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The Clergy and the Myth of the American West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Ferenc M. Szasz
Ferenc M. Szasz
Affiliation:
Mr. Szasz is professor of history in the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Extract

The myth of the American West has become the nation's greatest cultural creation. From nineteenth-century German writer Karl May to the present day Solidarity movement in Poland, images drawn from the frontier West have inspired people throughout the globe. Although scholars have spent years trying to separate fact from fiction in this tale, most have concluded that it is impossible. “The myth,” historian Robert Athearn has noted, “is an essential part of the western past.”1

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , December 1990 , pp. 497 - 506
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1990

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References

1. Athearn, Robert, The Mythic West in Twentieth Century America (Lawrence, Kans., 1986), p. 176;Google ScholarWhipple, T. K., Study Out the Land (Berkeley, 1942)Google Scholar, also argues that “frontier” and “West” are synonymous.

2. See, for example, Etulain, Richard W., “Changing Images: The Cowboy in Western Films,” Colorado Heritage 1 (1981): 37–55;Google ScholarSavage,, William W. Jr, The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History and Culture (Norman, Okla., 1979);Google ScholarSteckmesser, Kent Ladd, Western Outlaws: The “Good Badman”in Fact, Film, and Folklore (Claremont, Calif., 1985);Google ScholarTuska, John, The Filming of the West (Garden City, N.Y., 1976);Google ScholarCalder, Jenni, There Must Be A Lone Ranger: The American West in Film and Reality (New York, 1974);Google ScholarStegner, Wallace, “History, Myth, and the Western Writer,” in Great Stories of the West, ed. Taylor, J.Golden, vol. 1 (New York, 1971) pp. xiii–xxv;Google Scholar and Pilkington, William T., ed., Critical Essays on the Great Western American Novel (Boston, 1980).Google Scholar

3. Amour, Louis L', Last of the Breed (New York, 1986), p. 368;Google ScholarSaum, Lewis O., “Billington's Frontier and the Realm of Ideas,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 73 (1982): 123.Google Scholar

4. The literature is enormous, but the best studies are: Rosenberg, Bruce A., The Code of The West (Bloomington, 1982);Google ScholarSlotkin, Richard, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialism, 1800–1890 (New York, 1985);Google ScholarMitchell, Lee Clark, Witness to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response (Princeton, 1981);Google ScholarSlotkin, Richard, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1850 (Middletown, Conn., 1973);Google ScholarSmith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1950);Google ScholarBillington, Ray Allen, Land of Savagery/Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981);Google ScholarTatum, Stephen, Inventing Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881–1981 (Albuquerque, 1982).Google Scholar

5. I will expand the concept of “clergy” to incude nonordained Sunday school workers and missionaries, many of whom were women.

6. Goen, C. C., Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the American Civil War (Macon, Ga., 1985).Google Scholar

7. For King, see Starr, Kevin, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1981), pp. 97–105,Google Scholar and Frankiel, Sandra Sizer, California's Spiritual Frontiers: Religious Alternatives in Anglo-Protestantism, 1850–1910 (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 18–30.Google Scholar For the Pacific Coast missionaries, the best studies are: Drury, Clifford M., Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Opening of Old Oregon (Seattle, 1986);Google ScholarLoewenberg, Robert J., Equality on the Oregon Frontier: Jason Lee and the Methodist Mission, 1834–43 (Seattle, 1976),Google Scholar and Idaho Yesterdays 31 (Spring/Summer, 1987), the entire issue of which is devoted to the story of religion in the Pacific Northwest. An overview may be found in Szasz, Ferenc Morton, The Protestant Clergy in the Great Plains and Mountain West, 1865–1915 (Albuquerque, 1988).Google Scholar See also the essays in Szasz, , ed., Religion in the West (Manhattan, Kans., 1984);Google Scholar and Carl Guarneri and David Alvarez, eds., Religion and Society in the American West (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

8. Jung, A. M., Jesuit Missions Among the American Tribes of the Rocky Mountain Indians (Spokane, 1925);Google ScholarCarriker, Robert C., “Joseph M. Cataldo: Courier of Catholicism to the Nez Perces,” in Churchmen and Western Indians, ed. Milner, Clyde A. II and O'Neil, Floyd A. (Norman, Okla., 1988), pp. 109–139;Google ScholarMcKevitt, Gerald, “The Jump that Saved the Rocky Mountain Mission: Jesuit Recruitment and the Pacific Northwest,” Pacific Historical Review 55 (1986): 427–453;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBischoff, William N., The Jesuits in Old Oregon (CaIdwell, Idaho, 1945);Google ScholarSchoenberg, Wilfred P., A History of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest, 1743–1983 (Washington, D.C., 1987);Google ScholarBurns, Robert Ignatius, Jesuits and the Indian Wars of the North-West (New Haven, 1966);Google ScholarHorgan, Paul, Lamy of Santa Fe, His Life and Times (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

9. See Szasz, Protestant Clergy, and Schoenberg, History of the Catholic Church, both passim; see also Levinson, Robert E., “American Jews in the West,” Western Historical Quarterly 5 (1974): 285–294,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Harriet, and Rochlin, Fred, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West (Boston, 1984).Google Scholar

10. El Paso Herald Post, 19 April 1938.

11. Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York, 1973);Google ScholarGoodykoontz, Cohn B., Home Missions on the American Frontier, with Particular Reference to the American Home Mission Society (Caidwell, Idaho, 1939);Google ScholarPalladino, L. B., Indian and White in the Northwest: A History of Catholicity in Montana, 1831 to 1891 (Lancaster, Pa., 1922).Google Scholar

12. Balanced studies of missions to the Indians include: Berkhofer,, Robert F. Jr, Salvation and the Savage (New York, 1972)Google Scholar and Bowden, Henry Warner, American Indians and Christian Missions (Chicago, 1981).Google Scholar The most representative accounts of western clerics, however, are monographs that discuss a single denomination within a state framework. Typical examples are: Breck, Allan duPont, The Episcopal Church in Colorado, 1860–1963 (Denver, 1963);Google ScholarBullock, Motier A., Congregational Nebraska (Lincoln, Nebr., 1905);Google ScholarMyers, Lewis A., A History of New Mexico Baptists (Albuquerque, 1965);Google ScholarNoel, Thomas J., Colorado Catholicism (Denver, 1990).Google Scholar

13. Bold, Christine, Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860–1960 (Bloomington, 1987), p. xii.Google Scholar

14. Cawelti, John G., “Prolegomena to the Western,” Western American Literature 4 (1970): 259–271;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Note carefully the lack of clerical references in the otherwise excellent compilations by Milner, Clyde A.II, ed.Major Problems in the History of the American West (Lexington, Ky., 1989)Google Scholar, and Bergon, Frank and Papanikolas, Zeese, eds., Looking Far West: The Search for the American West in History, Myth, and Literature (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

15. Weil, Simone, “Morality and Literature,” from the Simone Weil Reader, ed. Panichias, George A. (Mt. Kisco, N.Y., 1977), pp. 290–291.Google Scholar

16. C. W. Boynton to John Mills Kendrick, 19 January 1902, Box 1, JMK Papers, Archdiocese of the Rio Grande, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

17. See the essays in Peterson, Merrill D. and Vaughan, Robert C., eds., The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (Cambridge, 1988).Google Scholar

18. Cited in Marty, Martin E., Religion and Republic: The American Circumstance (Boston, 1987), p. 235.Google Scholar

19. Moore, R.Laurence, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York, 1986),Google Scholar details the life of these groups.

20. Peterson, Charles S., Take Up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870–1900 (Tucson, Ariz., 1973), p. 242;Google ScholarShipps, Jan, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, Ill., 1985);Google Scholar the quotation comes from a citation in Melish, John Howard, Franklin Spencer Spalding: Man and Bishop (New York, 1917), p. 169.Google Scholar

21. Burns, Jeffrey M., “The Mexican American Catholic Community in California, 1850–1980,” in Guarneri and Alvarez, Religion and Society, pp. 255–273.Google Scholar

22. R. L. Hartt to Mother, Hartt Manuscripts, Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana; cited in Szasz, , Protestant Clergy, p. 91.Google Scholar

23. ---r, J. S., “Pierre-Jean De Smet,” Dictionary of American Biography, p. 256.Google Scholar

24. Goetzmann, William H. and Goetzmann, William N., The West of the Imagination (New York, 1986), p. ix.Google Scholar

25. Here I borrow ideas from Sidney Mead, E., The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York, 1975);Google Scholaridem,The Old Religion in the Brave New World (Berkeley, 1977); idem, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York, 1963).

26. See Folsom, James K., ed., The Western: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1979),Google ScholarFrench, Warren, “West as Myth: Status Report and Call for Action,” Western American Literature 1 (Spring, 1966);Google ScholarFife, Jim L., “Two Views of the American West,” Western American Literature I (Spring, 1966);Google Scholar and Westbrook, Max, “The Practical Spirit: Sacrality and the American West,” Western American Literature 3 (Fall, 1968).Google Scholar

27. Billington, Ray A., America's Frontier Culture (College Station, Tex., 1977), p. 77.Google Scholar

28. Athearn, , Mythic West, p. 186.Google Scholar