We Are Yet Alive

United Methodists in the History of North Dakota and South Dakota

by Stephen Perry

Draft of Chapter Three

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) 149 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.

We believe that in the teachings of the New Testament will be found the ultimate solution of all the problems of our social order. When the spirit of Christ shall pervade the hearts of individuals, and when his law of love to God and man shall dominate human society, then the evils which vex our civilization will disappear.

The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1908, Appendix, ¶59, “The Church and Social Problems,” https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89077101475. (¶59 developed into the “Social Principles” of The United Methodist Church.)

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Chapter Three WEST RIVER & THE SECOND FRONTIER

The Funeral of Martha Canary, Deadwood Methodist Episcopal Church, August 4, 1903

When Martha Canary came back to Deadwood to die, she was only forty-seven years old. Her annals were as short as her years were few: a westward journey, orphanage, riding the rails, carousing in saloons, frontier poverty. In conversations during the summer, she intimated her end. This may be why she returned to Deadwood where, in younger years, she had participated in the excitements of Territorial days.

But she actually died farther up in the Black Hills while visiting at Terry on August 1, 1903, and her body had to be carted back down the gulches for burial in Mt. Moriah Cemetery. Before they buried her, the people of Deadwood gave her a large funeral at the Methodist Episcopal Church presided over by Charles Badger Clark, Superintendent of the Black Hills Mission.

Why did so many people turn out for the funeral of someone who had led so unremarkable a life? How were they able to recruit a pastor from a denomination that had never admitted her to membership and had always taken an unambiguous stand against alcohol and the saloon?

Martha Canary was the birth name of Mary E. Burke, also known as Calamity Jane, the greatly remarked Deadwood celebrity who, in spite of her real life, planted a legend that her funeral only ripened. Just a few people found her real life to be more worth telling than her legend. The pastor who preached her funeral sermon was one of them.1

Clark read Psalm 90. “Before the mountains were brought forth,…thou art God.” “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch

1 Two others served at different times on the faculty of Dakota Wesleyan University: J. Leonard Jennewein, author of Calamity Jane of the Western Trails, Rapid City, South Dakota: Dakota West Books, 1991 (original edition 1953); and James D. McLaird, author of Calamity Jane; The Woman and the Legend, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. -149- Draft on 1/17/2019 in the night.” “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” Then, he offered the congregation wisdom in three parts.

First, he reminded the people of the uncertainty of life and the reality that death came to all without regard to their station in life.

Next, he recalled what life was like twenty-five years before. Today, schools and churches surrounded the community, and it enjoyed “a higher civilization.” “In the other days you could not venture from your log cabin without the rifle or the revolver with which to defend yourself.” Whoever turned out to be the heroes of this “romantic” transformation from frontier to civilization, Jane Burke was the heroine because of her deeds of kindness and charity. In the snows of winter, she found her way to the solitary cabins of miners who suffered from disease. She brought them food and medicine.

Clark told the congregation that even the smallest act of kindness was valuable in the eyes of God and that God, who was “too good to do us harm” and “too wise to make mistakes,” would see to her reward.

Finally, he addressed the old settlers present who knew the truth about Mrs. Burke and knew that their own time was drawing near. “So may you my fellow citizens, so live that your last days may be your best days, that you may be enabled to crown the heroic efforts of the past twenty-five years with lives consecrated to the highest good of humanity and the glory of God.”2

Clark’s eulogy for Calamity Jane provides a historic example of a practice now widespread in The United Methodist Church: opening the doors of a church building for the funeral of someone not connected to the Church, finding something good to say about her, and offering comfort to those who knew her.

The good words that Clark found likely came from the old settlers themselves, and the picture of Calamity Jane as a kind nurse in a rough time became part of her legend. Clark’s second wife, Rachel Anna Morris Clark, orphaned in her youth like Calamity Jane but adopted and raised by a prominent Iowa family, described Black Hills children at play in her romance novel, Sylvia of the Hills (1936). One of the girls played Calamity Jane, and one of the boys played Wild Bill Hickok. The girl, whose

2 The Daily Pioneer-Times (Deadwood, South Dakota), August 5, 1903, p. [5,] viewed on South Dakota State Historical Society, Newspaper Microfilms, reel 16881 (July 1, 1903 thru December 31, 1903). -150- Draft on 1/17/2019 vocabulary of swear words, unlike Calamity’s, was limited to “dog-on-it,” took soup to Wild Bill on his sick bed.3

But Charles Badger Clark’s good words about Calamity Jane were not her words. In The Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane (1896), ghostwritten but sold by Martha Canary, she herself emphasized shooting and riding, not nursing.4 She alleged a number of associations with famous soldiers and Deadwood men that her biographers have either contradicted or been unable to confirm, and so, her autobiography seems to have been part of an effort to invent a legend. But her words might also have been aspirational, a narrative of things hoped for but not seen during her lifetime.

Anna Morris Clark’s heroine in Sylvia of the Hills similarly aspired to a life in the world of men. Nobody gets shot in this romance, but Sylvia’s ability to ride a horse plays a crucial role in finding a route for the Needles Highway (South Dakota Highway 87) designed by her beloved civil engineer hero shortly after the First World War. Forensic accounting skills, acquired during her college education and business career, enable her to end his father’s imprisonment back east on false charges of embezzlement, remove the stain on the son’s family name, and so empower him to propose marriage to her.

All of this begins with a vision of Sylvia’s going to college in spite of her own father’s opposition to advanced education for women. Her father, after the untimely deaths of his wife and his son, became angry with God. Sylvia’s grandmother, who came to the Black Hills from the East to help raise Sylvia, has the vision. Light fills a room, and it opens into the blue sky. At her feet, a steep and difficult stairway leads up to a shining doorway. “I might have climbed this stairway once,” she tells Sylvia, “but that was long ago. Now the chance is yours.”5

The congregation at Deadwood Methodist Episcopal Church may very well have heard the good words that Charles Badger Clark delivered for Calamity Jane in 1903 as a eulogy for Dakota Territory, the passing of a generation, and the end of the frontier. But, just as Clark’s emphasis on Calamity Jane’s role as a nurse ignored her own aspirations, this would have ignored the second frontier that developed between 1889, the year of statehood for North Dakota and South Dakota, and the First World War. Immigration had definitely slowed during the late 1880’s and declined when

3Anna Morris Clark, Sylvia of the Hills; A Gift Book, Custer, South Dakota: The Chronicle Shop, 1936, p. 19; Part II Official Journal of the Fifty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.[, 1937], pp. 281-282; Major John F. Lacey Memorial Volume, Iowa Park and Forestry Association, [1915], viewed at https://archive.org/stream/majorjohnflaceym00iowa on April 8, 2018. 4 Jennewein, Calamity Jane, pp. 36-39, reprinted The Life and Adventures. 5 Clark, Sylvia of the Hills, p. 33. -151- Draft on 1/17/2019 severe economic depression set in after the Panic of 1893. Even before Clark preached, however, both the economy and immigration were recovering, the federal government was opening new land for settlement, railroad companies were consolidating and laying track into unsettled regions, and aspirations were soaring again. ******* A decade after the funeral of Calamity Jane, Charles Badger Clark took part in another ending, the last session of the Black Hills Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church and its transformation into the Rapid City District of the Dakota Annual Conference. The failure of the Mission to become the conference it had hoped to become since Territorial days showed how difficult conditions of life remained in South Dakota west of the Missouri River. The large number of people who immigrated from East River and farther east during the early 20th century did not all find a sustainable way to feed themselves on West River. Many had to leave the countryside, and town populations divided between a core of business families who persisted and others who could not. New immigrants replaced those who left, or they did not come at all.6

The turning over of population, the constant appearance of new faces in new places, made starting and growing congregations both exciting and hard to do. Within a few years of constructing a church building, a community could be overbuilt or underserved, over subsidized or underfinanced. The towns and the congregations that survived tended, just as they had in the 1880’s, to lie along railroads. By 1910, the railroads had bridged the Missouri at Chamberlain, Pierre, and Mobridge and reached Rapid City or the North Dakota state line near Lemmon.7

Because the railway companies laid track from east to west, the Dakota Annual Conference’s Mitchell District could extend its congregations west earlier than the Black Hills Mission could move very far east or north. But Mitchell District also drew on a larger supply of clergy than the Black Hills Mission could mobilize. In fact,

6 Charles Badger Clark and Homer W. Minish, “Brief Historical Statement Concerning Methodism in the Black Hills,” Minutes of the Twenty-ninth Session of Dakota Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.: G. D. Brown and others[, 1913], pp. 88-90; Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder, Growing Up with the Town; Family and Community on the Great Plains, Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2002, pp. 48-49; Paula Nelson, After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Townbuilders in Western South Dakota, 1900 1917, Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1986. Nelson contended that early 20th century West River South Dakota was a frontier. So, in effect, did Mary Wilma M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900-1925, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1957. 7 Mark Hufstetler and Michael Bedeau, South Dakota’s Railroads: An Historic Context, Pierre, South Dakota: South Dakota State Historic Preservation Office, 1998, revised 2007, pp. 17-21; Herbert S. Schell, History of South Dakota, third edition, Lincoln, Nebraska, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1975, pp. 253, 256. Elwyn B. Robinson addressed the problem of building what he called “too much” in History of North Dakota, Fargo: North Dakota State University Institute for Regional Studies, 1995 (reprinting University of Nebraska Press, 1966), especially pp. 294-296, 537-538, an interpretation taken up by Richard M. Lunde, “History of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in the Dakotas,” M.A. thesis, University of North Dakota, 1959. See also Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900-1925, pp. 485-490. -152- Draft on 1/17/2019 many of the Black Hills clergy, including Charles Badger Clark, came as missionaries from the Dakota Annual Conference. When the Mission turned into the Rapid City District, many of its charges and outlying preaching points remained “to be supplied” or supplied with lay preachers.8

Mitchell District began its West River work by sending an old man into a new country. Sometime after conference adjourned in the fall of 1901, traveling far from the railroads, Grove J. Corwin left his family in Mitchell and entered Gregory County. He worked westward from the river at Fairfax where he started a class and a unit of the Epworth League, the Methodist Episcopal Church’s youth organization. Corwin was sixty years old. He and his wife, Ellen J. Corwin, grew up in New York and Vermont before the Civil War. He ran a log hotel in Rapid City but moved East River and joined the Dakota Mission Conference in 1881. He and his wife raised one son and four daughters who formed an extended Methodist family. Gold Corwin and her husband, J. P. Hauser, later served as missionaries in Mexico. Madge Corwin married J. C. Chapman, architect for Sioux Falls First Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist State Hospital in Mitchell.9

In 1902, the Dakota Annual Conference took notice of the “land boom” on West River and started appealing to the Missionary Society and the Board of Church Extension for financial assistance. A similar appeal in 1907 detailed the conference’s reasons for starting new congregations. First, it estimated that, since 1900, the population of South Dakota had already increased by about 100,000. Within the past year alone, 50 towns had been started along the new railroads. A federal government irrigation project around Belle Fourche and the opening of Tripp County and the Indian reservations to settlement would, the appeal stated, contribute to a doubling of the population in the next ten years. Second, the conference believed that the “American” percentage of South Dakota’s population was increasing in relation to the “foreign-born” population. This meant that the number of people raised in the Methodist Episcopal Church and settling West River would be large. Helping these

8 Minutes of the Thirty-third Annual Session Black Hills Mission Methodist Episcopal Church, New Underwood, South Dakota: C. L. Fillebrown[, 1912], p. 25; Minutes of the Twenty-ninth Session of Dakota Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church[, 1913], pp. 36, 85-86. 9 Minutes of the Seventeenth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: N. A. Swickard, Publisher[, 1901], p. 27; Minutes of the Eighteenth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: W. S. Shepherd, R. B. Beavis[, 1902], p. 27; 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. 64-65; Official Journal of the Forty-fourth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.[, 1928], pp. 84-85; Matthew D. Smith and others, Circuit Riders of the Middle Border; A History of Methodism in South Dakota, Midwest Beach, Inc., 1965, p. 65. -153- Draft on 1/17/2019 Methodists “re-establish themselves in new surroundings” would fulfill the promise of this great mission field.10

Isaac Platt Potter had a wife and six children outside of Mitchell when he took a ferry across the river and entered Lyman County in 1903. He rode the horse that his wife’s brother kept for him at Oacoma all the way to Kennebec where his wife’s sister lived. There, he changed horses and continued westward. In rides of six weeks at a time, he eventually established a circuit of twenty-one Sunday schools and Methodist classes that extended as far west as Vivian and parts of what is now Jones County. Toward the end of the decade, the conference minutes called it “Minty’s circuit” because Walter F. Minty from Gloucestershire, England, spent the last years of his life and retirement riding it.

When Potter organized this circuit, the minutes listed him as a “supernumerary,” meaning that he had no regular appointment or salary and would have to figure out for himself how to eat and where to sleep. He took this conference relation because, three years before, he had suffered some kind of physical collapse and could no longer muster the energy to do what pastors on East River needed to do. Before he became a pastor in the late 1890’s, he failed to make enough money farming to support his family. He tried organizing campaign meetings to elect Populist and Democratic candidates in Brule County who would advance agricultural reform. 11

Then, he felt a call from God to become a pastor.

This aspiration and agricultural conditions saddled his wife and children with a life of terrible poverty. They had to appear on the streets of Mitchell in clothes stitched together from the contents of “missionary barrels” that eastern churches shipped west. They were outraged when they discovered that their husband and father had

10 Minutes of the Eighteenth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1902], pp. 17, 24; Minutes of the Twenty-first Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: G. T. Notson, Publisher, 1905, p. 49; Minutes of the Twenty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: G. T. Notson and others[, 1907], pp. 52-53, signed by prominent conference members: G. T. Notson, J. O. Dobson, A. C. Shepherd, Thomas Nicholson, J. M. Brown, C. E. Hager, J. P. Jenkins, W. I. Graham, George F. Hopkins, and A. S. Loveall. Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirtieth Session, n.p.: G. D. Brown and J. M. Hunter[, 1914], pp. 52, 54, discussed church work near the Belle Fourche irrigation project. 11 The Kimball Graphic (Kimball, South Dakota), October 6, 1894, p. 1, col. 6, viewed at https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn99068076/1894-10-06/ed-1/seq-1.pdf on October 19, 2018; Mrs. U. W. Hilton (Lois Potter), “My father was a “Circuit Rider!”,” Biographical Files, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, The George and Eleanor McGovern Library, Dakota Wesleyan University, Mitchell, South Dakota. The South Dakota Farmer's Alliance Due Paying Members, 1890-1894, Database, at http://history.sd.gov/Archives/farmers/Search.aspx (last name=Potter; county=Brule) viewed on October 19, 2018, showed an “F. P. Potter” of Kimball, Brule County, as a member of the # 281 Waldro Populists with dues paid in 1890 and 1892 only. Additional documents appearing to come from Potter’s descendants were available at https://www.outinunder.com/content/potters-g1-isaac-platt-and-minnie-mariah-documents on December 9, 2018. -154- Draft on 1/17/2019 pledged $100 to Dakota Wesleyan University during one of its large fundraising campaigns. His older children needed that money to attend the school themselves. By herself for weeks at a time, with fear in her heart about what might happen to her husband across the river and what might become of children whose parents had so few financial resources, their mother, Minnie Maria (Smith) Potter, raised the large family and managed the small farm where they lived north of town.

Years later, her seventh child, a daughter, would come to terms with childhood in this home. She would conclude that going West River was her father’s and, eventually, her family’s salvation. It restored his health by relieving him for weeks at a time from the worries of home life and challenging him with the work of starting congregations first in Lyman County and, in 1910, laying a foundation for the Methodist Episcopal Church at Winner in Tripp County. His knowledge of horses gave him an immediate connection with ranchers, who appreciated his veterinary skills. He brought them news of the outside world. He taught them faith and trust in God just by his prayers and his friendly presence with them.

Late in the decade, she recalled, he took her, his eighth child (a son), and his wife across the Missouri on a tour of Minty Circuit. Though still a small child, she noticed that people everywhere loved her father. One late afternoon, the family was in a buggy following an Indian trail along the contour of a butte. The wind came up suddenly, and the sky let loose on the earth. Gumbo, West River’s clay soil that came to life in rain, grabbed at the wheels of the buggy. When water and darkness blinded her father, he loosened the reins on the horses and let them find the way. They walked on sightless until, suddenly, at a shadow, he called them to a halt. A door opened. Light appeared. He cast his son and his daughter, one after the other, into the light. After they landed safely in the arms of a homesteader, Potter helped his wife enter the tar-papered claim shack that had been waiting for them in the night.

He returned to pastoring East River congregations in 1911. In 1927, a few years before his death, his seventh child and several of her brothers and sisters joined many other preachers’ children and gave gifts to the conference in honor of their ministerial fathers.12

12 Minutes of the Nineteenth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: W. S. Sheppard, R. B. Beavis, 1903, pp. 8, 25; Minutes of the Twentieth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: G. T. Notson, Publisher, 1904, pp. 9, 24; Minutes of the Twenty-first Session of the Dakota Annual Conference, 1905, pp. 8, 23; Minutes of the Twenty-second Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.: P. H. McBeth, Publisher, 1906, pp. 7, 24; Minutes of the Twenty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1907], pp. 7, 25; Minutes of the Twenty-fourth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Chnrch [Church],…, n.p.: G. T. Notson and others[, 1908], pp. 8, 26; Minutes of the Twenty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, n.p.: G. T. Notson and others[, 1909], pp. 8, 28; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, n.p.: W. A. Wilkinson , J. M. Hunter[, 1910], pp. 8, 30; Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of -155- Draft on 1/17/2019

The expansion of the Methodist Episcopal Church on West River came at a high personal cost to many of the settlers as well as the ministerial families who served them. Herbert L. Case, a Methodist pastor in Iowa, received a letter inviting him to start preaching at Sturgis in 1909. He moved his wife and five children to a farm north of town near Matȟó Pahá (Bear Butte), but within two years, he found himself distributing 60 barrels of clothing and shoes to more than 500 individuals from 130 families. Drought began in 1910 and lasted several years. His sons grew up to attend Dakota Wesleyan University like the children of I. P. Potter, and they went on to become a United States senator (Francis H. Case) and an editor of Together (Leland D. Case), a Methodist magazine for families. But the experience of seeing how hard life could get just before the Black Hills Mission merged with the Dakota Annual Conference shaped them for the rest of their lives.13

The reorganization of the Black Hills Mission as the Rapid City District of the Dakota Annual Conference in 1912 did not solve all of its problems. In 1914 the District Superintendent reported that only 6 out of 26 charges had become self-supporting and no longer needed funds from the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension. In 1920, 17 of the 25 pastors in the district were receiving missionary funds. Settlers continued to leave during these years although at a decreasing rate as they discovered that the environment worked better for cattle than for cash crops.14

Mitchell District brought more resources to bear and kept its West River congregations supplied with preachers more easily than the Black Hills Mission, but conditions remained difficult here, too. As late as 1924, when automobiles and paved roads had revolutionized transportation in many parts of the United States, E. D. Kohlstedt, President of Dakota Wesleyan, found a journey west from Mitchell next to daunting. Without trouble, he reached Chamberlain by rail on a Sunday morning, crossed the Missouri in a train engine, and got into a Chevrolet that was waiting for

the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1911], pp. 9, 29; Official Journal of the Forty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.[, 1927], pp. 529-530; Mrs. U. W. Hilton (Lois Potter), “My father was a “Circuit Rider!”; Smith and others, Circuit Riders, pp. 66-69. Both Hilton and Smith quoted excerpts from a manuscript journal by I. P. Potter. A search in 2010 failed to recover it. “Missionary barrels” were a project of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society, which tried to improve the quality of clothes that congregations donated. 13 Minutes of the Thirty-third Annual Session Black Hills Mission[, 1912], p. 31; Smith and others, Circuit Riders, pp. 71, 75; Richard R. Chenoweth. “Francis Case: A Political Biography,” South Dakota Historical Collections, 39 (1978): 296-297. Nelson, After the West Was Won, pp. 120-141, discussed the drought and the involvement of Methodists Robert S. Vessey and Eben W. Martin in relief efforts. 14 Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirtieth Session[, 1914], p. 53; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty-first Session, n.p.: G. D. Brown and J. M. Hunter[, 1915], p. 50; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty-second Session, n.p.: G. D. Brown and J. M. Hunter[, 1916], pp. 36, 38; Official Journal of the Thirty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Sioux Falls, South Dakota: H. P. Eberhart[, 1920], p. 50; Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900-1925, pp. 196-208, especially p. 200; Schell, History of South Dakota, third edition, pp. 342-351. -156- Draft on 1/17/2019 him on the other side. But the Chevrolet stopped moving westward when the gumbo glued it to the ground. Kohlstedt got out of the car, walked three miles back to the railroad, and then rode thirty miles in a “railroad motorcar” chasing a work train. This train took him to Murdo where he got into a Ford. He arrived at Okaton just in time to preach for the dedication of the new Methodist Episcopal church building.15 ******* During the late 1890’s, the presiding elders (later known as district superintendents) of the North Dakota Annual Conference noticed that Methodists were moving into the state again. Early in the decade, the Soo Line (the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault St. Marie Railway) had completed a long diagonal railroad from the southeast corner to the border with Saskatchewan. This increased the possibility that a large population would immigrate to the northwest part of the state, but construction finished just as economic depression forced many people to cut back on their plans. From 1890 to 1900, the number of Methodist Episcopal charges in North Dakota grew by only 2 from 90 to 92.16

By 1905, however, the number of charges had grown to 126. It would reach 164 in 1910 before pulling back to 135 in 1920. Most of this growth took place in western North Dakota where the Missouri River flowed into the northwest corner of the state and headed southeast a considerable distance before turning south. This created a different geography for North Dakota’s second frontier. South Dakota divided clearly into “East River” and “West River,” and the expansion of the Methodist Episcopal Church on West River took place under the management of an East River district and a West River district. But North Dakota, in 1909, redistricted itself into two western districts, Minot District and Bismarck District, whose boundaries kept the two Red River Valley districts, Fargo District and Grand Forks District, away from the west.17

15 Official Journal of the Fortieth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.[, 1924], pp. 45-46. 16 Minutes of the Fifth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, n.p.: Edited by the Secretary and Published by the Committee[, 1890,], pp. 21-22; Minutes of the Twelfth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: Henry Witham[, 1897], p. 29; Minutes of the Thirteenth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: Henry Witham[, 1898], p. 28; Minutes of the Fourteenth Annual Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: James Anderson[, 1899], pp. 31, 33; Minutes of the Fifteenth Annual Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: James Anderson[, 1900], pp. 29-30; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth [Twenty-fourth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: A. W. Brown and others[, 1909], p. 85; North Dakota State Rail Plan, Bismarck, North Dakota: North Dakota Department of Transportation, 2007, pp. 11-12. From Carrington to Portal, today’s highway U. S. 52 stays close to the Soo Line (now the Canadian Pacific). “Charge” referred to one or more congregations to which a bishop had appointed a pastor. In addition to congregations, a charge might also include one or more “preaching points” where a pastor met with people who had not yet organized a congregation. Preaching points might be schoolhouses or any other places where people could gather. 17 Minutes of the Eighteenth Annual Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Jamestown, North Dakota: Danford, Greene and White[, 1903], p. 54 (“Bryant’s map”); Minutes of the Twentieth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.: C. D. Lewis, 1905, pp. 24-27; Minutes of the Twenty-fifth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.[, 1910], pp. 20-24; Minutes of the Twenty-fifth [Thirty-fifth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, Lisbon and Mandan, North Dakota: Hollett, Harriss, and -157- Draft on 1/17/2019

For some time before this redistricting, Minot District had already confined Grand Forks District to the Red River Valley. “The Grand Forks District lies almost wholly in the Red River Valley,” its presiding elder noted, “and hence has not enjoyed that inflow of emigrants that is constantly pouring into the western part of the state.” For example, Canadian Methodists who originally settled Pembina County moved out, and immigrants of other nationalities moved in. German Russians, Italians, and Poles were replacing Methodists in many parts of North Dakota. “These peoples may be very good peoples in their proper place,” the presiding elder wrote, “but we maintain the proper place for most of them is in Europe, and the remnant who might consistently become a part of this country we have never been able to do much with along Methodistic lines.” 18

Before the redistricting of 1909, Fargo District extended all the way west to Dickinson along the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Samuel A. Danford served as its presiding elder. But then, the Conference split Fargo District in two between Valley City and Jamestown, and the bishop appointed Danford to be district superintendent for the new Bismarck District. From 1904, Danford, as presiding elder of Fargo District, undertook to develop southwestern North Dakota. Now, separated from congregations in the eastern part of the state, he would continue that work until 1915. Meanwhile, in 1907, Charles E. Vermilya took charge of Minot District and the denomination’s development in the northwest. He served until 1913.

So, by 1909, events and bishops had established the leadership of Danford and Vermilya in western North Dakota. Both were born after the Civil War and grew up in eastern Ohio. Danford’s father was a Methodist pastor who served in North Dakota. Danford himself started his adult life as a public school teacher, came up in the traditional way thru the Course of Study, and received ordination at the hands of Bishop Charles C. McCabe in 1900. Vermilya, on the other hand, went to college at Ohio Wesleyan University and earned the degree of Bachelor of Sacred Theology at Boston University before joining the North Dakota Annual Conference. He and his wife raised three children.19 others[, 1920], pp. 13-15 The number of charges for Dakota Annual Conference, calculated from that conference’s Minutes, show: 126 (1890), 119 (1900), 139 (1905), 154 (1910), and 177 (1920) reflecting merger of Black Hills Mission. 18 Minutes of the Twentieth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1905, pp. 36-37 (M. P. Burns); Minutes of the Twenty- first Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: C. D. Lewis, 1906, pp. 43-44 (M. P. Burns); Minutes of the Twenty-Fourth Session [Twenty-second] of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: C. D. Lewis, 1907, p. 40 (M. P. Burns); Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p., [1911], p. 40 (J. G. Moore); Minutes of the Thirty-second Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Fargo, North Dakota: A. W. Brown and others[, 1917], p. 29 (J. G. Moore). 19 Who's Who in American Methodism, ed. Carl F. Price, New York: E. B. Treat & Co., 1916, p. 229 (Vermilya), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101075888139 on October 22, 2018; Minutes of the Fifteenth Annual Session of the North -158- Draft on 1/17/2019

Danford and Vermilya, in their annual reports, offered conflicting alternatives for organizing the second frontier, but they both agreed on the challenges the conference faced. Danford constantly needed more preachers but did not have places for them to live. The pastor at Hettinger, for example, struggled to survive the winter of 1908 with a sick wife and a child in “a one room board and tar paper shanty,” and, during the summer, some preachers on Bismarck District lived with their families in tents. The only material incentive to accept this kind of housing was a free homestead. “Personally,” Vermilya told the conference, “I do not have the heart to ask men to stay on some of these fields and endure the suffering and humiliation that must necessarily come to them and their families…” from poor housing and low pay. Both Danford and Vermilya exerted themselves to reduce or eliminate congregations’ dependence on the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension and to develop local financing to pay for pastors and church buildings.20

Danford repeated what John Wesley Powell had observed long before about adapting agriculture to lower and variable rainfall west of the 100th meridian. “Land speculators” misled homesteaders about how easy establishing a farm and a home would be. Farmers needed to adjust their methods to low moisture until “somebody chops down the Rocky Mountains.” But the adjustment was requiring suffering and hardship. Vermilya looked at the rural communities of the northwest and saw “sheep without a shepherd.” He found a pastor for the Fillmore Circuit, located on a new railroad between Devils Lake and Drake, who could speak the languages of the

Dakota Annual Conference[, 1900], p. 27 (Danford); Proceedings of the Forty-Fifth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Devils Lake, North Dakota: Alfred Roe[, 1930], p. 297 (memoir of Danford’s father, James W. Danford); History of Noble County, Ohio,…, Chicago: L. H. Watkins and Company, 1887, pp. 367-368, 387-390, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433081844718 on October 22, 2018 (Danford family). The National Register of Historic Places, https://nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com/OH/noble/state.html, listed the Samuel Danford Farm on October 22, 2018. An ancestor of Samuel A. Danford, the North Dakota district superintendent, settled this farm in the early 19th century. General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church, Annual Conference Journal Memoirs Index, Database Record id Number 27174, viewed at http://catalog.gcah.org/ on October 22, 2018, cited “Pacific Northwest Conference Journal for 1938,” p. 382, for Samuel A. Danford (1865-1937) and, Database Record id Number 97065, “Wyoming Conference Journal for 1950,” p. 540, for Charles E. Vermilya (1872-1950). 20 Minutes of the Twenty-fifth [Twenty-third] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.: C. D. Lewis, 1908, p. 26; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth [Twenty-fourth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference [, 1909], p. 66. Four years later, Danford reported that Hettinger had relinquished “Missionary money” and set the pastor’s salary (in addition to a parsonage) at the third highest in the District, Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Park River, North Dakota: A. W. Brown and others[, 1912], p. 44. Samuel A. Danford, Spreading Scriptural Holiness; Or, the North Dakota Movement, Chicago: The Christian Witness Company, 1913, republished Danford’s annual reports. -159- Draft on 1/17/2019 Russians, the Germans, and the Scandinavians living in the area. But, as far as he knew, this constituted the conference’s first attempt to reach German Russians.21

Danford deeply believed in revivals as the way to reach people who were constantly moving around and those among them who would ultimately stay in North Dakota. Revivals laid a foundation for new churches by offering conversion and sanctification to individuals who might settle in a different place than the place of the revival that converted or sanctified them. Many heard a call to preach at a revival, and this would fill otherwise empty pulpits with preachers who could speak authentically about Christian life because they had actually experienced the love of God themselves. Others who had fallen away from church membership in the course of migration might be reclaimed in a revival. With church members constantly transferring their membership from place to place, membership statistics did not measure what was really happening in a congregation where just a few truly converted members could help it survive until a more stable future arrived.22

“One problem difficult of solution,” Danford wrote, “is the evangelization of the American money mad crowd who come to our frontier for land. They want churches but they balk on piety and the Methodist program of righteousness, and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost does not appeal to the average new town.” The revival focused on growing the quality of church members and keeping them engaged in the struggle for the souls of their town’s citizens instead of quickly growing the number of members in a congregation.23

Vermilya did not oppose revivals, and he held them on Minot District. But he believed that the time had come “to redeem the revival.” Revivals as currently practiced expected conversion, sanctification, or the call to preach to take place instantaneously in a dramatic crisis. This led revivalists, especially professional evangelists who often preached at revivals, into the temptation of forcing decisions and using methods that ended up abusing and repelling the very people they tried to help. “All life tells us too plainly,” Vermilya observed, that people needed to take time to think about spiritual matters. What, he seemed to ask, has happened to the contemplative life as a means of transformation?24

21 Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, [1911], p. 33; Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1912], p. 57. The Fillmore Circuit did not last beyond 1920, and the multilingual pastor, Geoffrey (Godfrey?) Kopriva, moved out of the state. 22 Minutes of the Twenty-sixth [Twenty-fourth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1909], pp. 49-51; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference [, 1911], pp. 29-30. 23 Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference [, 1912], p. 45. 24 Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference [, 1911], pp. 42-43. -160- Draft on 1/17/2019 While not eliminating revivals, Vermilya wanted to shift the emphasis in two ways. First, he wanted his preachers to engage in “pastoral evangelism.” The results on Minot District “…clearly show that any pastor who will address himself personally and privately to men in the interest of the Christ will not come to the end of the year empty-handed.” This and training children for commitment to the Christian life had shown the largest gains. To these ends, he organized the district into seven groups of pastors to cooperate with each other on evangelism.25

Second, Vermilya suggested organizing the rural church as a “social center” that would use “the every day interests” of country people as a means of serving their needs and drawing them into the Christian life. Because the country had always offered fewer distractions in life, people who lived there would more likely respond to the Spirit and provide the Church with leadership for the future. But revivals alone could not create unity and community among large numbers of people.26

The divide between Danford and Vermilya and their different approaches to organizing conference-related frontier congregations continued to open up, and it eventually split the North Dakota Annual Conference. As if to widen the distance between them after they left western North Dakota, Danford moved to Oregon where he served again as a district superintendent, and Vermilya ended up in New York. Before he got there, he worked for the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension as Superintendent of its “Frontier Department”—a term of organization still in use almost thirty years after demographers and historians back east had declared the American frontier to be forever closed.27 ******* What happened with the United Brethren in Christ and the Evangelical Association on this second frontier?

By 1920, they had little or no presence in the western Dakotas. The United Brethren’s presence anywhere in the Dakotas amounted to a few congregations primarily in southeastern South Dakota. A merger of conferences in 1913 brought

25 Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1912], p. 55. On “pastoral evangelism,” compare Minutes of the Twenty-ninth Session of Dakota Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church[, 1913], p. 40-41; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty-first Session[, 1915], pp. 45-46. 26 Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1912], pp. 57-58. Vermilya may have drawn on the ideas of rural sociology. See below, pp. 204-205. 27 Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church Fall Conferences 1920, New York and Cincinnati: The Methodist Book Concern, [1920], p. 595, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433082252903 on December 11, 2018; Minutes of the Thirty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, n.p., 1921, p. 101; Minutes of the Thirty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, Lisbon and Hettinger, North Dakota: Hollett, Hedtke, and others[, 1922], p. 20; Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893, Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1894, pp. 197-227. -161- Draft on 1/17/2019 these congregations into the East District of the Nebraska Conference, placing them at the edge of a conference life that centered on their college in York, Nebraska.28

The Evangelical Association, on the other hand, although it had very few congregations in the west, grew in total number of congregations during these years. The Dakota Conference consisted of 24 “fields” in 1890, 31 in 1900, 38 in 1905, 47 in 1910, and 56 in 1920 when it divided in two, forming the North Dakota Conference and the South Dakota Conference. The Evangelical Association benefited from its early presence in the James River Valley during the Territorial period and a national reunification of Evangelical denominations that created the larger Evangelical Church in 1922.29

But neither the Evangelicals nor the United Brethren had the resources in people and money to expand to the scale of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Institutions whose scale even it could not match, however, outdistanced the Methodist Episcopal Church—business and government. People from across the country and the globe

28 Minutes of the First Session of the Nebraska Conference of the…Church of the United Brethren in Christ Held in the Church, York, Nebraska. September 10-15, 1913, Beatrice, Nebraska: Milburn & Scott Co., 1913, pp. 6, [8,] 24, 32, 33-35. Pp. 14 and 59 reported a plan and resolution in favor of union with the Methodist Protestant Church. P. 6, the Conference Roll, listed only one pastor, A. B. Small of Vermillion, with a South Dakota address. The United Brethren worked in the Dakotas under a succession of conferences that preceded the Nebraska Conference of 1913: Dakota Conference, Elkhorn Conference, Elkhorn and Dakota Conference, Minnesota Conference, and North Nebraska Conference. See Albea Godbold, John H. Ness, Jr., and Edwin Schell, Table of United Methodist Church Annual Conferences, 1796-2001, [Madison, New Jersey:] The General Commission on Archives and History[, 2001], pp. 64, 83, whose dating of these conferences did not quite agree, however, with the Nebraska Conference’s Minutes of 1913 cited above nor with the minutes of several of these conferences published as General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church, Microfilm HS-104. See also the very detailed but unpublished time line by Pat Breidenbach, “United Brethren Work in South Dakota,” Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. The Archives holds files on closed United Brethren congregations of the following places: Dexter (Codington County), Graceland (Codington County), Milltown (Hutchinson County), Pleasant Hill (Clay County), Star Prairie (Clay County), Stickney (Aurora County), and Golden Valley County in North Dakota. Of these, Pleasant Hill and Star Prairie lasted the longest. The “Star Prairie Cook Book” of 1920 listed the names of women in the Ladies Aid Society of the Star Prairie United Brethren Church according to http://files.usgwarchives.net/sd/clay/church/starprairie.txt on October 25, 2018. When a minority of United Brethren formed an “Old Constitution” denomination in 1889, most South Dakota congregations remained in the “New Constitution” denomination. On this division, see J. Bruce Behney and Paul H. Eller, The History of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, ed. Kenneth W. Krueger, Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon, 1979, pp. 227-230. 29 “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association]”, trans. Mrs. Arend Arends and ed. Mrs. Richard Lunde, typescript carbon copy, 1890, pp. 14-15; Verhandlungen der Siebzehnten Jahressitzung der Dakota Conferenz der Evangelischen Gemeinschaft,…, Cleveland, Ohio: Druck von Thomas & Mattill, 1900, pp. 32-33; Verhandlungen der zweiundzwanzigsten Jahres-Sitzung der Dakota Conferenz der Evangelischen Gemeinschaft,…, Cleveland, Ohio: Druck von F. G. Lamb[, 1905], pp. 26-27; Verhandlungen der siebenundzwanzigsten Jahres-Sitzung der Dakota Conferenz der Evangelischen Gemeinschaft…, n.p.: C. A. Bremer[, 1910], pp. 29-31 and 65-71, indicating that one appointment could have several congregations; “Report of the Commission on Conference Division,” Minutes of the Thirty-sixth Annual Session of the Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Association…, n. p.: C. F. Strutz[, 1919], p. 25; Minutes of the Thirty-seventh Annual Session of the Dakota Conference and the newly organized North Dakota and South Dakota Conferences of the Evangelical Association…, n.p.: C. F. Strutz and J. E. Booth[, 1920], pp. 62-63, 76; Behney and Eller, The History of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, pp. 283-285, 309-313, on denominational division from 1891 to 1922. Evangelical “fields” consisted of one or more congregations and preaching points. The Evangelical Association established a “Montana Mission” whose missionaries were listed in the minutes of the Dakota Conference for recording purposes only. -162- Draft on 1/17/2019 could seek the fulfillment of their aspirations in North Dakota and South Dakota because the United States Department of the Interior opened Indian reservation lands to settlement, railway corporations bridged the Missouri River and constructed new railroads, and Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act (1902) that brought flowing water to dry land. Religious denominations could only follow the immigrants and hope to meet their needs without building too little or too much in any one place.

James J. Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railway, set forth an expansive vision for American agriculture in his book, Highways of Progress (1910), which illustrated how large business corporations molded people’s ideas about where to live and how to live when they arrived. Whether the United States continued to flourish as a civilization or declined like earlier civilizations depended, according to Hill, on a large number of people living on small farms, conserving the soil, and using highly productive methods to cultivate it. The sustainability of small farms that could be acquired for little or nothing under the nation’s homestead laws would offer economic security to large numbers of families who would otherwise flock to towns and cities where most of them would become poor.

Making country life attractive, especially to young people who, for good reasons, often wanted to get off the farm, stood at the top of Hill’s agenda for the United States. He saw education—agricultural education and the denominational college—as a way to keep families on the land. Probably for this reason, he made sizeable contributions both to Wesley College in Grand Forks and Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell. But his mother, who raised him, may have predisposed him. Even though Hill was born to a Baptist father, attended a Quaker academy in Ontario, and married a Catholic, she came from an Irish Methodist family.30

Hill’s dream of a large number of families living on small farms throughout states like North Dakota and South Dakota did not come true. After he died in 1916, the First World War took many young people off the farm and out of small towns to see things they had never seen before, agriculture fell into a long depression, and Congress,

30 James J. Hill, Highways of Progress, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910, pp. 45-84; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1910], pp. 57-58; Edward P. Robertson, “The Story of the Affiliation of Wesley College with the University of North Dakota,” 1935, carbon copy typescript, pp. 39-41 (copy in my possession; another copy available at Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks); Joseph Gilpin Pyle, The Life of James J. Hill, 2 vols., 1917. 1: 17; Albro Martin, James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest, St. Paul, Minnesota: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1991, p. 15. Hill delivered a commencement address on the importance of the denominational college that was reported in the Methodist press, “James J. Hill and Willamette University,” Pacific Christian Advocate (Portland, Oregon), May 11, 1910, p. 7; and “James J. Hill and the Denominational College,” The Messenger (Helena, Montana), July 1, 1910, p. 1. He also contributed to the construction of a new building for the Pierre, South Dakota, Methodist Episcopal Church in 1911, Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1911], p. 35. -163- Draft on 1/17/2019 when it passed the Immigration Act of 1924, severely restricted the international movement of population that had fueled the second frontier.

Did inability to match the large dreams and the emerging scale of business and government—and, as a consequence, overbuilding in some places and underserving other places—defeat the mission of conference-related congregations in the Dakotas?

In 1955, Charles W. Zech, a long-serving pastor and presiding elder of the Evangelical Association, recalled leaving the Groton Circuit after preaching there for four years during the first decade of the 20th century. In his parting sermon at Butler, South Dakota, one of the smaller points on the circuit, he told the congregation that he had tried to do his best and prayed that he had not worked in vain. He received an invitation to dinner after church from the son of an Evangelical pastor in the Minnesota Conference. The son said that he had been an “atheist” when Zech came to Butler and went to church only for the sake of his family. But one of Zech’s sermons got to his heart. Then he prayed, and “the light came.”

“You said you didn’t know whether you had accomplished anything, [but] You at least led me back to God again.”31

Given the ultimate importance that Evangelicals, United Brethren, and Methodists attached to the spiritual lives of individuals, what scale could possibly have measured this accomplishment?

Mother’s Day, May 9, 1909

Governor Robert S. Vessey proclaimed the first Mother’s Day observance in South Dakota. Following the suggestion of Anna Jarvis, a Methodist woman who grew up in West Virginia and lived in Philadelphia, he set apart the second Sunday in May— May 9, 1909—to remember “the one who, in our infancy watched over us with tenderest care, in our youth gently guided us to higher ideals—the counsellor of our

31 Charles W. Zeck [Zech], “Reminiscences of 50 Years from Child Hood,” Biographical Files, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, p. 4; Verhandlungen der neunzehnten Jahressitzung der Dakota Conferenz der Evangelischen Gemeinschaft…, Cleveland, Ohio: Druck von Mattill & Lamb, 1902, p. 15; Verhandlungen der zweiundzwanzigsten Jahres-Sitzung der Dakota Conferenz der Evangelischen Gemeinschaft[, 1905], p. 26; Historical Directory of the Groton Mission of the Evangelical Association: Comprising Groton, Butler, Bethel and Ferney, 1905, General Archives and History Commission of The United Methodist Church, Microfilm HS-122, reel 2. Watertown Regional Library, Watertown, South Dakota, holds a much longer version of the Zech reminiscences. Zech had Sunday dinner at the home of August Knebel, son of August Knebel, Presiding Elder of Yankton District, 1886-1889, Albert H. Utzinger, History of the Minnesota Conference of the Evangelical Association, 1856 to 1922, Cleveland, Ohio: Evangelical Press, n.d., 1: 286-288, and later a member of the South Dakota House of Representatives, Biographical Directory of the South Dakota Legislature, 1889- 1989, 2 vols., Pierre, South Dakota: The South Dakota Legislative Research Council, 1989, 1: 607. -164- Draft on 1/17/2019 mature years.” He believed that such an observance would appeal “…to him who has missed life's crowning joy, the tender ministrations of a mother's love, no less than to the one who has derived the elements of a noble character from the maternal care bestowed in childhood.” He recommended that pastors address their congregations on the subject and that congregations wear and distribute “the white flower, symbolizing purity, beauty and fragrance—the attributes of a true mother….”

Before offering these details for the observance, Vessey’s proclamation opened with the same rationale that had laid the foundation for Methodist and Evangelical political involvement since Territorial days: a recognition of “the importance of the home as the fountainhead of society” and a realization that “…no strtesmanship [statesmanship] or legislation can save us if our homes become abodes of ignorance and degration [degradation].”32

South Dakota’s voters had elected Vessey to be governor the previous fall. He was the second of several “progressive” Republican governors who served the state just before and during the First World War. Progressives distinguished themselves from “stalwarts” in the state’s Republican Party. Stalwarts defended railroads and other large businesses and did not want to see a tax burden laid on the resources required to operate large-scale organizations that were obviously beneficial to the public.33 Vessey himself started out as a Wisconsin lumberjack and came more recently from a small business background in Wessington Springs, South Dakota. In national politics, he and other progressives allied themselves with Theodore Roosevelt who wanted to regulate but not destroy large corporations.

Vessey grew up in a Methodist family and participated actively in the Methodist Episcopal Church. The lay electoral conference of the Dakota Annual Conference chose him to represent South Dakota’s laity at the General Conference of 1912, and he worked especially hard on political issues that seemed to Methodists to advance the cause of home and family as the foundation for a free society: prohibition, woman suffrage, and agricultural reform.

32 Pierre Weekly Free Press (Pierre, South Dakota), April 8, 1909, Image 5 [p. [5]], viewed at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn98062890/1909-04-08/ed-1/seq-5/ on July 12, 2018. As of October 27, 2018, the West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History had posted extensive information on Anna Jarvis and her mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, at http://www.wvculture.org/history/notewv/ajarvis.html and http://www.wvculture.org/history/archives/women/jarvis.html. On October 27, 2018, the Register of Historic Sites of The United Methodist Church listed the International Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia, http://gcah.org/research/register-of-historic-sites. 33 Schell, History of South Dakota, third edition, pp. 258-265. Stalwarts who were also members of the Methodist Episcopal Church included Governor Samuel H. Elrod of Clark. James J. Hill, Highways of Progress, pp. 286-308, expressed a similar position on what he called “the conservation of capital.” -165- Draft on 1/17/2019 These issues, which people today might struggle to connect, proved to be interrelated in the minds of progressives like Vessey and in the economic world they confronted. For example, one of his legislative achievements prohibited gambling and drinking on passenger trains. In the minds of Methodists and Evangelicals, this both checked the power of alcohol to corrupt public spaces and restrained large business corporations.34

Prohibition, woman suffrage, and agricultural reform continued in the early 20th century to attract Methodist and Evangelical interest as these issues did in Dakota Territory and the 1890’s. The Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church supported a national campaign in 1912 to elect a president of the United States who pledged support for prohibition. The district superintendent for Rapid City commented on saloons in his annual reports and, in 1916, took pleasure in noting that the number of saloons in his district was declining. A clergy member of the North Dakota Annual Conference headed the North Dakota Enforcement League which aimed to achieve local compliance with North Dakota’s constitutional ban on alcohol. The Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Association advanced a novel argument for prohibition during the First World War—that it conserved grain needed for the war effort.35

Governor Vessey helped to gain passage of a resolution in support of both prohibition and woman suffrage during the laity convention at the Dakota Annual Conference of 1910. Among other things, the resolution recommended organizing the businessmen of each town into “an association for the protection of the boyhood of the community” against “the conscienceless tobacco vender [vendor], the pool room and the saloon keeper, and the slot machine operator.”

Noting the establishment in the previous decade of “perfect equality between men and women of the laity in voting and holding the offices of the church,” the resolution also supported an amendment to the South Dakota state constitution for woman suffrage. “Home and Childhood” needed the protection that voting women would give them, and women needed the ability to protect their own property rights against the tyranny of taxation without representation.36

34 Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,…, n.p.: G. D. Brown and others[, 1912], p. 73. For Vessey’s biography, see chapter 2, p. 114n154. 35 Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1911], pp. 22, 48-49; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty-second Session[, 1916], p. 39; Proceedings of the Fifty-fifth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Church…, Wahpeton, North Dakota: Wilson Johnstone[, 1940], p. 86 (Frank L. Watkins); Verhandlungen der Vierunddreißigsten Jahres-Sitzung der Dakota Konferenz der Evangelischen Gemeinshaft…, n.p.: C. F. Strutz[, 1917], p. 19. 36 Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1910], pp. 55-56. South Dakota amended its constitution in 1918 to allow woman suffrage. -166- Draft on 1/17/2019 North Dakota’s state legislature submitted woman suffrage to the voters in 1914. Well before the vote, Elizabeth Preston Anderson, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of the state, asked the North Dakota Annual Conference for their support. Several preachers endorsed a resolution of support, including Samuel Danford and Charles Vermilya, and the conference adopted it unanimously.37

“Agricultural reform” covered many early 20th-century proposals for helping farm and ranch families to live better lives in an industrializing economy. The Methodist Episcopal Church did not speak officially on agricultural reform at this time, nor did all Methodists in North Dakota and South Dakota agree about any particular proposal. But the denomination’s statement on “The Church and Social Problems” in the 1908 version of its Discipline, employed principles that could be applied to agriculture. It advocated peaceful and cooperative settlement of disputes between labor and business (later known as “collective bargaining”) with the goals of safe working conditions and a living wage. Many of the denomination’s specific ideas about industrial disputes required government action although the statement did not go into any detail about government as a check on the power of business.38

Farm and ranch families lived in a somewhat different situation than the labor force of a factory because agriculture consisted overwhelmingly of independent operators who owned the means of production. However, they did not own the means of getting their products to market or the means of processing their products into consumer goods or the means of financing their production and marketing costs on favorable terms. Instead, large business enterprises controlled grain elevators and stockyards, railroads, flour mills and slaughterhouses, and banks. So, like new ideas for improving factory jobs, many proposals for agricultural reform in the early 20th century involved government action against the power of these businesses.39

Eben W. Martin, a member of Deadwood Methodist Episcopal Church, represented South Dakota in the Congress of the United States from 1901 to 1915. Although he did not always identify himself as a progressive, he gave a speech at the University of South Dakota proposing federal licenses for businesses engaged in interstate

37 Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1913], pp. 26, 51. 38 The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1908, Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham and New York: Eaton and Mains, 1908, Appendix, ¶59, “The Church and Social Problems,” viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89077101475 on October 29, 2018. 39 James J. Hill, Highways of Progress, on the other hand, emphasized technological and educational solutions that involved more efficient use of soil and other resources. Dakotas farmers and ranchers who were tenants and not owner- operators accounted for a much smaller percentage of the agricultural population during the period 1890 to 1920 than the decades after the First World War. See Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900-1925, pp. 75-77, 482; Robinson, History of North Dakota, p. 369. -167- Draft on 1/17/2019 commerce. His speech was said to have influenced Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt broke up a few trusts—notably, James J. Hill’s Northern Securities Company which consolidated financial control of several major railroads—but, generally, the President believed that an industrial economy required large-scale organization, and so, he preferred government regulation of business. For many Methodists, this approach of reconciling the interests of labor, business, and the public resembled the cooperative approach that the Methodist Episcopal Church advocated in its statement on “The Church and Social Problems.”40

In 1916 North Dakota decided to take a different approach to agricultural reform. The Nonpartisan League gained control of the Republican Party in the primary election, and, in the fall, the voters elected its nominee for governor, a Methodist farmer raised in southern Pembina County near Hoople, Lynn J. Frazier. One of the first bills he signed into law granted women the right to vote in state and local elections. Governor Frazier spent most of his four years in office experimenting with public ownership of businesses that had major impacts on farmers and ranchers.

Opponents, who organized themselves as the Independent Voters Association, dismissed this project as “socialism.” North Dakota’s voters eventually recalled Frazier in a special election, and most of the League’s state-owned businesses failed or made little impact on the economy during the 1920’s. However, after recalling him as governor, the voters promptly sent him to the United States Senate where he stayed until 1941. Furthermore, the Nonpartisan League endured as a faction of North Dakota’s Republican Party until the 1950’s.

Some of the League’s founders, not including Frazier, had been members of the Socialist Party but actually left it in order to start the League. They were frustrated with the Socialists’ neglect of agriculture. The League emphasized agriculture, campaigned for candidates like Frazier who came from agriculture, and advocated both private and public measures that they believed would benefit farmers and ranchers. The Independent Voters Association represented bankers, insurance agents,

40 O. W. Coursey, Who’s Who in South Dakota, 3 vols., Mitchell, South Dakota: Educator School Supply Co., 1913-1920, 1: 51-58, especially 56-57; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, viewed at http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=M000176 on October 29, 2018. The Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., contain correspondence with Martin as well as Robert S. Vessey. See Index to the Theodore Roosevelt Papers, 3 vols., Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress, 1969, 3 vols., 2: 747, 3: 1211, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015023564050 on October 29, 2018. See especially Eben W. Martin to Theodore Roosevelt, January 31, 1911, Roosevelt Papers, Series 1, viewed at https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss38299.mss38299-098_0001_0900/?sp=353, and Roosevelt to Martin, February 10, 1911, Roosevelt Papers, Series 3A, viewed at https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss38299.mss38299- 364_0977_1200/?sp=167&r=-0.164,0.058,1.431,0.588,0 on December 11, 2018. -168- Draft on 1/17/2019 and rural merchants—small businessmen. Both of these groups worked within the Republican Party to achieve results favorable to their constituents.41

Many German Russians in North Dakota supported the Nonpartisan League, and so did pastors of the Evangelical Association. Reuben E. Strutz followed by his brother, C. F. Strutz, served as pastor of the Evangelical congregation at Bismarck from 1913 to 1927. The Legislative Assembly, frequently under the control of the League during these years, chose the brothers to be chaplains for the legislators. Reuben chaired the League in Stutsman County where he and his son raised cattle. The son, Alvin C. Strutz, later became Attorney General of North Dakota and a justice on the state’s Supreme Court.42

South Dakota may have paid the greatest tribute to North Dakota’s attempt at agricultural reform by means of public ownership when, in 1918, South Dakota voters amended their constitution to allow their state to own businesses, too. The progressive Republicans in charge of state government simply used this permission more sparingly. Both states did enter the banking business and provided “rural credits” to farmers and ranchers, but both banks eventually failed. Perhaps this was inevitable since the economic forces affecting agriculture had already turned global, but the early 20th-century failure of state government agricultural financing contributed to the steep decline in the number of families on farms and ranches during the rest of the century.43

Looking into the future from 1920, however, the political prospects for agricultural reform, woman suffrage, and prohibition—for laying the foundation of a free society in home and family—seemed to shine with the light of victory. By 1920, the Constitution of the United States allowed income taxes to be levied on individuals as well as corporations (16th amendment), required the voters of every state to elect their United States senators directly instead of election by state legislatures that large corporations could control (17th amendment), prohibited alcohol production and its

41 Nels Erickson, The Gentleman from North Dakota, Lynn J. Frazier, Bismarck: State Historical Society of North Dakota, North Dakota Heritage Center, 1986, pp. 6, 7, 15 (reproduction of a photo showing Frazier signing woman suffrage into law with Elizabeth Preston Anderson standing next to him); Michael Lansing, Insurgent Democracy; The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics; Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015, especially p. 33, 52, 55, 69, 84- 85, 127, 133, on Methodists involved in the League; Robinson, History of North Dakota, pp. 327-351. Lansing concluded that the League was more committed to lobbying for agriculture than to socialism. 42 Lunde, “History of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in the Dakotas,” pp. 100-103; Official Minutes of the Fourth Annual Session of the North Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Church, Wishek, North Dakota, 1923, inside back cover advertisement. Lunde interviewed C. F. Strutz and Alvin C. Strutz in 1959. Although the League supported woman suffrage and many in the Evangelical Association supported the League, German Russians generally had opposed woman suffrage in the 1890’s. See chapter 2, p. 133. 43 Schell, History of South Dakota, third edition, pp. 265-269, 278-280; Robinson, History of North Dakota, pp. 342-344, 380- 381. -169- Draft on 1/17/2019 commerce (18th amendment), and established the right of otherwise qualified women to vote in federal and state elections (19th amendment).44

The Methodist and Evangelical politics that contributed to new constitutional law flowed from the lives of individuals, families, and congregations. Change came to this more private world as well. ******* In 1909 Easter Sunday fell about a month before Mother’s Day. The Methodist Episcopal congregation at Bismarck, North Dakota, chose that Easter to dedicate its second building free of debt, illuminated with beautiful new stained glass windows, and named after Charles C. McCabe, the beloved bishop who had just died.

So, the congregation could picture Jesus sitting down in a bright corner of the building. He has just finished saying something. What was it? He holds one child in his right arm while he extends his left hand to bless another little head after a young mother gently nudges her child toward him. This child offers a bouquet of flowers. More children stand around Jesus or kneel before him waiting their turn as childhood is teaching them to do. An onlooker can see other buildings up the hillside in the distance. But Jesus and the children share something much more noticeable—they are all barefooted and probably enjoying it.

What did Jesus say before he sat down?

“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14).

Below this scene, the words, “Cradle Roll,” painted in Gothic script on the stained glass, identified the window and announced that McCabe Methodist Episcopal Church, along with many other congregations of the early 20th century, placed great emphasis on motherhood, childbirth, infant baptism, and Sunday school. Cradle rolls listed newborn, unbaptized infants associated with congregations. Some congregations that kept them would hold a “cradle rocking” ceremony to celebrate recent births. All of them kept track of newborns and encouraged their parents to have them baptized and to bring them to Sunday school.45

44 Because the United States Constitution framed the right to vote as a series of exceptions to the federal government’s and the states’ power to determine who may vote, the 19th amendment did not enable all adult women citizens to vote. In practice, the 19th amendment did not immediately enfranchise Native American or African American women. 45 McCabe United Methodist Church, Bismarck, North Dakota, preserves and displays this window. Mrs. A. L. Grebel [Cameron], Special Welcome Services for the Cradle Roll, [about 1908,] Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, described the practice of cradle rolls and cradle rocking at the Methodist Episcopal Church of Parker, South Dakota. See also Mrs. Herzberg, “The Value of the Cradle Roll,” handwritten note in the Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference copy of Official Minutes of the Fifth Annual Session of the North Dakota Conference of the Evangelical -170- Draft on 1/17/2019

Bismarck’s new Cradle Roll window represented organized concern for the well-being of children and a turn to children for the future of the Church. This turn to children took place, however, in the midst of a long-term decline in the rate of birth for both the general population and for Methodists, Evangelicals, and United Brethren nationally. As measured by the rate of baptism, North Dakota and South Dakota lagged considerably behind the national decline. But Territorial families with fewer children had already grown up, and, before the end of the 20th century, the rate of baptism in the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, like the rate of baptism for The United Methodist Church in the United States, dropped to a point where church members no longer replaced themselves.46

A late 19th-century and early 20th-century vision of a new kind of family, one whose women bore a significantly smaller number of children but focused intensely on the quality of their children’s lives, helped to start the downward trend in the rate of baptism. Growing knowledge of the human body, especially reproductive medicine, provided the means to keep it going.

From the 18th century, health care and healing held both a theological and an organizational place in the lives of Methodists, Evangelicals, and United Brethren. In Dakota Territory, midwives and uncertified nurses traveled the countryside. For example, in eastern South Dakota, Mrs. J. W. Dibble, mother of James Birney Dibble, assisted at many births, and Mary A. Springer, wife of Henry M. Springer and mother of Bishop John McKendree Springer, attended “the thinly settled country sick.” Reporting on the work of Ladies’ Aid societies in Huron District, the district superintendent wrote, “...their most beautiful service is in visiting the sick, reporting to the pastor the stranger, and in looking after the poor and needy.” James Anderson, Fargo District Superintendent and husband of Elizabeth Preston Anderson, gave a dire report in 1919 of deaths during the Spanish influenza epidemic that followed the First World War. But, he added, “...our women's societies ministered generously in supplying nurses, food, and flowers to the sick and sorrowing.”47

Church, Drake, n.p.: F. W. Agte[, 1924]. The archivists of the Dakotas Annual Conference have documented this practice in additional ways, including examination of the records of closed churches at Church’s Ferry (Ramsey County), Starkweather (Ramsey County), Dazey-Rogers (Barnes County), Douglas (Ward County), Pearl Creek (Beadle County), and Springfield (Bon Homme County). 46 Stephen Perry, “Writing the History of the Dakotas Annual Conference: Who Should Be Included in a Conference History?” paper presented to the North Central Jurisdictional Archives and History Commission and Historical Society of The United Methodist Church, July 8, 2008, Biographical Files, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. See chapter 1, p. 14; chapter two, pp. 87, 89, 90, 94, 101; and chapter 3, p. 158, for examples of smaller families, and see chapter 2, p. 83, Graphic 2.4, on the rate of baptism. 47 The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley, ed. Frank Baker, Richard P. Heitzenrater, and Randy Maddox, Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1976-, vol. 32, “Medical and Health Writings”; James Birney Dibble, “Prairie Jumbles [autobiography],” typescript, c. 1950, Biographical Files, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The -171- Draft on 1/17/2019

Traditional means of healing like touch and prayer continued to be widely practiced during the early 20th century. In addition to being Bismarck District Superintendent, Samuel A. Danford served as one of the original members of the North Dakota Board of Chiropractic Examiners and as a member of the North Dakota Annual Conference’s Board of Deaconesses. Amon Ortman, a Methodist layman, founded the Ortman Chiropractic Clinic of Canistota, South Dakota, about 1915. C. E. Hagar, Huron District Superintendent, gave thanks for the many prayers offered throughout the state when he became seriously ill and underwent surgery in 1908. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “to doubt the efficiency of prayer as shown in my remarkable recovery.” The nurses and student nurses of Methodist State Hospital, opened in 1918 by the Dakota Annual Conference, gathered regularly for prayer with the pastor of First Methodist Episcopal Church in Mitchell. A former faculty member of Dakota Wesleyan University published a book on The Philosophy of Prayer (1922). Stained glass treatments of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane before his suffering and death reminded many worshippers of the central place of prayer in Christian life.48

In other words, Methodists, Evangelicals, and United Brethren in North Dakota and South Dakota already held beliefs about human health and engaged in health care practices—with women among the practitioners—when medicine began to professionalize and claim the authority of science during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

What did they believe about sexuality and childbirth?

United Methodist Church, p. 33; Official Journal of the Fortieth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1924] p. 82; Grace D. Whiteside, “A Wheel within A Wheel: The Life Story of the Rev. Henry M. Springer Pioneer Minister in South Dakota,” Watertown, South Dakota, 1972, Biographical Files, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, p. 2; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1910], p. 37; Minutes of the Thirty-fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, Carrington and Lisbon, North Dakota: Hollett, Harriss, and others[,1919], p. 33. 48 State of North Dakota, 1919 Legislative Manual, Bismarck, North Dakota: Bismarck Tribune Company, [1919,] p. xv, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015062346062 on October 30, 2018; Joseph C. Keating, Jr., Carl S. Cleveland III, and Michael Menke, “Chiropractic History: a Primer,” Association for the History of Chiropractic, 2004, p. 19, available at http://www.historyofchiropractic.org/books/ on October 30, 2018; [Minutes of the Sixteenth Annual Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p: Published by the Secretary, 1901?], p. 17; Ervin Ortman, A Touching Story, Canistota, South Dakota: Canistota Clipper, 2000 (original edition 1985); Minutes of the Twenty-fourth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1908], p. 34; Myra F. Buehler, “Early History of Methodist Hospital,” Series III, Box 21, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, [p. 4]; C. K. Mahoney, The Philosophy of Prayer, New York and Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press, 1922. See also Karl R. Stolz (faculty member of Wesley College in Grand Forks), Auto-Suggestion in Private Prayer; A Study in the Psychology of Prayer, [Grand Forks, North Dakota, 1913]. Early 20th-century stained glass treatments of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane were often based on “Christ in Gethsemane” (1890) by the German painter, Heinrich Hofmann. -172- Draft on 1/17/2019 Without quite intending to answer what was, for them, a very private question, they nevertheless outlined an answer in their actual behavior of producing a growing number of smaller families, the books they may have read, and the new health care organizations they created during the first two decades of the 20th century.

John A. Pickler and Alice (Alt) Pickler and their four children collected a large number of books in their home at Faulkton, South Dakota. Their library included copies of Samuel Roberts Wells, Wedlock; or, the Right Relations of the Sexes: Disclosing the Laws of Conjugal Selection, and Showing Who May, and Who May Not Marry (1869); Bernarr MacFadden, Manhood and Marriage (1916); Upton Sinclair, The Book of Life (1921-1922); Elinor Glyn, The Philosophy of Love (1923); and Herman H. Rubin, Eugenics and Sex Harmony (1933). Of course, the presence of these titles on the shelves of the Pickler home demonstrates only that information and opinion on sexuality and childbirth circulated more widely in the early 20th century than people today may think. It does not show whether the Pickler family agreed with what their books advocated or even that they actually read them.49

A Text-Book of Nursing for the Use of Training Schools, Families, and Private Students (1885) by Clara Weeks-Shaw offers more decisive evidence of what some members of the Methodist Episcopal Church read and endorsed. The General Conference of 1900 required—for the first time since it created the office of deaconess in 1888—a “Course of Study” with readings for women preparing to become deaconesses. Most of the readings covered the history, doctrine, and law of the Church, but all students had to read Weeks’ “Manual of Nursing,” as it was commonly known, whether they intended to become nurses or not. The second edition, published in 1892, added chapters on gynecology, obstetrics, and infant care.50

49 These books were on the shelves in the library at the Pickler Mansion, Faulkton, South Dakota, in 2015. William Langer, The Nonpartisan League: Its Birth, Activities and Leaders, Mandan, North Dakota: Morton County Farmers Press, 1920, p. 191, accused Governor Lynn J. Frazier, a Methodist, and the Nonpartisan League of circulating Ellen Keyes [Ellen Key], Love and Ethics, New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1911. 50 The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1900, New York: Eaton & Mains and Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye, 1900, Appendix, ¶63, p. 410, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433070782861 on October 30, 2018; Clara S. Weeks-Shaw, A Text-Book of Nursing for the Use of Training Schools, Families, and Private Students, second edition, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101074755321 on October 31, 2018; Lucy Rider Meyer, Deaconesses and Their Work, Chicago: The Deaconess Advocate, 1897, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/chi.56504300 on October 30, 2018; “Clara S. Weeks Shaw 1856-1940,” American Nursing ; A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Vern L. Bullough, Olga Maranjian Church, and Alice P. Stein, New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988, [vol. 1,] p. 290. Weeks added the gynecology chapter in the second edition (1892) using material supplied for “the greater part” by Dr. G. W. Jarman. For Jarman’s biography, see The New York Times, September 21, 1939, p. 31, viewed at https://nyti.ms/2NIkeLW on July 25, 2018. The third edition (1902), viewed in a 1905 printing at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112069075221 on October 31, 2018, interspersed poetry with the severely clinical language of the text. -173- Draft on 1/17/2019 The opening paragraph of Weeks’ chapter on gynecology made an extraordinary statement. “Happily ignorance of her own anatomy is no longer regarded as essential to a woman’s refinement,….”51 We should regard this assertion as extraordinary for three reasons. First, its early date may astonish people today who have fixed ideas about “Victorian morality.” Second, as a generalization about the state of knowledge and social attitudes at the time of its writing, it must have been far more aspirational than literally true. Third, the contents of Weeks’ textbook and their likely influence on the deaconess movement helped her aspiration to come true or truer than it had been.

During the early 20th century, Methodists and Evangelicals in North Dakota and South Dakota founded or assumed control of seven hospitals at Bismarck, Mandan, Kenmare, Ortonville (Minnesota), Brookings, Mitchell, and Rapid City. National deaconess boards or women’s home missionary societies exercised oversight for most of them, deaconesses held the chief administrative position of “superintendent” in most of them, and they typically ran nurses training schools. Physicians made medical decisions, and clergy, as members of local boards of trustees, made property and fundraising decisions, but it seems reasonable to suppose that, in practice, deaconesses and nurses disseminated a great deal of information about women’s health.52

Physicians at these hospitals frequently came from the Methodist Episcopal Church or the Evangelical Association and, presumably, had a sympathetic understanding of the vocations of the deaconess and the nurse. Men dominated the medical profession, but, even so, exceptions were already developing. Dr. Abbie Jarvis, a member of Faulkton Methodist Episcopal Church, cared for two daughters while attending the Women’s Medical College of Northwestern University in Chicago during the 1890’s. She returned to Faulk County and served town and country families for the rest of her life, sometimes driving her horse and buggy into blizzards.53

51 Weeks-Shaw, Text-Book of Nursing, second edition, p. 273. 52 Deaconesses in supervisory positions identifiable from conference minutes and journals of the early 20th century were Clara Mueller at Mandan Hospital (Methodist), Mrs. A. K. Happel and Louise Hoerman at Bismarck Evangelical Hospital and Deaconess Home, Elva M. Wade at Rapid City Methodist Deaconess Hospital, Mabel O. Woods at Methodist State Hospital in Mitchell, and, serving at Dakota Deaconess Hospital (Methodist) in Brookings, Clara Black, Winifred Crouch, Eleanor S. Moore, Emma M. Moberg, and Katherine O. Woods. See also Methodist Deaconess Hospital of Rapid City, South Dakota….Report 1916-1919, Series III, Box 15, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church; First Annual Report Methodist State Hospital Mitchell, South Dakota From February 12, 1918 to September 31, 1919, Series III, Box 15, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church; Kathleen McGreevy, A Century of Care...A Journey of Faith, Mitchell, South Dakota: Avera Queen of Peace Health Services, 2006. 53 Irene A. Cordst, “A Lifetime of Caring and Sharing – Abbie Ann Jarvis, M.D.,” History Writing Contest Essay Submitted to The Center for Western Studies, Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 1988, in South Dakota -174- Draft on 1/17/2019

Furthermore, a number of women graduates of Dakota Wesleyan University and the Nurses Training School at Methodist State Hospital in Mitchell became medical missionaries. Alice B. Brethorst, after graduating from Dakota Wesleyan University, served from 1906 to 1931 under the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society in the West China Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She finished her career back in the United States as Dean of the School of Nursing at Hamline University in Minneapolis. Just before this, while serving on the faculty of Dakota Wesleyan, she coauthored Sociology Applied to Nursing (1941). This book included discussions of the family, sex education, birth control, and the nurse as an educator in these subjects.54

Dating the year when most of the Methodists, Evangelicals, and United Brethren of North Dakota and South Dakota used some kind of birth control would probably be impossible. But, long before 1920, many of them had already embraced a vision of kind and peaceful homes where men, women, and children lived in good health and did not have to endure a widespread trauma of 19th-century American life: the death of a mother or a child in childbirth.55

State Historical Society, Pierre, South Dakota, Women's History Collection, H88-61. Physicians of the early 20th century identified in conference minutes and journals as Methodist or Evangelical included Byron A. Bobb of Methodist State Hospital in Mitchell; Charles Bolsta of Ortonville Evangelical Hospital; Leslie Deeble of Webster, South Dakota; Fred Ewing and John Ewing of Kenmare Hospital, North Dakota; W. C. Fawcett of Starkweather, North Dakota; C. V. Fox of Wessington Springs; H. P. Frank of Wagner; T. B. Green; John B. James of Page, North Dakota; D. S. Kalayjian of Parker, South Dakota; E. C. Miller of Brookings and a member of the South Dakota Senate; Fred W. Minty of Rapid City Methodist Deaconess Hospital; George Potter of Redfield, South Dakota; C. H. Cowgill of Iroquois, South Dakota; F. E. Van Demark whose clinic still exists in Sioux Falls; and E. H. Whiteside. 54 Oscar W. Coursey, A History of Dakota Wesleyan University for Fifty Years (1885-1935), Mitchell, South Dakota: Dakota Wesleyan University [, 1935], pp. 127-128; Buehler, “Early History of Methodist Hospital,” Series III, Box 21, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, [p. 4]; Emory S. Bogardus and Alice B. Brethorst, Sociology Applied to Nursing, Philadelphia and London: W. B. Saunders Company, 1944 (copyright 1941), pp. 73-114; Biographical Files, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. Susan Lovina Halverson Lamb and Regina May Bigler practiced medicine in Mitchell, Dakota Territory, and then became medical missionaries in Guangzhou (Canton), China, under the auspices of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, Lisa R. Lindell, “All calls promptly attended to, day or night”: Women Doctors in Southern Dakota Territory,” South Dakota History, 45 (2015): 46-54. I owe this reference to Pat Breidenbach, retired archivist of the Dakotas Annual Conference. See also Grove S. Dow, Society and Its Problems; An Introduction to the Principles of Sociology, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, 1922 (original edition 1920), especially pp. 37-68 (eugenics and birth control), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/pst.000055456227 on October 31, 2018, a required book for the Evangelical Church’s Course of Study according to Journal of the Tenth Annual Session of the North Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Church, Napoleon, North Dakota: F. W. Agte, 1929, p. 13. More generally, see Ashley Boggan, “A God-Sent Movement: Methodism, Contraception, and the Protection of the Methodist Family, 1870-1968,” Methodist History, 53 (2015): 68-84. 55 Carl Degler, At Odds; Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present, Oxford, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980, especially pp. 178-226, disputed conventional wisdom that “urbanization,” “industrialization,” and new birth control techniques explained declining fertility in the general population of the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. He argued that the decline began before any of these factors could have had a major impact. He advanced the thesis that growing autonomy and “individualism” for women within their families proved to be crucial for creating smaller families. Trent MacNamara, Birth Control and American Modernity; A History of Popular Ideas, Cambridge and other places: Cambridge University Press, 2018, with his thesis of “subjective modernization,” demonstrated the careful thought that this complex subject, still very much under investigation, requires. Christianity has a history of exerting influence on fertility from the ancient practice of celibacy to the -175- Draft on 1/17/2019

Unlike today’s birth rate among American United Methodists which cannot, by itself, replace current membership, South Dakota Methodists baptized a growing number of children at about the same rate per member each year, around 5%, and grew in number of members from 1890 to 1920. North Dakota Methodists recruited fewer members but still grew and baptized at a rate of about 7% of the membership each year. The Evangelical Association decreased in number of members and baptized fewer children even though the number of its congregations grew.56

The most revealing statistic from these years measured the increase of infants and children being baptized and the decrease of adult baptisms. Already in 1900, the Evangelical Association baptized almost no adults. Only 40% of North Dakota Methodists baptisms involved adults in 1905, and, by 1910, adult baptisms in South Dakota had declined to the same percentage. This marked a historic departure from the 19th century when, for decades, the Methodist Episcopal Church baptized more adults than children—a surprising and still not fully explained record for a denomination that professed infant baptism as a matter of doctrine.57

The increasing percentage of infant and child baptisms gave one more signal of a turn to children for the future of the Church. As early as 1901, the presiding elders of the Dakota Annual Conference remarked that more preachers were baptizing children. This trend soon developed into expanding Sunday schools. In 1916, First Methodist Episcopal Church of Aberdeen, for example, reported Sunday school attendance of more than 1,000. The design of church buildings changed to meet demand for “educational wings.” Both Fargo First and Grand Forks First constructed or initiated planning for educational wings around 1911. During these years, some conferences also appointed “Sunday School missionaries” to organize Sunday Schools in newly settled areas as a way of laying a foundation for new congregations.58

Protestant Reformation’s advocacy of a married clergy to the decision of Phoebe Palmer, a founder of the holiness movement in Methodism, to stop having children in order to pursue a spiritual calling to be an evangelist. For the Methodist vision of the home in the Dakotas, see chapter 2, pp. 131n195, 132n196, 165n32, and Samuel Weir, Christianity as a Factor in Civilization An Evidence of Its Supernatural Origin, Cincinnati: Cranston & Curts and New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1893, pp. 47-62, viewed at https://archive.org/stream/christianityasfa00weir on October 31, 2018. Weir taught at Dakota Wesleyan University during the early 20th century. 56 The numbers were computed from the statistical tables in the Minutes of Methodist Episcopal conferences and the Verhandlungen of the Evangelical Association’s Dakota Conference. These sources are known conventionally as “conference journals.” See also chapter 2, p. 83, Graphic 2.4. 57 The numbers were computed from the statistical tables in conference journals and similar tables in the Minutes of the Annual Conferences, originally a serial publication of the Methodist Episcopal Church that dated from 1773 and has continued into the 21st century under various titles like General Minutes and, eventually, in digital format. See also Perry, “Writing the History of the Dakotas Annual Conference: Who Should Be Included in a Conference History?” 58 Minutes of the Seventeenth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1901], p. 29; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty- first Session[, 1915], pp. 51, 74; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty-second Session[, 1916], p. 29; Official Journal of the Thirty-ninth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.[, 1923], p. 437; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth -176- Draft on 1/17/2019

Since the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church established its Board of Sunday Schools in 1908, church membership had grown nationally as well as in North Dakota and South Dakota, and a large number of new members came from the Sunday school and Methodist children. “In this age, the Sunday School organizer seems to be a necessary forerunner of the preacher and the church organizer,” Charles A. Macnamara, himself a Sunday school missionary before becoming a district superintendent, contended. In 1916, another North Dakota district superintendent expressed his confidence in the Sunday school, writing, “The sowing of the seed naturally precedes intelligent conviction and decision.”59

But did a spiritual decision made by an individual child or teenager who grew up under the care of a congregation amount to quite the same thing as the conversion of an adult experienced in the ways of the world? Where would schooling as a path to faith and church membership lead when the wind that rocked the cradle calmed down and fewer names were on the roll?

Samuel A. Danford on Trial, October 14-15, 1915, First Methodist Episcopal Church, Fargo, North Dakota

The year before Samuel A. Danford stood trial, the North Dakota Annual Conference adopted “A Resolution Aiming at Brotherly Co-operation.” Already, unity and holiness had come into conflict within the family of the Church. In spite of frequently stated intentions, separation would be the consequence.

Many North Dakota Methodists of the early 20th century experienced their increasing disunity as not only regrettable but deeply shameful, something that required admission of guilt or assignment of blame. The memory of the end of Danford’s ministry in North Dakota and the withdrawal of other pastors and lay people from the

[Twenty-fourth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1909], p. 84-86; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, [1911], p. 36; Minutes of the Forty-first Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, Devils Lake, North Dakota: The Publishing Committee[, 1926], p. 250. See also Gary T. Notson’s assertion, while discussing the Epworth League (youth work) on Huron District, that “our problem is not the lost, but the loss we suffer from year to year for want of faithful nurturing of the young….,” Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1911], p. 37. A movement to give high school credit for Bible classes began in these years, Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1913], p. 65; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirtieth Session[, 1914], p. 32. 59 Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirtieth Session[, 1914], pp. 45-46; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty- second Session[, 1916], p. 48; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth [Twenty-fourth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1909], pp. 51, 84-86; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, [1911], p. 40; Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1913], pp. 67-68; Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1914], p. 33; Minutes of the Thirty-First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Carrington, North Dakota: A. W. Brown and others[, 1916], p. 52 (James I Asher). -177- Draft on 1/17/2019 Methodist Episcopal Church persisted well into the 1950’s as something almost incomprehensible, something that was not supposed to have happened in a fellowship of love descended from John Wesley.60

The conference resolution of 1914 expressed these feelings. It opened with a confession of failure and a sense that ultimate values were about to be sacrificed. “Our leadership is weakened in proportion as we fail to exemplify His [Christ’s] spirit.”

The whole resolution occupied over a page of small print in the conference minutes, an unusually large amount of space for anything except the journal of proceedings, the annual reports of district superintendents, and the statistical reports. Reading the document today, however, does not immediately yield a clear understanding of the specific issues that were creating conflict or the names of the advocates on either side of the issues. Today’s reader needs to look between the lines and put the document in the context of other documents in order to discover what was really going on. But this very difficulty by itself reveals something. The presence of generality and indirection in the resolution was consistent with a desire to shroud the shame of conflict in as much secrecy as possible.

Reading the resolution in the early 21st century without direct experience of the feelings it originally hid or expressed demonstrates, however, that its foundational conflict between unity and holiness was not confined to North Dakota a little over a hundred years ago. Instead, the resolution amounted to only one instance of a perennial conflict in the history of the Church between two cherished values—two values that probably cannot be completely reconciled within history but have to be balanced and rebalanced constantly.

From this perspective, North Dakota’s resolution on brotherly cooperation needs to be read as a striking and instructive example of thinking theologically under duress.

Charles E. Vermilya, who had previously served as Northwest District Superintendent and Danford’s opposite in western North Dakota, probably drafted the resolution and offered it in executive session. It consisted of an introduction, five points, and a conclusion. The first point “deplored” the state of controversy over “educational plans” and “some difference of doctrinal emphasis.” The second point appealed from division over finding “worthy places” for members of conference and launching educational institutions to the prayer of Jesus in John 17 “…in which He pleaded that

60 See the recollections of C. A. Armstrong in History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota and Dakota Territory, n.p.: North Dakota Conference Historical Society, 1960, pp. 52-61. -178- Draft on 1/17/2019 His disciples might be one,….” The third point warned against “…schismatic insistence upon the immediate adoption by the conference of our individual viewpoints.”

The fourth point spoke both to those who have “lacked in zeal” and “those who have had a zeal not well tempered.” It recognized the possibility that some could end up neglecting sound doctrine because others’ particular emphasis on it had led to evil. Nevertheless, the Methodist Episcopal Church ought to hold on to Wesley’s teaching that, “both thru growth and an act of faith,” human life could arrive at a point “…where the power of sin will be broken and God’s will made supreme.”

The fifth point addressed this doctrine in more detail. The Methodist Episcopal Church had never required its members or its ministers to enter into “the triumphant life” at a particular hour. Instead, it assumed in its “vows and practices” that anyone who was “pressing forward” was just as entitled to “good standing” in the Church as someone who had moved farther along in “Divine Grace.” The right approach obligated Methodists “…so to conduct ourselves as to draw each other nearer the higher life rather than repel and disown them.” Then the resolution quoted a passage from John Wesley’s own writings on perfection in love where Wesley had warned against schism in the Church of Jesus Christ. “Suffer not one thought,” Wesley had written, “of separating from your brethren[,] whether their opinions agree with yours or not.”61

What did all this mean in early 20th-century North Dakota?

It meant, first, that the resolution quoted Wesley in support of a view that holiness (also known as perfection in love or sanctification) was more than merely consistent with unity in the Church. Holiness required unity in the Church. No matter what their opinions on doctrine or anything else, individuals who believed themselves to be filled with divine love and actually were would not separate from their brothers and sisters or act in ways likely to separate themselves. By implication, those who promoted separation or did not guard themselves against behavior likely to lead to separation brought their own sanctification into question.

61 Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1914], pp. 20, 69-71. The resolution appears to have been adopted in executive session. The quotation from Wesley came from James H. Potts, Living Thoughts of John Wesley; A Comprehensive Selection of the Living Thoughts of the Founder of Methodism as Contained in His Miscellaneous Works, New York: Eaton & Mains and Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye, 1891, p. 296 (not p. 29 as cited in the conference minutes). The quotation originated in Cautions and Directions Given to the Greatest Professors in the Methodist Societies (1762) and ended up in the text of A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766). See Works of John Wesley, 13: 89, 121, 187. -179- Draft on 1/17/2019 The resolution also asserted a broader view of sanctification than many Methodists who called themselves “holiness” Methodists held. It described sanctification as something that could happen to an individual “both thru growth and an act of faith,” as the end of a process or in an instant. People like Danford, however, emphasized instantaneous and “entire” sanctification. For him, the perfection of divine love in an individual was a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, a wondrous and unforgettable event in the life of that individual.62

Finally, the resolution hinted at controversy over education and the appointment of pastors to congregations. Since 1912, the North Dakota Annual Conference had been considering how to reorganize and expand its institutions of higher education. This included expanding Wesley College in Grand Forks, establishing a new college in Danford’s Bismarck District, and bringing all educational enterprises under the control of one conference board so that no school would ever pass out of conference ownership.63

At the same time, controversy over the appointment of pastors was increasing as the year 1915 approached when Danford’s term as Bismarck District Superintendent would expire. Who would the bishop appoint to succeed him? Would his successor act in sympathy with the many holiness pastors Danford had recruited, or would the new district superintendent recommend them all for frontier circuits?

The resolution concluded with a commitment to make the various theological positions that pastors held “purely secondary” to the Kingdom of God and to seek no special favor from the bishop and the district superintendents for future appointments to congregations. But the great interests at stake, both theological and personal, were not, as events turned out, reconciled or even put in second place. Given the difficulty of choosing between the two cherished values of unity and holiness—especially since different pastors understood these values differently— perhaps no amount of commitment could have accomplished this.

The adoption of the resolution on brotherly cooperation set the stage for the conference session of 1915 at Fargo where the brothers of Samuel A. Danford, one of the longest-serving district superintendents in conference history, put him on trial.

62 Samuel A. Danford, Holiness Bible Readings, Chicago: The Christian Witness Co.[, 1907?] The text of this book but not page images or pagination was available at http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyctr/books/2001-2100/HDM2037.pdf on December 14, 2018. 63 Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1912], pp. 24, 60-61; Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1913], pp. 37-39; Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1914], pp. 66-67; Minutes of the Twenty-ninth [Thirtieth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, Carrington, North Dakota: A. W. Brown and others[, 1915], p. 66. Charles E. Vermilya chaired the commission that conducted these discussions, and Danford, as a district superintendent, participated. -180- Draft on 1/17/2019

On Thursday morning, October 14, Danford asked Bishop William Quayle for the floor on a question of privilege. When the bishop recognized him, he requested an immediate trial of his case. In other words, an official investigation had already produced charges against him. The bishop granted Danford’s request. Joseph Grant Morrison served as his attorney. Danford had been responsible for Morrison’s appointment to Jamestown and then to Dickinson. Many holiness pastors wanted Morrison to succeed Danford as Bismarck District Superintendent, but Quayle failed to make this appointment, and Morrison eventually led a large number of the holiness pastors out of the conference and into the Church of the Nazarene.64

The annual conference elected Charles E. Stinson to be attorney for the Church. A few years later, Stinson died when a train collided with his automobile while he was traveling to raise funds for Wesley College in Grand Forks.65 Jabez G. Moore presided over a select number of fourteen conference members who tried Danford’s case. Contrary to the wishes of many holiness pastors, Quayle soon appointed Moore to succeed Danford as Bismarck District Superintendent.

On Friday, October 15, according to the Minutes of 1915, “The report of the select number was given relative to the trial of S. A. Danford and filed with the [conference] secretary.” The Minutes recorded nothing more than this, but, in 1916, the conference amended the Minutes to read, “The Report of the Select Number was given relative to the trial of S. A. Danford. He was acquitted and the Report filed with the Secretary. The Counsel for the church [Stinson] gave notice of an appeal to the General Conference from the decision of the Chairman of the Select Number [Moore], by which eight of the eleven specifications were ruled out.”66

In 1916 the Judiciary Committee of General Conference reported this appeal and gave much more information about the case than the cryptic references in the North

64 Minutes of the Twenty-ninth [Thirtieth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1915], p. 25. Ira Edwin Hammer, “North Dakota Holiness Movement, 1905-1921,” [1955,] Series III, Box 15, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, pp. 43-44; and Ronald Richard Emptage, “The Laymen's Holiness Association of America: The Development of a Wesleyan-Fundamentalist Sect,” Ph.D. thesis, Michigan State University, 1991, pp. 119-120, reported a petition, representing about “1,000” lay people and “40” pastors, to the bishop for appointment of Morrison. History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, p. 25, stated that Church of the Nazarene membership amounted to “1,127” in 1940 “…nearly all of whom were previously members of Methodist churches.” 65 Minutes of the Thirty-third Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Carrington and Lisbon, North Dakota: Hollett, Harris, and others[, 1918), pp. 49-51. 66 Minutes of the Twenty-ninth [Thirtieth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1915], p. 25; Minutes of the Thirty-First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1916], pp. 31-32. The conference appears to have followed Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1912, Cincinnati and New York: The Methodist Book Concern, [1912,] viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112101746516 on November 2, 2018, ¶256.3 (select number), ¶301.2 (appointment of counsel), and ¶304.13 (order of appeal on a point of law). -181- Draft on 1/17/2019 Dakota Minutes. The Judiciary Committee recommended that General Conference sustain Moore’s procedural ruling on the invalidity of eight of the “specifications” against Danford because they would have placed him in double jeopardy. Its report stated that Stinson, representing several pastors in the conference who had signed a complaint, had accused Danford of “immoral conduct,” specifically, “lying.”67

Reading the rest of the Judiciary Committee’s report alongside of North Dakota’s Minutes makes clear that the events leading up to the trial of 1915 actually began in 1914 at the time the conference adopted “A Resolution Aiming at Brotherly Co- operation.” During that year, Danford lied about something connected to the appointment of pastors, conference’s discussions on higher education, or the growing differences over sanctification. Several members of conference, whose names do not appear in these documents, made a formal complaint against his character. He then “…signed a confession of lying, made profession of penitence for his sin, and promise of restitution, truthfulness, and brotherly behavior thenceforth;….” The complainants accepted his confession. The day after the conference adopted “A Resolution Aiming at Brotherly Co-operation,” Danford’s character was “passed” on the conference floor, and he gave his annual report.68

But, in 1915, the complainants alleged that Danford had not lived up to his promise, “…and his false and unbrotherly conduct has continued.” This led to the trial. Moore ruled, however, that, since Danford had already confessed in 1914 and the complainants had accepted his confession, the eight specifications that repeated what he had already admitted placed him in double jeopardy and were, therefore, invalid. The select number of fourteen conference members who tried the case acquitted him of the remaining three specifications that made allegations about his behavior after his confession of 1914. When Stinson appealed in 1916, General Conference found no basis for reinstating the eight specifications that Moore had disallowed because the select number had acquitted Danford on the charge of not keeping the promise he made in 1914.69

Moore’s judicious attention to procedural fairness for someone with whom he disagreed theologically contributed to the outcome of acquittal and may have

67 Journal of the Twenty-Seventh Delegated General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church Held in Saratoga Springs, New York, May 1—May 29, 1916, New York and Cincinnati: The Methodist Book Concern, [1916,] pp. 497-499 (Judiciary Committee, Report No. 14, “Appeal in the Case of Samuel Alexander Danford”), viewed at https://archive.org/details/journalsaratogat00meth on November 2, 2018. 68 Journal of the Twenty-Seventh Delegated General Conference…1916, pp. 497-498; Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1914], pp. 20, 21. Hammer, “North Dakota Holiness Movement,” pp. 42-43, referred to charges against Danford and characterized them as having to do with appointment of pastors, but he did not correctly date the events he described nor give any indication that he knew of Danford’s confession to the original charge. 69 Journal of the Twenty-Seventh Delegated General Conference…1916, pp. 498-499. -182- Draft on 1/17/2019 recommended him to Bishop Quayle. Quayle probably found himself closer to Moore’s theological position than to Danford’s and likely considered a bishop’s task to be restoring peace and unity to a conference on the verge of separation. For these or other reasons, he appointed Moore to succeed Danford as Bismarck District Superintendent at the end of the 1915 conference session.70

Whatever Quayle’s intentions were, the appointment of Moore did not restore peace and unity because many of the holiness pastors wanted Morrison to become district superintendent. Quayle became notorious in holiness annals because he also moved Morrison from the single-point charge of Dickinson to the Larimore circuit in Grand Forks District.71

Moore, in his first report as Bismarck District Superintendent, stated that his own appointment came “unexpectedly.” He used friendly and diplomatic language, acknowledging Danford’s cooperation in the transition and thanking the pastors and the laity for their cooperation during his first year. But he made his own views clear, views that were already well-known. In 1913, his last year as Grand Forks District Superintendent, he showed support for pastors there who, “…while not waning in their devotion to the work of getting sinners converted, have a new vision of the relation of the church to the child and of the child to the Kingdom.” To the pastors of Bismarck District also, he emphasized this turn to children for the future of the Church. “God pity the pastor who awaits the coming of an evangelist to bring the young people of his congregation into church membership.” He believed that “…the spirit of commercialism has invaded the field of Evangelism.” Hiring outside, paid evangelists to conduct revivals took money that could support low-paid frontier pastors, and it resulted in few converts who were willing to assume the obligations of church membership after their conversion. The solution lay in “pastoral evangelism”

70 William A. Quayle, The Blessed Life, Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye, New York: Eaton & Mains, 1901, especially pp. 135- 151, “Christianity and Thought-Life,” viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89097191837 on November 2, 2018. This book offered less a doctrinal treatise than a pastoral approach that differed from the holiness revival. The presence of the book in the library of Gary T. Notson of the Dakota Annual Conference, “List of Dr. Notson’s books” (1961), #41, Series VI, Biographical Files, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference, showed that Quayle’s book circulated in the Dakotas. 71 C. T. Corbett, Soldier of the Cross; The Life Story of J. G. Morrison (1871-1939), Kansas City, Missouri: Beacon Hill Press, 1956, chapter 4. A year later, Morrison’s new district superintendent, G. H. Quigley, reported that Morrison had moved from Larimore to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the sake of his wife’s health, Minutes of the Thirty-First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1916], p. 46. Neither Corbett nor Hammer, “North Dakota Holiness Movement,” nor Timothy Smith, Called Unto Holiness; The Story of the Nazarenes: The Formative Years, Kansas City, Missouri: Nazarene Publishing House, 1962, chapter 13, nor Emptage, “The Laymen's Holiness Association of America,” considered the Brotherly Cooperation resolution of 1914 or Report No. 14 of the 1916 General Conference’s Judiciary Committee. Compare Corbett’s account to History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, pp. 55-58, which avoided discussing the Danford trial altogether. -183- Draft on 1/17/2019 (evangelism conducted by pastors) and using a conference-sponsored evangelist for new and difficult areas.72

Morrison’s autobiography, Interesting Incidents: Continuing the Sketches Published in an Earlier Booklet Entitled Other Days (1918?), showed why he, unlike Moore, continued to gravitate toward revivals.73 As he remembered it, his own conversion brought with it a strong sense that God was calling him to preach, but he continued to struggle with being a minister. He did not enjoy his early years serving as pastor during the 1890’s for Webster and then Hitchcock in the Dakota Annual Conference where he grew up. Any small or large difficulty would infuriate him, and only his wife and her cheerful disposition could restrain his anger. They lived in poverty which he resented, and he often thought that neither God nor anyone else cared.

While serving a circuit of five preaching places at Hitchcock, he lost his temper with the horses drawing his buggy, whipped them unmercifully, and drove them at high speed into a farmyard. “With hatred and disgust for myself, and fury in my heart and brain, I stabled the beasts.” He took cruelty to animals to be a serious fault in himself and vowed never to preach again. But the farm wife he came to visit calmed him down and told him that he needed no further conversion or reconversion. Instead, he needed the second blessing, the baptism of the Holy Spirit that the disciples of Jesus had waited for and received at Pentecost. This would cleanse him of sin and cure his abiding anger. She referred him to several Bible passages and John Wesley’s A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. He had read this in the Course of Study to become a pastor, but, at her request, he read it again, and now it began to make sense.

Several months passed, conference came, and Morrison and his wife moved to Faulkton Methodist Episcopal Church, the home of John and Alice Pickler. The “burning baptism” finally descended one glorious day as he was sitting in his study chair. “Like a great spiritual light it slowly rose above the horizon of my soul. It shined and burned and melted away all the feverish, gun powdery, carnal, disposition that I had. It filled my heart and my life.”

72 Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1913], pp. 67-68; Minutes of the Thirty-First Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1916], pp. 33-34, 37. On p. 37, Moore criticized pastors who promoted religious newspapers hostile to the Methodist Episcopal Church. See above pp. 160-161 for Charles E. Vermilya’s support of “pastoral evangelism.” Compare the views of other North Dakota district superintendents, G. H. Quigley, Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1914], p. 43, and James I. Asher, Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1914], p. 47. 73 The source for this and succeeding paragraphs on Morrison is his Interesting Incidents; Continuing the sketches published in an earlier booklet entitled Other Days, Kansas City, Missouri: Nazarene Publishing House, n.d., chapters 10-11. Minutes of the Ninth Annual Session of the South Dakota Conference,…, n.p.: J. P. Jenkins[, 1893], p. 420; Minutes of the Tenth Annual Session of the South Dakota Conference…, n.p.: J. P. Jenkins[, 1894], p. 465; Minutes of the Eleventh Annual Session of the South Dakota Conference…, n.p.: Published by the Secretary[, 1895], p. 524, recorded his early appointments in South Dakota. -184- Draft on 1/17/2019 Morrison’s preaching soon began to have more success as he spoke without fear or anger about holiness. Before this, the Picklers had intimidated him. His formidable military bearing and her swishing silk dress as they strode down the church aisle to their pew made him lose all confidence.74

One worship service following his entire sanctification, however, he found himself able to witness articulately to his own experience and felt glad that the distinguished couple had come to worship. They could now hear the message of holiness. After his personal testimony, he called for the congregation to sing, “I Am Coming, Lord” by Louis Hartsough. Then, he preached on entire sanctification and its necessity as preparation for heaven. Everybody was still when he stopped preaching. Although his sermon did not seem to sit well with the Picklers, the congregation experienced what evangelists called a “break”—the first such event in Morrison’s ministry. People started weeping and coming forward to the altar. They became “seekers.” Revival spread for miles around. Morrison was now “supremely happy” and believed that, instead of his fearing Pickler, the old Civil War soldier now feared him.

Morrison’s sense of a spiritual divide between the Picklers and himself suggested how he and other holiness pastors in North Dakota would, years later, see the appointment of Jabez G. Moore to be Bismarck District Superintendent. Spiritual life for them highlighted dramatic events when everything changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. So, it is easy to imagine that many of them, when the hour came, would have seen separation from the Methodist Episcopal Church as the call of God.

But conflict between unity and holiness that led in North Dakota to separation also released a tremendous amount of creative energy that went into developing conference institutions in both of the states that once formed Dakota Territory. Camp meeting associations produced revivals designed to kindle Christian life in a sacred hour while schools produced educational processes designed to nurture years of devotion to that life. ******* In 1905, Red River Valley University gained new life as Wesley College when it moved from Wahpeton to Grand Forks and “affiliated” with the University of North Dakota. Not far south of Wahpeton, a camp meeting took place that same year at White Rock, South Dakota, a ghost town today. With leadership from Samuel A. Danford and others, it organized as the North Dakota Holiness Association. The next year, it

74 Morrison misremembered “Pickler” as “Pike.” By his own account, Morrison’s personal religious experiences did not happen in revival settings but when he was alone or with a female guide. He experienced women as guides or, as in the case of Alice Pickler, as symbols of extravagance, a view he also expressed in his criticism of women’s fashions during the 1920’s, Satan’s Subtle Attack on Woman, Kansas City, Missouri: Nazarene Publishing House, n.d. -185- Draft on 1/17/2019 moved to Fargo and, the year after that, to Jamestown where it became the North Dakota Methodist Camp Meeting Association.75

Disagreement about whether the association should have official connections to the North Dakota Annual Conference, interdenominational holiness associations in North Dakota counties, or the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness led two conference members, W. C. Ehlers and C. A. Thompson, to organize the Northwestern Holiness Association (eventually, the Holiness Methodist Church). In a probably unrelated development during 1908, the Church of the Nazarene decided to send Harrison D. Brown back to North Dakota from Washington State to lead a revival at Surrey. The next year, Charles E. Vermilya reported the “dissipation” of the Methodist Episcopal Church at Surrey because of Nazarene activity. The increase of Nazarene activity and the formation of the Northwestern Holiness Association meant that, years before the trial of Danford, unity and holiness had already emerged as issues in North Dakota.76

From 1907, the North Dakota Methodist Camp Meeting Association organized the meetings that began in White Rock and held them during the summer at Jamestown. They took place inside tents south of town at first. At the close of the 1911 meeting, according to a story full of symbolic meaning, the camp manager remembered that Bushrod Shedden Taylor, pastor of Jamestown Methodist Episcopal Church in the late 1880’s, had held a tent meeting north of town beside a beautiful horseshoe bend in the Jim River. Following the river north, the camp manager discovered the spot and was “strangely impressed” that this was “God’s choice for the grounds” of the Association. He asked someone for directions to the owner’s cabin near the river and found that the path to it led away from a cold spring with a whiskey bottle floating on the surface. After a series of perilous events that could have defeated everything, the heirs of the owner, who died before the transaction was completed, sold the land to the Association. Contemporary newspaper accounts agreed with this story as far as stating its outcome. Danford and Joseph Grant Morrison pushed for relocating the camp to the bend in the Jim River, and William R. Movius of the Lidgerwood Milling

75 Minutes of the Twentieth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, 1905, p. 44; Hammer, “North Dakota Holiness Movement,” pp. 10-14. Beverly Carradine from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, preached at White Rock. 76 Northwestern Holiness Advocate (Minneapolis), January 1, 1910, p. 1, and January 1911, pp. 7-9; William Kostlevy, Historical Dictionary of the Holiness Movement, Lanham, Maryland, and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2001, pp. 92-93, 131; Emptage, “The Laymen's Holiness Association of America,” p. 173; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth [Twenty-fourth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1909], p. 65. Constitution and Discipline of the Northwestern Holiness Association, Minneapolis: Northwestern Holiness Publishing Co., 1911, listed “districts” in McHenry, McLean, Mountrail, and Williams counties in northwestern North Dakota and Grand Forks, Walsh, and Richland counties in the Red River Valley. -186- Draft on 1/17/2019 Company, then president of the Association’s trustees, signed the contract with the heirs that brought the land under its ownership.77

Then, a carpenter working for the Association had a dream. According to the same symbolic story, God revealed to him the plan of a wooden tabernacle that could seat a thousand people. The Association built the tabernacle in the shape of an octagon with a lantern or skylight on top for lighting and ventilation. It also constructed a dining hall and a storehouse. Cabins were added later.

From 1912, meetings took place in this sacred space. Without exercising much imagination, campers could see the tabernacle as the tent of meeting described in Exodus and Hebrews where the people of ancient Israel worshipped as they wandered in the wilderness. The horseshoe bend of the Jim River outside could easily become the River Jordan where the people crossed over into the Holy Land and the Holy Spirit later descended on Jesus at his baptism. Although the Association had contracted for land in North Dakota, Jerusalem’s golden streets could not have felt more than a short walk away.78

In 1916, following Danford’s trial and the failure of the bishop to appoint Morrison as district superintendent, many of the laity who had camped at Jamestown started to organize the Laymen’s Holiness Association. Danford himself soon left the state for Methodist Episcopal work in Oregon and returned to preside over camp business only once a year. Morrison, after serving a year at Larimore, accepted an appointment in the St. John’s Annual Conference in Florida, but he left during the conference year at the call of North Dakota laity to provide leadership for the Jamestown camp and the Laymen’s Holiness Association. Even though he pleaded that he had found a substitute for his Florida congregation, his annual conference there charged him with abandoning his appointment, convicted him, and “located” him, meaning that he could no longer be appointed as a pastor in the Methodist Episcopal Church.79

During the next several years, many holiness pastors in the North Dakota Annual Conference refused their appointments and were put on trial or withdrew from

77 Hammer, “North Dakota Holiness Movement,” pp. 32-34; Turtle Mountain Star (Rolla, North Dakota), March 28, 1912, p. 5, viewed at http://tur.stparchive.com/Archive/TUR/TUR03281912P05.php on August 30, 2018; The Pioneer Express (Pembina, North Dakota), March, 29, 1912, viewed at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88076741/1912-03-29/ed-1/seq-7/ on August 30, 2018; Northwestern Christian Advocate (Chicago), April 10, 1912, pp. 473-474, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015084595423 on November 14, 2018. 78 Hammer, “North Dakota Holiness Movement,” p. 35. 79 Bismarck Daily Tribune (Bismarck, North Dakota), May 5, 1916, p. 3, col. 4, viewed at https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042242/1916-05-05/ed-1/seq-3/ on November 5, 2018; Hammer, “North Dakota Holiness Movement,” pp. 49-52; Corbett, Soldier of the Cross, chapter 5. -187- Draft on 1/17/2019 conference membership. Even before the Laymen’s Holiness Association completed its legal organization, it began to absorb pastors and congregations. In 1922, it decided to unite with the Church of the Nazarene.80

Morrison’s path to separation from the Methodist Episcopal Church and unification with the Nazarenes has been traced from his columns for the newspaper of the Laymen’s Holiness Association, The Holiness Layman. Originally, he thought of the Association as an organization for evangelism to convert the unconverted, to sanctify the unsanctified, and then to direct them to the care of congregations in the Methodist Episcopal Church or other denominations with congregations near where they lived. At this early point, he did not believe that another Christian denomination was needed. But his distrust of the willingness and the ability of Methodist pastors and congregations to nurture Christians in holiness increased, and, finally, he turned to another denomination, the Church of the Nazarene.81

The separation almost ended up at the Stutsman County courthouse. The campground north of Jamestown remained the gathering place for members of the Laymen’s Holiness Association even after it joined the Nazarenes. The trustees of the North Dakota Methodist Camp Meeting Association still owned the land and the buildings, but the trustees identified with the Laymen’s Holiness Association. In 1927, Evan B. Goss, a former North Dakota Supreme Court justice, represented the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in a suit to recover possession of the campground so the conference could hold Methodist meetings there. He negotiated out of court, however, and although the conference minutes did not state the result, they recorded the conference’s decision in 1929 to withdraw the suit.82

In the meantime, in 1922, German Russian congregations of the North Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Church (formerly the Evangelical Association) near Lehr built a campground. It, too, had a tabernacle as the center of the camp. Like the tabernacle at Jamestown, this tabernacle hosted many religious experiences. It drew

80 The trials and withdrawals may be traced in clergy membership lists and district superintendent reports of the North Dakota Annual Conference’s Minutes for the years 1916-1920. Holiness pastors saw the trials as persecution, Hammer, “North Dakota Holiness Movement,” pp. 45-46. 81 According to Emptage, “The Laymen's Holiness Association of America,” p. 134, who studied Morrison’s columns, The Methodist was published by the camp meeting association from 1917 to 1919, and The Holiness Layman was published from 1919 to 1924 followed by The Holiness Messenger from 1924 to 1925. North Dakota Methodist (Jamestown), founded by Samuel A. Danford in 1908, and The Little Methodist (Bismarck) preceded these titles. 82 Minutes of the Forty-second Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, Devils Lake, North Dakota: The Publishing Committee[, 1927], p. 335; Minutes of the Forty-third Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference…, Devils Lake, North Dakota: The Publishing Committee[, 1928], p. 41; Minutes of the Forty-Fourth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Devils Lake, North Dakota: Alfred Roe[, 1929], pp. 128, 130. The Jamestown campground also went by the names, “Bailey Fuller Park” and “Beulah Camp.” -188- Draft on 1/17/2019 people back to the place for many summers and, for many years, to the memory of what happened to them there. The Lehr tabernacle may have been the last building of this type that any ancestor of The United Methodist Church constructed in North Dakota or South Dakota. Made out of wood and located near small towns that eventually ran out of people to support them, campground tabernacles used to map the Bible onto the land in almost every district of every conference.83

Joseph Norvell, a member of the Dakota Annual Conference, served as one of the first presidents of the South Dakota Holiness Association. In 1907, this association established the Riverside campground out in the country east of Mitchell and built a wooden tabernacle there in 1918. This place became so important to the spiritual lives of Norvell and his wife, Sarah (Barnum) Norvell, that, at their request, they were buried in a cemetery that overlooked the campground.84

Norvell wrote a series of holiness novels published mostly by the Christian Witness Company of Chicago. Although the Dakota Annual Conference never divided over holiness like North Dakota did, one of Norvell’s novels, The Lost Guide (1910), dramatized the urgent sense of many holiness Methodists that they were embattled against a hostile world whose corruption was grasping for the heart of the Methodist Episcopal Church.85

83 Robert Erbele and others, Lehr Campmeeting Memories 75th Anniversary 1921-1996[, comb bound booklet, Wishek, North Dakota, 1996]; Arnold H. Marzolf, “The Lehr Tabernacle; A Historical and Personal View,” [mimeograph; also published in Germans from Russia Heritage Society, Heritage Review, 21 (number 3, September 1991): 3-12.] Marzolf described a cross-generational transition at Lehr Camp after the Second World War from solidarity and the German Russian sense of unsere Leute (“our people”) to greater emphasis on the individual. For additional examples of tabernacles, see chapter 2, p. 106; Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1911], pp. 36-37 (St. Lawrence site purchased for Huron District); Official Journal of the Forty-fourth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1928], p. 58 (Dobson Park, Canton, South Dakota); and see below p. 196. George William Dolbey, The Architectural Expression of Methodism, London: The Epworth Press, 1964, pp. 99-115, described the octagonal chapel of 18th century British Methodism. Both the Jamestown tabernacle and the Lehr tabernacle were octagons. 84 1893-1974 Constitution, By-Laws and History of the South Dakota Holiness Association[, 1974]. This appears to be the same item that worldcat.org cataloged under a different title as OCLC 21324993. I consulted the copy held in the Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, Series III, Box 15. The undated “Statement of Doctrine,” pp. 6-8, made a point of distinguishing the Association’s work from the work of denominations and local churches. It asserted that there was no conflict between a holiness association and congregations. Senator George S. McGovern’s father served as Association president, and McGovern himself participated in a quartet that sang at camp meetings and churches in 1939 and 1940, pp. 13, 17. Official Journal of the Thirty-ninth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1923], p. 463, gave a memoir of Norvell. Asbury Theological Seminary Library, Wilmore, Kentucky, holds a collection of the “Records of the South Dakota Holiness Association.” 85 Joseph E. Norvell, The Lost Guide, Chicago: The Christian Witness Co., 1910. Minutes of the Twenty-fifth [Thirty-fifth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1920], pp. 54-55, gave a memoir of Edwin J. G. Reid (1865-1920), the son of Isaiah Reid, who founded the Christian Witness Company in Boston. The son moved the business to the Methodist Book Concern’s building in Chicago and later joined the North Dakota Annual Conference. Among other books, the company also published Samuel A. Danford’s Holiness Bible Readings, his Spreading Scriptural Holiness (a collection of annual reports), and titles related to women: Florence Ethel Smith [McMichael], Woman, the Eternal Question (1909); and F. M. Lehman, The White Slave Hell, or with Christ at Midnight in the Slums of Chicago... (1910). -189- Draft on 1/17/2019 Isaac Venner, the lost guide of the title, leads a group of eastern immigrants westward to create “The Settlement” in the broad valley of the Willow River. Life on the frontier is hard and puts many obstacles in their way, but, over the years, they build a new community that prospers spiritually as well as materially. Venner is their pastor. Under his preaching and care, many are converted. He becomes well-known for his achievements, and the leaders of his denomination’s home mission board and educational fund call him to Boston to consult about starting a college near The Settlement.

This occasions a fateful railroad journey back east with his wife. On the train they meet Dr. Bickford, now a city pastor who, in his younger days, conducted revivals and preached many into conversion. Twinges of regret and remorse occasionally come over his face as he listens to the Venners’ account of growth in The Settlement and as he recounts his own younger days in ministry. The thrust of his conversation with the Venners is to disabuse them of the beliefs of their—and his—youth and give them the benefit of his own subsequent “investigations” into theology.

First, he challenges the Old Testament as “largely made up of folklore and legendary accounts that can never be substantiated or relied upon.” Then he tells them why he threw aside the virgin birth of Jesus as absurd. This led him to a rejection of the divinity of Jesus except in the sense that all human beings were children of God. What really shocked him and he also finds no longer credible is the notion of Jesus’ vicarious atonement on the cross for human sin. Jesus was, instead, “a martyr to what he had taught and lived.” No one individual could be the exclusive savior of all the world because many people had spoken great things and done great things that had uplifted the human race and moved it forward. The right name for what really aids human development is not “salvation” but “education”—in its greatest sense of developing all the possibilities of humanity and bringing people into right relations with their surroundings. Finally, Dr. Bickford denies the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

All of this, of course, upsets the couple from the frontier parsonage. But they have listened too long without protesting. Despite their belated protests, doubt begins to creep in. They attend their meeting in Boston, and the high esteem in which church leaders hold Dr. Bickford impresses them. Then, they begin to read books.

When they return home, Venner works into his sermons a new and disturbing theology full of false doctrine. Conversions decline precipitously. Their son leaves home on a drunken binge. Their daughter dies (although not without coming to victorious faith on her death bed thru the ministrations of a neighbor woman). Their lives worsen, and their community suffers—until, one fine morning at church, laymen -190- Draft on 1/17/2019 speak up in favor of true doctrine. They compassionately persuade the pastor that he has lost his way. Revival begins just as everyone notices who has been standing at the back of church—the pastor’s returning and repentant son. ******* Wesley College in Grand Forks proved to be one of the most innovative educational institutions in North Dakota. But for many holiness pastors and laity in the state, the college’s innovations embodied the theological catastrophe of Dr. Bickford in The Lost Guide. The religion and philosophy faculty at Wesley College and the professors from back east who spoke during its annual Hazlett Lectures sounded like they were attacking Christian doctrine. The actual situation turned out to be more complicated than this, however, and widespread failure to communicate or to understand the complications showed how much the two sides that formed around the trial of Samuel A. Danford talked past each other.86

The theology advanced at Wesley College had a lot to say about the death of Jesus on the cross, for example, but it distinguished between the atonement and “theories” of the atonement. The word, “atonement” referred to an act that brought together and made “at one” two parties who had been alienated from each other—in this case God and human beings. According to one of the Hazlett lecturers, to say that God had accomplished a great work of divine grace by means of the cross, a work that enabled people to obtain forgiveness of sins and to return to God, said all that really needed to be said on the subject.

The New Testament said this in many ways and at many places. Passages from the letters of Paul, Hebrews, and 1 John communicated vividly to the peoples of the ancient world by employing a vocabulary of blood sacrifice familiar in their time. So, Jesus was often shown offering a sacrifice or actually being a sacrifice to God for the sins of the whole world or, in another way of expressing the thought, providing on the cross a ransom for the lives of many (Mark 10:45; 1 Timothy 2:6).

But to pay attention only to the dictionary meaning of words like “sacrifice” and “ransom,” to confuse a way of expressing a thought with the thought itself, missed the point and confused God’s revealed Word with the human words that the Biblical authors had used to express it. This, according to many of those who taught or lectured at Wesley College, resulted in theories of the atonement that, for instance, had Jesus taking the place of human beings on the cross and, by his death, satisfying the justice of a God who was deeply angry with them. These theories undermined the

86 Bulletin of Wesley College…The Catalog, June 1922, pp. 4-8, 12-13, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuo.ark:/13960/t4rk0p40n on September 15, 2018; History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, pp. 52-53, 171-172. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas L. Hazlett of Valley City made a bequest for the lectures “…to promote knowledge in the field of religion and philosophy.” -191- Draft on 1/17/2019 faith of 20th-century people and took their eyes off God’s love for them and their need for divine love.87

Understanding this approach to the atonement called for a distinction between attacking the atonement itself and attacking doctrinal formalism. Doctrinal formalism assumed that an undeniable logic of true doctrine could overcome resistance in all kinds of people and, sooner or later, lead to conversion, sanctification, and happy endings like the conclusion of The Lost Guide. Believing the right things and sincerely confessing them to be true laid the foundation for Christian faith and continued experience of God. Unbelief—failure to assent to a doctrine—became another word for sin.

Attacking the doctrinal formalism of atonement theories and other theological abstractions applied three controversial developments of the late 19th century: “higher criticism” of the Bible, “personalism,” and religious education.

Higher criticism did not mean making negative remarks about the Bible. It meant studying the books of the Bible in order to understand their original meaning for the people who wrote them and the people who first heard or read them. Higher criticism differed from “lower criticism.” Lower criticism compared surviving manuscripts of the same Biblical text in order to establish which manuscript contained the wording that was closest to what the original authors wrote.

Higher criticism began with the observation that human language and culture changed during the course of history. Those changes had to be taken into account in order to determine whether a passage from the Bible that used the vocabulary of ancient sacrifice meant to say something about sacrifice or to speak metaphorically about divine grace—just as Jesus spoke in parables when he spoke about the kingdom of God.

This approach to the Bible had roots in the 18th century and continued to grow in the 20th century. At the time Wesley College moved to Grand Forks, the outstanding and still controversial accomplishments of historical study of the Bible included the identification of four lost sources that lay behind the first six books of the Bible, the

87 Borden P. Bowne, The Atonement, Cincinnati: Curts & Jennings and New York: Eaton & Mains, 1900, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89097229470 on November 6, 2018. See also Bowne’s Studies in Christianity, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909, chapter 2, “The Incarnation and the Atonement.” Bowne, Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Graduate School at Boston University, inaugurated the Hazlett Lectures in 1907. In addition to the people named below, Hazlett lecturers included Luther Freeman (1911), Harry F. Ward (1915), author of the first Social Creed of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Lynn H. Hough (1916), Charles Wesley Burns (1918), Isaac Taylor Headland (1919), and William F. McDowell (1921). See Bulletin of Wesley College, June 1922, pp. 12- 13. -192- Draft on 1/17/2019 discovery of parallels to the Old Testament in laws and stories recently recovered from ancient Egypt and ancient Iraq, and the comparison of similarities and differences in the first three New Testament gospels (“the synoptic problem”) to infer the existence of several lost sources for the gospels. All of this painted a picture of the Bible as a collection of ancient writings that had undergone long historical development before it became the single, translated, printed book familiar to American Christians.88

“Personalism” referred in general to putting the highest value on the person and the development of each human being’s personality. More specifically in the history of The United Methodist Church, it named the theology and philosophy taught at Boston University at the time Wesley College moved to Grand Forks and Joseph Norvell published The Lost Guide. Advocates of personalism took great interest in human consciousness and the inner life of human beings as far as this could be discovered by careful study of what people actually reported about their lives. Both the rational and the non-rational aspects of the inner life shaped an individual.

What would actually help people to become mature, good, and loving human beings? Doctrine presented in the right way had a role to play, but it was a secondary role according to personalists. Doctrine and creeds were finally means to the end of personal development, and the logical structure of a doctrinal theory could never be the most important factor. Personalists wanted to look closely at the actual consequences of doctrine for individuals and society, and what they found led them to conclude that merely preaching a doctrine did not necessarily give a desirable result for any particular individual. In the case of a theory of the atonement, for example, it might end up leaving someone afraid that God was deeply angry and mainly concerned with retribution, not love.

The Church, itself a means to an end, needed to provide the means for people to become more loving—not by demanding that they do works of love or think of Jesus

88 Robert W. Rogers, The Recovery of the Ancient Orient, New York: Eaton & Mains and Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1912, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b264087 on November 6, 2018. Rogers, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis at Drew University, gave the Hazlett Lectures in 1908 and 1909. Albert C. Knudson, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis and later Dean of the School of Theology at Boston University, lectured on “The Message of the Old Testament Prophets” in 1917, and Frederick Carl Eiselen, Professor of Semitic Languages and Old Testament Exegesis and later President of Garrett Biblical Institute, spoke about “The Prophet and the Modern World” in 1920. Two New Testament scholars served on the faculty of Wesley College during the early 20th century: Chester C. McCown and Wallace N. Stearns. Edward P. Robertson, President of Wesley College, and Samuel F. Halfyard, Professor of Philosophy and Theology, gave expert testimony on the plenary inspiration of the Bible before the Supreme Court of North Dakota in the case of Gudmundson et al. v. Thingvalla Lutheran Church et al., 150 Northwestern Reporter 750 (1915), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951d005651463 on November 6, 2018. Two Methodist Episcopal justices, Evan B. Goss and Burleigh F. Spalding, gave conflicting opinions on the nature of the court’s jurisdiction over an Icelandic Lutheran congregation in Pembina County and its synod. -193- Draft on 1/17/2019 as a substitute for the works of love they should have done themselves—but by cultivating personal instincts and habits that led them consistently and continuously into the behaviors of love.89

So, finally, the attack on doctrinal formalism applied the teaching concepts of a growing movement in American Protestantism for religious education. In the views of this movement, religious education from Sunday school to graduate school should use methods based on verifiable observations of the psychology of religious experience. This meant recognizing that one size of religious experience like conversion or sanctification did not fit all human beings. True, some people became loving and spiritually mature in a way that surfaced only in a dramatic event, but others grew into it in a series of noticeable steps. Even conversion displayed more than one variety because, although it often occurred in adolescence, it also frequently occurred in young adulthood. Effective religious education that actually reached the goal of love required attention to the inner life of each individual and the differences as well as the similarities between that individual and everyone else. It also required attention to age because a child’s personality was necessarily different from what the same individual would become in adolescence or adulthood.90

Samuel F. Halfyard, Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Wesley College and a member of the North Dakota Annual Conference, saw the impact of the death of Jesus on the cross as a matter of influence and persuasion not unlike the educational process of raising children. Theories of the atonement that portrayed his death as ransom or satisfaction of some divine demand for justice missed the power of the

89 Borden Parker Bowne, cited above on p. 192n87, and Albert C. Knudson, identified above on p. 193n88, both founders of “Boston personalism,” gave Hazlett lectures. Francis J. McConnell, who delivered the lectures in 1910, studied with Bowne, and Harris Franklin Rall, lecturer in 1912 on “The Social Significance of Religion,” served with Bishop McConnell on the Social Service Commission of the Colorado Annual Conference during the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913-1914. 90 Allen Hoben, author of The Minister and the Boy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1912, lectured at Wesley College on “The Religious Education of Boys” in 1913. Edwin Diller Starbuck, author of The Psychology of Religion; An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness, London: Walter Scott, Ltd. and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899, gave his Hazlett lectures on “The Psychological Basis of Religious Education” in 1914. Karl R. Stolz, Professor of Religious Education at Wesley College and author of Auto-Suggestion in Private Prayer; A Study in the Psychology of Prayer, [Grand Forks, North Dakota, 1913,] studied with Starbuck. Starbuck himself studied with William James at Harvard University and strongly influenced James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1910). James and Borden Parker Bowne, one of the founders of “Boston personalism” were good friends. What I have called “an attack on doctrinal formalism” resembled the approach of thinkers, including John Dewey, treated in Morton White, Social Thought in America; The Revolt Against Formalism, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Dewey addressed the Religious Education Association, whose members included Allan Hoben, Edwin D. Starbuck, and Wallace N. Stearns (later of Wesley College), at its first meeting, The Religious Education Association; Proceedings of the First Annual Convention, Chicago February 10-12, 1903, Chicago: Executive Office of the Association, 1903, pp. 60-66, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/pst.000009749023 on September 14, 2018. See also Wallace N. Stearns, “Religious and Moral Education in the Universities and Colleges in the United States: The Report of the Committee of Six,” Religious Education, 1 (1906-1907): 201-225, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.30000104434794 on September 17, 2018. -194- Draft on 1/17/2019 cross as a persuasive demonstration of God’s love for human beings. ““Christ brings to human hearts the undying conviction that this universe is not so much a huge court-room as our Father’s house; and we are not so much jail inmates, haled forth from our cells to the prisoner’s dock to stand trial, as members of our Father’s family; unworthy, imperfect, undeserving members; but for all that, held in a deathless love.””91

To holiness Methodists, Wesley College stood for a theology fatally rooted in higher criticism, personalism, and the religious education movement. But the College also created an innovative model for the relationship between religion and higher education at a time when American colleges and universities were changing rapidly under the influence of the German research university and the financing of American industrial wealth.

When, in 1905, Red River Valley University changed its name to Wesley College and moved from Wahpeton to Grand Forks, it “affiliated” with the University of North Dakota. This meant that it specialized in Bible, Church history, philosophy, religious education, music, speech, and similar subjects that prepared young people for ordained ministry, missions, Sunday school teaching, and other religious work. It still awarded its own degrees and certificates for these subjects, but the University counted course work at the College toward degrees in other subjects taught by the University. Students who majored in college subjects or university subjects could live in college dormitories built with contributions from prominent Red River Valley Methodist laity such as Frank and Georgia Lynch and N. G. Larimore.92

91 Samuel F. Halfyard, Fundamentals of the Christian Religion, Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham and New York: Eaton & Mains, 1911, p. 109, enclosed these words with quotation marks but without attributing them to their source, James I. Vance, The Eternal in Man, New York and other places: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1907, pp. 124-125, viewed at https://archive.org/stream/eternalinman00vanc on September 13, 2018. See also Halfyard, Fundamentals, pp. 107-109, 125-136. Compare Samuel Weir, Christianity as a Factor in Civilization an Evidence of Its Supernatural Origins, Cincinnati: Cranston & Curts and New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1893, chapter 1, viewed at https://archive.org/stream/christianityasfa00weir on November 7, 2018, who argued that, in modern times, the “influence” of Christianity was more important to apologetics (the intellectual defense of Christian faith) than miracles or fulfillment of prophecy. Weir later served on the faculty of Dakota Wesleyan University. 92 Edward P. Robertson, “The Affiliated College,” Religious Education, 1 (1906-1907): 226-227, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.30000104434794 on September 17, 2018; Wallace Nelson Stearns, “The Denominational College and the State University,” Religious Education, 1 (1906-1907): 52-56, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.30000104434794 on September 17, 2018; Edward P. Robertson, “The Story of the Affiliation of Wesley College with the University of North Dakota, carbon copy typescript, 1935; George A. Henry, “A Good Investment: the Story of Wesley College and that of the Mother Institution-Red River Valley University—as well as the Story of Still Earlier Plans of the Methodist Church to Promote Educational Work of College Rank in North Dakota,” 1948, University of North Dakota Publications 21, viewed at https://commons.und.edu/und-books/21 on November 7, 2018; History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, pp. 152-172. Stearns noted the earlier model of Victoria University, a Methodist institution, and its relationship to the University of Toronto. Wesley College expanded its own model to Fargo College (North Dakota State University) and Valley City Normal School. The University of North Dakota holds the archives of Wesley College, which closed in 1965 and whose funds were administered for -195- Draft on 1/17/2019

This model of religion and higher education contrasted with a number of others that Methodists, Evangelicals, and United Brethren in the Dakotas knew or promoted. Preparatory academies (private high schools) and liberal arts colleges run by conferences had dominated the 19th century. Holiness colleges that drew students from the Dakotas followed this model: Central Holiness University (later John Fletcher College) in Iowa, Taylor University in Indiana, and Asbury College in Kentucky. The campus of Central Holiness University focused on a tabernacle. The Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Association recommended Northwestern College and Union Bible Institute at Naperville, Illinois, because “we are skeptical of some subjects taught at other colleges,” and the faculty at “our college” is Christian and under the observation of the denomination. When, during the 1950’s, the United Brethren college at York, Nebraska, merged with Westmar College established by the United Evangelical Church at LeMars, Iowa, Westmar remained a denominational college.93

Other models besides Wesley College challenged the denominational college. Nettleton Commercial College, founded by a member of Sioux Falls First Methodist Episcopal Church, reflected the growing need in the early 20th century for business skills and leadership. A Methodist Episcopal bishop started the Chautauqua movement for adult education during the summer on a former campground in New York. He meant for it to educate Sunday school teachers, but Chautauquas established in the Dakotas and elsewhere soon offered lectures in many other subjects. Chautauqua auditoriums sometimes resembled tabernacles surrounded by campers living in tents.94

educational purposes by the Wesley Center of Religion from then until 2016. A finding aid for the archives was viewable at https://apps.library.und.edu/archon/index.php?p=collections/findingaid&id=1069 on September 17, 2018. 93 Minutes of the Thirty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1922], p. [84] (Central Holiness University); Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirtieth Session[, 1914], advertisement in back matter and Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty-first Session[, 1915], advertisement in back matter (Taylor University); 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], p. 368 (Asbury College); “Dakota Conference Journal [Evangelical Association]”, trans. Mrs. Arend Arends and ed. Mrs. Richard Lunde, typescript carbon copy, 1894, pp. 12-13 (Northwestern College and Union Bible Institute); The WPA Guide to 1930s Iowa, Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University Press, 1986 (original edition 1938), p. 518 (John Fletcher College). The Yearbook of the United Brethren in Christ, a serial publication with early 20th-century samples at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008700175 on November 7, 2018, published solicitations from York College. See also Mary Lue O. Warner, “What Happened to Westmar College?” Center for the Evangelical United Brethren Heritage Telescope―Messenger (United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio), 1 (Summer 1991): [3-5], viewed at http://united.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/TM-1-2.pdf on November 7, 2018. The Laymen’s Holiness Association planned to establish a Holiness Academy in Jamestown, North Dakota, Hammer, “North Dakota Holiness Movement,” p. 61. Its leader, Joseph Grant Morrison, a graduate of the University of South Dakota, eventually became president of Northwest Nazarene College in Nampa, Idaho. 94 Official Journal of the Thirty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1919], advertisement in back matter (Nettleton Commercial College); John H. Vincent, The Chautauqua Movement, Boston: Chautauqua Press, 1886, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/aeu.ark:/13960/t3dz1bq0x on November 8, 2018; Michael R. Schliessmann, “Culture on -196- Draft on 1/17/2019

The primary challenge to the denominational college came, however, from the idea of the university as a research institution. Research would create new knowledge in addition to nurturing traditional values in a new generation. The scientific study of agriculture at North Dakota State University and South Dakota State University probably attracted the widest public support for research in the Dakotas, but the idea of the university as a research institution also meant exposing undergraduates to the methods and the results of evolutionary biology, Biblical archaeology, and historical study of the Bible. This did not always receive a warm welcome. In fact, it helped to turn higher education into an experience that endured to the 21st century: learning to think and live well in the cacophony of debate between the voices of tradition and the voices of innovation.95

For all the experimentation with different models of religion and higher education among the ancestors of United Methodists in the Dakotas, only Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell survived into the 21st century. Several actions undertaken before the First World War laid the foundation for this long institutional life. At the beginning of the century, Dakota Wesleyan absorbed the college that the Black Hills Mission had founded. Until the presidency of Thomas Nicholson from 1903 to 1908, however, Dakota Wesleyan enrolled more students in its preparatory academy than it did in its college of liberal arts. Nicholson and his successors also transformed the campus with new buildings. They raised large sums of money to construct them, and they developed an endowment fund that reached $336,184 by 1920. One of the first new buildings, Science Hall (1912), made of Sioux Falls granite and equipped with laboratories as well as classrooms, followed the direction that higher education was already taking. It went up during the administration of Samuel F. Kerfoot whose father had preached in Pembina County, northern Dakota Territory. The Dakota Annual Conference had never before mounted fundraising campaigns as large as its efforts for Dakota Wesleyan. Like the North Dakota Annual Conference in its efforts for Wesley College, fundraising for education gave the conference valuable experience that it soon applied to paying for hospitals and endowing clergy pensions.96

the Prairie: The Big Stone Lake Chautauqua,” South Dakota History, 21 (1991): 247-262. A partial list of Chautauquas with Methodist connections includes Big Stone City (Big Stone Lake), Brookings, Canton (Dobson Park), Devils Lake, Hot Springs (Black Hills), Madison (Lake Madison), Valley City, and Walhalla. Robert F. Kerr, private secretary to South Dakota governor Samuel H. Elrod—both Methodists—served as Chautauqua manager for Brookings. N. G. Larimore, associated also with Wesley College, led the North Dakota Chautauqua Association for eight years. 95 Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon (eds.), The Rise of the Research University; A Sourcebook, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. 96 Harry R. Woodward, “A History of Black Hills College,” South Dakota Historical Collections, 20 (1940): 431-466; Coursey, History of Dakota Wesleyan University, pp. 71, 75; Violet Miller Goering, Dakota Wesleyan University: Century I, Freeman, South Dakota: Pine Hill Press, 1996, pp. 32-33, 119, 124. See chapter 2, p. 108, on Kerfoot’s family. In addition to college presidents, prominent fundraisers included Alexander Karr (Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the -197- Draft on 1/17/2019

Nicholson came from Cornell College in Iowa where he taught philosophy and Bible and headed the preparatory academy. After Dakota Wesleyan, he became Secretary of the Board of Education of the Methodist Episcopal Church and, later, a bishop. He believed that the traditional denominational college had a mission in the 20th century, but it needed to transform itself in order to fulfill that mission. For his inaugural address at Dakota Wesleyan, he took as his theme, “the necessity of the Christian college.”97

He stipulated at the outset that an educational institution served the public and could not survive as “the expression of denominational bigotry” or “nothing more than the commercial enterprise of the single city in which it happens to be situated.” Institutions like Dakota Wesleyan University expressed the life of their nation, and a principal characteristic of American civilization consisted in the value it placed on the “almost unlimited possibilities in the future development of individuality and personality.” “The first function of the college, therefore, and I am prone to think its most important function in our day, is to discover to young people their possibilities,….” He had no quarrel with tax-supported institutions of higher education, but he believed that “…religion is an essential factor of the human personality, and that a place must be found for religious education within general education.”

All institutions of higher education would eventually figure this out, but the 20th- century Christian college could point the way. He saw historical study of the Bible and “the sounder and more psychological methods of approaching religious problems” as a foundation for unity among denominations, and he deplored the separation of the traditional small college’s liberal arts curriculum from more practical or manual subjects like commerce, agriculture, domestic science, and technology.98

When Nicholson left Dakota Wesleyan in 1908 and became Secretary of the Board of Education, he edited the Board’s quarterly magazine, The Christian Student. This

North Dakota Annual Conference, [1911], pp. 60-64), Gary T. Notson (Official Journal of the Thirty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1920]), p. 72 ), and John P. Jenkins. They all came from the clergy. 97 Thomas Nicholson, The Inaugural Address, Dakota University, June 14, 1904, Cincinnati: Press of Jennings and Graham [, 1904]. Worldcat.org cataloged this as OCLC 10962877 using the title on the title page. OCLC 7348285 appears to be the same item cataloged using the title on the front cover, The Necessity of the Christian College. Nicholson joined the Religious Education Association when it was founded, The Religious Education Association, Proceedings of the First Annual Convention, Chicago, February 10-12, 1903, Chicago: Executive Office of The Association, 1903, p. 371, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/pst.000009749023 on September 19, 2018. After he went to the Board of Education, he participated in planning for North Dakota educational institutions with Charles E. Vermilya, Joseph Grant Morrison, Edward P. Robertson, and others, Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1913], pp. 37- 39. 98 Nicholson, Inaugural Address, pp. 4, 6, 9, 12, 28-29, 31-32, 40-41, 44-45, 48-49. -198- Draft on 1/17/2019 quarterly published a study in 1912 that surveyed the educational qualifications of Methodist Episcopal ministers across the country. A growing number were coming to the ministry with a college degree and even a degree from a theological seminary. Of those who had a college degree, the vast majority had studied at a Methodist college or university like Dakota Wesleyan, not a state university or a school of another denomination. This trend, which the Dakota Annual Conference noted, helped to strengthen conference support for Dakota Wesleyan.99

The trend toward more schooling for pastors also meant that future pastors and district superintendents in North Dakota and South Dakota would look a lot less like Samuel A. Danford or Joseph Norvell’s fictional pastor, Isaac Venner. Even those who, like Danford, came into the ordained ministry thru the Course of Study instead of a theological seminary would follow a very different curriculum than he had. In 1916, General Conference turned responsibility for the Course of Study over to a commission chaired by Harris Franklin Rall of Garrett Biblical Institute in Evanston, Illinois. John Wesley’s A Plain Account of Christian Perfection still stood at the beginning of the readings in the Course of Study for “traveling preachers,” but the books required for later years looked more like a recommended reading list for Wesley College’s Hazlett Lectures—which Rall had given in 1912.

The lay electoral conference of the Dakota Annual Conference soon petitioned General Conference against Rall’s curriculum and its “many books containing unsound teaching.” But the same conference’s Board of Examiners was already organizing the “South Dakota Training School for Christian Workers” to meet at Mitchell during the summer and provide instruction for the new Course of Study as well as educational events for Sunday school teachers, leaders of women’s societies, and Epworth League youth workers. The Evangelical Association made fewer changes in its Course of Study in the early 20th century, but, by 1920, its curriculum included sociology and Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) by Walter Rauschenbusch.100

99 James Allen Geissinger, “A Study of the Ministerial Supply of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Christian College, and the State University,” The Christian Student, 13 (August 1912): 21-31, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89077111508 on September 20, 2018; “Report of the Committee on Education,” Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1912], pp. 58-61 (signed by Thomas Nicholson, chairman of the committee). See also Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty-first Session[, 1915], p. 49. Geissinger sent questionnaires to 12,100 “ministers.” He received 3,342 responses and did not address the differences between those who responded and those who did not. Since the survey questions were biased in favor of those who had more education, he probably received more responses from the more educated ministers, but, because he broke his data down by decade of entry into ministry, he likely did capture the direction of the trend if not its size. The reason for the survey can be surmised from Alexander Karr’s report of a decreasing number of college students preparing for ordained ministry, Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, [1911], p. 61. 100 Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1916, New York and Cincinnati: The Methodist Book Concern, 1916, ¶599, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89077101236 on November 9, 2018; Official Journal of the Thirty- -199- Draft on 1/17/2019

By 1920, transformation of theological education converged with several other developments like longer appointments, increased regulation of evangelists by church law, and campaigns for higher salaries and clergy pensions that would make ministry more attractive to pastors and their families.101 This convergence made pastors sound less like frontier preachers and more like doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Their congregations changed, too.

Letcher Methodist Episcopal Church before the Supreme Court of South Dakota, June 2, 1921

No congregation of any denomination that formed The United Methodist Church has worshipped in Letcher, South Dakota, since the end of the First World War. The town lies near a small lake west of the James River along an abandoned railroad that linked Mitchell to Woonsocket in Sanborn County, a county known in the 20th century for its harvest of melons and squash about the time of State Fair.

In 1898, the trustees of Fowler Methodist Episcopal Church of Letcher acquired land in town and built a church on it. The deed stated that “this property is deeded in trust for the use and benefit of the ministry and members of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, subject to the discipline, usage and ministerial appointment of Said church as from time to time authorized and declared, and if sold, the proceeds shall be disposed of and used in accordance with the provisions of said discipline.” This sentence, a descendant of John Wesley’s model deed or trust clause, provided the legal cement to bind congregations and conferences fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1919], p. 378, 388-389; Minutes of the Thirty-seventh Annual Session of the Dakota Conference and the newly organized North Dakota and South Dakota Conferences of the Evangelical Association…, [, 1920], pp. 51-52, 66-67; Proceedings of the South Dakota Conference Evangelical Church…Seventh Annual Session..., 1926, n.p.: John E. Booth, n.d., p. 7. As early as 1911, the North Dakota Annual Conference had petitioned General Conference to include a textbook on temperance and social reform, Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, [1911], p. 51. 101 Early 20th-century pastors who served longer appointments according to the Minutes of their conferences included: J. M. Brown (Sioux Falls), W. D. Deeble (Britton), John S. Hoagland (Mitchell), H. G. Leonard (Fargo), Reuben E. Strutz (Bismarck), C. F. Strutz (Bismarck), J. W. Taylor (Aberdeen), and Herbert S. Wilkinson (Mitchell). For the regulation of evangelists, see Minutes of the Thirty-seventh Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1922], p. [65]. In 1902, the Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Association adopted its “first finance law” to set clergy salaries, Verhandlungen der neunzehnten Jahressitzung der Dakota Conferenz der Evangelischen Gemeinschaft, 1902, p. 6; Journal of the Thirteenth Annual Session of the North Dakota Conference of the Evangelical Church, Great Bend, North Dakota: H. C. Lehner[, 1932], p. 28. The North Dakota Annual Conference petitioned General Conference to require the adoption of a pastoral support plan at fourth quarterly conference, Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, [1911], p. 51. The Dakota Annual Conference set a minimum salary, Official Journal of the Thirty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1919], p. 377, and Official Journal of the Thirty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1920], p. 43, reported that pastors were being paid monthly. The North Dakota Annual Conference laid a substantial foundation for pension endowment before the First World War, but significant increase in clergy retirement income did not follow until the Second World War, History of the Methodist Church in North Dakota, pp. 173-198. Mrs. And Mrs. Frank Crowell pledged $100,000 to the Dakota Annual Conference Claimants’ Endowment Fund, Minutes of the Thirty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference, n.p.: G. D. Brown and J. M. Hunter[, 1917], p. 151. -200- Draft on 1/17/2019 together. It would also guarantee that the Dakota Annual Conference could close the church.102

Twenty years later, the bishop and district superintendents appointed the trustees of Lane Methodist Episcopal Church, a congregation northwest of Letcher in Jerauld County, to be trustees for the church property at Letcher. On July 19, 1918, the Lane trustees completed legal paperwork that conveyed the Letcher church property to the Congregational Conference of South Dakota. The Congregational Church of Letcher proceeded to take possession and convert the Methodist Episcopal church building into a parsonage for the Congregationalist pastor. By the end of September, the Congregationalists had sold the Methodist pulpit and other church furniture.103

Then, Laura Eitel and other trustees of the Fowler Methodist Episcopal Church of Letcher sued. When the circuit judge in Sanborn County ruled against the Letcher Methodists, they appealed to the Supreme Court of South Dakota. The Supreme Court handed down its decision on June 2, 1921, and sustained the Congregationalists on the ground of the Methodist trust clause. Lauritz Miller, a prominent Methodist attorney from Mitchell, defended the Congregationalists by explaining the Methodist trust clause to the Supreme Court.104

For the Dakota Annual Conference, this surprising sequence of events concluded satisfactorily much earlier in October 1918 when John Kaye, who had recently lost his wife, Annie Hirst Kaye, became pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Lane, a town that, when he arrived, no longer had a Congregational church.105

102 Fowler Methodist Episcopal Church of Letcher et al. v. Congregational Conference of South Dakota et al., 183 Northwestern Reporter 129, 130 (1921), viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951d02208347j on October 3, 2018. The case as published in Reports of Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of the State of South Dakota, Pierre, South Dakota: State Publishing Co., 1922, 44: 213 [44 S.D. 213 (1921)], viewed at http://sdsdl-montage.auto-graphics.com/#/item- details/entities_657 on November 9, 2018, provided additional details. See also Works of John Wesley, Large Minutes (1763), 10: 868-870. 103 The Dakota Annual Conference ratified the action of the bishop and district superintendents in October, 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], p. 256. 104 Fowler Methodist Episcopal Church of Letcher v. Congregational Conference, 183 Northwestern Reporter 129, 129-130; Biographical Directory of the South Dakota Legislature, 2: 755 (Lauritz Miller). The justice who delivered the opinion of the Court implied that the Letcher Methodists had unaccountably delayed filing their original suit. 105 Minutes of the Thirty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1917], pp. 193-194 (Annie Hirst Kaye), Official Journal of the Forty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p., [1929], p. 213 (John Kaye); Biographical Files, Archives of the Dakotas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church (John Kaye and family). One of their five children married Lars J. Grinager of Canton, father of Lloyd K. Grinager, a clergy member of the South Dakota Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. The Dakota Annual Conference sold the Congregationalist property in Lane and authorized the proceeds to be used for Methodist extension work in Lane, Official Journal of the Thirty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1919], p. 354, 355-356. -201- Draft on 1/17/2019 What actually happened in Lane and Letcher? Officials of the Dakota Annual Conference agreed with officials of the Congregational Conference of South Dakota to stop competing with each other in these two places. Under the principle of “comity,” the Congregationalists persuaded their congregation in Lane to close, and the Methodists exercised authority under their own Discipline to close their congregation at Letcher. Neither the Congregationalists’ congregation at Lane nor the Methodists’ congregation at Letcher was very large or well-supported. Would the Congregationalists at Letcher and the Methodists at Lane not become stronger if Letcher Methodists became Letcher Congregationalists and Lane Congregationalists became Lane Methodists? Did this not make a great deal of economic sense?

The case of Fowler Methodist Episcopal Church of Letcher et al. v. Congregational Conference of South Dakota et al. recorded a minor incident in the history of the Church but exposed a major theological change underway at many other places as well. The details of why Protestant congregations in Letcher and Lane were not stronger remained unrecorded, but their weakness had reached a point where Congregationalists were willing to overlook their Calvinist heritage and Methodists were willing to overlook their Wesleyan heritage.

Doctrine, in other words, really did take second place at this point. The model of a congregation’s constructing a church building and a parsonage and getting them supplied with a paid pastor dominated practical thinking so much that it banished any other possibility beyond the frontier of imagination. To treat this model as the only model worth considering necessarily required its followers to devote their attention not to doctrine but to the economic reality of construction and maintenance costs, pastoral salary costs, and dividing the payment of these costs in some manner among a limited number of households. Unavoidably, the financial burden per household would increase as the number of households decreased. So, the model would not work well where a certain minimum number of people could not be found within a certain traveling distance of a church building. The record gave no reason for thinking that church leaders did not care about the individuals who lived in small places. But at the point of unaffordability, conferences could think of no alternative but to close congregations.106

Already in the Territorial period, members of Methodist Episcopal congregations were concentrating disproportionately in a small number of larger congregations, and this process intensified during the 20th century. The minimum number of members

106 Superintendent of Mission Alexander Stevens supported church “federation” and “comity” but believed that they could put Christian doctrine at risk in some cases, Minutes of the Thirty-third Annual Session Black Hills Mission[, 1912], pp. 34-35. Nelson, After the West Was Won, p. 205n6, discussed contemporary recognition of the problem of distance and viability of congregations on West River. -202- Draft on 1/17/2019 needed for a congregation to support a building and a pastor continued to increase and limited the number of places that the Methodist Episcopal Church tried to serve, not to mention the number of places that the Evangelical Church and the United Brethren could serve. It left individuals who lived in sparsely populated areas or otherwise without sufficient financial resources underserved, served by another denomination, or just not served. Apparently, no single denomination could aspire to have a mission to all and for all.107

In 1912, the Dakota Annual Conference addressed this emerging reality by adopting the “Statement of Principles” of a new organization called, “The Federation Council of the Churches of Christ in South Dakota.” The principles included respect for the work of any denomination that had entered a community prior to another denomination that might be considering entry, respect for the preferences of the community itself, and consultation among officials of the different denominations supervising the area where that community was located. Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists agreed to these principles. In 1913, they decided on the additional principle of “comity”: one denomination’s withdrawal from a community in exchange for another denomination’s withdrawal from a different community once neither community could sustain two congregations. The Dakota Annual Conference ratified this principle and authorized exchanges of property.108

The North Dakota Annual Conference adopted a similarly worded set of principles for interdenominational comity. In fact, comity and federation became the foundation in practice for a new understanding of the Church that subordinated denominational identity and suppressed competition for solving “problems” as different as the rural church, the integration of German Methodist congregations with English-language congregations during and after the First World War, and the limited willingness of Protestants to commit resources to Indian reservations for missions there. The case of Fowler Methodist Episcopal Church of Letcher et al. v. Congregational Conference of South Dakota et al. showed that, in spite of statements of principles, comity at the level of denominational supervisors like bishops and district superintendents could become imposition at the level of a particular community.109

107 See chapter 2, p. 81, Graphic 2.2. 108 Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1912], pp. 69-70; Minutes of the Twenty-ninth Session of Dakota Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church[, 1913], pp. 25-26. 109 Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1913], pp. 53-54 (signed by Charles E. Vermilya and Jabez G. Moore among others); Official Journal of the Thirty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1919], p. 353 (comity with the Northwest German Conference); Official Journal of the Forty Sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference Methodist Episcopal Church, n.p.[, 1930], p. 272 (merger with the Chicago-Northwest Conference); William R. King, History of Home Missions Council with Introductory Outline of Home Missions, New York: Home Missions Council[, 1930], especially pp. 36, 37-38, 39-42. Charles E. Vermilya served as Executive Secretary of the Home Missions Council from 1924 to -203- Draft on 1/17/2019

Many of the principles of interdenominational cooperation came from the study and teaching of rural sociology, an academic subject that Protestant Christians helped to create. In addition to comity among denominations and cooperation among local churches, these principles included making the rural pastor an expert at parish surveys and turning the rural church building into a center for events that would bring country people together, break down isolation, and nurture the growth of individuals, especially young people. All of these principles tended to subordinate doctrine and denominational identity to practical work for the improvement of community life.

Rural sociology received strong encouragement from Theodore Roosevelt’s appointment of a national commission on country life in 1908. The commission’s report included recommendations for the country church. Founded the same year, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America (succeeded by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA), published The Country Church; The Decline of Its Influence and the Remedy in 1913. One of the two authors of this book served on Roosevelt’s National Commission on Country Life. About the same time, Dakota Wesleyan University started teaching rural sociology and used John M. Gillette’s Constructive Rural Sociology (1913) as the textbook for the course. Gillette taught at the University of North Dakota across the street from Wesley College in Grand Forks. After the great curriculum revision of 1916, the Course of Study for ordained clergy in the Methodist Episcopal Church listed Garland A. Bricker’s Solving the Country Church Problem published by the Abingdon Press in 1913. In 1920, Dakota Wesleyan hired Erwin C. Paustian to teach rural sociology. During the 1920’s, he helped the Dakota Annual Conference to survey a map of “parish touching parish” with the hope of bringing “vast stretches of unoccupied and unchurched areas” under pastoral supervision.110

1927. This interdenominational agency supported “religious work” at Flandreau, South Dakota, and Pipestone, Minnesota. 110 Report of the Country Life Commission and Special Message from the President of the United States, Spokane, Washington: Chamber of Commerce, 1909 (60th Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Document No. 705) viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo1.ark:/13960/t0ft9554r on October 6, 2018; Charles Otis Gill and Gifford Pinchot, The Country Church; The Decline of Its Influence and the Remedy, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.ah4kzc on October 6, 2018; Dakota Wesleyan University Bulletin (Mitchell, South Dakota), 11 (1913), number 7, pp. 112-113, viewed at https://archive.org/stream/annualcatalog1217dako on October 6, 2018; Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1916, ¶599, p. 551, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89077101236 on November 9, 2018; Official Journal Dakota Conference Methodist Episcopal Church Thirty-eighth Session,…, n.p.[, 1922], p. 316. Paustian received a Master of Arts degree from Northwestern University in 1920 for a thesis surveying a rural community in Illinois. In 1942, several years after leaving Dakota Wesleyan’s faculty, he wrote a doctoral dissertation at Northwestern on Ferdinand Tönnies who had brought to sociology a fundamental distinction between community (gemeinschaft) and society (gesellschaft). See worldcat.org OCLC 35527177 and OCLC 25943811. James J. Hill’s Highways of Progress (1910) offered a number of parallels to the concepts of rural sociology and the country life movement. See above p. 163. -204- Draft on 1/17/2019 Drawing on some of the ideas of rural sociology, District Superintendent James Harkness praised the country church in his annual report for Aberdeen District in 1914. But he objected to labeling it as a “problem.” Country churches were already providing a large number of college students who would lead American society in the future. He believed that prosperous town and city churches depended on smaller churches elsewhere, and he wanted to make the country church “organically central and commanding in rural life.” In other words, the city and the country should not be divided into two separate worlds. They formed one, connected society.111 ******* When the Methodists of Letcher received their last benediction in 1918, the aspirations of many large town and city congregations had led them far from the days of Dakota Territory. Demand for longer pastorates, larger buildings, and missionary expansion drove the development of new, larger-scale financial organization. Longer pastorates required higher salaries paid at regular times and pension benefits. Constructing new and larger buildings could be accomplished only with fundraising campaigns and debt financing. Missionary expansion across a conference, the nation, and the globe needed some way of sharing costs among many congregations and church members.

Financial practices still used in the 21st century originated in response to these needs just before and after the First World War: membership numbers as the basis for apportioning denominational and conference budgets, the “every member canvass” as the means of obtaining pledges to support local church budgets, offering envelopes, and finance committees charged with budgeting and raising money. Pressure to adopt these practices came from all levels of a denomination. Church law mandated many of them in a process that began in 1912 for the Methodist Episcopal Church and 1917 for the Evangelical Association.112

111 Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirtieth Session[, 1914], pp. 44-45. Harkness later made a strong statement in support of revivals in Official Journal of the Thirty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1920], pp. 48-49. Compare the views of Charles E. Vermilya above p. 161. See also James H. Madison, “Reformers and the Rural Church, 1900- 1950,” The Journal of American History, 73 (1986): 645-668; and Suzanne Smith, “The Institutional and Intellectual Origins of Rural Sociology,” conference paper, Rural Sociological Society, 2011, viewed at http://www.ag.auburn.edu/~bailelc/Smith.2011.pdf on January 18, 2019. Parts of Smith’s research have also been published as “The Institutional and Intellectual Origins of Rural Sociology: Selected Excerpts,” The Rural Sociologist, 31(3) (2011): 21-32, but I have so far been unable to see this article. 112 Minutes of the Seventeenth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1901]), p. 29; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth [Twenty-fourth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1909], p. 51; Minutes of the Twenty-fifth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1909], p. 36; Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference, [1911], p. 37; Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1912], p. 43; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirtieth Session[, 1914], p. 78; Minutes of the Twenty-ninth [Thirtieth] Session of the North Dakota Annual Conference[, 1915], p. 51; Verhandlungen der Vierunddreißigsten Jahres-Sitzung der Dakota Konferenz…[, 1917], p. 15, 23-24; Stephen Perry, “The Revival of Stewardship and the Creation of the World Service Commission in the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1912-1924,” Methodist History, 23 (1985): 223-239, available at http://hdl.handle.net/10516/5298 on November 11, 2018. -205- Draft on 1/17/2019 Pastors during these years preached about tithing and stewardship as essential spiritual practices in relation to money and finance. These terms derived from medieval England. The “tithe” or tenth of agricultural produce named a tax that supported the parish priest. A “steward” managed the financial and other household affairs of a lord. The English Bible used the terms to translate Hebrew and Greek words that came from an even more distant historical situation but still referred to obligations that carried the force of law—the steward as one required to take care of another person’s property and the tithe as a tax. The Greek New Testament also used its words for “steward” and “stewardship” to refer to trustworthiness with spiritual matters such as apostleship or service to other Christians. John Wesley, addressing a time of great commercial and landed wealth, combined the various historical meanings of “stewardship” and spoke of the stewardship of wealth itself as a spiritual matter. “Steward” has also named church officers of various kinds from Wesley’s day forward although it no longer does so in The United Methodist Church.113

The amount of wealth that surrounded American churches in the early 20th century surpassed by far both the economy of the ancient world and the economy of 18th century Britain. But getting access to this wealth could not happen by force of law. Because, under American constitutional law, churches and clergy could not receive government support, the tithe ceased to be a tax in the United States. Because those who possessed private wealth earned or inherited it, they would behave as stewards of their wealth only if they chose to think of themselves as stewards.

Giving to congregations happened, in other words, on a purely voluntary basis. It also happened on a primarily individual or household basis. Other sources of funds imaginable at the time like return on an invested endowment or communal labor on a “God’s acre” project that sold a crop raised by several church members did not receive the attention that individual giving received. So, church finance, like many other areas of church life, came to emphasize the individual, in this case the individual church member as a steward of wealth.114

113 Matthew 20:1-16, Luke 16:1-9, 1 Corinthians 4:1-2, 1 Peter 4:10; The Oxford English Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross, second edition, Oxford and other places: Oxford University Press, 1990, under “tithes”; The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols., Oxford and other places: Oxford University Press, 1971, under “steward” and “tithe”; “The Use of Money” (sermon 50) and “The Good Steward” (sermon 51), Works of John Wesley, 2: 263-298; Cyclopaedia of Methodism, ed. Matthew Simpson, fourth edition, Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881, p. 832, under “stewards,” viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101078171145 on November 11, 2018; The Encyclopedia of World Methodism, ed. Nolan B. Harmon, 2 vols., Nashville, Tennessee: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1974, 2: 2248-2249, under “steward (in American Methodism),” viewed at https://archive.org/stream/encyclopediaofwo02harm on November 11, 2018. 114 Official Journal of the Thirty-fourth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1918], p. 266, mentioned a 40-acre wheat project at Gettysburg Methodist Episcopal Church. During these years, the Dakota Annual Conference mounted notable endowment campaigns for Dakota Wesleyan University, above p. 197, and the North Dakota Annual Conference laid a foundation for a very large clergy pension endowment, above p. 200n101. -206- Draft on 1/17/2019

Financing the soaring aspirations of conferences and congregations on a foundation of individual giving had practical consequences. Because of the growing wealth of many individuals, appeals to individuals raised unprecedented sums of money, but they also made congregations and conferences dependent on individual promises to pay. Although American law would sometimes enforce charitable pledges as binding contracts, very few church officials considered resort to judicial enforcement of a promise to pay as anything but self-defeating in the long run. So, what happened when individuals could not keep their promises or when not enough individuals in a congregation made promises?

First Methodist Episcopal Church of Pierre endured painful years of indebtedness after it dedicated a new building in 1911. The pastor and Governor Robert S. Vessey had secured outside donations from James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway and Cyrus McCormick, the farm implement inventor of Chicago. Two years later, however, bankruptcy threatened the congregation. Gifts from the Swift and Armour meatpacking families relieved the crisis in 1914 but did not end it. In 1915, the Dakota Annual Conference began a combined fundraising campaign for clergy pensions, Methodist State Hospital in Mitchell, the Pierre church building debt, and other causes. When conference met in Pierre in 1917, it acknowledged a gift of $12,500 from Catherine G. Woolley “…which enabled this church to be saved for Dakota Methodism.”115

The entire Methodist Episcopal Church encountered problems with collecting on individual pledges when recession set in after the First World War. Many individuals all over the United States as well as in North Dakota and South Dakota could not finish or renew pledges totaling millions of dollars for the centenary of the Missionary Society, a corporate ancestor of The United Methodist Church’s General Board of Global Ministries. Plans already made and projects already begun for new missions across the country and the globe had to be canceled or cut back.116

Even so, a long list of congregations in North Dakota and South Dakota built new church buildings in the early 20th century and remained solvent. Some of these buildings still stand today and, although, like all church buildings, their congregations

115 Minutes of the Twenty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1910], pp. 17, 21; Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1911]), p. 35; Minutes of the Twenty-eighth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1912], p. 42; Minutes of the Twenty-ninth Session of Dakota Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church[, 1913], pp. 21, 44-45, 60; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirtieth Session[, 1914], pp. 48, 77; Minutes of the Dakota Annual Conference Thirty-second Session[, 1916], pp. 60-62; Minutes of the Thirty-third Session of the Dakota Annual Conference[, 1917], p. 182. 116 John Lankford, “Methodism “Over the Top”: The Joint Centenary Movement, 1917-1925,” Methodist History, 2 (1963): 27-37, viewed at http://hdl.handle.net/10516/1341 on November 11, 2018; Perry, “The Revival of Stewardship,” Methodist History, 23 (1985): 223-239. -207- Draft on 1/17/2019 have tried to improve them ever since, they still reflect the early 20th century. Unlike church buildings made of wood in Territorial days, they were constructed of sturdier materials such as brick, stone, concrete, and, sometimes, steel. Unlike buildings constructed after the Second World War, they were located downtown on a street corner or city block near where many urban residents then lived and not too far from the railroad station. Their outside appearance, like the “tithing” and “stewardship” campaigns that financed them, referred back to medieval Europe, but they might also have educational wings or rooms to accommodate large and growing Sunday schools. Inside, they provided facilities and equipment for “social center” activities: church dinners, church orchestras, exercise, sports, libraries, and, sometimes controversially, showing one of the new moving pictures.117

The construction and maintenance of these buildings connected their congregations to a large network of small businesses in town or the Midwest: bankers, lawyers, architects, general contractors, stone masons, brick layers, steel companies, lumber yards, church furniture suppliers, furnace manufacturers, roofers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and, most distinctively, stained glass makers. Entering the sanctuary of one of the new urban church buildings, the people would see illuminated colors that made Christian symbols and scenes from the Bible come almost alive. Many of the stained glass windows installed in early 20th century sanctuaries derived from paintings by 19th-century German Protestants like Bernhard Plockhorst who had painted Jesus as the Good Shepherd (Matthew 18:10-14, Luke 15:3-7, John 10:1- 18).118

117 Examples of surviving United Methodist church buildings that originated in these years include: Aberdeen First, Devils Lake, Fargo First, Jamestown First, Mitchell, Madison, Pierre First, Rapid City First, Sioux Falls First, Watertown First, and Wessington Springs. Official Journal of the Thirty-sixth Session of the Dakota Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church…, n.p.[, 1921], advertisement in back matter, publicized films for the “non-theatrical exhibitor” from The New Era Films of Chicago, Des Moines, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. Official Journal Dakota Conference Methodist Episcopal Church Thirty-eighth Session[, 1922], p. 308, reported exhibition of “moving pictures of merit” at Chester Methodist Episcopal Church. 118 Perry, “The Urbanization of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Jerauld County, South Dakota,” Proceedings of the North Central Jurisdictional Archives and History Commission (1990), pp.40-147. The new early 20th century church buildings participated in the mass reproduction of religious art for educational and devotional purposes. See Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, Catalogue A. Glass, Paints, Oils and Painters’ Sundries, Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1901?, pp. 254 and following plates, viewed at https://archive.org/details/glasspaintsoilsp00pitt on November 11, 2018; Albert E. Bailey, The Gospel in Art, Boston and Chicago: The Pilgrim Press, 1916, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/pst.000056726084 on November 11, 2018; Albert Edward Bailey, The Use of Art in Religious Education, New York and Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press, 1922, viewed at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.ah5s8h on November 11, 2018; Taber-Prang Art Company, Illustrated Catalog of Pictures 1923, Springfield, Massachusetts: Taber- Prang Art Company, 1923, viewed at https://archive.org/details/taberprangartcom00unse on November 11, 2018; Charles Nelson Pace, Pictures That Preach, New York and Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press, 1924; Cynthia Pearl Maus, Christ and the Fine Arts, New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1938, especially pp. 533-536 on Plockhorst’s Der Gute Hirte (1887). -208- Draft on 1/17/2019 Because of all this, at certain times of day in certain larger towns and cities of North Dakota and South Dakota, light poured into the sanctuary to reveal the pastoral mission of the Church. Just before sunset and darkness, Jesus in a crimson tunic and his bare feet returns from a countryside full of thorns. Sheep, numbering as many as ninety-nine, crowd around him. His left hand holds a shepherd’s crook, a weapon against wolves. His right hand cradles a little lamb who lost its way, only one single lamb out of a hundred sheep, one only who wandered a great distance, one individual who now is found.

-209- 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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