Draft on 1/17/2019

Graphic 2.5 8 Nine Major Railroads in Dakota Territory, 1886 9 1. Chicago & Northwestern Railway 2. Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway 7 3. Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha with Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway 4. Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway 6 5. Chicago & Northwestern 5 Railway 6. Chicago, Milwaukee 1 & St. Paul Railway 7. Northern Pacific 2 Railway 8. St. Paul, Minneapolis 3 & Manitoba Railway 9. St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway (Great Northern) 4

Seven of the highways cut across the James River Valley. Highmore, for example, lies on U. S. Highway 14 at the western edge of the watershed, and this highway approximates an east-west route of the Chicago & Northwestern Railway. In the 1880’s the Van Camp brothers and their families from Iowa helped to start the congregation here and sustain it thru its difficult early years. Andrew N. Van Camp practiced law and held a local preacher’s license. He and his wife served as officers of the Highmore Equal Suffrage Association.83

Traveling west on U. S. 14 leads into the Missouri River watershed and Blunt where the first session of the Dakota Annual Conference took place in October of 1885

83 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 44-45; Perkins, History of Hyde County, pp. 66-67, 95. -84- Draft on 1/17/2019 after the Dakota Mission became a recognized annual conference. John T. Blakemore had started a church building campaign here, too, as he had at Highmore. The meeting of conference in Blunt, far away from the southeastern corner of the Territory, signaled its increasing interest in missions located up the Missouri from Pierre.84

Arriving in Pierre brought a traveler to the end of the line in the 1880’s. One of the great “church builders” of the conference, Abram F. Thompson, was serving as pastor in 1882 and started a building campaign. He promoted Pierre in the Northwestern Christian Advocate and predicted that it would become “the chief city” of Dakota. This did not turn out to be true, but Pierre eventually did become the capital of South Dakota. The Evangelical Association (Evangelische Gemeinschaft), with far fewer resources to organize new congregations, chose to develop one of its new congregations in Pierre.85

Returning to Highmore and then traveling east brought a railroad passenger to Miller and other places in Hand County with Methodist settlers. By 1890, members of the Methodist Episcopal Church would account for 6% of this county’s population and 49% of its church members. Hand County formed one of seven contiguous counties in the James River Valley that had the highest percentages of Methodists in Dakota Territory at statehood. Still today, counties in the James River Valley watershed make up a region with the highest percentages of United Methodist Church members even though most of the members in the two states belong to congregations in counties outside of the watershed.86

84 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 38, 55; Minutes of the Sixth Session of the Dakota Mission Conference. First Session of the Dakota Conference,…., Sioux Falls, Dakota: S. T. Clover, Leader Job Print, 1885, viewed at https://archive.org/stream/31162303.1885.emory.edu/31162303; N. H. Axtell, “Over the Okobojo,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, May 2, 1883, p. 1, cols. 5-7. 85 Northwestern Christian Advocate, March 21, 1883, p. 6, cols. 2-3; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirtieth Session, n.p.: G. D. Brown and J. M. Hunter[, 1914], p. 87 (memoir of Thompson); “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association],” trans. Arends, 1885, p. 15. The Evangelical Association’s mission at Pierre during the 1880’s did not last. Thompson oversaw construction of churches, parsonages, or both at Wessington, Pierre, Huron, Madison, Howard, Carthage, Roswell, Diana, Salem, and Claremont, Palmer’s Directory, p. 20. 86 See Graphic 2.6 computed from United States Religious Census, 1890, Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 2011. Boundaries and other geographic features come from the “Official railroad map of Dakota issued by the railroad commissioners, November 1st, 1886.” Recent datasets of the Association of Religion Data Archives at http://www.thearda.com show the persistence of United Methodist concentration in the James River Valley. -85- Draft on 1/17/2019 Graphic 2.6 Twelve Strongly Methodist Counties, Dakota Territory, 1890 1. Pembina 2. Brown 3. Marshall 4. Faulk 5. Spink 6. Codington 7. Hughes 8. Hand 9. Beadle 10. Brookings 11. Jerauld 12. Davison

●Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) % of County Population 5% or Greater and ●MEC % of All Church Members in County 14% or Greater and ●Total MEC Members in County 234 or Greater These numbers were above average for the Territory, and no other county reached all of them. The slight offsets in some north-south lines represent correction lines.

Percentages of “adherence” like these can serve as a guide to the likelihood that the membership of a particular denomination had enough size to influence public affairs and local history. Continuing along U. S. 14 from Hand County to Huron in Beadle County, another one of the seven contiguous Methodist counties, bears this out.

A nearby pastor at Lake Byron singled out Huron in the Northwestern Christian Advocate to argue that the Methodist laity of Dakota Territory “…are in every sense the equals of those who have remained in older communities, and preachers of the most brilliant abilities need not fear, if minded to follow their people to the task of establishing here

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our means of grace, the lack of cultured and appreciative audiences.”87 William F. T. Bushnell and his wife, Blanche (Van Pelt) Bushnell could have served as examples. Palmer’s Directory listed both as members and him as Sunday School Superintendent. The husband edited The Dakota Farmer, the first official newspaper of the Dakota Farmers’ Alliance. Under his editorship, it achieved one of the largest circulations in the Dakotas, and it continues to be publishedAberdeen today. His sister, Katherine C. Bushnell, became a medical missionary6 and wrote a work of Biblical interpretation, God’s Word to Women (1923). They came from an Illinois family of nine children. The Bushnells of Huron raised, however, only three children.88

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Rapid City Sioux Falls An eastbound train out of Huron would soon stop at Cavour and Iroquois and then DeSmet, Arlington, and Brookings before leaving the Territory. At Brookings in the upper Big Sioux River Valley, the Methodist Episcopal Church and Dakota 3 Agricultural College (South Dakota State University) were already developing close relations.

James W. Dibble, a local preacher and farmer from Iowa, organized the congregation4 at Brookings. The first of about nine of his children, James Birney Dibble, attended the College where he met his future wife, Hettie Doughty, who insisted on completing her degree before they married and spent their lifetimes serving South Dakota

87 J. H. More, “Southern Dakota,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, March 12, 1884, p. 6, cols. 2-4. Northwestern Christian Advocate, May 2, 1883, p. 5, col. 2, reported that Rev. J. H. More, M.D., of the Rock River Conference and Chicago left for Huron, Dakota. Minutes of the Sixth Session of the Dakota Mission Conference, 1885, p. 85, listed “J. H. Moore” as supply pastor for Lake Byron. More appears to have been the same Methodist who served in the Sioux Falls Constitutional Convention of 1885, Doane Robinson (ed.), Dakota Constitutional Convention, 2 vols., Huron, South Dakota: Huronite Printing Co., 1907, 1: 57, 190, 201, 369, 408, 507, 526, 528, 555, 602, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.35112203926540 on September 4, 2017. Charles C. McCabe made a fundraising tour to Dakota Territory and participated in the dedication of the first church building at Huron in 1883, and Abram F. Thompson oversaw construction of the parsonage. See Palmer’s Directory, pp. 46-49; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference, 1914, p. 87; Northwestern Christian Advocate, November 22, 1883, p. 6, col. 3. 88 Palmer’s Directory, title-page (advertising The Dakota Farmer), p. 47; Memorial and biographical record of South Dakota, Chicago: G. A. Ogle & Co., 1899, pp. 672-674 (W. F. T. Bushnell); Kingsbury, 4: 591-594; Paula M. Nelson, “‘Everything I Want Is Here!’: The Dakota Farmer’s Rural Ideal, 1884-1934,” The American West: The Reader, ed. Walter T. K. Nugent and Martin Ridge, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 179-202; R. Alton Lee, Principle over Party: The Farmers’ Alliance and Populism in South Dakota, 1880-1900, Pierre, South Dakota: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2011, pp. 18, 48-49; Kristin Kobes Du Mez, A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. -87- Draft on 1/17/2019

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7 congregations. OneBismarck of their four sons, Paul G. Dibble, became a missionaryFargo to India. William M. Brooke, the grandson of an early Ohio Methodist preacher, James B. Finley, and his family also participated in the Brookings congregation.89

The first and second presidents of the college and their wives joined this congregation. One of the wives, Mrs. George Lilly, served as President of the Ladies’ Aid. The congregation also included a faculty member, Robert F. Kerr, who would become active in South Dakota Republican Party politics.90

The Chicago & Northwestern Railway crossedAberdeen southern Dakota as U. S. 14 crosses South Dakota—almost at its center6 . Six other railroads brought immigrants into the James River Valley, three to the north and three to the south. The Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway (Milwaukee Road) ran trains over the first one to the south from Flandreau to Woonsocket, approximately the route of today’s South Dakota Highway 34.

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James W. Dibble moved with his family to the Flandreau area late in the 1870’s and organized the congregation here as well as in Brookings. Survivors of the war of 1862 were already organizing the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe. Eastbound trains would3 make their first Minnesota stop at Pipestone where Native Americans quarried the stone of that name to make pipes for ceremony and prayer. Hosea Locke taught at the Flandreau Indian School. He and his wife, Mary Ann (Cook) Locke, were 4

89 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 123-124; James Birney Dibble, “Prairie Jumbles [autobiography],” typescript, c. 1950, Biographical Files, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, pp. 10, 27, 28, 32, 33 (Mrs. J. W. Dibble’s work as a midwife), 48 and following (Dakota Agricultural College), 51 (call to the ministry), 58 (A. D. Traveller and conversion), 59 (marriage proposal); Official Journal of the Forty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., [1927], p. 504 (Mrs. J. B. Dibble); Official Journal of the Forty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., [1929], pp. 187, 188 (Paul G. Dibble); Official Journal of the Seventy-Fifth Session of the South Dakota Annual Conference (Incorporated) of the Methodist Church…, Sioux Falls, South Dakota: John V. Madison, [1959], pp. 122-123 (J. B. Dibble). 90 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 123-124; Kingsbury, 5: 308-311 (Kerr); Robert F. Kerr, “President’s Biennial Address,” South Dakota Historical Collections, 5 (1910): 69-84, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuo.ark:/13960/t21c5mf13 on September 13, 2017. The other presidential couple were Rev. Lewis McLouth and Sarah A. McLouth. -88- Draft on 1/17/2019 members of the Flandreau Circuit which he started for Methodists who lived in the surrounding area.91

The next stop west came at Madison where Abram F. Thompson oversaw the construction of another church building. “In consequence of its being the location of the Territorial Normal School [the teacher training school, later Dakota State University],” Palmer’s Directory stated, “it is one of our important fields, and we can not afford, as a church, to overlook the fact.” The Northwestern Christian Advocate believed that the new building had turned Madison from being one of the most discouraging fields to one of the most hopeful.92

After Madison trains would stop at Howard. The first Methodist worship service here took place in a local newspaper office. The editor’s father preached it. Some years later, the congregation finished its first church building under Thompson. On the same day in June of 1886, the presiding elder dedicated this building along with two other Thompson churches in the area.93 Until after statehood, trains made their final stop at Woonsocket although Methodists and others had already settled farther to the west.

Farther to the south, the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha Railway (Omaha Road) and the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway carried passengers back and forth along today’s I-90 corridor all the way from the Big Sioux River at Sioux Falls and Canton to the Missouri River at Chamberlain. In Canton, A. E. Carhart was serving as Sunday School Superintendent when Palmer’s Directory was published. He later became a pastor and helped to organize the Anti-Saloon League of America. Born in New York in 1846, he grew up in Iowa. Several of his children became missionaries to Mexico and Chile.94

91 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 103-104; James Birney Dibble, “Prairie Jumbles”; Northwestern Christian Advocate, December 29, 1915, p. 24 (obituary of Mrs. Hosea Locke), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015084595415 on September 13, 2017. Hosea Locke later worked at the Fort Hall Indian School in Idaho. The Arms family of Flandreau Circuit produced exhorters and pastors who were still serving in the 1920’s, Official Journal of the Thirty-ninth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., [1923], pp. 465-466; Official Journal of the Forty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference…, 1927, pp. 529-530. 92 Palmer’s Directory, p. 129; Northwestern Christian Advocate, September 9, 1885, p. 5, cols. 2-3. Methodists organized the Lake Madison Chautauqua Association in 1891, Minutes of the Seventh Session of the Dakota Conference…, Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brown & Saenger, 1891, viewed at https://archive.org/stream/31162303.1891.emory.edu/31162303_1891 on September 5, 2017. 93 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 80-81. Roswell and Carthage were the two other churches dedicated. S. H. Bronson edited the Howard Advance, Memorial and Biographical Record…, Chicago: George A. Ogle & Co., 1898, pp. 318-319, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89064894397 on September 13, 2017. 94 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 98-99. The three children were: Florence Carhart (Mrs. Ezra Bauman), Walter Carhart, and Raymond Carhart (married to Edith Noble). Raymond and Edith’s son, Raymond T. Carhart, a graduate of Dakota Wesleyan University, developed the field of audiology and taught at Northwestern University. See Woman's Who's Who of America, American Commonwealth Co., 1914, p. 160, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044087542197 on -89- Draft on 1/17/2019

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Traveling west by rail from Sioux Falls brought a passenger to Montrose and Salem. Isabella Hartsough helped the Montrose pastor to organize a congregation with “special meetings.” Joshua Watson, a local preacher born in Durham, England, in 1844, organized Salem, and Abram F. Thompson oversaw construction of its first building. Watson and his wife, Mary (Readshaw) Watson, born in 1849 also in the north of England, raised four children. He helped to start Sunday schools and congregations in neighboring Canistota, Riverside (McCook County), Bridgewater, and Montrose. While he traveled the county, she managed the farm.95

After Montrose and Salem, a train from Sioux Falls would enter Davison County, another county in the James River Valley where Methodists held larger percentages of the population than other parts of the Territory. It stopped at Mitchell. McCabe had already made a short visit in 1883 to dedicate the First Methodist Episcopal Church. After many debates in conference and the Northwestern Christian Advocate about location, Dakota Wesleyan University finally opened for classes here in 1885, but, early in the morning of March 9, 1888, its only building, the Merrill Memorial Building, burned to the ground with injuries and loss of life. One of the last pages of Palmer’s Directory included an appeal for rebuilding, turning this membership directory into a fundraising project for not just one but two disasters.96

September 13, 2017; Official Journal of the Forty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference, 1929, pp. 218-219 (Mrs. Ezra Bauman); Official Journal of the Fiftieth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., [1934], p. 327 (A. E. Carhart); Biographical Dictionary of Modern Educators, ed. Frederik Ohles, Shirley M. Ohles, and John G. Ramsay, Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 55-56. 95 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 74-75, 89; Joshua Watson biographical materials in possession of his great granddaughter who still lived in South Dakota in the 2000’s. See also John H. Schlueter and Wendall Anderson, Canistota’s Seventy-Fifth Anniversary 1884–1959; A Short History of The First Seventy-Five Years of Life In Canistota, South Dakota, 1959, available in 2017 at http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sdmccook/Canistota75Anniversary.htm. Watson served in the South Dakota House of Representatives during its first session. 96 Charles C. McCabe, “Church Extension in Dakota,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 22, 1883, p. 6, col. 3; Palmer’s Directory, pp. 67-71, 83-85, 150; Oscar W. Coursey, A History of Dakota Wesleyan University for Fifty Years (1885- 1935), Mitchell, South Dakota: Dakota Wesleyan University [, 1935], pp. 34-38. -90- Draft on 1/17/2019

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West of Davison County, the tracks led to Plankinton and White Lake before passing 7 thru Kimball and ending at Chamberlain on the Missouri River. The congregations at Plankinton and White LakeBismarck got started using a process that could best be describedFargo as self-assembly. Methodist immigrants brought their church membership letters with them when they came to the Territory. At Plankinton, three men and three women with four different surnames among them “…obtained a class book, and entering their names began to hold meetings.” For several months they had only occasional preaching. In June of 1882, a visiting preacher officially organized the class and appointed one member, Henry Clark, to be class leader, but not until the fall did the 97 growing congregation receive a regularly appointedAberdeen pastor.

Clark’s son, Charles B. Clark, served as6 a presiding elder of Mitchell District during the late 1880’s and then moved to the Black Hills Mission. The presiding elder’s son, Badger Clark, started out in the Methodist ministry but achieved 20th-century celebrity as the poet laureate and cowboy poet of the state of South Dakota.98

Going south of today’s I-90 corridor revisits the early days of Dakota Territory. The east-west direction of the1 principal railroads that crossed the James River Valley to the north did not prevail here. According to railroad maps of the 1880’s, trains in this Rapidpart City of the Territory moved from southeast to northwest as if the Missouri River had nudged the tracks up from the south at the same time that they had to avoid running into Choteau Creek and the Yankton Indian Reservation to the west.

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Today’s highway system traces these historic diagonal routes only from Sioux City, Iowa, to Yankton on Union County Road 1B, the Burbank Road in Clay County, and South Dakota Highway 50. But this one route closely follows the path of the first immigrants who aimed to settle in the James River Valley before the great east-west

97 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 87-88, 92-93. 98 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 7, 87; Official Journal of the Thirty-fourth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1918], p. 271; Official Journal of the Thirty-seventh Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, 1921, pp. 215-216; Charles Badger Clark, God of the Open, Black Hills United Methodist Historical Society, 1981. -91- Draft on 1/17/2019

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routes arrived to the north. The first German Russians came this way, and the Evangelical Association met them during the 1870’s with churches in Yankton and Scotland.99 9 The earliest Methodists to organize in the James River Valley located at Scotland in 1872. The congregation constructed a building out of native chalk rock. This Grand Forks building has long since ceased to be used for worship, but it survived into the 21st- century. Its survival made it unlike church buildings of the 1880’s farther north in the valley that were built from lumber shipped in by rail. Most of these buildings eventually burned down in fires, collapsed in storms, or gave way when more durable building materials became affordable for the early 20th century’s expanding 7 congregations.100

Bismarck Fargo Leaving the southern end of the James River Valley and moving north beyond U. S. Highway 14 that runs thru Highmore, today’s automobile traveler can find three more historic east-west routes that cross the valley.

The Chicago & Northwestern Railway ran another railroad, originally the Winona & St. Peter, along the approximate route of today’s U. S. Highway 212. It entered the Territory at Gary and took many passengers to Watertown near the source of the Big Sioux River at Lake Kampeska.

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Methodists in Codington County and Watertown accounted for a significant Rapid City percentage of the churchgoing population and the largest Methodist percentage of any county in the Big Sioux Valley at the time of statehood. McCabe visited in 1880 to

99 See Chapter 1, pp. 42, 43. 100 Scotland United Methodist Church. 125 Years of Ministry. 1872-1997, [Scotland, South Dakota: Scotland United Methodist Church, 1997] [saddle stitched electrostatic copy.] Esmond (or Sana) Methodist Episcopal Church, built in 1885 but unaccountably missing from Palmer’s Directory, is one of the few wood framed Methodist church buildings from Dakota Territory still standing. Over the succeeding years, however, the congregation added an annex to the north and made other improvements—showing that many church buildings are works in progress. -92- 4 Draft on 1/17/2019 raise funds for building a church at Watertown, and, by the time of Palmer’s Directory, the congregation had 204 members, more than Sioux Falls.101

A westbound train out of Watertown would have traveled through the hills around Henry and Clark, the home of Samuel H. Elrod and Mary E. Elrod, Methodists who served in the early 20th century as governor and first lady of South Dakota.102 Descending into the valley of the James River, the train would then stop at Doland, Frankfort, and Redfield in Spink County.

Spink County ranked as another of the seven contiguous counties in the valley with the highest percentages of Methodists living in the Territory. Exercising local option, it granted no licenses for saloons. An article in the Northwestern Christian Advocate filed from Redfield described a countryside populated with “doctors, lawyers, ministers, professors (some of them broken down, it is true), and college graduates without a profession, male and female,….” They were “…breaking up quarter sections of sod, building farm-houses and barns, flouring mills, grain elevators, school-houses, churches, towns and cities,….” Life in the James River Valley was “not pioneer life as it used to be.” After just a few years of settlement, the “golden harvest” of 1885 was turning out “…from fifteen to thirty bushels of No. 1 hard spring wheat to the acre!”103

The year before this, 1884, the Nordwest Deutsche Konferenz of the Methodist Episcopal Church built the Beulah Camp Meeting ground in Redfield at a site on Turtle Creek now known as Vinegar Flats. The conference had established by statehood six congregations worshipping in German near or along the route of today’s U. S. Highway 212: Watertown in Codington County, Redfield and Crandon in Spink County, Rockham and Faulkton in Faulk County, and Gettysburg in Potter County.104

Faulk County and Potter County attracted many Union veterans of the Civil War, and Faulk County had one of the highest percentages of Methodists in the James River Valley. John A. Pickler and Alice (Alt) Pickler moved from Iowa to settle at Faulkton

101 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 112, 135. See Graphic 2.6. 102 Palmer’s Directory, p. 125; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty-first Session, n.p.: G. D. Brown and J. M. Hunter[, 1915], p. 8. 103 Northwestern Christian Advocate, October 7, 1885, p. 1, cols. 6-7. A. McClintock wrote this article. Palmer’s Directory, p. 30, listed Alva McClintock as a member of Redfield Methodist Episcopal Church. 104 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1890, pp. 315-316. The Dakota Annual Conference took over management of the Beulah Camp Meeting in 1935 following the dissolution of the Nordwest Deutsche Konferenz after the First World War, Official Journal of the Fifty-first Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., [1935], pp. 422-423; Part 1. Official Journal of the Fifty-second Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., [1936], pp. 45-46. See also E. W. Henke and others, Die Nordwest Deutsche Konferenz der Bischöflichen Methodistenkirche, Charles City, Iowa, n.d. -93- Draft on 1/17/2019 where Thomas Simmons was conducting Methodist revivals that led to the organization of several English-language congregations in the area. John A. Pickler taught a Bible class at Faulkton, and he and his wife served on the first board of trustees for the church building there.

The husband ended the Civil War as a white officer in the 122nd Regiment of the United States Colored Infantry. After the war, he became a lawyer, and, in the 1885 session of the Dakota Legislative Assembly, he worked on woman suffrage with John T. Blakemore and others. At statehood he became a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. South Dakota’s voters re-elected him several times during the 1890’s.

William Hyde moved to Faulkton after preaching at Groton, returning to Ontario to marry, and bringing his young wife to Dakota Territory. “Major Pickler,” he remembered, “…spent much of his time counseling the pioneers who were ignorant of the legal loopholes that gave unfair advantage to claim jumpers or unscrupulous agents.”

For decades, Alice Pickler collaborated with Anna R. Simmons, wife of the earlier pastor, on woman suffrage and temperance. They both helped to organize and provide leadership for the Equal Suffrage Association and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Dakota Territory and South Dakota. They brought Susan B. Anthony to the state several times when civil rights for women came before the voters.

Two sisters of Alice Pickler also settled in Faulkton and married other settlers—a specific example of the extended families that accounted for many church members in the 1880’s. The Picklers raised four children, and some of their descendants could still be found in Dakotas United Methodist congregations at the end of the 20th century.105

Moving farther north, U. S. Highway 12 now runs about where the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway sent trains from Minneapolis thru the James River

105 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 22-23; The Bismarck Weekly Tribune, February 6, 1885, p. 5, cols. 1, 3; C. H. Ellis, History of Faulk County, South Dakota, Faulkton, South Dakota: Record Print, 1909, pp. 218-225, 267-281, 297-304, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/yale.39002028024363 on September 5, 2017; Kingsbury, 5: 1266-1271; Hyde, Dig or Die, Brother Hyde, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954, p. 123. The Pickler Family Papers survive and are held at the South Dakota State Historical Society, Pierre, South Dakota, Linda M. Sommer, “Dakota Resources: The Pickler Family Papers and the Humphrey Family Papers at the South Dakota State Historical Society,” South Dakota History, 24 (1994): 115-134. Alice Pickler served as a reserve lay delegate from the Dakota Annual Conference to General Conference in 1896, Minutes of the Eleventh Annual Session of the South Dakota Conference…, n.p.: Published by the Secretary[, 1895], p. 564. -94- Draft on 1/17/2019

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Valley to Aberdeen and points west. William Hyde took a train across this railroad on the third day of his original journey from Ontario to become pastor at Groton.106

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Just inside the Territory,1 a Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul train stopped at Big Stone City. At the end of July 1884, two years before Hyde came to Groton, the Dakota Mission held a camp meeting on the shore of Big Stone Lake. Fifteen hundred to Rapid City eighteen hundred people assembled in “the grove.” Speakers and participants included a future President of Dakota Wesleyan University (William Brush), two of the seven commissioners of 1878 (Louis Hartsough and Archibald Jamieson), Isabella Cornish Hartsough who also played the organ, A. D. Traveller, and many more Methodist Episcopal pastors. Several pastors from the Evangelische Gemeinschaft 3 (Evangelical Association) in Big Stone City and the Yellow Bank community in Minnesota attended in an expression of unity eighty-four years before their successors organized The United Methodist Church.

William Fielder of Huron District, “the youngest presiding elder in the Methodist Episcopal Church,” took for his text, “Go preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark4 16:15). He showed, according to the Northwestern Christian Advocate, “…that the religion of Christ as compared with the tenets of science, culture, and constitutionalism, reaches all classes, and especially the degraded classes, to elevate and ennoble them in a way that any other means fails to do.”107

“The power of God unto salvation was in the camp, and believers were greatly blessed,” the newspaper continued. The conference soon incorporated the campground and named it “Simpson Park” after the antislavery bishop, Matthew Simpson, who presided over the conference session of 1883. When the camp

106 See Chapter 1, pp. 49-50. 107 Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 6, 1884, p. 5, cols. 1-2. -95- Draft on 1/17/2019 meeting concluded, the local steamboat company gave all the clergy, their families, and their friends an excursion up the lake almost to the continental divide.108

A train did not have far to go from Big Stone City to its next stop at Milbank. On January 13 following the 1884 camp meeting at Big Stone City, the Methodist Episcopal Church at Milbank burned down. The congregation dedicated a new $10,000 building one year later after a fundraising campaign administered by D. W. Diggs of the Bank of Milbank and sometimes Sunday School Superintendent. He and his family had moved to the Territory in 1879. A decade later in 1888, the Dakota Annual Conference elected him to be its first delegate to General Conference. He also played a crucial role in transfer of land from the Lake Traverse Reservation to the United States in 1891.109

The train then ascended to Waubay and Webster and Bristol and Andover before Brown County and the James River Valley spread out ahead of it. In this county, another one of the valley counties with the highest percentages of Methodists, the train stopped first at Groton where Hyde stood on the station platform for a few minutes with A. D. Traveller. Several years before, A. R. Boggs, a former presiding elder from the Michigan Conference, was preaching at several points around Ordway (near Aberdeen) and farming with his family sixteen miles north of Groton. He found that many people in the area were also from Michigan, including some former parishioners. Boggs wrote that the Groton postmaster seemed to be one of the few who were not from Michigan. Asked about this, he said “…he was glad not to belong to a state where everybody seemed anxious to get away.”110

Anecdotes like this suggest that immigration to Dakota Territory in the 1880’s followed a pattern similar to the formation of congregations: large families and even communities changing places.111 They also suggest how widely preachers ranged over the countryside. The preachers may have collected their mail at one place, but they

108 Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 6, 1884 p. 5, cols. 1-2; May 27, 1885, p. 5, col. 2; Palmer’s Directory, p. 7. The first camp meeting at Big Stone Lake, under Louis Hartsough, Wilmot Whitfield, and others, closed July 29, 1883, Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 8, 1883, p. 5, col. 4. 109 Northwestern Christian Advocate, April 8, 1885, p. 5, col. 4; November 25, 1885, p. 5, col. 5; December 30, 1885, p. 5, col. 4; Edward D. Neill, History of the Minnesota Valley...., Minneapolis: North Star Publishing Company, 1882, pp. 997- 998, 999 and following; Palmer’s Directory, pp. 130-131; DeCoteau v. District County Court (1975), 420 U.S. 425, 432-433. 110 Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 2, 1882, p. 1, cols. 4-6; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1881, New York: Phillips & Hunt and Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, n.d., p. 225; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1883, New York: Phillips & Hunt and Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, n.d., pp. 224, 305, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89077112175 on September 14, 2017. 111 Boggs’ colleague from the Michigan Conference, W. H. Ware, served a “colony” at Broadland in Spink County that came mostly from Morencie, Michigan, Northwestern Christian Advocate, January 24, 1883, p. 5, cols. 2-3; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1883, p. 224. -96- Draft on 1/17/2019 did not stay in one place. They preached and visited across the countryside because the countryside was much more densely populated than it is today.

Hyde traveled many miles on horseback around the Groton countryside, but he did not have to get far from town, the railroad, and modern conveniences to see the ancient struggle of men and women to live off the land and bear and raise many children to help them. When things went wrong, they went badly wrong, and, some sixty years later, he could still recall in graphic detail the poverty, hunger, and disease he found as well as the welcome he received from farm families.112

Leaving Groton and its countryside behind, the train moved on to Bath where O. A. Phillips oversaw the construction of a church building. Like Abram F. Thompson farther south, Phillips organized several congregations and built several church buildings, including Aberdeen and Ipswich where westbound trains headed. He had begun his ministry as a pastor of the United Brethren in Christ but joined the Methodist Episcopal ministry in the 1880’s. He unsuccessfully advocated Ordway as a site for Dakota Wesleyan University. After his death, his colleagues remembered him as “probably the leading spirit” behind the creation of a permanent Conference Claimants’ Endowment Fund, which, combined with efforts in other conferences, laid a foundation for 21st-century clergy pensions in the Dakotas Annual Conference.113

A visitor who came by rail to Aberdeen or Ipswich might have found Simeon H. Cranmer and Emma (Powers) Cranmer at home. Palmer’s Directory listed them as members of the Methodist Episcopal Church at Ipswich in Edmunds County during 1887 to 1888, but they later moved to Aberdeen so that he could expand his law practice. In 1890 several things happened that turned them into public figures. Members of the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union (the “Southern Alliance”) and others organized the South Dakota Independent Party, later known as the People’s Party or the Populists. Simeon H. Cranmer joined the party and eventually became party chair for Brown County. Both he and Emma Cranmer gave speeches in favor of an interrelated program of social change that Methodists increasingly supported in one version or another: agricultural reform, woman suffrage, and temperance. But as the Republican Party gradually defeated or absorbed friends of these causes during the 1890’s, the Populists split into factions. The Cranmers ended up in the Social Democratic or Socialist Party, the most radical of the

112 Hyde, Dig or Die, pp. 55-59, 60-61, 64-65, 68-70, 71-73, 91-95. 113 Minutes of the Minnesota Annual Conference, Twenty-Sixth Session,…, Saint Paul: Miller & Rich, 1880, p. 26; Palmer’s Directory, pp. 24, 32; Official Journal of the Thirty-fourth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1918], pp. 295-296 (memoir of O. A. Phillips). The Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference and Palmer’s Directory showed Phillips to have been involved in founding or building at Ellendale, Westport, Ashton, Waubay, Bristol, Andover, Warner, Scatterwood, Ipswich, and Frederick. -97- Draft on 1/17/2019 factions. Also in 1890, their daughter was born, and they named her Frances Willard Cranmer after the Methodist President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). When she grew up, she moved back east and painted Modernist portraits of immigrant farmers, Native Americans, and members of high society.114 ******* I-94 now follows the route of the northernmost railroad in Dakota Territory that crossed the James River Valley, the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railroad. Unlike trains to the south that stopped in their tracks at or before the Missouri River, the Northern Pacific bridged the Missouri in 1879 and reached the Pacific Northwest in 1883. Palmer’s Directory did not cover the Territory’s Methodist churches along this route because these churches belonged to the North Dakota Annual Conference, organized out of the North Dakota Mission in 1886.

Neither Methodists, Evangelicals, nor United Brethren published a comparable membership directory for what became the state of North Dakota, but other sources survive that allow us to continue trying to understand congregations by thinking about their locations on the expanding railroad network of the 1880’s. These sources include the minutes or journals that conferences produced every year to record proceedings of conference sessions and the Methodist Pioneer, the newspaper of the North Dakota Annual Conference during the 1880’s and the only newspaper known to have been published within the bounds of Dakota Territory by any of the conferences that preceded today’s Dakotas Annual Conference.

From the beginning of the North Dakota Annual Conference in Dakota Territory thru the 1890’s, the minutes printed an annual list of individuals who contributed to the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in response to Charles C. McCabe’s “Million for Missions” campaigns. Unfortunately, while these lists allow for identification of a number of individuals and their surnames by congregation, they do not purport to offer a complete membership list for any congregation, and so, they do not permit the statistical generalizations about 1880’s congregations that Palmer’s Directory does. On the other hand, they do tell us that “conference” represented for these congregations an opportunity to give back as well as to get started.

114 Frances Cranmer Greenman [Frances Willard Cranmer], Higher Than the Sky, New York: Harper & Brothers., 1954; Daryl Webb, “Just Principles Never Die”: Brown County Populists, 1890-1900,” South Dakota History, 22 (1992): 366- 399; Lee, Principle Over Party, p. 122; Marian Wardle (ed.), American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Brigham Young University Museum of Art in association with Rutgers University Press, 2005, p. 198. In 1898 Simeon H. Cranmer collaborated with Father Robert W. Haire and W. E. Kidd on amending South Dakota’s constitution to provide for initiative and referendum, Greenman, Higher Than the Sky, p. 37. -98- Draft on 1/17/2019

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Northern Pacific trains had been running across the Red River into Fargo ever since William H. White crossed over on the bridge built with his lumber in 1872. By 1886, the First Methodist Episcopal Church was occupying the second of its three successive buildings on a site donated by the N6orthern Pacific just south of the station. Someone stopping for a Sabbath day’s rest on a journey west could have heard a sermon there from Septimus 5W. Ingham himself, the preacher who first waded the Big Sioux River at Sioux City, Iowa, in 1860 and was now finishing his ministry at one of the Territory’s largest congregations just as the Territory was coming to the end of its existence.1115

Ingham’s congregation consisted of many families whose lives would now be difficult or impossibleRapid to Citydetail, but it also gathered a number of prominent citizens of the Territory who would be active in North Dakota’s public life thru the First World War. Charles Pollock, an attorney and later a judge, developed and enforced the North Dakota law of prohibition. Pollock worked on North Dakota marriage law and later 3 served on a commission to reunite the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. His daughter, Clara Pollock, played the church organ. Smith Stimmel, a young Methodist from Ohio during the Civil War, bore arms as a sergeant in Abraham Lincoln’s personal bodyguard which the President gave the 4 evening off when he went to the theater on April 14, 1865. Beginning in 1882, Stimmel, too, practiced law in Fargo, and he presided over the Cass County chapter of the Farmers’ Alliance. His son, Howard Lincoln Stimmel, took the first step toward becoming a Methodist minister in the North Dakota Annual Conference in 1935.116

115 Minutes of the North Dakota Mission Conference, 1885, p. 13; Minutes of the Third Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, Grand Forks, Dakota, 1888, pp. 14, 16, 21; White, Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1: 316-317; Lounsberry, North Dakota, 1: 543. 116 Minutes of the Fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, Grand Forks, Dakota: The Plaindealer, 1889, p. 7; Minutes of the Forty-third Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, n.p. 1928, p. 91; History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota and Dakota Territory, n.p.: North Dakota Conference Historical Society, 1960, p. 56; Clement A. Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota; Essential Outlines of American History, Washington, D.C.: Liberty Press, 1919, pp. 471-482 (Pollock), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hx52l2 on November 28, 2017; Engelhardt, Gateway to the Northern Plains, p. 204 (Stimmel); Morris Davis, The Methodist Unification: Christianity and the Politics of Race in the Jim Crow Era, New York and London: New York University Press, 2008, pp. 94, 139; Smith Stimmel, Personal Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, Minneapolis: William H. M. Adams, 1928, viewed at https://archive.org/details/personalreminisc00stim on March 14, 2017; Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Oakes, North Dakota: Wilson Johnstone, 1933, p. 24; -99- Draft on 1/17/2019

Burleigh F. Spalding, son of a Methodist preacher in Vermont, began his practice of law in Fargo at the start of the decade. He helped to organize the Merchants National Bank of Fargo. His extensive public service included membership on the Territorial commission that successfully recommended moving the capital from Yankton to Bismarck (although he opposed the move), the North Dakota Constitutional Convention of 1889, the Central Committee of the North Dakota Republican Party, the United States House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court of North Dakota. He played a major role in opening the Fort Buford Military Reservation to settlement, and one of his judicial opinions helped to establish the law of primary elections in the state. He and his wife, Alida (Baker) Spalding raised five children.117

Also living in Fargo, Mrs. J. S. Campbell served as a Sunday school teacher, Sunday School Superintendent, and treasurer for the conference unit of the Womans’ Home Missionary Society. When Bushrod Shedden Taylor conducted evangelistic campaigns in northern Dakota during the late 1880’s, she “…entered into the experience of Heart Purity, and ever since her cup has been full and running over, and she has been a source of inspiration to her pastors.” This description came from a presiding elder of the conference, and his reference to “Heart Purity” located her within the Methodist holiness movement’s understanding of sanctification.118

Leaving Fargo, a Northern Pacific train would shortly stop at Casselton. Andrew H. Burke, a Methodist and the second governor of North Dakota, called this his home until he left the state after being defeated for a second term. He grew up as an orphan

Proceedings of the Forty-ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Oakes, North Dakota: Wilson Johnstone, 1934, p. 11; Howard Lincoln Stimmel, Rendezvous with Eternity, New York and Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1947, a book on eternal life intended to help family members who had lost someone in the Second World War. 117 “Hon. Burleigh Folsom Spaulding,” The Vermonter: A State Magazine, 8 , number 5 (December 1902): 173-174, viewed at https://books.google.com/books?id=gldEAQAAMAAJ&dq on March 15, 2017; History of the Red River Valley, 2: 1108-1110; W. B. Hennessy, History of North Dakota, embracing a relation of the history of the state from the earliest times down to the present day, including the biographies of the builders of the commonwealth ..., Bismarck, North Dakota: The Bismarck Tribune Company, 1910, part 1, pp. 160-161, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89067920363 on March 15, 2017; Minutes of the Forty-Fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., 1929, pp. 163- 164; Proceedings of the Forty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., 1932, p. 27; Proceedings of the Forty-ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1934, p. 32; Schell, History of South Dakota, pp. 210-211. Some sources spell Spalding’s last name as “Spaulding.” North Dakota State University, the State Historical Society of North Dakota, and the University of North Dakota hold collections of Spalding’s papers. 118 Mrs. J. S. Campbell, letter to editor, reprinted in Bushrod Shedden Taylor, Holy Fire or How, When, Where and Why to Promote Revivals of Holiness, St. Paul, Minnesota: Rich & Clymer, Book and Law Printers, 1887, p. 74, viewed at https://archive.org/details/holyfire00tayl on September 15, 2017; Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p., 1914, p. 34. “Mrs. J. S. Campbell” is the only identification in these two references. “J. S. Campbell” (her husband?) settled in Fargo during 1871 according to History of Red River Valley, 1: 471, and worked as an architect and contractor according to Fargo Chamber of Commerce Records, http://history.nd.gov/archives/manuscripts/inventory/10486.html viewed on March 17, 2017. -100- Draft on 1/17/2019 and rode an orphan train from New York City to Indiana where a farm family took him in and raised him. His childhood exemplified the treatment that orphaned and homeless children often received in the 19th century until people like Harrison D. Brown expanded adoption. Burke did not gain a second term as governor because, at the height of the Farmers’ Alliance’s political influence, he vetoed a bill to bring all grain elevators and warehouses under state control.119

Frank Lynch and Georgia A. Lynch moved to Casselton in 1882 and opened a John Deere farm implement business. With the scale of agriculture in the Red River Valley, it became one of the largest dealerships in the United States and created enough extra wealth that the Lynches could also develop a large lumber business in the Pacific Northwest. Their mill in San Diego processed huge logs lashed together as giant rafts and floated south on the Pacific Ocean. The mill delivered wood products that helped to build the West Coast. They also invested in land and agricultural finance.

Without children of their own, they made large donations to Wesley College in Grand Forks, served in major lay leadership positions in the North Dakota Annual Conference during the early 20th century, supported the North Dakota Law Enforcement League’s work for prohibition, and left the bulk of the wealth that remained after they died in trusts with the interest to be used for conference clergy pensions. The Dakotas Annual Conference continued to benefit from these trusts in the 21st century.120

Stopping at Tower City brought a passenger to other prominent Methodists in northern Dakota Territory. William J. Clapp and Alice (Stevens) Clapp moved here for him to practice law. He attended the Constitutional Convention of 1889 before they moved to Fargo where he would teach Sunday school and counsel William H. White among many other clients.121

Elam S. Preston, a Methodist preacher in the North Indiana Conference, and Anna N. (Willard) Preston moved their family to Tower City in 1880. He preached in the area,

119 Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, pp. 425-426; Louis F. Crawford, History of North Dakota, 3 vols., Chicago: The American Historical Society, Inc., 1931, 1: 378. 120 The references to Frank and Georgia Lynch in the Minutes of the North Dakota Annual Conference are too numerous to list. See also Lounsberry, North Dakota, 2: 322-323; and History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, pp. 185-187. At about the same time that the Lynches lived, Thomas B. Walker and Harriet G. (Hulet) Walker built their wealth from lumbering and endowed institutions in the Minnesota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. 121 Methodist Pioneer, May 1, 1889, p. [2]; Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the First Constitutional Convention of North Dakota, p. 3; Compendium of History and Biography of North Dakota, Chicago: George A. Ogle and Company, 1900, p. 251; viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89072939572 on September 15, 2017; Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, p. 417; History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, p. 179. Clapp later served as Superintendent of Public Instruction. -101- Draft on 1/17/2019 and his sons farmed. His daughter, Elizabeth, taught school, and, in 1889, she helped to organize the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for the new state. She married James Anderson, a clergy member of the North Dakota Annual Conference, in 1901, and became widely known in the 20th century as Elizabeth Preston Anderson for her work on temperance, prohibition, woman suffrage, and the law of marriage and divorce in North Dakota. After the First World War, she held a Methodist preacher’s license.122

When the train crossed the Sheyenne River, it stopped immediately in Valley City. Harrison D. Brown, one of the seven commissioners of 1878 bound now for a future with the Children’s Home Society and the Church of the Nazarene in Washington State, lived here in 1886 under appointment as a member of the North Dakota Annual Conference.123

The James River Valley narrows in North Dakota where the Northern Pacific ran. Jamestown was the major stop, and its inhabitants made important contributions to the state and The United Methodist Church. R. W. Teichmann, a member of a family that would have a long history with the Evangelical Association, served as pastor for the Evangelical congregation here during the 1880’s, and his wife, Mary Teichmann, was elected first President of the Woman’s Missionary Society (Dakota Branch).124 Another resident, Alfred M. Dickey, a Methodist, held office as North Dakota’s first Lieutenant Governor.125 In 1912, the estate of Bailey W. Fuller, Jamestown’s mayor in 1889 and one of the state’s first state senators, sold land along the river on the north side of town to the North Dakota Annual Conference for a camp meeting

122 Minutes of the Sixty-third Session of the North Indiana Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Richmond, Indiana: Nicholson Printing & Mfg. Co., 1906, pp. 142-144, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433082254925 on March 16, 2017; Who's Who in American Methodism, ed. Carl F. Price, New York: E. B. Treat & Co., 1916, p. 4, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101075888139 on September 15, 2017; Minutes of the Thirty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, n.p., 1923, p. 16; Proceedings Seventieth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Church…, Williston, North Dakota: Ray McClure, 1955, pp. 124-126; The Encyclopedia of World Methodism, ed. Nolan B. Harmon, 2 vols., Nashville, Tennessee: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1974, 1: 103, viewed at https://archive.org/stream/encyclopediaofwo01harm on September 15, 2017; Engelhardt, Gateway to the Northern Plains, p. 231. North Dakota State University holds a collection of Elizabeth Preston Anderson’s papers. 123 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1886, New York: Phillips & Hunt, Cincinnati: Cranston & Stowe, n.d., p. 321; Minutes of the First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1886, p. 20. 124 “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association],” trans. Arends, 1888, p. 15; Minutes of the Third Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1888, p. 9 (which referred to “W. A. Teichman” of Jamestown); The Official Journal. The Dakotas Annual Conference. The United Methodist Church. The Fourth Session…, n.p.: Mark Ahlsten and Mark S. Ellingson, 1997, p. 197 (Richard Teichmann (1936-1997)). 125 Methodist Pioneer, December 1, 1888, p. [3]; New York Times, January 27, 1901, p. 7 (obituary of Alfred [M.] Dickey, former Lieutenant Governor of North Dakota); viewed at http://www.nytimes.com; Minutes of the Eighteenth Annual Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Jamestown, North Dakota: Daily Capital, Printers and Binders, 1903, p. 45, referring to Alfred E. Dickey, Mayor of Jamestown, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433082254917 on September 16, 2017. -102- Draft on 1/17/2019 ground. Holiness Methodists who left the conference in the early 20th century would eventually dispute ownership of this campground with the conference.126

Jamestown’s involvement with the holiness movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church began much earlier, however, when Bushrod Shedden Taylor became pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1886. He came from the Vermont Conference after earning a degree at one of the Church’s oldest institutions of higher learning, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Although Taylor left the Territory after a church trial in 1888, another pastor, still serving in North Dakota a quarter- century later, remembered him as “the pioneer expounder of the teaching of Sanctification in this state.” Taylor’s presentation of the gospel appealed to the intellect of his hearers. Septimus W. Ingham, who heard him in Fargo, could not think of any other successful revivalist “…who appealed so little to the emotional element in our natures, and depended so entirely upon the power of great truths plainly presented, for success.” During his summers, he led a “praying band” to conduct revivals at points far and wide. The band included a cowboy and women who preached.127

A journey of 100 miles still lay ahead of the railroad passenger who wanted to reach the capital of Dakota Territory, Bismarck. The Bismarck congregation had struggled at the beginning of the decade and benefited from fundraising on its behalf by Chaplain McCabe and J. Walter Jackson, chaplain of the Seventh Cavalry of the United States Army across the Missouri at Fort Abraham Lincoln.128 The Evangelical Association also established a presence in Bismarck and across the river in Mandan early in the 1880’s. During the early 20th century, this would lead to organization of a hospital and exercise of political influence for agricultural reform.129

126 Turtle Mountain Star, March 28, 1912, p. 5, viewed at http://tur.stparchive.com/Archive/TUR/TUR03281912P05.php on August 30, 2018; Standard Atlas of Stutsman County, North Dakota, Brock and Company, 1930, “Midway Township,” section 26, viewed at http://www.historicmapworks.com/Map/US/44918/Midway+Township/Stutsman+County+1930/North+Dakota/ on September 16, 2017. 127 Minutes of the First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1886, pp. 10, 13; Minutes of the Second Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, Minneapolis: Press of Brumfield and Edwards, [1887,] p. 49; Minutes of the Third Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1888, pp. 10, 12, 15; Minutes of the Fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1889, p. 11; Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1914, p. 34; Methodist Pioneer, April 15, 1887, p. [1]; May 2, 1887, p. [1]; April 1888, p. [6]; Taylor, Holy Fire, p. 71; Alumni Record of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., fourth edition, ed. Frank W. Nicolson, New Haven, Connecticut: The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company, 1911, p. 194 (Class of 1874), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo1.ark:/13960/t7jq1jr56 on March 20, 2017. 128 Northwestern Christian Advocate, March 31, 1880, p. 5, col. 5; Minutes of the Minnesota Annual Conference, 1880, p. 19. 129 “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association]”, trans. Arends, 1884, p. 15; Albert H. Utzinger, History of the Minnesota Conference of the Evangelical Association, 1856 to 1922, Cleveland, Ohio: Evangelical Press, n.d., 1: 116; Richard M. Lunde, “History of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in the Dakotas,” M.A. thesis, University of North Dakota, 1959. -103- Draft on 1/17/2019

In 1880, John Bull, pastor of the Bismarck Methodist Episcopal Mission, took a ride on the Northern Pacific 100 miles west of Mandan. He reported favorably on the land and the climate but found no one living there. In 1889, D. C. Plannette, Presiding Elder of Fargo District and editor of the Methodist Pioneer, took the same ride and could describe Dickinson as “a thriving town” that “…contains more good dwellings than any other place of its size in North Dakota.” He preached in the Baptist church and visited with the Methodist pastor of Gladstone, just to the east on the railroad, who also cared for Methodists in Dickinson. The Gladstone Methodist Episcopal Church had recently purchased an organ. This congregation began in 1883 when William Cooke, born in Ireland, came from Wisconsin to serve British Methodists who had settled in Gladstone. During the Depression of the 1930’s, a member of the Cooke family and one of the first women to be given charge of a Methodist church in the Dakotas, became pastor.130

Back in Fargo, another railroad traveled an older path. North along the Red River, the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railway (later the Great Northern Railway) went in the same general direction as early 19th-century traders who 9 journeyed from St. Paul to Winnipeg. This pattern of development looked a lot like the way that rail transportation in the southeastern corner of the Territory had replaced early 19th- 8 century trade from St. Louis north and west on the Missouri River. Today, automobiles and trucks drive I-29 down the Red River 7 Valley to Canada.

Not too far north of Fargo, still in

130 Northwestern Christian Advocate, July 21, 1880, p. 6, col. 5.; Methodist Pioneer, April 1, 1889, p. [4]; Minutes of the Fifth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1890, p. 40; Minutes of the Thirty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1923, pp. 16, 17; Minutes of the Forty-second Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, n.p., 1927, p. 332; Minutes of the Forty-Fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1929, p. 122; Proceedings of the Fifty-second Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Wahpeton, North Dakota: Wilson Johnstone, 1937, pp. 8, 22, 45; Wayne McKirdy, Together; The Marriage of Wayne and Maybelle McKirdy, Denver, Colorado: Outskirts Press, 2014, pp. 28-31. -104- Draft on 1/17/2019 6

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4 Cass County, a train bound for Manitoba, would stop at Grandin. Pleasant E. Royse organized a Methodist Episcopal congregation here in 1882. He had moved from Indiana, where he became a conference member in 1849, because some of his children were farming in the valley on both sides of the Red River. He took great interest in the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, and published two books of his own on the subject, interpreting history several centuries beyond their dates of publication, The voice of the prophets; proclaiming wonderful tidings about the time of the end: as exemplified by collateral, historical and critical annotations on the Apocalypse (1860) and The Great Importance of the Sabbatic Number Seven, as Connected with the Characters, Actions, and Events of the Bible (1890).131

At the end of the decade, the Grandin congregation was still meeting in a local schoolhouse with Charles Macnamara as pastor. Macnamara, the son of a British army officer who served in India and Ireland, would later become presiding elder for Fargo District. At Grandin he was preaching temperance. Because of his sermons, the school board voted to end his congregation’s use of the schoolhouse. The congregation and the conference stepped up their effort to construct a church building that would ensure freedom of the pulpit.132

This small and long-forgotten incident helps to explain why Methodists, Evangelicals, and United Brethren poured so much money and time into building and rebuilding churches in the Dakotas. A congregation’s possession of a church building contributed to the independence of its preachers from government and supported their ability to function as the conscience of a community as they interpreted that conscience. Hundreds of local church histories and anniversary booklets published over the years since the 1880’s bear witness to congregations’ devotion to their buildings, but even after imagining all the family events that have taken place in any particular church building, an outsider may have difficulty appreciating this devotion without considering the freedom that church property holding endowed.

131 Minutes of the Fourteenth Annual Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Bismarck, North Dakota: Tribune Printers and Binders, 1899, p. 48. Royse’s The Great Importance of the Sabbatic Number Seven (1890), including as an appendix Arthur Ferris, The Trumpet; Computation of Time by Chronological Topics, Showing that the Coming of the Messiah Is at Hand, Fargo, North Dakota: The Fargo Stationery and Publishing Co., 1889, appears to have been a work of premillennialism. This subject, although unfamiliar to many 21st- century readers, played an important role in the development of 20th-century American Methodist theology. See Harris Franklin Rall, Modern Premillennialism and the Christian Hope, New York and Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press, 1920, a text in the “Course of Study” that prepared pastors for ordination and conference membership. William Underwood (1832-1906), who served at White Lake and other places in southern Dakota, wrote a manuscript commentary on Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, Minutes of the Twenty-second Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.: P. H. McBeth, Publisher, 1906, p. 50. 132 Methodist Pioneer, January 1, 1889, pp. [5], [7]; March 1, 1889, p. [2]; pp.; Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1933, pp. 105-106. -105- Draft on 1/17/2019 Leaving Cass County, a train might stop next at Kelso where the Norsk-Danske Aarskonference (Norwegian-Danish Conference) of the Methodist Episcopal Church had established a campground and built a tabernacle in the woods. The Norwegians in charge encouraged the English-speaking congregation nearby at Grandin to hold its camp meetings here, but they had located the campground at Kelso because of the concentration of Methodist Episcopal congregations that worshipped in Norwegian. From Fargo to Grand Forks, a half-dozen congregations belonged to the Red River District of the Norsk-Danske Aarskonference.133

Grand Forks, like Fargo, began its existence in the 1870’s. An English-speaking Methodist Episcopal congregation organized in 1873, and an Evangelical congregation organized in 1881, but the congregations remained small until the large immigration of the 1880’s.134 Matthias S. Kaufman led a revival for seven weeks during the winter of 1882 and brought 62 adults into the First Methodist Episcopal Church, including “a considerable number of husbands and wives” who “…sought the Lord side by side at the altar.” Kaufman, a Civil War veteran from Illinois, became the first President of the “Red River Collegiate Institute” in 1883. This project took a long time to bear fruit, but, in the early 20th century, many years after Kaufman had left the Territory, the Presbyterian President of the University of North Dakota invited the North Dakota Annual Conference to “affiliate” Wesley College with the University in Grand Forks.135

Wesley College then became a center for the diffusion of new and often controversial theological ideas into North Dakota. Unlike Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, Wesley College would not be the only institution in town devoted to a liberal arts curriculum. Instead, the North Dakota Annual Conference located its campus right across the street from a government-sponsored, tax-supported university where Methodism could engage a large student body and where a faculty of many denominations or no formal religion at all could get the attention of Methodists.

133 Methodist Pioneer, July 1, 1887, p. [3]; September 1887, p. [1]; January 1888, p. [8]; April 1888, p. [6]; June 1, 1888, p. 2. By 1890, Norwegian congregations in the area included Fargo, Halstad (Minnesota), Blanchard, Hillsboro, Reynolds, and Grand Forks, Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1890, p. 292; History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, pp. 90-91. 134 History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, p. 232; Utzinger, History of the Minnesota Conference of the Evangelical Association, 1: 110-111. 135 Northwestern Christian Advocate, March 1, 1882, p. 5, col. 2; Minutes of the Minnesota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-Ninth Session,…, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Tribune Book Rooms Print., 1883, p. 69; Northwestern Christian Advocate, July 16, 1884, p. 5, col. 3; Year-Book of the New England Southern Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Providence, Rhode Island: Snow & Farnham Co., Printers, 1924, pp. 629-630 (memoir of Kaufman), viewed at https://books.google.com/books?id=8IIzAQAAMAAJ& on March 27, 2017; Edward P. Robertson, “The Story of the Affiliation of Wesley College with the University of North Dakota,” unpublished typescript, Grand Forks, North Dakota[, 1935]. -106- Draft on 1/17/2019 Although this venture had barely started when Kaufman conducted his revival at Grand Forks, Newell G. Larimore and his son, Clay Larimore, were already producing the wealth that would finance it. West of Grand Forks, they had organized a 15,000- acre bonanza farm as the Elk Valley Farm Company. The Larimore family came from St. Louis where N. G. Larimore owned grain elevators and warehouses. Growing wheat in the Red River Valley made him very wealthy, and he directed some of his wealth toward educational enterprises like the University of North Dakota and Wesley College where he served on the trustees. He also provided leadership for the North Dakota Chautauqua Association, the American Sunday School Union, and the school board of Larimore, North Dakota. He supported the North Dakota Democratic Party.136

After Grand Forks, a northbound train passed thru the small towns of Ardoch, Minto, and Grafton where Methodists were organizing congregations. In 1883, the pastor at Grafton began revival meetings in January, and the membership grew from 2 to 32, mostly “new converts” according to his report. He also remarked that temperatures were reaching 40º Fahrenheit below 0º. “The town with its many saloons is being shaken by the Holy Spirit,” the Northwestern Christian Advocate noted in February. At the beginning of May, the congregation dedicated a new building constructed on a design provided by the Board of Church Extension, and a baby girl was born to the pastor and his wife. The family moved south in the fall of 1884 to serve the congregation at Larimore.137

Then the train sped past the last county line before Canada and entered one of the largest Methodist regions in North Dakota at statehood, Pembina County. Out of a total population of 14,434 in 1890, church members of all denominations numbered 6,396. Methodist church members accounted for 7% of the total population and 16% of the church members. Ernest F. Movius served the Evangelical Association in the county during part of the 1880’s, and, as a result of his and others’ work, Pembina

136 Minutes of the Sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, Fargo, North Dakota: Nugent & Brown, 1891, p. 14; Minutes of the Seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…1892, p. 29; Minutes of the Fourteenth Annual Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1899, p. 34; Hennessy, History of North Dakota, part 2: 259-260; Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, p. 525; Thomas P. Newgard, William C. Sherman, and John Guerrero, African-Americans in North Dakota: Sources and Assessments, Bismarck, North Dakota: University of Mary Press, 1994, pp. 62-72. The University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University hold collections of Larimore and Elk Valley Farm papers. 137 Northwestern Christian Advocate, January 17, 1883, p. 5, col. 4; February 21, 1883, p. 5, col. 4; May 2, 1883, p. 5, col. 3; May 9, 1883, p. 4, col. 7. John Walton, listed in History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, p. 245, was the pastor although the Northwestern Christian Advocate frequently misspelled his name. He was born in England, 1850, admitted to the “Toronto Conference” of the “Methodist Church of Canada,” 1869, admitted to the Minnesota Annual Conference and appointed to Drayton, 1881, [Minutes of the] Minnesota Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Held at Fargo, Sept. 29, 1881,…, Minneapolis: Review Publishing Company, 1881, pp. 11, 22, 52. -107- Draft on 1/17/2019 County had become the largest appointment in the Dakota Conference by the end of the decade, counting 238 members.138

Movius found members for the Evangelical Association spread over a wide area, however. He and his wife lived at Cavalier, but one descendant of his parishioners remembered being told that he held worship services on her grandparents’ farm east of Langdon (21st-century Cavalier County) as part of the “Pembina Mountain Mission” circuit.139 The Methodist population of Pembina County also lived at a variety of places before statehood. St. Thomas, Hamilton, Bathgate, and Neche were railroad towns. Drayton lay in the southeast corner of the county and Pembina (the town) in the northeast, both on the Red River. The residents of Walhalla lived in the northwest corner of the county at the foot of the mountains along the Pembina River.

Pembina County’s proximity to Canada contributed to its Methodist population. Drayton, Dakota Territory, began as a colony from Drayton, Ontario.140 Samuel and Eliza (Neeland) Kerfoot moved from Manitoba to the Red River Valley in the late 1870’s. His father, also a Methodist, came from Ireland, and one of his sons would become President, successively, of Dakota Wesleyan University and Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the summer of 1884, Samuel Kerfoot organized a camp meeting at “Moffat’s grove” somewhere on the Bathgate and Hamilton circuit. The presiding elder and several conference pastors attended or preached, including Charles Macnamara and Pleasant Royse. The Northwestern Christian Advocate reported Sunday attendance for the event at around 1,000.141

“Many rejoiced that the time of the meeting was spent in preaching repentance and forgiveness of sins, and in pointing sinners to a loving Savior, rather than in

138 See Graphic 2.6; “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association],” trans. Arends, 1890, p. 27. 139 Rita Maisel to Stephen Perry, e-mail, December 1, 2015. See Chapter 1, “Evangelische Gemeinschaft, Yellow Bank Township, Lac Qui Parle County, Minnesota, May 4-7, 1883,” for the story of the Movius family. The Methodists were exploring across the Pembina Mountains in the mid 1880’s, “North Dakota Mission,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, October 15, 1884, p. 5, cols. 2-3; Minutes of the North Dakota Mission Conference, 1885, pp. 20-21; Methodist Pioneer, July 1, 1887, p. [7]; September 1887, p. [2]. 140 History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, pp. 22-23; Randy William Widdis, With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration into the United States and Western Canada, 1880-1920, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998, pp. 255- 289. 141 Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 6, 1884, p. 5, col. 1; Who’s Who in American Methodism (1916), p. 118; History of the Red River Valley, 2: 852; The Pioneer Express (Pembina, Dakota), October 17, 1890, viewed at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88076741/1890-10-17/ed-1/seq-3/. Charles A. Macnamara in Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, p. 563, recalled that an 1884 camp meeting took place at “Carlisle, Pembina County.” This would appear to have been somewhere in Carlisle Township. To distinguish the different generations of the Kerfoot family, see “United States Census, 1880,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MCVW-596: 11 August 2016), Samuel Kerfoot, Township 158 and 159 North Range 51 West, Pembina, Dakota Territory, United States; citing enumeration district ED 77, sheet 72C, NARA microfilm publication T9 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.), roll 0114; FHL microfilm 1,254,114. -108- Draft on 1/17/2019 disquisitions by specialists on the definitions and gradations of the higher Christian life.” This comment from the denominational newspaper may have expressed exasperation with holiness preachers’ portrayals of sanctification although it also stated that the work of sanctification “progressed” as evidenced in “the spirit of prayer that seemed to rest upon all, and the earnest personal work that was done.”142

By 1889, Grand Forks District had purchased a tent 50 feet in diameter for camp meetings. In June and July of that year, teams of preachers, including the presiding elder, worked their way down the Red River Valley to Pembina County where they held revivals at Walhalla and Pembina. The one at Walhalla attracted so many people that the preachers decided to extend it before they moved on to Pembina. Four “lineal descendants” of Philip Embury, an Irish Palatine preacher who founded a Methodist congregation in 18th-century New York City before the War of Independence, became “converts” and joined the Methodist Episcopal Church. Others, already converted, “…obtained the blessing of perfect love.” At least one of the Methodist preachers involved in the meetings, William R. Morrison, had roots in Irish Methodism. He was born in Ireland and came to Dakota Territory from Canada.143

A few days after the Methodist camp meetings concluded in Pembina County, the Farmers’ Alliance held a picnic on the land of “Father Bechtel” near Cavalier, the county seat in 1889. The Evangelical minister at Cavalier, Leon S. Koch, attended and filed a positive report on the event with Der Christliche Botschafter , the newspaper of the Evangelical Association. He heard news and opinions about the Constitutional Convention at Bismarck as well as debate on agricultural issues that had come before the Legislative Assembly. He noted that Smith Stimmel traveled all the way from Fargo to speak. Koch had served the Evangelical congregation in Fargo earlier in the 1880’s and became acquainted with Stimmel during that time.144

The newest of the nine major railroads in Dakota Territory and the northernmost of the east-west routes began at Grand Forks. This railroad formed part of the

142 Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 6, 1884, p. 5, col. 1. 143 Minutes of the Fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1889, p. 25; The Pioneer Express (Pembina, Dakota), July 19, 1889, viewed at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88076741/1889-07-19/ed-1/seq-3/ on April 17, 2016; Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1933, pp. 104-105 (memoir of William R. Morrison). The Pioneer Express article asked participants in the meetings to bring copies of “Moody & Sankey, No. 5 books,” which probably meant Ira D. Sankey and others, Gospel Hymns No. 5 with Standard Selections, New York: The John Church Co. and Chicago: Biglow & Main, 1887, available with music at https://archive.org/details/gospelhymnsno500sank. Number 179 in this hymnal was Louis Hartsough’s “I Am Coming, Lord.” The Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church holds William R. Morrison’s Diaries/Journals, 1873-1926. 144 Der Christliche Botschafter (Cleveland), August 5, 1889, pp. 6-7. -109- Draft on 1/17/2019 Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Manitoba network and later came to be known as the transcontinental route of the Great Northern Railway. U. S. Highway 2 runs close to it today.

Going west instead of north out of Grand Forks, a train traveling this road soon came to Emerado and Larimore, then to Michigan City, Lakota, and Devils Lake as well as the Spirit Lake Reservation. Traveling on to Church’s Ferry, Rugby, and Towner in 1886, the train had to reverse at Minot on the Mouse River (Souris River) because the tracks went no farther. Before the end of the decade, it could continue to Williston and Fort Buford along the north bank of the Missouri River and then on to Montana.

English-speaking Methodists started congregations in all these towns. The area around the railroad became part of the Northwest District of the English-speaking North Dakota Annual Conference in 1889, well after the conference organized its other districts. By statehood, the Evangelical Association had congregations only at Grand Forks and Bartlett west of Lakota. Norwegian Methodists organized at Crary west of Bartlett and at Devils Lake. German Methodists had a mission at Devils Lake in 1888 but listed no congregation in 1890.145

In the winter of 1887, the Methodist Episcopal congregation at Lakota started a local society of the Women’s Foreign Mission Society. The society’s president reported a year later that sharing responsibility for devotional exercises at the home meetings on the first Wednesday of each month “…has proven a means of grace, to all the timid shrinking ones, who have participated, and brought forth buried talents.” In the spring, the pastor and the women of the church formed a “Ladies’ and Pastor’s Union” to visit individuals and families.146

145 Minutes of the Fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1889, p. 22; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1890, pp. 291, 339, 361; “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association],” trans. Arends, 1890, p. 14; Methodist Pioneer, May 1, 1888, p. 4; November 1, 1888, p.[2]. Martin N. Johnson, later United States Senator from North Dakota and a member of a Norwegian Methodist family, lived in this general area near Petersburg. 146 Methodist Pioneer, January 1888, p. [4]; April 1888, p. [1]. -110- Draft on 1/17/2019 The Minneapolis, St. Paul & Manitoba Railway donated land for the Devils Lake Methodist Episcopal Church in 1885. During the spring and summer of 1888, the pastor, W. L. Dempsey, edited the Methodist Pioneer while the usual editor, D. C. Plannette, attended General Conference in New York. Dempsey married the daughter of the Methodist pastor at Grand Forks, Henry Rittenhouse Miller, who had known Charles C. McCabe since they were young men in Ohio. In 1892, Devils Lake also became the site of a Chautauqua Association that several other Methodist pastors organized for adult education.147

On June 10, 1887, two wagon teams drove into Minot carrying three young women, two young men, blankets, guns, canned goods, lariats, lantern, hatchet, oats, hay, baggage, and a 10-foot by 12-foot tent. The tired and sun-beaten human beings wanted to meet the Methodist pastor who had seen to the assembly of the larger tent they had shipped by rail. For five days, Bushrod Shedden Taylor and his “praying band” had traveled two hundred miles overland from Jamestown following railroad surveyors’ landmarks and old trails. Once, a lone cowboy, who looked, while still at a distance, like a hostile Indian, set them back on course when they lost their way across the “vast inland sea of grass.”

They came to Minot to conduct a revival and stayed until almost the end of the month to complete it. “Seekers for pardon and purity were forward at every meeting,” one of them reported later. Before they left to return to Jamestown, no longer strangers to Minot, they gave “…many dear friends a tearful good-by.” “God grant we may all meet again at Jesus’ feet.”148 ******* Most congregations in Dakota Territory during the 1880’s met near one of nine major railroads, but not all of them did. Even among those that did not, some congregations still gathered in railroad towns because their towns were located on railroads that connected to one or more of the major routes. A number of congregations on connecting links of the network served towns southwest of Fargo. Other congregations wanted to be in railroad towns, but the railroad simply had not reached them yet or never would. For example, Methodists already lived in or near the Turtle Mountains before statehood as they did along the Missouri River downriver from Chamberlain and upriver from Yankton.149

147 Minutes of the North Dakota Mission Conference, 1885, p. 19; Methodist Pioneer, March 1888, p. [3]; May 1, 1888, p. 4; Minutes of the Sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1891, p. 12; Minutes of the Seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…1892, pp. 16, 25, 43; Minutes of the Thirty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, n.p., 1921, p. 147; Macnamara in Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, p. 563. 148 Taylor, Holy Fire, pp. 77-80. 149 The serial, Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006771726, and Methodist, Evangelical, and United Brethren conference minutes (journals) provide the easiest way of documenting the origin of the congregations. -111- Draft on 1/17/2019

Still other congregations and settlements located without apparent reference to the railroad network. The reasons for their locations away from railroads reveal interesting details about the nature of congregations that were connected to conferences in Dakota Territory.

After beginning in the early 1870’s to settle just north of Yankton, German Russian farmers moved up the James River Valley. In 1885, the Northwestern Christian Advocate reported German Russian settlements much farther north in McPherson County and Campbell County. Seeking land and freedom from government interference with religion, they saw geographical isolation as an advantage. By 1890, the Evangelical Association had organized congregations at Eureka in McPherson County and Ashley in McIntosh County.150

Unlike Germans from Russia, the Unkenholz family originated in Prussia, immigrated to New York, and became English-speaking Methodists who farmed in Morton County south and west of Mandan beginning in 1883. They and the friends they brought with them created a rural community far from the Northern Pacific Railroad, eventually organized a congregation called, simply, the Rural Methodist Episcopal Church, and raised or helped to form several prominent lay people in the North Dakota Annual Conference and a number of clergy. Some lived into the 21st century, including Richard Unkenholz and Grace Huck. Many of the others lie buried in the Rural Union Cemetery next to the now closed church building.151

Norvel Blair was born a long time before the Civil War. In 1882, when he was an old man, he bought land to farm with his family in Sully County, Dakota Territory, north of Okobojo Creek near what later became the ghost town of Fairbank. He and his wife, Mary E. (Bagby) Blair, had already raised seven children. One of their sons, John Wesley Blair, did not live in Sully County but, while a porter, saved many lives on a train that had to pass thru an enormous forest fire around Hinckley, Minnesota, in 1894. Their eldest daughter, Nancy Jane Blair, married Cornelius Wright who served most of their married life as a pastor in Iowa. The other daughters ran businesses or helped on the farm, and the other sons farmed.

150 Northwestern Christian Advocate, December 16, 1885, p. 7, col. 1; Lunde, “History of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in the Dakotas,”, p. 85; “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association],” trans. Arends, 1890, p. 26. 151 “United States Census, 1900,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M9VV- G7Z : accessed 19 September 2017), John Unkenholz, Townships 132-137-Ranges 79-84, Morton, North Dakota, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 237, sheet 10A, family 124, NARA microfilm publication T623 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1972.), FHL microfilm 1,241,230; History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, p. 50; Grace E. Huck, God's Amazing Grace; Stories from My Life, Spearfish, South Dakota: Sand Creek Printing, Inc., 2005, pp. 67-73. -112- Draft on 1/17/2019 Back in 1863 during the war, the father moved from Tennessee to Morris, Illinois, where he put his family back together. He spent twenty years developing a prosperous farm there, but corrupt public officials and lawyers defrauded him of his land and his wealth and finally sent gunmen to shoot up his house. That decided the family to move to Dakota Territory.

Descended from Africans and Cherokees, released from slavery in 1863, and terrorized in Illinois, they lived the rest of their lives in freedom near the Missouri River where they now lie buried. Before they died, they participated in a project of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the “Northwestern Homestead Movement,” to encourage African American emigration from the South. They lived to see the community they created grow to around 200 people in the 20th century.152

Almona B. Smart also came to Dakota Territory from Illinois. He had graduated from Wesleyan University like Bushrod Shedden Taylor, as well as Boston Theological Seminary (Boston University School of Theology). As a member of the Rock River Conference in northern Illinois, he had a vision of a temperance colony and a college far removed from the influence of the saloons that populated railroad towns. His thoughts turned to “the boys and girls all over the land who were still aspiring and struggling amid poverity [poverty] and want.” As he and friends from Illinois organized the settlement of Wessington Springs in the hills of Jerauld County for this purpose, he attempted to use covenants in land deeds to enforce temperance as the rule of the community. Twenty-five years later, he looked back and recognized that he had not entirely succeeded, but he still emphasized what he considered to be the benefits of keeping saloons at a distance. “Consequently, the county has no

152 Norvel Blair, Book for the People! To Be Read by All Voters, Black and White, with Thrilling Events of the Life of Norvel Blair, Joliet, Illinois: Joliet Daily Record Steam Print, 1880, viewed at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/blair/menu.html on September 20, 2017; William Wilkinson, Memorials of the Minnesota Forest Fires in the Year 1894, Minneapolis: Norman E. Wilkinson, 1895, pp. 127-163, viewed at https://archive.org/stream/memorialsofminne00wilkiala on September 20, 2017; “United States Census, 1900,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MMRX-MYF : accessed 20 September 2017), Norval Blair, Fairbanks, Farmington, Garner, Hartford, Milford, Pearl & Troy Townships & Schools, Sully, South Dakota, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 317, sheet 7A, family 85, NARA microfilm publication T623 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1972.), FHL microfilm 1,241,554; The Minneapolis Journal, November 1, 1906, p. [7], viewed at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045366/1906-11-01/ed-1/seq-7/ on September 20, 2017; B. M. Lister and Bessie B. Lumley, History of Sully County, Onida, South Dakota: The Onida Watchman, 1939, pp. 76-78, 82-86 (“Sully County’s Colored Colony” by Mary C. Donahue, 1938) viewed at https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE6992961 on September 19, 2017; Michelle C. Saxman, “To Better Oneself: Sully County's African-American Colony,” South Dakota History, 34 (2004): 319- 328. The Minnesota Historical Society has a small collection of John Wesley Blair’s papers. In spite of an excerpt from an obituary of Nancy Jane (Blair) Wright at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~walfloyd/obituaries.html viewed on September 20, 2017, Cornelius Wright was most probably a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC), not the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). The two denominations separated from each other after the death of Francis Asbury in 1816 over the treatment of African American church members and never reunited. Although an AMEC congregation opened in Yankton during the 1880’s and the MEC congregation at Onida dated from these years, the sources I consulted do not show that either denomination ever served the Sully County colony. -113- Draft on 1/17/2019 pauper, no criminals, no debts…and is raising a new generation of men and women.”153

Charles Vessey, a Methodist local preacher from England and Wisconsin, and his large family also moved to Jerauld County in the 1880’s. One of his sons, as governor of South Dakota in the early 20th century, signed a number of Progressive Republican reform measures into law, including prohibition of gambling and alcohol consumption on passenger trains. Another of Vessey’s descendants was still serving in the clergy of the Dakotas Annual Conference during the early 21st century.154

East of the Missouri River, congregations located off the railroad network tended to be west of the James River into the Missouri Hills. But the largest exception to location on the highly traveled east-west railroads lay far west of the Missouri River in the Black Hills. Until 1886 when a railroad connected Chadron, Nebraska, to Rapid City, getting to the Black Hills required overland travel for the last part of any journey.155

At first, few made such a journey except to visit traditional sacred places or to mine gold. Bishop Cyrus D. Foss recorded a memorable trip to preside at the second annual session of the Black Hills Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church in August of 1881. His train could go no farther than Pierre where he boarded a stagecoach that took him over the last, dusty 200 miles to Deadwood. During the 36- hour journey, he seldom encountered shade, but, when he did and it sheltered a thermometer, he read 103º Fahrenheit. Although he noticed few human inhabitants, the road was well-traveled. The transportation company that operated the stage employed 5,000 oxen in teams of ten yoke each to haul wagonloads of freight in and out of the Hills.

153 Alumni Record of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., 1911, p. 244 (Class of 1868);A. B. Smart, Outlines of Pioneer History, Jerauld County, S. D., Wessington Springs, South Dakota: Dunham Historical Society, n.d., pp. 3, 10. This saddle stitched pamphlet reprinted 1905 local newspaper articles by Smart but, according to Lawrence Petroskey in an article in the True Dakotan (Wessington Springs), out of their original order. See also, N. J. Dunham, A History of Jerauld County, South Dakota, Wessington Springs, South Dakota, 1910, available at https://archive.org/stream/historyofjerauld00dunh. 154 P. S. Bennett, History of Methodism in Wisconsin, Cincinnati, 1890, p. 476; The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Supplement I, New York: James T. White & Company, 1910, p. 200 (Robert S. Vessey); Kingsbury, 5: 1024-1025 (Frank G. Vessey); Ernest Vessey with Fred Dunham, “Robert Scadden Vessey,” in Charles J. Dalthorp, South Dakota's Governors, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 1953; Calvin Perry Armin, “Coe I. Crawford and the Progressive Movement in South Dakota,” South Dakota Historical Society, Collections, 32 (1964): 23-231; Stephen Perry, “The Urbanization of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Jerauld County, South Dakota, in the Early Twentieth Century,” Proceedings of the North Central Jurisdictional Archives and History Commission (1990), pp.40-147; The Official Journal. The Dakotas Annual Conference. The United Methodist Church. The Nineteenth Session…, Northwood, North Dakota: Journal Editing Committee, 2012, pp. 133-134 (memoir of Robert Vessey (1921-2012)). 155 “Official railroad map of Dakota issued by the railroad commissioners, November 1st, 1886”; Schell, History of South Dakota, p. 163.] -114- Draft on 1/17/2019 When he sighted the Hills, they “rose from the vast encircling plain” like “an island from the sea.” “It was the discovery of gold among these hills that led to the expulsion of the Indians and the rushing tide of white immigration; but the fine agricultural lands in the valleys insure a permanent population.”156

Bishop Foss’s observation summarized his denomination’s approach to establishing congregations in this part of Dakota Territory. Deadwood provided the starting point for organizing miners and other immigrants who would eventually descend to the valleys and the grasslands at the edge of the Hills where the “sea” met the “island.” Just a few months after Bishop Foss returned back east, the Superintendent of the Black Hills Mission, Jesse D. Searles, assured clergy who were thinking of joining the Mission about the kind of congregations they could pastor. “There are no Indians here; our people are intelligent and enterprising; doctors, lawyers, judges, ex- presidents and professors of colleges will be in your congregations….Our people are law-abiding citizens; the days of desperadoes are past.”157

Although the Mission organized congregations in the Southern Hills and in Rapid City during the 1880’s, it had its most immediate success in Deadwood. Revivals began in 1880.158 Even here, however, the environment required people to adapt before their lives could continue. On May 18, 1883, Deadwood had just dedicated a new church building when Whitewood Creek and its tributaries flooded. Telephone wire had recently connected some of the communities in the canyons, and warnings came just in time for people to escape drowning by climbing the hills or moving farther down the creek. But the waters completely destroyed the new church building and the ground on which it stood. Two years later, after many appeals in the Northwestern Christian Advocate (and shortly before a tornado struck Highmore), Deadwood dedicated another building on a different site.159

Eben W. Martin, President of the Board of Trustees, and Edwin B. Cummings, the pastor, helped to organize the rebuilding. Martin served as a Republican in the Legislative Assembly and, during the early 20th century, the United States House of Representatives. In 1884, his sister, Frances Martin, married Joseph O. Dobson, who came from Iowa to be Deadwood’s pastor in 1886. Dobson later became a presiding

156 Northwestern Christian Advocate, August 31, 1881, p. 1, cols. 1-2; January 24, 1883, p. 5, cols. 4-5; Minutes of the Black Hills Mission Conference, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1879-1887, Deadwood, Dakota: Pioneer Book and Job Printing House, 1887, p. 6. 157 Northwestern Christian Advocate, January 24, 1883, p. 5, col. 4. Northwestern Christian Advocate, June 3, 1885, p. 2, col. 1, reported movement of families from mining camps into the valleys. 158 Northwestern Christian Advocate, September 9, 1880, p. 5, col. 5. 159 Northwestern Christian Advocate, March 21, 1883, p. 5, col. 3; May 9, 1883, p. 6, cols. 5-6; May 30, 1883, p. 5, col. 4; June 6, 1883, p. 4, col. 4; June 6, 1883, p. 5, col. 3; June 6, 1883, p. 6, cols. 4-5; May 27, 1885, p. 5, col. 2. -115- Draft on 1/17/2019 elder in the Dakota Annual Conference and founded Dobson Park (Chautauqua Park) in Canton to host Epworth League meetings for Methodist youth.160

Cummings served during the Civil War in a Union hospital corps. In Dakota Territory he joined the Farmers’ Alliance, edited its official newspaper, The Dakota Ruralist, and successfully ran for South Dakota’s first state legislature. He worked with Henry Loucks, a Presbyterian who headed the Alliance, and his wife who held her membership in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Eventually, Cummings returned back east to Indianapolis to edit an Alliance newspaper there.161

Before he left the Black Hills, Cummings moved north from Deadwood to the Minnesela Circuit in Butte County where Belle Fourche is located today. He wrote a promotional article that appeared on July 29, 1885, in the Northwestern Christian Advocate. This article, along with others like it, demonstrated that the Methodist Episcopal Church aimed first of all in Dakota Territory to organize, retain, and develop people who already had Methodist connections. Mission Superintendent Searles believed that hundreds of immigrants had come to the Hills “with church letters hid away.” The clergy needed to seek these families out, organize them into classes, and build churches with the riches that they had come to the Hills to acquire so that their wealth would become a blessing and not a curse.162

Cummings appealed in his article for “Methodist colonies” to immigrate and farm the land. He also wanted Methodists from the East to invest in bonds to build public schoolhouses for the 75 children who lived in the area. If the schoolhouses were built, he could gather more people for worship and Sunday school instead of making do with the inadequate space inside claim shanties. He insisted that he was not asking for charity. He needed an investment of people and wealth in order to develop more wealth and spiritual lives. Already, he pointed out, the circuit had raised $20 toward Chaplain McCabe’s “Million for Missions” campaign.163

160 Northwestern Christian Advocate, February 6, 1884, p. 5, cols. 3-4; Minutes of the Black Hills Mission Conference, p. 24; Official Journal of the Thirty-ninth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference…, 1923, pp. 464-465; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, viewed at http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=M000176 on September 20, 2017. 161 Palmer’s Directory, p. 44; The Campus of Allegheny College (Meadville, Pennsylvania), February 13, 1917, p. [2,] col. 3, viewed at https://dspace.allegheny.edu/bitstream/handle/10456/31882/The_Campus_Feb_13_1917__Vol_35_Num_15_.pdf?se quence=1 on September 20, 2017; Lee, Principle Over Party, pp. 82, 85-86; South Dakota Farmer's Alliance Due Paying Members, 1890-1894, Database, at http://history.sd.gov/Archives/farmers/Search.aspx (last name=Cummings; county=Butte). I could not identify Cummings in the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Database of the National Parks Service. 162 Northwestern Christian Advocate, September 20, 1882, p. 6, cols. 3-4. 163 Northwestern Christian Advocate, July 29, 1885, p. 6, cols. 5-6. -116- Draft on 1/17/2019 Cummings’ appeal demonstrated a practice that went all the way back to 1860 and Septimus Ingham at Mulholland’s tavern in Vermillion. Methodist clergy in Dakota Territory sought Methodists first. If they expected organized Methodists then to attract Christians of other denominations or people with no church background, they did not say so. If they expected the profound transformation of individual lives for the better signified by their words, “conversion” and “sanctification,” then beginning, as they began in so many places in Dakota Territory, with the ritual of revival would likely have attracted people whose family affiliations predisposed them to respond to revival preaching—not the Lutherans and Catholics who came to dominate Christianity in North Dakota and South Dakota and not people who were unfamiliar with even one variety of Christian experience.

On a much smaller scale, the Evangelical Association, which had no congregations in the Black Hills in 1890, recruited only a few of the large number of German Russian immigrants to the Dakotas before the First World War. It would remain primarily an American denomination that conducted revivals in German.

These two denominations acted out in Dakota Territory an enduring conflict of Church history between aspiration to holiness and aspiration to catholic and apostolic mission. The history of monastic and religious orders displayed an earlier version of this conflict in the long passage from the hermits of the ancient Egyptian desert who obeyed their abbot for the sake of their own spiritual lives to the Jesuit missionaries of modern times who obeyed their abbot and the Pope for the sake of the mission of the Church to the world. How can the Church love if it does not offer love to everybody? How can it offer love to anybody if its members have not themselves already become loving people?164

The Methodist and Evangelical version of this conflict offered a path to holiness and divine love to the whole world in theory but to just a few in practice. Like Matȟó Pahá (Bear Butte) rising from the earth to the sky that domes the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the revival seemed in the eyes of many to be unusual, distant, and no place to live. But it formed a few to do the good that they did for a few, not the universal good that, by themselves, they could not possibly have done. ******* The Methodist Pioneer, the newspaper of the North Dakota Annual Conference during the 1880’s, provides another way of understanding congregations that were connected to conferences in Dakota Territory. Unlike Palmer’s Directory, conference minutes, and other sources that give a glimpse of a few, usually more prominent lives, the Methodist

164 David Knowles, From Pachomius to Ignatius: A Study in the Constitutional History of the Religious Orders, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. -117- Draft on 1/17/2019 Pioneer permits the recovery of a calendar of everyday church life that affected everybody’s lives. Recovering this calendar has the important consequence of placing disasters like the Highmore tornado or remarkable events like revivals in their original setting alongside more ordinary events that prepared individuals for the people they would become.

The new conference year began as soon as the preachers left conference and returned to their homes or moved to the new appointments that their bishop had assigned them. The Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Association met in May, and the Black Hills Mission met in August. But the Methodist Pioneer reported on the North Dakota Annual Conference. Like the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the North Dakota Annual Conference met in October just after the harvest of spring wheat.165

For North Dakota Methodists, the adjournment of conference meant being plunged almost immediately into the final stage of election campaigns like the General Election of 1888 and issues that Methodists cared about: temperance, woman suffrage, agricultural reform, and statehood.166 For pastors and their families appointed to new places, it also meant getting resettled and responding to “sociables” like the custom of pounding. “Pounding” did not mean being taken to task for an offensive sermon. It meant parishioners arriving at the parsonage door, pounding on it, and giving the pastor and family a pound of something good to eat, to drink, or otherwise to enjoy. Poundings occurred anytime from November on into the new year.167

Come Sunday, worship for “the Lord’s Day” could take place in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening or any combination that fitted the number of preaching points for which a pastor had responsibility. According to the Discipline of 1888, the book of church law adopted by General Conference in that year, worship would open with a hymn followed by prayer and the Lord’s Prayer. Then the people would hear or read responsively an Old Testament lesson and a New Testament lesson from the Bible. Then they made an offering of money and sang another hymn. After this, the pastor preached a sermon and prayed a short prayer “for a blessing on the Word.” More singing and a doxology came next, and, finally, the pastor pronounced “the Apostolic benediction” (2 Corinthians 13:13 or 14).168

165 Methodist Pioneer, September 1, 1888, p. [3]. The Methodist Library, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, holds the only run of this newspaper shown by worldcat.org to have survived. Unfortunately, it is a partial run. 166 Methodist Pioneer, August 1, 1888, p. 3; September 1, 1888, p. [2]; October 1, 1888, p. [3]; November 1, 1888, p. [1], p. [7]. 167 Methodist Pioneer, March 1888, p. [1]; December 1, 1888, p. [1], p. [3]; January 1, 1889, p. [1]. 168 Methodist Pioneer, December 1, 1888, p. [2]. -118- Draft on 1/17/2019

Winter snows came about the same time as the first quarter of the conference year. The presiding elder held a “Quarterly Meeting” on every charge four times a year and either attended himself or assigned an outside pastor to preside. The meeting schedule for the first quarter extended into January. Each meeting could involve as much time as Friday, Saturday, and the Sunday worship service. It could include prayer and discussion on topics like “the work of the Holy Spirit” and “the secret of power in soul saving,” preaching, an altar service for “consecration of believers and conversion of sinners,” quarterly conference for business, the Love Feast, the Lord’s Supper, and Sabbath school (Sunday school) with the administration of baptism. Quarterly meetings involved the sacraments, education of the congregations, and their business. These concerns sometimes competed with each other for time.169

Christmas always fell during the first quarter after Conference. From Fargo to Pembina, Santa Claus put in appearances at the congregations’ celebrations. William H. White distributed trees to customers of his lumberyards, including the churches. Christmas trees went up in sanctuaries, and the adults decorated them with gifts, especially gifts for the children. Children gave recitations and sang songs before they received their presents. Pembina prepared a “Christmas picnic” that included roast turkey, mince pie, and old English plum pudding.

The Methodist Pioneer connected gifts from Santa Claus and gifts on Christmas trees with “the Gift of Christ—God’s best and greatest gift to man.” At Inkster in western Grand Forks County, Santa Claus particularly remembered “the poorest children in town,” and this reminded the newspaper’s correspondent of feeding Christ when he was hungry and clothing him when he was naked (Matthew 25:31-46).170

The second quarter—January, February, and March—brought the first of two revival seasons. Reading between the lines of the Methodist Pioneer’s advocacy of revivals, resistance to weeks of winter meetings was already developing. Editorials in February 1888 and January 1889 criticized a lack of “earnestness” and a willingness to be satisfied with “merely the preaching of the Sabbath.” When weeks of meetings were actually held, sometimes they were organized as “union meetings” that involved other evangelical Protestant denominations. But this just diluted the strength of each

169 Methodist Pioneer, January 1, 1889, p. [7]; February 1, 1889, p. [3]. Cyclopaedia of Methodism, ed. Matthew Simpson, fourth edition, Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881, p. 550, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101078171145 on September 21, 2017, gave a contemporary definition of a love feast—a sharing of bread, water, and testimony to the goodness of God. 170 Methodist Pioneer, January 1888, p. [1]; January 1, 1889, p. [1]; January 1, 1889, p. [5]; Northwestern Christian Advocate, January 10, 1883, p. 5. col. 4. See also Bruce Forbes, Christmas; A Candid History, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007. -119- Draft on 1/17/2019 denomination. “The flying artillery of Methodism is not very effective when launched as navy with our Baptist brethren or made to yield to the slower and more regular tactics of the Presbyterian infantry.” Denominationalism could and should be turned to advantage for all.

Methodism in the Northwest needed old-fashioned, highly expressive, earnest feeling—“the social means of grace.” Simple, quiet concern for someone struggling against sin would not communicate or persuade. A pastor and congregation’s concern for the sinner needed to be displayed in the open conflict of the revival and not hidden. “Your joy or sadness only awakes corresponding feelings in your friend when it has become known to him.”

The season of revival contributed to a sense of urgency about time. “Now is the accepted time,” one preacher took as his text (2 Corinthians 6:1-2).171 Still, people experienced the urgency of the revival simultaneously with other winter church events like oyster suppers, box socials, basket socials, necktie socials and other “sociables” that raised money for the congregation and missions.172

Easter followed the winter revival meetings. Morning worship services and altar tables decorated with flowers emphasized the Resurrection, and another, newer service was celebrated in the evening or at other times near Easter. The children and youth of a congregation presented this service, and it focused on the mission of the Church. For a number of weeks in advance of Easter, children collected small contributions to support the “Million for Missions” campaign promoted by Charles C. McCabe and the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. During worship, the flags of other nations would be displayed as “the plea of the nations” for Christian missions. Sometimes, the children would distribute eggs to the congregation.

“What day more appropriate to kindle missionary fire in the hearts of the children, than that which commemorates Christ rising from the dead.” What better way to train them for “the Great Commission” of Mark 16:15?173

171 Methodist Pioneer, February 1888, p. [3]; January 1, 1889, p. [6], p. [7]. 172 Methodist Pioneer, February 1888, p. [1]; March 1888, p. [1]; April 1888, p. [1]. 173 Methodist Pioneer, May 2, 1887, p. [6]; February 1888, p. [3]; April 1888, p. [1]; May 1, 1888, p. 2; February 1, 1889, p. [2]; April 1, 1889, p. [5]; May 1, 1889, p. [1]. More recently, “the Great Commission” has usually referred to Matthew 28:19-20. Mark 16:15 comes from the “longer ending” of Mark that the earliest and most reliable manuscripts of this gospel did not contain. Ever since the argument against its textual authenticity in B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort’s critical edition of the Greek New Testament (1881), many Protestant translations into English have bracketed and footnoted the longer ending. -120- Draft on 1/17/2019 As Sunday worship continued each week and the Third Quarterly Meeting after Annual Conference approached and the snow melted and wildflowers appeared on the land, the time to plant had come. Every four years during May, General Conference met back east as it did in 1888, the same year as the General Election.174 Otherwise, the end of May brought District Conference with an agenda set by the presiding elder. In 1887, the first conference for Grand Forks District met in Pembina County at St. Thomas. Three questions that the pastors of the district debated indicated that changes could be coming in the future: whether class meetings should be discontinued in the denomination, whether “union meetings” produced the best results, and whether the upper limit on pastoral service in one appointment should be raised from 3 to 5 years. Answers to these questions would affect revivals and whether Methodist preachers saw themselves more as missionaries or more as community pastors.175

For Children’s Day in June or sometimes July, children and adults brought wildflowers to church, gave a program, took up a collection for education, and even ate ice cream. The flowers reminded people of “the kingdom of heaven” “where the flower of the soul has its immortal bloomage in unfading beauty.”176

Most camp meetings took place during the fourth quarter in July or August. This second season of revivals could involve just one congregation going out of doors but, more often, the pastors of several congregations cooperated, some of the participants traveled by rail, and the size of the resulting event attracted people from beyond the membership of any congregation.177

The Fourth Quarterly Meeting provided the last opportunity to get ready for annual conference and to finish raising funds for the conference year, including the pastor’s salary. Quarterly meeting happened as harvest drew near and a congregation began to know the financial prospects of its members for the coming year.178

Unlike the planned events scheduled throughout the calendar of the church year, death and a funeral could come at any time. The Methodist Pioneer reported that Dora May Ward died of diphtheria at her home near Emerado on August 18, 1888, about two months before her eighteenth birthday. If this diagnosis was correct, bacterial infection would probably have caused her to suffocate or made her heart stop after

174 Methodist Pioneer, June 1, 1888, p. 6 [5]. 175 Methodist Pioneer, June 1, 1887, p. [1]; July 1, 1887, p. [3]. 176 Methodist Pioneer, July 1, 1887, p. [1]; August 1887, p. [1]; August 1887, p. [2]. 177 Methodist Pioneer, July 1, 1887, p. [2], p. [3], p. [10]; August 1887, p. [2]; June 1, 1888, p. 2. 178 “Quarterly Conferences,” Cyclopaedia of Methodism, ed. Simpson, p. 739. -121- Draft on 1/17/2019 the seven days of extreme suffering also mentioned in the newspaper. She had sung as a soprano in worship, played the organ, and was advancing toward full membership. This and her testimonies in class meetings and prayer meetings the article took to be evidence that, on her death, God received her into “the Church Triumphant.” Before she could no longer speak, she told her father, “I am not afraid to die; I am going home to Jesus.”179

Then, following harvest, the preachers of all the congregations in all the districts gathered again for their annual conference. The clergy made their reports on members added or subtracted and funds raised. They received communion from their bishop. They sang hymns and heard sermons and prayed together. They rejoiced over the accomplishments of the year now ending and renewed their commitment to make the next year better.

But the preachers also had to deal with controversies of several kinds. First, growing support for temperance, woman suffrage, and agricultural reform did not mean universal support either within a conference or throughout Dakota Territory. Those who did support these causes did not necessarily unite on which political party was most likely to advance them or which legislative proposals would work best.180

Conference also had to deal with the traditional task of disciplining its members for preaching false doctrine or behaving in unloving ways. In his few short years in northern Dakota Territory, Bushrod Shedden Taylor, a charter member of the North Dakota Annual Conference, became a popular evangelist and preacher of sanctification. In October of 1888, when conference convened in Jamestown where he had served as pastor, he was charged with lying, violation of promise, and contumacy. The conference minutes do not record the alleged facts of his case, only that conference acquitted him of the first two charges but found him guilty of contumacy.

Whatever its factual basis may have been, the charge of contumacy probably has the most historical interest simply because the word, “contumacy,” has ceased to be a common term in United Methodist church law and because willful disobedience to authority—the definition of “contumacy”—would no longer be widely regarded as an act that rose to the level of a chargeable offense. Its legal status at the end of the 19th century showed the detailed inquiry into personal behavior to which conference-

179 Methodist Pioneer, September 1, 1888, p. [4]. The gravestone of “Dora Mellicent Ward” (1870-1888) still stands in Sunset Prairie Cemetery, Emerado, North Dakota. 180 See the next section of this chapter entitled, “Sioux Falls and Bismarck, Dakota Territory, July 4, 1889.” -122- Draft on 1/17/2019 related clergy voluntarily submitted themselves and the obedience in pursuit of divine love that they expected of each other.

The Bishop called Taylor forward in open conference and reprimanded him. The conference granted him supernumerary status, and, at the conference of 1889, he requested and received a certificate of location. He left Dakota Territory and worked until his death in 1935 as an evangelist, speaker, and author, but he never again served under episcopal appointment.181

Conferences also faced theological and philosophical challenges from the raging intellectual world of the late 19th century which increasingly questioned authority. Methodist and Evangelical pastors in Dakota Territory, especially those who read German, learned about developments in science and study of the Bible from their denominational publishing houses, other sources of books, and hundreds of newspapers and journals published in the United States and other countries. They discussed them with each other at conference and ministerial associations.182

Robert G. Ingersoll embodied many of the challenges to Christianity in the late 19th century. The son of a New England Congregationalist pastor who led revivals, Ingersoll confronted American Christians with the discoveries of Charles Darwin about the evolution of life and the conclusions of historians about the nature and development of the Bible. “Darwinism” and “higher criticism” became synonyms for hostility to Christian faith in Ingersoll’s lectures and books and in many pastors’ perceptions of science and Biblical scholarship. If Darwin were right, then Biblical chronology as traditionally understood could not account for the vast lengthening of time that geological and paleontological evidence required. If Biblical scholars were right, then readers of the Bible could not legitimately treat it as if it were divine revelation in the form of a 19th-century newspaper or historical narrative. The Bible had to be read instead as a collection of parables, theological narratives, and other ancient forms of literature and its status as revelation figured out from there.

181 Minutes of the Third Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1888, pp. 10, 12; Minutes of the Fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1889, p. 11; Who’s Who in New England, ed. Albert Nelson Marquis, second edition, Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Company, 1916, p. 1050; Proceedings of the Fifty-first Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Wahpeton, North Dakota: Wilson Johnstone, 1936, p. 20; Proceedings of the Fifty-second Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1937, p. 83. 182 Methodist Pioneer, January1, 1888, p. [1], advertised a list of books that would be given as rewards for soliciting subscriptions for the newspaper. Other book advertisements appeared in its pages, and it reprinted sermons from Eastern pulpits and “Notes on International Lessons.” See also Minutes of the Seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…1892, p. 17, and the required books listed in the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Doctrines and Discipline and sometimes listed in the minutes (journals) of the various Dakotas conferences for the “Course of Study” that prepared pastors for ordination and conference membership. -123- Draft on 1/17/2019 Charles C. McCabe wrote a widely distributed Methodist response to Ingersoll entitled, “Dream of Ingersollville.” It held Ingersoll and his sympathizers up to ridicule and personal attack, and it failed to deal with the evidence and argument that Ingersoll advanced to support his views. McCabe’s satirical approach could not stop modern science, and the debate over evolution and the Bible among Methodists and Evangelicals took a different turn in the 20th century.183

Evolution with its “struggle for survival” and “survival of the fittest” sounded at first like another form of determinism to which Methodists and Evangelicals would understandably react as they had reacted to Calvinism. They opposed the notion of a universe in which freedom was not a factor, especially when “social Darwinists” maintained the futility of attempting to change the present state of moral development and distribution of power and wealth.184 The descent of human beings from monkeys as depicted in an advertisement accepted for publication in the minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference’s first session in 1885 made Darwinism seem patently ridiculous and even hilarious. The advertisement showed two gardens side by side. The “zoological garden” traced the ancestry of “Messrs. Huxley, Darwin, Tyndal, Ingersoll & Co.” to monkeys swinging from trees. The “Garden of Eden” claimed Adam and Eve as the ancestors of the advertisers, J. J. Pike & Co., Chelsea, Massachusetts, manufacturers of Pike’s Centennial Salt Rheum Salve.185

To anyone who had actually read Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), this advertisement amounted to blatant falsehood. Darwin never contended that human beings descended from monkeys or apes. He offered evidence that monkeys, apes, and human beings descended from a common ancestor. Even though they were

183 McCabe’s “Dream of Ingersollville” first appeared in Mistakes of Ingersoll, ed. J. B. McClure, Chicago: Rhodes & McClure, Publishers, 1879, with a preface dated May 17, 1879, pp. 43-47, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89097191423. An earlier edition of this book without McCabe’s contribution was published with a preface dated April 22, 1879, available at https://books.google.com/books?id=G_8xAQAAMAAJ. Several subsequent editions included the “Dream of Ingersollville.” Frank Bristol included it as chapter 27 of his biography, Life of Chaplain McCabe. See also The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, 12 vols., New York: The Dresden Publishing Co., C. P. Farrell, 1902, available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007648057. J. Walter Jackson, when he was serving as chaplain at Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, presented a paper on “The Mistakes of Ingersoll” to the Ministerial Association of the Red River District of the Minnesota Annual Conference, meeting at Fargo, Northwestern Christian Advocate, June 23, 1880, p. 5, col. 4. 184 Methodist Pioneer, January 1, 1888, p. [1] (advertisement for subscription solicitation book rewards), referred to Natural Law in the Spiritual World probably by Henry Drummond although it did not give the book’s author. In this and other works, Drummond responded to Darwin and contemporary uses of Darwin. The Minnesota Annual Conference tried A. G. Wilson for preaching unsound doctrine, including “Darwinism,” in a sermon at Redwing, Minutes of the Minnesota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Twenty-Eighth Session…, Minneapolis: Tribune Job Printing Company, 1882, pp. 20-21. Constant opposition was not, however, the only position on evolution possible in 19th-century American Methodism. See C. David Grant, “Evolution and Darwinism in the Methodist Quarterly Review, 1840-1870,” Methodist History, 29 (1991): 175-183. 185 Minutes of the Sixth Session of the Dakota Mission Conference, 1885, p. 95 recto, viewed at https://archive.org/stream/31162303.1885.emory.edu/31162303 -124- Draft on 1/17/2019 related historically, far more biological distance separated them from each other than from their shirttail cousins. The telescoping of time in Darwin’s understanding of history allowed for small differences among individuals of the same species to add up by “natural selection” to large differences across new species.

When read for what it really said, Darwin’s earlier book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), struck at the foundation of any predetermination of life. For Darwin, only individuals were real, and each one was unique in some way. “Species” merely described which individuals had the biological possibility of mating with each other and reproducing themselves at a given point in time. Many outcomes were possible, and anything that was possible could still happen until age, disease, and death made it impossible.

Refocusing attention on the reality of the individual plant or animal and the reality of the life of each human being led to changes in the study of human psychology that were already underway when statehood came to Dakota Territory.186 Passionate concern for what would truly liberate individual human beings from anything that bound them animated both McCabe and Ingersoll even though they understood the sources of human freedom in different ways. Concern for human freedom led late 19th-century Methodist and Evangelical pastors in Dakota Territory to identify with McCabe. It led their 20th-century successors to take evolution and historical study of the Bible as worthy of a response more serious than McCabe’s.

When Methodist and Evangelical pastors gathered, they thought about time in other ways, too. Each conference session brought changes in the lists of active clergy, and these changes accumulated to a point in the very early 20th century when few of the

186 William James published his Principles of Human Psychology in 1890. “Spiritualism,” spiritual healing, and the possibility of a spiritual side to the natural world, which James would later explore in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), were live issues in Aberdeen about this time. J. C. Shelland, pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church and later Superintendent of the Indian School at Sisseton Agency, South Dakota, preached a sermon on January 4, 1891, “Spiritualism, Saul, and the Witch of Endor,” to which L. Frank Baum, later author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, took great exception. See Nancy Tystad Koupal, Baum's Road to Oz; The Dakota Years, Pierre, South Dakota: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2000, pp. 97, 99; Sixty-second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893, viewed at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.AnnRep93 on September 9, 2017, p. 305; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Fall Conferences of 1893, New York: Hunt & Eaton, Cincinnati: Cranston & Curts, 1893, p. 382, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89077112217 on September 9, 2017. Baum, who grew up in a Methodist family, had married the daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a member of the Theosophical Society and an officer of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Baum served with Simeon H. Cranmer as an officer of the Equal Suffrage Association in Aberdeen. When Emma Cranmer, a Methodist like her husband, eventually embraced Christian Science at her husband’s encouragement during a time of personal crisis for her, this created problems for their relationships in the Aberdeen congregation. According to their daughter, the Cranmers often invited drunk and homeless people into their home, and her mother succeeded in healing many of them, Greenman, Higher Than the Sky, pp. 14, 32-33, 36. -125- Draft on 1/17/2019 Territorial clergy were still serving. The end of conference could signal a parting of ways among people who would never meet again in Dakota Territory.

This happened in southern Dakota when, at the age of sixty-one years, Louis Hartsough requested and received “superannuated” status from the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church during its fifth session at Huron in 1889. His brother preachers hailed him as “the Nestor of our conference” and bade him farewell for his last years in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where he lived with his wife, Isabella, until their deaths toward the end of the First World War.

Few if any retiring clergy of The United Methodist Church in the 21st century leave with the words, “the Nestor of our conference,” ringing in their ears, and this indicated one more difference between Hartsough’s time and our own. Nestor was a wise old soldier in Homer’s Iliad who used his long years of experience to advise Greeks fighting to capture the city of Troy. His younger friends listened to him with respect even when his accounts of the past got longwinded and emphasized his own accomplishments. Hartsough made Nestor’s acquaintance before the American Civil War when, immediately after attaining the age of today’s high school student, he read the classics of ancient Greece and Rome at the Oneida Conference Seminary in Cazenovia, New York. Because he had a Classical education, he understood the compliment conference paid him when his active ministry came to an end.187

After his retirement, the Dakota Annual Conference continued to sing Hartsough’s hymn, “I Am Coming Lord,” at its sessions, and this hymn gave another insight into his time, an insight that helps us to see thru the details of theological disputation to the meaning and the joy that some people found in their religion. The vivid words of the hymn spoke about the atoning death of Jesus on the cross and its wondrous consequences for human beings. His music, now unfamiliar to most United Methodists, expressed a drama of the human spirit central to the revival. Each stanza describing what God was saying and doing ascended from the tonic note of a major chord to its octave. The chorus offering the singer’s uncompelled commitment—“I am coming Lord”—began on the octave and descended. For all the references to the “vileness” of unrepentant and unreformed human nature in the stanzas, the octave longed for the height of joy where Jesus had made it possible for a human being, liberated from all lesser things, to meet God.188

187 Minutes of the Fifth Session of the Dakota Conference,…, Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brown & Saenger, 1889, pp. 202-203; First Fifty Years of Cazenovia Seminary. 1825-1875, Cazenovia, New York, 1877, p. 507, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo1.ark:/13960/t8ff4bz92 on September 21, 2017; “Cazenovia Seminary,” Cyclopaedia of Methodism, ed. Simpson, pp. 173-174. Cazenovia Seminary was a coeducational institution. 188 See above at the beginning of this chapter for the text and reference to a hymnal with Hartsough’s music. Members of the Dakota Annual Conference were still singing this hymn in 1910, Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the Dakota -126- Draft on 1/17/2019

As Hartsough retired, one conference year ended and another began as it also did in the North Dakota Annual Conference. Earlier in 1889 on Sunday, May 19, the Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Association adjourned from Cavalier in Pembina County and began its new year. The secretary, Leon S. Koch, concluded the conference journal with the words, “Thus ended a blessed and successful Conference session. Go in peace, ye Servants of the Lord, and may our Master grant each one the privilege of bringing many souls to Him during the coming year.”189

Sioux Falls and Bismarck, Dakota Territory, July 4, 1889

During the coming year of 1889, the Congress of the United States divided Dakota Territory and admitted North Dakota and South Dakota into the Union. Before the President could proclaim that the people of the Territory had met all Congressional requirements for admission as two states, the voters of each prospective state had to elect delegates to a convention that would draft a constitution. At the same time as voters in southern Dakota elected delegates, they ratified a constitution that they had approved once before in 1885 when a majority in Congress did not yet support statehood. This bound the Sioux Falls Convention of 1889 to adopt that document. Following the meeting of northern Dakota delegates, voters there returned to the polls to ratify the constitution that the Bismarck Convention wrote.

Delegates to the constitutional conventions began their work on Independence Day at the Territorial capitol building in Bismarck and the Germania Verein in Sioux Falls. Few in the Territory would have missed the meaning of the date. Almost thirty years had passed since Congress organized a territorial government and imposed unelected governors and judges by appointment of the President. Adult men in the growing population did elect representatives to the Legislative Assembly, but many saw this legislature and even Congress itself as servants of large and powerful corporations like the Northern Pacific Railway Company. At the same time, because many Union veterans and their families had settled in Dakota Territory, the public wanted progress toward the relative independence of statehood to take place under the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States.

Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, [Mitchell, South Dakota: Mitchell Publishing Co., 1910], p. 15. American soldiers sang it during the First World War. Although it does not appear in hymnals of The United Methodist Church, a search of the Internet will show its global dispersion in the 21st century, including Welsh versions and a Pentecostal version from Ghana. The English Hymnal (1906) included it as number 573 with a different fourth stanza. 189 “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association],” trans. Arends, 1889, p. 22. -127- Draft on 1/17/2019 So, in the midst of Fourth of July parades and fireworks and the Civil War still a living memory, the gathering of convention delegates in Bismarck and Sioux Falls celebrated the ability of a free people to manage its own affairs and shape its own destiny without resort to violence. Methodists and Evangelicals numbered themselves among this people. During the course of the events that led to statehood, Methodists proclaimed their vision for a new birth of freedom in Dakota Territory and ways that church and government could bring it about. Evangelicals also envisioned a new society, but they differed on some points with Methodists, and their smaller numbers made their views less evident in the documentary record.

In 1882, Wilmot Whitfield succeeded Thomas Williams as Superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Dakota Mission. Whitfield, participated in crucial events that led to state constitutions and statehood at the end of the decade. As a member of the Dakota Citizens’ League, he joined in sponsoring a convention at Canton that opened on June 21. Delegates from most of the counties south of the 46th parallel attended. The convention decided to ask the Legislative Assembly of the Territory to authorize the election of delegates to another convention that would draft a constitution and submit it to Congress. Whitfield chaired the executive committee that wrote a law for calling the constitutional convention, and the Legislative Assembly passed it. But Governor Nehemiah G. Ordway, a federal appointee, vetoed it.

Once this happened, Whitfield and his executive committee decided to call for another convention to meet at Huron on June 19, 1883, and debate what to do. The Huron convention asked all the counties in southern Dakota to elect delegates who would convene in Sioux Falls on September 4, write a constitution, and submit it to Congress even though the Governor opposed it.190

The Sioux Falls Constitutional Convention of September 4-19, 1883, expressed many of the ideas that ended up in the constitutions of North Dakota and South Dakota that Congress approved in 1889. Between these two dates, other conventions and meetings took place, including a second constitutional convention in Sioux Falls, September 8-25, 1885, whose document became the actual text, with minor additions, adopted at the third Sioux Falls Constitutional Convention of July 4, 1889.

190 State of Dakota. Official Record of the Proceedings of the Preliminary Constitutional Convention Held at Huron, June 19, 1883, no place, no date, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951d02413554j on September 5, 2017; Robinson (ed.), Dakota Constitutional Convention, 1: 6, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.35112203926540 on September 4, 2017. “Methodism in the Dakotas,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, September 30, 1903, p. 13, summarized Whitfield’s conference work in Dakota Territory. In 1897, he collaborated with Harrison D. Brown (one of the seven commissioners of 1878) to found the Washington Children’s Home Society, Clarence Bagley, History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1916, 3 vols., 2: 492, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433081784823?urlappend=%3Bseq=70 on September 4, 2017. -128- Draft on 1/17/2019

Beginning with Wilmot Whitfield, Methodists and Evangelicals found much to support in the statehood movement. Methodists and Evangelicals cooperated with their fellow citizens by means of the ultimate authority for collective action in American law and government, a convention of the people. Several Methodists won elections for delegates to the conventions of the 1880’s, and voters in most of the counties with the largest percentages of Methodists approved the Sioux Falls constitution of 1883 by margins greater than the entire Territory’s vote to approve. In advance of the General Election of 1888, Methodist clergy participated with other Protestants in a call for a “clergymen’s convention” in Huron on July 10-11 to support the statehood movement.191

Dakota Territory counties below the 46th parallel took the initiative in the statehood movement. The constitutions drafted at Sioux Falls during the 1880’s reflected a deepening distrust of unchecked power in the legislative and executive branches of government as well as a related desire to separate southern Dakota from northern Dakota. These constitutions seem to have originated in an attempt to defend the section of land in each township that was supposed under federal law to guarantee the maintenance of public schools. The conventions concluded that only constitutional

191 See Graphic 2.7 computed from Kingsbury, 3: 1716. See Graphic 2.6 for the definition of “strongly Methodist counties.” Kingsbury, 3: 1752-1753, gave the county votes on the Sioux Falls Constitution of 1885. I have been able to identify the following participants in Dakota Territory constitutional conventions as members or adherents of the Methodist Episcopal Church: Francis A. Burdick (Chief Clerk, Sioux Falls Constitutional Convention of 1889), S. H. Bronson, William J. Clapp, Thomas Conniff, Simeon H. Cranmer, Samuel H. Elrod, Martin N. Johnson, Jefferson P. Kidder, Nicholas Irwin Lowthian, C. W. McDonald, James H. More (or Moore), John A. Pickler, Carl G. Sherwood, Almona B. Smart, Burleigh Folsom Spalding, T. F. Tofflemire, and Wilmot Whitfield. Kingsbury, 2: 1840, listed the Methodist Episcopal clergy who signed the 1888 call for a “clergyman’s convention.” -129- Draft on 1/17/2019 law could prevent a state legislature from selling the school lands prematurely at low prices and wasting the money.192

Division of the Territory into two states also reflected unwillingness to trust a constitutionally unconstrained legislature to make good laws. According to the call for the first Sioux Falls Constitutional Convention in 1883, southern Dakota and northern Dakota fundamentally differed from each other. The people of southern Dakota were “…home-holders and steady going citizens comparatively content with the days of small things, and themselves directly interested in the conduct of public affairs….” But, in northern Dakota, “…large capitalists and extensive operators and speculators…were able to dictate the policy of the region by their influence upon the large bodies of farming people in their employ or under their control.”193

Southern Dakota supported division of the Territory as a way of avoiding control of the legislature by large organizations like the Northern Pacific Railway. This demonstrated that constraining the legislature by means of constitutional law also had a bearing on a widespread desire to regulate business corporations, especially large business corporations like railroads, banks, breweries, and distilleries. The constitutions of the 1880’s contained many provisions to require regulation of large business in the public interest and to prevent corporations from corrupting the legislature in order to pursue their special interests. The constitutions drew on a doctrine of human nature familiar to Methodists, Evangelicals, and other Christians. The Dakota Farmer editorialized in the terms of this doctrine about the organized power that large corporations exercised over farmers. “Human nature is too selfish to resist using the power it has under such circumstances, and it is well to place safeguards around it, lest when great power is gained, great abuses be perpetrated.”194

192 Kingsbury, 4: 203-205; “Memoirs of William H. H. Beadle,” ed. Doane Robinson, South Dakota Historical Collections, 3 (1906): 213; Robinson (ed.), Dakota Constitutional Convention, 1: 57, 201, 507, 526. Whitfield and another Methodist preacher, James H. More (sometimes spelled “Moore”), a delegate to the Sioux Falls Constitutional Convention of 1885, supported William Henry Harrison Beadle’s ideas for constitutional provisions to protect school lands. As Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, p. 413, noted, the Minnesota constitution of 1857, both the “Democratic” version and the “Republican” version, placed restrictions on the sale of school lands. The North Dakota Constitutional Convention of 1889 also adopted restrictive school lands provisions. John D. Hicks, The Constitutions of the Northwest States, University of Nebraska Studies, 23, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1923, detailed the suspicion of legislative power in the constitutions of other states that entered the Union about the same time as North Dakota and South Dakota. 193 State of Dakota. Official record of the proceedings, p. 16. Early historical writing about North Dakota and South Dakota perpetuated this characterization of difference between the two states, especially in the contrasting ways that George Washington Kingsbury and Clement A. Lounsberry treated Governor Ordway. 194 The Dakota Farmer (Huron), February 1885, p. 1. Alvin D. Chase, a Methodist preacher and member of the Dakota Territory Farmers’ Alliance (Palmer’s Directory, p. 136; The Dakota Farmer, February 1887, p. 2), and The Dakota Farmer, April 1889, p. 16, endorsed the 1885 Sioux Falls Constitution in 1889 for its provisions limiting business corporations. Thomas Conniff, a Methodist Episcopal member of the McCook County Farmers’ Alliance, introduced or supported several measures at the1885 Sioux Falls Convention, including definition of railroads as common carriers and restrictions on the use of eminent domain to favor inexpensive railroad construction across farm land, Kingsbury, 2: 1738; Robinson (ed.), Dakota Constitutional Convention, 1: throughout. Illinois, in its state constitution of 1870, had already adopted these -130- Draft on 1/17/2019

Why did statehood pull conference-connected preachers and congregations into politics? Why were Methodists and Evangelicals willing—remarkably for the 19th century—to make common cause with other citizens no matter what their religious denomination?

A list of three issues offers one answer to these questions: prohibition, woman suffrage, and agricultural reform. But such a list divides what the minds of late 19th- century Methodists often united. Many individuals in the Methodist Episcopal Church if not the Evangelical Association supported all three causes. The eventual failure of the movement to prohibit commerce in alcohol and the emergence of treatments for alcoholism based on scientific medicine obscure the vital connections of prohibition to granting women the right to vote and empowering farmers. They encourage people looking back from the 21st century to take the anachronistic point of view of the 21st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and its repeal of prohibition in 1933. They also lend support to the caricature of prohibitionists as moral scolds who set themselves against conviviality and the very idea of having a good time.

To see the world of the 1880’s as Methodists and Evangelicals in Dakota Territory saw it means reimagining prohibition as an early form of government-sponsored health care, woman suffrage as an opening to a new kind of family, agricultural reform as food security, and all three as a response to an industrializing society that exposed families and individual lives to substantial risks. Seen this way, the three issues that grew apart during the 20th century become, once more, three aspects of one issue: the integrity and the sanctity of the home as the foundation of a free society.195

From this point of view, a state constitution could close saloons. Closing saloons would end the impoverishment of families whose fathers got drunk on the money they earned from farming or other occupations and then came home and beat up their wives and children. The prospect of eradicating the saloon gave the Farmers’ Alliance and other supporters of agricultural reform common ground with temperance organizations. The Dakota Farmer, published by W. F. T. Bushnell of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Huron, became both a Farmers’ Alliance newspaper and a prohibition newspaper. During the Territorial election campaign of 1888, W. J.

ideas. Several articles in North Dakota Law Review, 65 (1989), dealt with the attempt of the Northern Pacific Railway Company to influence the drafting of the North Dakota constitution in 1889. 195 Revealing expressions of the home as the foundational issue included Archibald Jamieson’s prayers at the 1885 Sioux Falls Convention, Robinson (ed.), Dakota Constitutional Convention, 1: 55-56 (especially), 69, 93, 199; Methodist Pioneer, November 1, 1888, p. [1]; and Charles A. Pollock’s 1915 sentencing statement in a trial that convicted Robert Hendrickson, while drunk, of murdering his wife, Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, pp. 477-478. -131- Draft on 1/17/2019 Barton, pastor of Drayton Methodist Episcopal Church, toured northern Dakota to support both prohibition and the Farmers’ Alliance. Supporters of prohibition, armed with an analysis of social problems that connected poverty, domestic violence, and plying citizens with alcohol to get their money and their votes, believed that they were offering ample justification for government to interfere with the business of alcohol and ensure the public interest that children grow up in homes free from these evils.196

When the voters approved their state constitutions in 1889, they also considered separate amendments that provided for prohibition of commerce in alcohol. Because prohibition aroused major opposition, supporters of statehood at the conventions in Bismarck and Sioux Falls did not want to jeopardize adoption of the constitutions by including prohibition in the original texts submitted to the voters. Nevertheless, the amendments passed in both parts of the Territory. Prohibition endured in North Dakota; South Dakota voters repealed it in 1896.197

196 Dakota Farmer, October 1887, p. 3; January 1889, p. 13; April 1889, p. 25, July 1889, p. 21; September 1889, p. 23; October 1889, p. 12; November 1889, p. 23; Methodist Pioneer, September 1, 1888, p. [1], p. [2]; November 1, 1888, p. [1]; Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, pp. 477-478. 197 See Graphic 2.8 computed from Kingsbury 3: 1752-1753; South Dakota Legislative Manual 1903 [Pierre, South Dakota: State Publishing Company, 1903,] p. 176, viewed at https://cdm16384.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15307coll3/id/38133 on November 9, 2017; Official Vote of South Dakota by Counties From October, 1889, to November, 1912, Aberdeen, South Dakota: News Printing Co., 1912, p. 6, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hx54qq on November 9, 2017; Legislative Manual Containing the Constitution of North Dakota…, Bismarck, North Dakota: Daily Tribune, 1890, p. 170, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015030956182 on November 9, 2017. See Graphic 2.6 for the definition of “strongly Methodist counties.” William Fielder (1852-1936) and Susan Fielder (1854-1891) of the Dakota Annual Conference provided leadership for the 1889 prohibition amendment campaign in South Dakota, Dakota Farmer, January 1889, p. 15; Minutes of the Seventh Session of the Dakota Conference…, 1891, pp. 299, 309. During the 1880’s, Methodists in southern Dakota debated whether to support constitutions submitted without a prohibition clause, Minutes of the Fourth Session of the Annual Conference of Dakota Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Sioux City, Iowa: Perkins Bros., 1883, p. 37; Minutes of the Sixth Session of the Dakota Mission Conference, 1885, p. 101. Methodist Pioneer, May 1, 1889, p. [2]; Kingsbury, 2: 1903; and Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, pp. 471-482, recorded public support for the decision to submit a separate amendment in northern Dakota. Charles A. Pollock sketched the history of prohibition in North Dakota in Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, pp. 471-482; and Christian Advocate (New York), June 17, 1915, pp. 810-811, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433003097007 on September 5, 2017. “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association],” trans. Arends, 1889, pp. 9-10, supported prohibition. -132- Draft on 1/17/2019

Woman suffrage did not fare so well. In the early 20th century, Alice Pickler of Faulkton Methodist Episcopal Church remembered the defeat of a series of constitutional amendments during the 1880’s and 1890’s that would have granted women the right to vote. She and other Methodist women like Anna Simmons, who itinerated with her husband, and Emma Cranmer of Ipswich and Aberdeen held leadership positions in both suffrage and temperance organizations. Pickler had been pleased when the Farmers’ Alliance endorsed woman suffrage at its convention in 1889 but equally disappointed when the Alliance joined with the Knights of Labor to form the Independent or Populist Party in 1890. The Independent Party refused to support woman suffrage in its platform. She and her husband, John A. Pickler, remained in the Republican Party, but she had critical words for her own party’s failure to provide official support for civil rights. She also pointed to the opposition of a large German Russian delegation at the convention of the South Dakota Democratic Party.198

All three parties facing their first election after statehood concluded that woman suffrage remained a political liability. The constitutional conventions in southern

198 Robinson, History of South Dakota, 1: 598-604. Ellis, History of Faulk County, pp. 228-255, reprinted Pickler’s account in Robinson with an update. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Ann D. Gordon, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997-2013, 6 vols., vol. 5, published Anthony’s correspondence with Alice Pickler on the 1890 woman suffrage campaign in South Dakota. See also Frances Cranmer Greenman, Higher Than the Sky, pp. 14-15. Sara Egge, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920, Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2018, chapter 3, especially p. 113, described the convergence of prohibition and woman suffrage in South Dakota politics and the interlocking leadership of the state’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union and its Equal Suffrage Association. (Methodists like Alice Pickler led both organizations.) In 1900, this resulted in a break with the National American Woman Suffrage Association because national leadership increasingly saw public connection with prohibition as a political liability. -133- Draft on 1/17/2019 Dakota had already seen this coming when they decided, as they did with prohibition, to let the voters determine whether woman suffrage should be a matter of constitutional law instead of jeopardizing adoption of any constitution by including a right to vote in its original text. The North Dakota Constitutional Convention declined to grant women the right to vote in the constitution or to submit the matter to the decision of the voters. Only a minority of the men who voted in the Dakota elections of the 1880’s and the 1890’s supported woman suffrage, and they knew they were a minority. 199

Did this minority support the right of women to vote as a means to an end—like increasing the number of votes for prohibition—or as an end in itself? Another question provides a way of answering this one. Did clergy and laity support rights for women inside their own religious denomination as well as beyond it in government and the society at large?

Report K in the 1891 Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church gave the South Dakota vote on an expression of opinion for the admission of women as delegates to General Conference. Church voters approved by

199 See Graphic 2.9 computed from South Dakota Legislative Manual (1903), p. 183. See Graphic 2.6 for the definition of “strongly Methodist counties.” South Dakota defeated an earlier constitutional amendment for woman suffrage in 1890, but the vote does not appear in official state publications, including the recent compilation, [South Dakota Election History 1889-2014] South Dakota Elections; Official Vote, 3 vols., [Pierre, South Dakota: South Dakota Secretary of State,] 2015. The original returns to the Secretary of State may still exist somewhere in Pierre, and some contemporary newspapers did report results at the precinct level for their circulation areas. Cecelia M. Wittmayer, “The 1889-1890 Woman Suffrage Campaign: A Need to Organize,” South Dakota History, 11 (1981): 199-225, did not discuss any record of 1890 election returns. -134- Draft on 1/17/2019 1754 to 198.200 Behind this action lay the annual conference’s election of Isabella Hartsough as a reserve lay delegate to the General Conference of 1888 and her license to preach from the Sioux Falls congregation. In 1887, when delegates of the conference’s laity convened for the first time to choose a lay delegate to the General Conference of 1888, they also adopted a series of resolutions, including several on prohibition and one stating “That we favor equal suffrage for women with men in church and state.”201

These resolutions did not connect woman suffrage to prohibition as if woman suffrage were a means to an end. Instead, they supported prohibition as a means to reform the male culture represented by the saloon and drunken behavior. Another resolution read, “We will use our utmost efforts in the family, the church and the public schools to keep our boys from the curse of tobacco and intoxicating liquors.” The significant choice of “our boys” in the place of what might have read “our children” demonstrated the purpose of prohibition in the minds of the lay delegates.202

The many provisions in the state constitutions of 1889 to check the power of business corporations resembled the effort to stop large-scale marketing of alcohol from breweries and distilleries thru saloons. Even though support for business regulation did not always mean support for prohibition or woman suffrage, the railroads, banks,

200 Minutes of the Seventh Session of the Dakota Conference…, 1891, p. 307; see also pp. 282, 286. The occasion for this vote is not quite clear except as preparation for a possible petition to the General Conference of 1892, nor is it clear who voted since the numbers total far more than the clergy in annual conference session but far less than the lay members in congregations. Nevertheless, the result of the vote is quite clear. Emma Cranmer and Alice Pickler participated in the lay electoral conference in 1891 to elect lay delegates to the 1892 General Conference, Minutes of the Seventh Session of the Dakota Conference…, 1891, p. 297. North Dakota also supported the eligibility of women to be General Conference delegates, Minutes of the Sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1891, pp. 16, 59. 201 Minutes of the Third Session of the Dakota Conference, Commencing Wednesday, October 19, 1887, at Aberdeen, Dakota, Sioux Falls: Dakota Bell Publishing Co., 1887, pp. 160, 162; Official Journal of the Thirty-fourth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1918], pp. 298-299. Four women out of a total of fifty delegates participated in the 1887 lay electoral conference. The clergy adopted a resolution supporting universal suffrage from a committee of W. H. Selleck, O. E. Murray, G. R. Oake, J. E. Norvell, and H. Springer, Minutes of the Third Session of the Dakota Conference, 1887, pp. 133, 154. The Methodist Pioneer (Devils Lake), May 1, 1888, p. 1, editorialized in favor of representation of women at General Conference. 202 Minutes of the Third Session of the Dakota Conference, 1887, p. 161. The Dakota Conference adopted a report on marriage laws from H. M. Springer, T. Simmons, C. E. Hager, and T. H. Walker (a committee formed on motion of Walter Minty) and petitioned the Legislative Assembly to enact a law establishing the age of consent for marriage without the consent of parents or guardians at 21 for males and 18 for females and raising the age of consent in the criminal law from 10 to 18, Minutes of the Second Session of the Dakota Conference,…, Watertown, Dakota: Courier-News Co., Printers and Book Makers, 1886, pp. [103], 108, 122. A North Dakota Conference committee consisting of A. T. Foster, D. C. Plannette, and Charles A. Pollock, supported similar legislation, Minutes of the Fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1889, pp. 7, 16; Minutes of the Fifth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1890, pp. 15, especially 33: “The author of the bill was Honorable George Lilly, a worthy member of our church at Ashley. The bill became law on July 1, 1890.” See The Revised Codes of the State of North Dakota 1895, Bismarck, North Dakota: Tribune Company, Printers and Binders, 1895, §2720-§2730, §7272-§7275. -135- Draft on 1/17/2019 breweries, and distilleries, with their size and great resources, could all damage families, especially families who made their living by producing food and whom corporate power confronted directly. Together, corporations controlled or influenced the price of storage and transportation for grain, the size of the money supply, agricultural credit, and the price and the availability of alcohol and other processed agricultural goods.

The membership of the Farmers’ Alliance included a number of Methodists and Evangelicals, and even many who were not members agreed with the basic contention of the Alliance that farmers and ranchers needed government regulation of large organizations and more. Farmers and ranchers needed to organize at the same scale as the business corporations that surrounded them. They needed to develop market power of their own to defend their families against poverty.203

To organize farmers on a larger scale, the Alliance developed cooperatives to help farmers buy what they needed at low prices and sell their own products at high prices. It also worked to reduce the considerable risk that farmers assumed when they raised a crop or bred a herd of animals. Palmer’s Directory, the membership directory of the Dakota Annual Conference, published advertising from hail and fire insurance companies connected to the Alliance, and the Alliance also sold life insurance to protect farm families.204

In 1890 John A. Pickler, cooperating with the Alliance, introduced a bill in the United States House of Representatives to establish a system of “subtreasury” warehouses that would receive grain, pay cash at a discount from the current price of the grain, and issue a negotiable receipt that gave the farmer one year to find a purchaser at a better price. The purchaser of the receipt would pay the farmer the difference between the better price and the cash the farmer had received, pay the federal warehouse the amount of cash it had given the farmer along with interest and fees, and then take delivery of the grain. If no one redeemed the receipt at the end of a year, the warehouse would sell the grain at auction and keep the proceeds. Although Pickler’s bill never passed, the Alliance had designed the scheme to prevent farmers from having to subject themselves and their families to market conditions at a time

203 The Dakota Farmer, February 1885, p. 1; March 1889, p. 15. W. F. T. Bushnell signed the original call to organize the Farmers’ Alliance in Dakota Territory, The Dakota Farmer, December 1884, p. 13. George Lily (Lilly)of Brookings Methodist Episcopal Church (not Ashley, North Dakota) argued for farmer organization in The Dakota Farmer, August 1884, p. 3; and December 1884, p. 9. Eventually, Henry Loucks and Edwin B. Cummings fell out with Bushnell, and The Dakota Ruralist replaced The Dakota Farmer as the official newspaper of the Farmers’ Alliance. Identification of additional Methodist or Evangelical members of the Farmers’ Alliance would be possible using names from Palmer’s Directory and other sources as search terms for the South Dakota Farmer's Alliance Due Paying Members, 1890-1894, Database, at http://history.sd.gov/Archives/farmers/Search.aspx. 204 Palmer’s Directory, pp. 142, [153]; The Dakota Farmer, March 1889, p. 15. -136- Draft on 1/17/2019 not of their own choosing—a crucial advantage for individuals managing risk in a modern economy and an important factor in maintaining capacity for a steady national food supply.205 ******* Agricultural reform, woman suffrage, and prohibition all looked like causes that statehood and the drafting of state constitutions could advance. In hindsight they look like causes that suffered more defeats than victories during the 1880’s and the 1890’s. But focusing on defeats at the polls and in Congress loses sight of the land that Methodists, Evangelicals, and many other citizens believed they saw as they looked over into statehood: a land of kind and peaceful homes where men, women, and children lived in good health, liberated from unchecked power in government and business to pursue happiness and participating as active citizens to create and sustain a free society.

For Methodists and Evangelicals, this vision of freedom began in the revival experience of holiness that transformed individuals into a loving God’s loving children who then freely chose to create the kind of society that only divine love could inspire.

So, July 4, 1889, became a memorable day when, once, all things seemed possible. At Bismarck, the parade began with infantry and cavalry from Fort Abraham Lincoln and Fort Yates. The yellow plumes of the cavalrymen “…waved in the breeze like miniature sheaves of shimmering gold in the reflecting sunlight.” Then came the convention delegates, among them Methodists William J. Clapp and Burleigh F. Spalding, marching toward the Territorial Capitol where the parade would end. Next, thirty-eight “young ladies” on horses represented the thirty-eight states of the Union. Applause from the crowd grew much louder when four more women in “spotless white” rode by standing for the states soon to be admitted: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington.

Veterans of the Civil War and the Indian wars followed from Grand Army of the Republic posts all over northern Dakota.

Then came Native American residents of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation arranged by the Indian Agent into five “platoons.” First came Yanktonai carrying the American flag and a banner reading, “March of Civilization.” A second banner, “Dakota Territory,” preceded men, women, and children “in full Indian costume”

205 The Dakota Farmer, March 15, 1890, p. 6. Charles W. Macune, later a Methodist preacher in Texas, originally proposed the subtreasury plan to the Southern Farmers’ Alliance in 1889. See George B. Tindall (ed.), A Populist Reader; Selections from the Works of American Populist Leaders, New York: Harper & Row, 1966, p. 80. -137- Draft on 1/17/2019 leading ponies and dogs that pulled travois “as though marching on the plains.” Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull), the Hunkpapa leader, walked with them. The third platoon consisted of United States Indian Police carrying a “Law and Order” banner and another American flag, and a fourth, “Justice,” identified the judges of the Indian police court at Standing Rock. Finally, “State of North Dakota, 1889,” labeled about two hundred young and middle-aged men and women in modern dress, the women all in white.206

Following the “March of Civilization,” the Valley City Band, “one of the most creditable musical organizations in the northwest,” came up playing patriotic music as newspapermen to represent freedom of the press, city and county officers, and fire companies also passed by. Two companies of territorial militia, one from Bismarck and the other from Jamestown, made up the rear guard for the parade.

After dinner and the first session of the North Dakota Constitutional Convention, everybody assembled outdoors “in the grove east of the Atheneum” and listened to the Declaration of Independence.207

Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála, Christmas 1890

Even so, eighteen months later, when cold and snow came once more, red blood stained white earth beneath the blue sky of Wounded Knee. The bodies of men, women, boys, girls, and recently born infants lay riven with bullets and frozen by the winds of a blizzard. The sun reappeared on New Year’s Day 1891, two days after the Seventh Cavalry’s attempt to disarm them had degenerated into violence, screaming, and death. The Santee physician who led a search and burial party east from the Indian Agency at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, belonged to a family that had fled Minnesota into exile after the war of 1862. Arriving now at Wounded Knee, he found very few human beings to heal with the science he had learned in medical school. He

206 In 1889, Congress established the Standing Rock Reservation, 25 U. S. Statutes at Large 889. It has become home to descendants of several historic peoples who spoke dialects of the same language: Yanktonai (both “Upper” or Ihanktonwana and “Lower” or Hunkpatina), Hunkpapa, and Sihasapa (“Blackfeet”). They are now organized as the “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe” and govern the reservation. See Handbook of North American Indians, 13: 785-786, and https://www.standingrock.org/content/history. 207 Bismarck Weekly Tribune, July 5, 1889, pp. 4, 5, viewed at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042588/1889- 07-05/ed-1/ on July 16, 2017; James McLaughlin to Clement A. Lounsberry, July 12, 1917, in Lounsberry, Early History of North Dakota, pp. 419-420. Jon Lauck, Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010, pp. 86-88, gave an account of Sioux Falls’ parade. -138- Draft on 1/17/2019 could only testify to the atrocities that attended both the beginning and the end of Dakota Territory.208

At Wounded Knee, the Seventh Cavalry destroyed an entire “band” or small town of Minneconjou Tetons who had left the Cheyenne Indian Reservation, headed south toward Pine Ridge, and surrendered. Farther north on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, the Indian Agent there had already buried Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, who marched in Bismarck’s Fourth of July parade. United States Indian Police shot him dead while trying to make an arrest in the middle of December.

Two other events framed the taking of life. On November 13, 1890, the President of the United States ordered the Secretary of War to suppress “any threatened outbreak” by sending the Army into the Teton reservations.209 Even though the order and discipline of the Seventh Cavalry and the Indian Police have been challenged ever since, their presence there at all happened as a result of demands on the President from a large public and represented the fear of many North Dakota and South Dakota citizens, Indian agents, and newspapers that the most populous group of Native Americans in the United States, the Teton Sioux, was plotting armed resistance.

The second event put an end to the military confrontation that led to Wounded Knee. On January 15, thousands of Oglala and Sicangu (Brule) Tetons, including a Sicangu religious leader named Tȟatȟáŋka Ptéčela (Short Bull), surrendered to the Army at Pine Ridge. His participation and leadership in the peaceful surrender of the last group of Tetons on the Pine Ridge Reservation that had refused to come into the Indian Agency provided one more example of the deep involvement of religion in the historic conflict between the United States and Native Americans.210

The United States, especially after the Civil War, developed and implemented a policy of suppressing Native American religious practices in the interest of bringing “civilization” and Christianity to reservations. In the view of the federal government

208 Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 1963, pp. 1-2, referred to Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa). Eastman, a grandson of a United States Army officer and a Santee woman, attended medical school at Methodist-related Boston University. 209 Utley, Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 111; Louis S. Warren, God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, New York: Basic Books, 2017, p. 232. 210 Warren, God's Red Son, pp. 266; Utley, Last Days of the Sioux Nation, pp. 260-261; American National Biography, ed. Garraty and Carnes, 19: 882-883. The recovery and reconsideration of five narratives by Tȟatȟáŋka Ptéčela has led to a different understanding of his role than the generally negative one in Utley. These narratives appeared in various states of translation from Lakota to English as an appendix to Sam A. Maddra, Hostiles? The Lakota Ghost Dance and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006, pp. 191-218. Thomas Shortbull, great grandson of Tȟatȟáŋka Ptéčela and a former member of the South Dakota Legislature, helped to found and served as president of Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota. -139- Draft on 1/17/2019 and many American citizens, religion lay behind the “threatened outbreak” that required sending the Army into the Teton reservations in 1890. Specifically, they had in mind what Lakota-speaking people called the wanáǧi wačhípi, conventionally translated as “Ghost Dance.” This new religious movement originated with Wovoka (Jack Wilson), a Paiute in Nevada, and spread to many parts of the American West, including Dakota Territory, during the late 1880’s.211

Men, women, and children who participated in the “Ghost Dance” gathered in a circle and held hands as they moved together in prayer and song. Some would drop out of the circle and move toward the center when they started to experience an ecstatic state of consciousness. They fell to the earth and dreamed of the sky, and, when they awoke, they frequently described a vision of peace, family members who had died from war or hunger, and symbols of the presence and providential care of God.212

Wovoka also delivered an ethical teaching against violence and consumption of alcohol and for finding a way to live with white people and a market economy.213

None of this seems in retrospect to constitute evidence of widespread armed resistance. On the other hand, people living on the Teton reservations certainly did have reasons to be deeply angry. The Great Sioux Reservation, established in 1868 by the Treaty of Fort Laramie, originally consisted of a large, undivided area of land, including the Black Hills. In 1877, in violation of treaty law, Congress removed the Black Hills from the Reservation. In 1889, anticipating Dakota Territory’s statehood, Congress divided the Reservation and left the six that now remain: Standing Rock, Cheyenne, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Pine Ridge, and Rosebud. In order to save money, Congress also unilaterally reduced food rations which created hunger and disease in western South Dakota.214

211 James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, abridged by Anthony F. C. Wallace, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1965, p. 35, gave various English translations for names of the “Ghost Dance” in Native American languages other than Lakota. This should arouse suspicion about “Ghost Dance” as a good translation of 19th-century meaning. Mooney’s original 1894 report, the first and classic study by an anthropologist, along with John Wesley Powell’s criticisms of it are available in the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at https://archive.org/details/annualreportofbu14118921893smit for part 1 and, for part 2, at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106000541737. Warren, God's Red Son, pp. 164, 293-327, assessed the insights and the limits of Mooney’s work and Powell’s criticisms. Powell rejected Mooney’s suggestion of similarities between the Methodist revival and the “Ghost Dance.” 212 Mooney, Ghost Dance Religion, abridged by Wallace, chapter 7, pp. 178-200; “The Ghost Dance As Told by Short Bull (1915),” Maddra, Hostiles?, pp. 216-218; Warren, God's Red Son, pp. 226-228. 213 “As Narrated by Short Bull (1891),” Maddra, Hostiles?, pp. 196-197; “The Messiah Letter,” Mooney, Ghost Dance Religion, abridged by Wallace, pp. 22-23. Warren, God's Red Son, emphasized this point and offered evidence for it throughout his book. 214 15 United States Statutes at Large 635 (Treaty of Fort Laramie); Charles J. Kappler (comp. and ed.), Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 7 vols., 2: 998-1007 (Treaty of Fort Laramie) available in edition at -140- Draft on 1/17/2019

Fanatical religion seemed at the time, however, to lie at the root of numerous, disturbing incidents. Prudence seemed to require sending the Army into the Teton reservations to stop a developing “outbreak.” Did the federal policy that tried to help Native Americans by replacing their religious practices with some version of Christianity encourage ignorance about those practices and lead to Wounded Knee? What did ancestors of today’s United Methodists contribute to the development of federal Indian policy? ******* Nathaniel G. Taylor, the United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs, signed first at the bottom of the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. Then came the signatures of the other members of the Indian Peace Commission that had been sent out from Washington, D.C., to end war in Wyoming Territory and to secure the Nebraska route of the first transcontinental railroad. Finally, many Teton leaders signed during the course of the year.215

Taylor was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Before the Civil War, he practiced law in Tennessee. Later, he helped to organize relief for war victims in eastern Tennessee and served in Congress as a Unionist. In 1872, he represented the Holston Conference as a lay delegate to General Conference and, later that year, joined Holston as a preacher. During his time at the Office of Indian Affairs, he advocated demilitarization of federal Indian policy and specifically condemned the 1864 Sand Creek massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by Colorado territorial militia under the command of his fellow Methodist, John M. Chivington.216

http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/Vol2/treaties/sio0998.htm; 19 U. S. Statutes at Large 254 (1877); 25 U. S. Statutes at Large 888 (1889); Utley, Last Days of the Sioux Nation, pp. 54-57. The United States Supreme Court in United States v. Sioux Nation (1980), 448 U.S. 371, upheld the finding of the United States Court of Claims that the removal of the Black Hills from the Reservation constituted an uncompensated taking of “Indian tribal property” and required monetary compensation. The Crow Creek Reservation on the east bank of the Missouri River has a different history than the Great Sioux Reservation because it originated with the war of 1862. Descendants of 19th-people who lived in Minnesota and descendants of 19th century people who lived in Dakota Territory both live there today. 215 Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2: 1003. 216 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Spring Conferences of 1887, p. 368, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89077112209 on August 30, 2017; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, viewed at http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=T000095 on August 15, 2017; Robert M. Kvasnicka and Herman J. Viola (eds.), The Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1824-1977, Lincoln, Nebraska, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979, pp. 115-122; Letter of the Secretary of the Interior, July 13, 1867, Senate Executive Document No. 13, 40th Congress, 1st session (Congressional Serial 1308), p. 2, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3984979 on September 26, 2017; “Report to the President by the Indian Peace Commission, January 7, 1868,” Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1868, Washington, D. C: Government Printing Office, 1868, pp. 34-35, viewed at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/History/History- idx?type=header&id=History.AnnRep68, on August 30, 2017; Gary L. Roberts, Massacre at Sand Creek; How Methodists Were Involved in an American Tragedy, Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2016. -141- Draft on 1/17/2019 The Treaty of Fort Laramie continues to affect United States relations with 21st- century Lakota people because Article 12 stipulated that no further cession of land would take place without the signed agreement of “…at least three-fourths of all the adult male Indians, occupying or interested in…” the Great Sioux Reservation. This became the basis for the Lakota claim against the United States’ exercise of both jurisdiction and power to transfer land title in the Black Hills. In other words, the United States never obtained a signed, three-fourths majority agreement.217

So, a Methodist preacher had a hand in the origin of this continuing dispute. Other provisions of the Treaty of Fort Laramie showed Taylor’s support for an emerging consensus among late 19th-century American churches about how to bring constructive change to Native American societies. Under the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, American churches became deeply involved in a legally sanctioned effort to bring “civilization” to Native Americans on reservations. Many in the United States saw Christian missionaries as the right people to cooperate with the federal government in staffing this project. The Evangelical Association and the United Brethren in Christ did not participate, and the Methodist Episcopal Church worked on other reservations than the Great Sioux Reservation. But Methodists like Taylor made important contributions to the civilization or “peace” policy.218

The Treaty of Fort Laramie made several provisions for dividing reservation land into small parcels for farming, the development of individual instead of communal land holding, and agricultural and vocational education for a new generation. Two flaws in the thinking behind these provisions increased hunger, disease, and despair after the Treaty came into effect: the greater suitability of western Dakota Territory to grazing as compared to farming and widespread Native American love of land as the source of life and spiritual connection that turned a group of individuals into one people.

217 Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2: 1002. However, the United States Supreme Court decided United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980), 448 U. S. 371, 410, as an issue of eminent domain and not violation of a treaty article, which it believed Congress had the power to abrogate. In 1875, Jefferson P. Kidder, Dakota Territory’s delegate to Congress, asserted without evidence that the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) “…was not legally made.” However, he advocated taking the Black Hills and compensating the Indians, Kingsbury 1: 1605. Kidder was a Methodist according to Bernard Floyd Hyatt, “A Legal Legacy for Statehood: the Development of the Territorial Judicial System in Dakota Territory, 1861-1889,” 2 vols., Ph.D. thesis, Texas Tech University, 1987, 1: 107, available at http://hdl.handle.net/2346/11927. 218 Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father; The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols., Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, 1: 479-533, on President Grant’s peace policy. Eventually, in the context of support for the “Blaine amendment” and opposition to government aid for Catholic schools, the Methodist Episcopal Church refused government aid for its own Indian schools, Journal of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Held in Omaha, Nebraska, May 2-26, 1892, New York: Hunt & Eaton and Cincinnati: Cranston & Curts, 1892, pp. 167- 168, viewed at https://archive.org/details/journalsomaha00meth on August 30, 2017. -142- Draft on 1/17/2019 Flawed and not always consistently implemented, the civilization policy, as the Tetons themselves ultimately adapted it to their lives, produced major changes within a single generation from 1868 to the end of Dakota Territory. By the time of Wounded Knee, many Tetons lived in settled places inside wood cabins trying to earn a living in a market economy.219

Hiram Price held the post of United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1881 to 1885 when he retired from government service. His annual reports expressed the civilization policy in great detail and reported on its implementation. He came from Davenport, Iowa. Before the Civil War, he established himself in retailing and banking, and Alpha J. Kynett was his pastor. He made the first contribution, $1,000, to the revolving loan fund for church extension that Kynett established in the Upper Iowa Annual Conference. In 1870, the Conference transferred this loan fund to the Board of Church Extension of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia where the fund laid the foundation for constructing or remodeling thousands of church buildings across the country, including financing the Church’s move into Dakota Territory.220

During the Civil War, Price and Kynett worked for the Governor of Iowa recruiting and providing support for Union soldiers. Price took personal financial risk to raise thousands of dollars in the early months of the war and then risked his life to travel thru Confederate regions of Missouri and pay Iowa troops deployed there. For most of the 1860’s, he represented Iowa in Congress where, among other things, he worked on the transcontinental railroads. Within months of the end of the Civil War, he persuaded the Republican Party of Iowa to support an amendment to the state constitution that removed the word, “white,” from the suffrage clause and granted the right to vote to African American men. He numbered among the few Methodist laymen who served the Church both as a sexton (church custodian) and a lay delegate to General Conference.221

219 See, for example, Fifty-ninth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1890, pp. 51-52. The annual reports of the Commissioners are available at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/History/History-idx?type=browse&scope=HISTORY.COMMREP. 220 Christianity in Earnest, 11: 50 (March-April 1899); George Elliott, “Sketch of Rev. A. J. Kynett, D.D., LL.D.,” Christianity in Earnest, 11: 104 (May-June 1899); Fellows, History of the Upper Iowa Conference, p. 148; Kvasnicka and Viola (eds.), The Commissioners of Indian Affairs, pp. 173-179. 221 B. F. Gue, “The Public Services of Hiram Price” The Annals of Iowa, 1 (1895): 595, 598, 599, 600, viewed at http://ir.uiowa.edu/annals-of-iowa/vol1/iss8/2; Christianity in Earnest, , 11: 65-66 (March-April 1899); Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, viewed at http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=P000525 on August 16, 2017; American National Biography, ed. Garraty and Carnes, 17: 860-861. Price also helped to establish the Soldier’s Orphans Home in Davenport, Iowa, Gue, The Annals of Iowa, 1 (1895): 599. -143- Draft on 1/17/2019 Given Price’s work against slavery and for civil rights before he became Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 21st-century Americans may have difficulty making sense of his vigorous advocacy of the civilization policy. However, his views on federal Indian policy mirrored the positions that Methodists and Evangelicals in Dakota Territory took on agricultural reform, prohibition, and woman suffrage during the 1880’s and reveal a coherent way of seeing the world even though that way of seeing the world may differ from the way United Methodists see the world today and certainly differed from the way Tetons saw the world then.

In Price’s view, civilization could not easily come to Indians without Christian teaching and influence. Unlike many other American citizens who dealt with Indians, missionaries, he contended, had no financial self-interest to serve. They could provide education, including raising children to speak the English language, and religious instruction. “If we expect to stop sun dances, snake worship, and other debasing forms of superstition and idolatry among Indians, we must teach them some better way.”222

Price recommended setting up courts to try Indian offenses, and these offenses included religious practices and polygamy. He believed that “…the preservation of good order on the reservations demands that some active measures should be taken to discourage and, if possible, put a stop to the demoralizing influence of heathenish rites.” Here, he made a clear connection between prevention of violence and suppression of religion.223

Price also supported allotment of reservation land in severalty, a measure that Congress adopted in 1887 with the Dawes Act. This meant surveying land and dividing it up into small parcels of a size that individual families could own and farm. “The allotment system tends to break up tribal relations,” he stated the crucial point. “It has the effect of creating individuality, responsibility, and a desire to accumulate property. It teaches the Indians habits of industry and frugality, and stimulates them to look forward to a better and more useful life, and, in the end, it will relieve the government of large annual appropriations.”224

The “tribe” played a role in Price’s thinking about Native Americans similar to the “corporation” in Methodist and Evangelical thinking about prohibition and business

222 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1882, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1882, pp. vi-vii. 223 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1883, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883, pp. xiv-xv. 224 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1881, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1881, p. xxiii. See also Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1882), pp. xlii-xliv. -144- Draft on 1/17/2019 corporations. Both terms referred to entities of vast power that had no countervailing check or balance. Both entities needed to be restrained in the interest of families and the individual. Price brought his lifelong involvement with temperance to bear on his analysis of the problem, too. Consumption of alcohol was “the chief cause of poverty and crime” and a threat to peace on the reservations. “Whiskey is furnished the Indians by disreputable white men, who would sell themselves and their country for so many pieces of silver.”225

Finally, vocational education for boys and girls in training schools back east and boarding schools and day schools on the reservations would replace the fading Indian past with a bright future for the next generation.226

The cultivation of the individual human being and the liberation of the individual from everything that destroyed freedom held Price’s ideas about social issues together whether he was thinking about emancipation of slaves or civilization policy for reservations. He summarized his own experience in a counsel of prudence to the young people of his day. Individual responsibility, he advised, was absolutely critical to survival in a “…world that owed no man a living until he has earned it.” “Industry and economy are worth more in the battle of life than genius or wealth, or influential friends or relations. The industry and economy become a part of the individual, and cannot be taken from him without his consent. The others may all leave him whether he consents or not.”227 ******* But the future did not bring a victory as simple and one-sided as the replacement of “tribal relations” with individual freedom and enterprise. Throughout Church history, the salvation, well-being, and self-expression of the individual have stood in tension with aspiration to the unity of the Church and the solidarity of human beings with each other and all living beings. Methodists and Evangelicals themselves with their concern for prohibition, agricultural reform, and, for some, woman suffrage sought to

225 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1882), pp. xiv-xvii. 226 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1882), pp. xxxii-xlii. See also Hiram Price, “The Government and the Indians,” The Forum, 10 (1890): 708-715, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015030769221 on September 26, 2017. Richard Henry Pratt, who was raised Methodist but married into a Presbyterian family, founded the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Elaine Goodale Eastman, a Presbyterian missionary who met Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) at Pine Ridge in 1890 and later married him, wrote an admiring biography, Pratt; The Red Man's Moses, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935. Methodists involved with federal Indian policy as it related to Dakota Territory included: Patrick Henry Conger, Mrs. H. M. Conger; D. W. Diggs, Clinton B. Fisk, Hosea Locke, and J. C. Shelland. As a member of Congress during the 1930’s, Francis H. Case, son of Herbert L. Case of the Black Hills Mission, worked unsuccessfully with the Big Foot Survivors Association and the Wounded Knee Survivors Association to gain compensation for the survivors of Wounded Knee and their descendants. He believed that compensation would promote assimilation and the end of tribal identity. See Richard R. Chenoweth, “Francis Case: A Political Biography,” South Dakota Historical Collections, 39 (1978): 322-325; and David Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee; the Lakotas and the Politics of Memory, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 161-174. 227 Gue, The Annals of Iowa, 1 (1895): 586. -145- Draft on 1/17/2019 strike a balance between the freedom of the individual and the scale of what human beings could accomplish when organized into congregations, conferences, and business corporations. They sought to do this by making the integrity and the sanctity of the home into the foundation of a free society. So, why did they and many other American citizens think about “tribal relations” as something to be replaced rather than something to be weighed in the balance?

The “Ghost Dance” connected non-Christian Native Americans, Christian Native Americans, and, in Nevada, even whites thru the joining of hands. But this collective act gave rise to a distinct religious experience for each individual. Wovoka spoke of going to see God and of Jesus coming to the earth. Porcupine, a Northern Cheyenne, dreamed of seeing Christ and the resurrection of his own dead family members. He treated Wovoka as Christ although Wovoka denied making such claims for himself. Tȟatȟáŋka Ptéčela (Short Bull) dreamed of being carried into the sky by an eagle and meeting his father as a young man. During another experience he saw “the Son of God.” The pole at the center of the “Ghost Dance” circle reminded him of the Sun Dance, and the marking of the four cardinal directions in the circle represented to him different Native American peoples coming together. The songs that many people sang as they moved in the circle made them think of being together again with their families.228

These distinct, individual experiences of joy coexisted, and they stood for a future of peace and connection with both the living and the dead. Civilization policy continued to manufacture poverty among Native Americans, but, remarkably from the perspective of Church history, the “Ghost Dance” allowed the figure of Jesus to escape from an exclusively European American stewardship and to take a place in Native American dreams and visions as a symbol, alongside other symbols, of peace, unity, compassion, and hope. The “Ghost Dance” turned Jesus into a source of comfort for the suffering.

And so, the winter light at Wounded Knee did point forward to victory—but not the submission to power that the Army and the American public won in 1891 or the individualistic future that some of the most thoughtful Christian citizens of the late

228 Mooney, Ghost Dance Religion, abridged by Wallace, pp. 13-14, 15, 22-23, 30-31, 37-40, 293-310; Maddra, Hostiles?, pp. 197, 207, 216-218; Warren, God's Red Son, pp. 225-230. I have not seen a discussion of the 19th-century Lakota words that may lie behind the continued use of English words of Christian origin like “Messiah,” “prophet,” “resurrection,” “gospel,” “church,” and “millennium” to describe the “Ghost Dance.” It seems reasonable to suppose that Lakota usage would not have communicated precisely the same meaning that such a theologically loaded term as “Messiah” did. It also seems likely that such a translation could generate false comparisons. At the same time, the invention of this translation from Lakota to English—the result of at least tacit cooperation between English-speakers who knew some Lakota and Lakota-speakers who knew some English—participated in the cross-cultural convergence that Wovoka envisioned in the first place. See also the discussion of “Ghost Dance” above, p. 140n211. -146- Draft on 1/17/2019 19th-century United States devised and tried to impose. The people to whom the dead belonged did not cease to exist as a people. Their relations with each other did not die. They did not perish from the earth. Their own language is still spoken. Their own schools are now open. In their own ways still they dance and pray. Many lives were preserved, and many descendants of all the peoples of Dakota Territory are alive today. Sometimes, we talk with each other. Sometimes when we talk with each other, we listen.

-147- Draft on 1/17/2019 Time Line for Chapters One, Two, and Three

1766 A Plain Account of Christian Perfection by John Wesley 1771 Methodist Conference Met at Bristol and Appointed Francis Asbury to America 1774 Thoughts upon Slavery by John Wesley 1791 John Wesley Died 1791 Revolution Began on Saint Domingue (Haiti) 1794 Odessa Founded on the Black Sea in Lands Recently Conquered by Russia from the Ottoman Empire 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte Sent a French Army to Suppress Revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti) and Arrest Toussaint Louverture 1803 Louisiana Purchase 1804 Haiti Declared Independence from France 1804 Louis and Clark Expedition (to 1806) 1806 Napoleon’s Domination of South Germany Stimulated Immigration to Russia 1849 Ludwig Bette (Lewis Beatty) Immigrated to the United States from Russia 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, Minnesota Territory 1859 On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection by Charles Darwin Published 1860 Septimus Watson Ingham of Iowa Began Organization of Methodist Episcopal Church in southeast Dakota Territory 1861 Congress Organized Dakota Territory 1862 Dakota War in Minnesota 1863 Charles C. McCabe Incarcerated at Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia 1867 Alpha J. Kynett Elected Corresponding Secretary, Church Extension Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, and Hired Charles C. McCabe as Agent for the West 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie 1870 German Settlement Began in Odessa Township, Big Stone County, Minnesota 1871 Light on the Pathways of Holiness by Lorenzo Dow McCabe 1872 Northern Pacific Railroad Extended to Fargo 1873 Panic of 1873 Led to Economic Depression in United States for Most of Decade 1873 Northwest Iowa Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Met in Yankton 1874 First Methodist Episcopal Church, Fargo, Incorporated by John Webb, William H. White, and others 1874 Seventh Cavalry, United States Army, Explored the Black Hills 1874 The Wesleyan Methodist Church Joined in a Merger to Create the Methodist Church of Canada 1874 Tsar Alexander II Subjected German Russians to Military Conscription 1876 Seventh Cavalry, United States Army, Defeated near the Little Bighorn River, Montana Territory 1876 Preacher Henry Weston Smith Killed While Traveling from Deadwood to Crook City in the Black Hills 1876 Northwest Iowa Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church,

-215- Draft on 1/17/2019 Dissolved North Dakota District and Dakota District 1877 Congress Removed the Black Hills from the Great Sioux Reservation 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States by John Wesley Powell 1878 Seven Commissioners from Minnesota Annual Conference and Northwest Iowa Annual Conference Divided Methodist Episcopal Church in Dakota Territory at 46th Parallel 1880 General Conference of Methodist Episcopal Church Authorized the “Mission” Form of Organization for “Domestic Foreign Missions” 1880 Dakota Mission and Black Hills Mission Organized 1881 Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway (Milwaukee Road) Reached Aberdeen from Ortonville, Minnesota 1883 Walter Minty of Gloucestershire, England, Joined Dakota Mission 1883 Minnesota Conference of Evangelische Gemeinschaft (Evangelical Association) Met at Yellow Bank Township, Lac Qui Parle County, Minnesota, and Authorized Formation of Dakota Conference 1884 North Dakota Mission Organized 1884 The Methodist Church of Canada and the Methodist Episcopal Church of Canada Merged as the Methodist Church 1885 Dakota Farmers’ Alliance Organized 1885 Tornado Destroyed Methodist Episcopal Church at Highmore 1885 Classes Began at Dakota Wesleyan University 1886 William J. Hyde Arrived in Groton from Bay of Quinte, Ontario 1887 Dawes Severalty Act (General Allotment Act) 1887 Movius Family Began to Relocate from Big Stone City to Lidgerwood 1887 Isabella Cornish Hartsough Elected as Reserve Lay Delegate to 1888 General Conference of Methodist Episcopal Church Representing Dakota Annual Conference 1888 Palmer’s Directory, Published to Raise Funds for Highmore Congregation and Dakota Wesleyan University, Listed Over 7,000 Methodist Episcopal Church Members 1889 Church of the United Brethren in Christ Divided into “Old Constitution” and “New Constitution” Denominations 1889 Congress Divided the Great Sioux Reservation 1889 Congress Admitted North Dakota and South Dakota as States with Prohibition Clauses in Both State Constitutions 1890 Seventh Cavalry, United States Army, Destroyed a Minneconjou Band on Wounded Knee Creek While Trying to Disarm It 1891 Evangelical Association Divided into United Evangelical Church and Evangelical Association 1893 Panic of 1893 Followed by Economic Depression for Most of Decade 1894 The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 by James Mooney 1896 The Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane 1901 Eben W. Martin Began Service in U. S. House of Representatives (served until 1915 as representative from South Dakota) 1901 Grove Corwin Began Organization of Methodist Episcopal Church

-216- Draft on 1/17/2019 in Gregory County, South Dakota 1902 U. S. Government Began Leasing and Selling Indian Reservation Lands in Dakotas 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act 1903 Funeral of Martha Canary, Deadwood Methodist Episcopal Church 1903 Isaac Platt Potter Began Organization of Methodist Episcopal Church in Lyman County 1904 Samuel A. Danford Began Service as District Superintendent in North Dakota Annual Conference (served until 1915) 1904 Thomas Nicholson Gave Inaugural Address as President of Dakota Wesleyan University on The Necessity of the Christian College 1905 Red River University of Wahpeton, North Dakota, Moved to Grand Forks and “Affiliated” with University of North Dakota as Wesley College 1907 Charles E. Vermilya Began Service as District Superintendent in North Dakota Annual Conference (served until 1913) 1907 Borden Parker Bowne of Boston University Inaugurated the Hazlett Lectures at Wesley College, Grand Forks, North Dakota 1908 Methodist Episcopal Church Made Statement on “The Church and Social Problems” That Developed into the Social Principles and Social Creed of The United Methodist Church 1908 Board of Sunday Schools Organized by Methodist Episcopal Church 1908 National Commission on Country Life 1909 Governor Robert S. Vessey Proclaimed Mother’s Day in South Dakota 1909 North Dakota Annual Conference of Methodist Episcopal Church Established Two Western Districts: Bismarck District and Minot District 1910 Highways of Progress by James J. Hill 1910 The Lost Guide by Joseph Norvell 1910 Long Drought Began on West River in South Dakota 1912 Tabernacle Built by North Dakota Methodist Camp Meeting Association at Jamestown, North Dakota 1912 Black Hills Mission of Methodist Episcopal Church Met for Its Last Session 1912-1913 Methodist Episcopal Church Conferences in Dakotas Adopted Principles of “Comity” and “Federation” in Relationship to Other Denominations 1913 Sixteenth Amendment to U. S. Constitution Ratified (income tax) 1913 Seventeenth Amendment to U. S. Constitution Ratified (direct election of U. S. Senate) 1913 Nebraska Conference of Church of the United Brethren in Christ Organized with East District that Included South Dakota Congregations 1914 First World War (to 1918) 1914 North Dakota Annual Conferenced Adopted “A Resolution Aiming at Brotherly Co-operation” 1915 Samuel A. Danford Tried at North Dakota Annual Conference 1915 Dakota Annual Conference of Methodist Episcopal Church Began Combined Fundraising Campaign for Clergy Pensions, Methodist State Hospital, Pierre Methodist Episcopal Church, and Other Causes 1916 General Conference of Methodist Episcopal Church Established Commission on Course of Study to Educate Ministers with a Revised Curriculum 1916 Nonpartisan League Gained Control of North Dakota Republican Party

-217- Draft on 1/17/2019 and Won Election for Lynn J. Frazier as Governor 1917 North Dakota Enacted Woman Suffrage Law 1918 Methodist State Hospital Opened in Mitchell, South Dakota, by Dakota Annual Conference, One of Seven Hospitals in the Dakotas Established in the Early 20th Century by Ancestors of The United Methodist Church 1918 Tabernacle Built by South Dakota Holiness Association at Riverside East of Mitchell, South Dakota 1919 Eighteenth Amendment to U. S. Constitution Ratified (prohibition) 1920 Nineteenth Amendment to U. S. Constitution Ratified (woman suffrage) 1920 Dakota Conference of Evangelical Association Divided into North Dakota Conference and South Dakota Conference 1921 South Dakota Supreme Court Decided Fowler Methodist Episcopal Church of Letcher v. Congregational Conference of South Dakota against the Methodists of Letcher 1922 Evangelical Church Merged Evangelical Association and United Evangelical Church 1922 Laymen’s Holiness Association of North Dakota Merged with Church of the Nazarene 1922 Tabernacle Built by Evangelical Congregations near Lehr, North Dakota 1924 Immigration Act 1936 Sylvia of the Hills by Rachel Anna Morris Clark

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