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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021
Like much of the American West, a history of material conquest and natural resource extraction has precluded sustained study of Montana's religious past. This article uses the case of gold miners in the southwestern corner of the Territory of Montana from 1862 to 1889 to argue for the value of place-based studies of American religious experience. Rather than serving as a restrictive lens, place-based studies reveal religion in process. In Montana gold mining communities, religion was produced and reproduced through the labors of daily life, intricately tied to the limits and possibilities of place, never static or complete. Protestant missionaries adopted alternative tools of evangelism to fit the particularities of place. Those who succeeded found that the “get-saved-quick” approach of revivals appealed to the “get-rich-quick” lifestyle of mining communities. Dominated by male miners, defined by physical toil for uncertain reward, and subject to national economic trends, gold rush communities reveal how religion shifts and transforms in relation to labor, gender relations, and the natural world. Situated at the nexus of mineral extraction and missionary adaptation and appropriation, this article reflects on the ways in which religion in the United States develops across borders and through practical engagement with regional landscapes.
1 Meredith, Emily, Not in Precious Metals Alone: A Manuscript History of Montana (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1976), 36Google Scholar, quoted in Small, Lawrence F., “Gold Camp Preachers,” in Religion in Montana: Pathways to the Present, ed. Small, Lawrence F. (Billings, MT: Rocky Mountain College, 1992), 80Google Scholar.
2 Goodykoontz, Colin Brummitt, Home Missions on the American Frontier (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1939), 307Google Scholar.
3 Rev. A. M. Hough, quoted in Anaconda Standard, August 29, 1909. Print. (Montana Historical Society).
4 The unified conquest of the American West should not be overstated. For one, the region was hardly unified, but rather, as Richard White argues, constructed of a multiplicity of Wests. And second, Eastern politicians and leaders did not always agree on the means of conquest, not to mention the variant motivations of Euro-American migrants. See Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
5 Alice Cowan Cochran, Miners, Merchants, and Missionaries: The Roles of Missionaries and Pioneer Churches in the Colorado Gold Rush and Its Aftermath, 1858–1870 (Philadelphia: American Theological Library Association, 1980), 69.
6 David Walker, Railroading Religion: Mormon Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 58.
7 See Ferenc M. Szasz, “The Clergy and the Myth of the American West,” Church History 59, no. 4 (1990): 497–506; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985); White, It's Your Misfortune, 1991.
8 Philip K. Goff, “Religion in the American West,” in A Companion to the American West, ed. William Deverell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 287.
9 See Anne Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Mercy: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1985); Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Quincy Newell, Constructing Lives at Mission San Francisco: Native Californians and Hispanic Colonists, 1776–1821 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009); as well as the robust bibliography of Mormon Studies works focused on intermountain history. Further, as Quincy Newell argues, the American West more generally “may also serve in some ways as a microcosm of the nation,” with religious trends such as Pentecostalism, the rise of the Christian Right, and the twenty-first century rise of “nones,” all emerging in the region. Quincy D. Newell, “Religion and the American West,” in Religion Compass 6, no. 11 (2012): 490.
10 Although excellent scholarship continues to be produced about the region, see Brandi Denison, Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017); Brett Hendrickson, The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó: America's Miraculous Church (New York: New York University Press, 2017); Sarah Koenig, Providence and the Invention of American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2018). The American Academy of Religion's “Religion in the American West” unit existed for only five years (2014–2019) because of lack of paper submissions and interest, no books have been published under Stanford University Press's 2016 Religion in the American West book series, and religion remains limited to a paltry few panel presentations at the Western History Association.
11 The field of environmental history is vast. For introductions see Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, eds., Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997); J. Donald Hughes, ed., The Face of the Earth: Environment and World History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000); Gunther Peck, “The Nature of Labor: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and Labor History,” Environmental History 11 (2006): 212–23; Lissa Wadewitz, “Pirates of the Salish Sea: Labor, Mobility, and Environment in the Transnational West,” Pacific Historical Review 75 (2006): 587–627; Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living? Work and Nature,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 171–85.
12 Like many histories of the American West, those of Montana have largely focused on the rich history of natural resource extraction. After the discovery of a major cooper lode in Butte in 1878, Irish, Italian, Croatian, and Slovenian Catholics flocked to the territory and, by the early 1900s, these Catholic immigrants came to define Montana's industrial mining centers. See Ken Egan Jr., Montana 1864: Indians, Emigrants and Gold in the Territorial Year (Helena, MT: Riverbend, 2014); Joseph Kinsey Howard, Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1943); Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); Duane A. Smith, Rocky Mountain Heartland: Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming in the 20th Century (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 2008).
13 For commentary on the irreligiosity of early Western mining communities see Ferenc Morton Szasz, “How Religion Created an Infrastructure,” in Religion and Public Life in the Mountain West: Sacred Landscapes in Transition, eds. Jan Shipps and Mark Silk (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004), 52; D. Michael Quinn, “Religion in the American West,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, eds. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: Norton, 1992), 164.
14 Prior to the “spatial turn” of the 1990s, most research in religion, space, and place focused on sacred space or pilgrimage studies. See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1959); Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); and Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978). Over the last thirty years scholars have shown that place matters to people in the practice of their lived religions—in the development of doctrine and rituals, and in relation to surrounding communities. The “spatial turn” of American religions is expressed most decisively in David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) and developed as a theoretical tool in Thomas Tweed's Crossing and Dwelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) and Kim Knotts’ Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis (London: Equinox, 2005).
15 Aristotle emphasized the word topos as a location, an inert container akin to a GPS location or position on a topographical map. Aristotle, Physics, Books III–IV, translated with notes by Edward Hussey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 209b.
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 5.
16 Richard J. Callahan Jr., Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 3, 156. Callahan's rich description of the development of Pentecostal-Holiness worship in Kentucky coal mining communities sets the stage for a deeper theoretical study of religion, labor, and place.
17 “Industry forms the backdrop for all human activities: machinery and buildings designed to extract, process, and ship mineral wealth stand shoulder to shoulder with small mining communities.” Richard Francaviglia, Hard Places: Reading the Landscape of America's Historic Mining Districts (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 9, 11. See also Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), for an example of the set of relationships formed between miners, capitalists, consumers, and the natural world.
18 Brandi Denison, Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 8.
19 “Arrival of the Governor,” Montana Post, August 27, 1864, 3. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025293/1864-08-27/ed-1/seq-3/
20 Archeological evidence indicates a human presence in Montana beginning in about 5,000 BCE, as well as the migration of Plains Indians to the region in the seventeenth century following migratory wildlife. See Montana Indians: Their History and Location (Helena, MT: Division of Indian Education, Montana Office of Public Instruction, no date).
21 Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West,” California History 77, no. 1 (1998): 34.
22 Elliot West, “Golden Dreams: Colorado, California, and the Reimagining of America,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Autumn 1999, 6.
23 Vine Deloria Jr. notes that a western European philosophy privileges temporal thinking, while “American Indians hold their lands—places—as having the highest possible meaning… . Space generates time, but time has little relationship to space.” Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2003), 61, 70. For examples of Indigenous ties to place see Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Winona LaDuke, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (Boston: South End, 2005); Richard W. Stoffle et al. “Cultural Landscapes and Traditional Cultural Properties: A Southern Paiute View of the Grand Canyon and Colorado River,” American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1997): 229–49; Matthew Wildcat et al., “Learning from the Land: Indigenous Land-based Pedagogy and Decolonization.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 3, no. 3 (2014): I-XV.
24 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 1991) 41–52, 116.
25 Duane Smith, Rocky Mountain Heartland: Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming in the Twentieth Century (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008), x.
26 “Virginia City,” Montana Post, August 27, 1864, 3. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025293/1864-08-27/ed-1/seq-3/.
27 David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 56.
28 Paul Reeve, Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 6.
29 Robert Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden, 1778–1990 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 2.
30 Cornelius Hedges, “25 Year History,” (undated). Cornelius Hedges Family Papers, 1828–1945. MC 33. Box 4, folder 29. Montana Historical Society Research Center, Archives, Helena, Montana.
31 Diary of John W. Grannis (Montana Historical Society, SC 301).
32 Helena Herald, December 12, 1867 (Montana Historical Society).
33 Earl of Dunraven (Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin), Hunting in the Yellowstone (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 63.
34 Kee van den Bos, “Making Sense of Life: The Existential Self: Trying to Deal with Personal Uncertainty,” Psychological Inquiry 20, no. 4 (2009): 200.
35 “These fond hopes were doomed in most instances to be unrealized. So the months ran on to years and still poverty was the heritage that the great majority attained.” Reverend J. D. Hewitt, “The Homes and Churches of Montana,” Helena Weekly Herald, January 2, 1879, 9. (Montana Historical Society).
36 “Our Social Status,” Montana Post, January 28, 1865, 2. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025293/1865-01-28/ed-1/seq-2/.
37 White, It's Your Misfortune, 302.
38 Hewitt, “The Homes and Churches of Montana.” (Montana Historical Society).
39 Bishop Tuttle, “A Pastoral Letter,” in Proceedings of the Convocation of the Clergy and Laity of the Missionary District Comprising the Territories of Montana, Idaho, and Utah (Salt Lake City: Tribune, 1874), 13.
40 For a detailed history of settlement patterns in agricultural areas, see John Mack Faragher's Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
41 “Wives,” Madisonian, Virginia City, December 20, 1873, 4; Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74; Nancy A. Hardesty, Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 33.
42 Susan Armitage, “Through Women's Eyes,” in The Women's West, eds. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 13–14.
43 Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West: 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), xvii. For North American histories of the West that argue for the centrality of race and gender in the making of colonial identities that extend beyond national borders, see Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Myra Rutherdale, Women and the White Man's God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002).
44 Anne Butler, “Prostitution,” in Encyclopedia of Women in the American West, eds. Brenda, Farrington and Gordon Morris Bakken (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 2003), 235; Anne Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Mercy.
45 Space does not permit a full discussion here. For excellent and more thorough considerations of women's experiences, see Mary Ann Irwin and James F. Brooks, Women and Gender in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004); Laurie Maffly-Kipp, “The ‘Wonderous Efficacy’ of Womanhood,” in Religion and Society in Frontier California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
46 Elizabeth Jameson, “The History of Women and the West,” in A Companion to the American West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 181.
47 Jameson, “The History of Women and the West,” 185.
48 Rocky Mountain Husbandman, September 7 1876, 5. Diamond City, MT. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025309/1876-09-28/ed-1/seq-5/.
49 Granville Stuart, “Diary Entry July 19, 1863,” in Forty Years on the Frontier as Seen in the Journals and Reminiscences of Granville Stuart, ed. Paul C. Phillips (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1925), 251.
50 “Informal Conference of the M. E. Church South,” Helena Weekly Herald (August 20, 1874), 8. See the three-column summary of the “Denver General Conference of the M. E. Church South, Held in Helena, M.T., July 29th 1875,” Helena Herald, August 5, 1875, 6; and the revival notes included in the “The Conference at Willow Creek,” Rocky Mountain Husbandman, September 25, 1879, 2. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025309/1879-09-25/ed-1/seq-2/.
51 Quoted in Robert W. Lind, Brother Van: Montana Pioneer Circuit Rider (Helena, MT: Falcon, 1992), 30.
52 This form of American exceptionalism as Protestant exceptionalism was not novel, but an ideology that was woven into the very earliest threads of the national fabric. See the classic nineteenth-century example in Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman and Smith, 1835). For analysis, see Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); George Marsden, “Religion, Politics, and the Search for an American Consensus,” in Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present, eds. Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harrow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); John F. Wilson, “History, Redemption, and the Millennium,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, eds. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 131–41.
53 Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California, 14–16. Extensive scholarship examines national myths about the American West. See, for example, Reginald Horseman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); David Maybury-Lewis, Theodore Macdonald, and Biorn Maybury-Lewis, eds., Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Henry Nash Smith, “The Myth of the Garden and Turner's Frontier Hypothesis,” in Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).
54 “Mission Work in Montana, Extract from a Letter Written by One of the Presbyterian Mission Ministers in this Territory to a Friend in Colorado,” Helena Weekly Herald, November 5, 1874, 3. https://newspaperarchive.com/helena-weekly-herald-nov-05-1874-p-3/.
55 Bishop Matthew Simpson, “Mineral Wealth of Our Territories,” Montana Post, September 3, 1864, 4. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025293/1864-09-03/ed-1/seq-3/.
56 George Grantham Smith, “The Pioneer Presbyterian Home Missionary in Montana,” Contributions to the Montana Historical Society (Helena: Historical Society of Montana, 1907), 295.
57 “History of Virginia City and Nevada City,” https://virginiacitymt.com/history.
58 1886 Methodist Episcopal Annual Conference Minutes, Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, Montana, 43.
59 Daniel S. Tuttle, Spirit of Missions, vol. 32 (New York: Sanford, Harroun and Co., 1867), 692.
60 A. M. Hough, “Establishment of Our Mission in Montana—Notes from My Diary” (1868), Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, Montana.
61 Minutes of the Montana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, Montana (1906); “From Helena.” Montana Post, November 10, 1866, 2. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025293/1866-11-10/ed-1/seq-2/.
62 Reverend Jonathan Blanchard to Reverend Milton Badger, 1864, in Blanchard Correspondence, quoted in Lawrence F. Small, “Gold Camp Preachers,” in Religion in Montana: Pathways to the Present, ed. Lawrence F. Small (Billings, MT: Rocky Mountain College, 1992), 88.
63 Bishop Enoch M. Marvin to Rev. R. J. Stanley, quoted in The Life and Labors of Enoch Mather Marvin, Late Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, ed. Thomas Finney (St. Louis: James H. Chambers, 1880), 531.
64 Alice S. Barnes, “Among the Miners,” Home Missionary, LXVII (August, 1895), 222. (Montana Historical Society).
65 William C. Rommel, “Reminisces of Rev. William C. Rommel,” in “The Pioneer Presbyterian Home Missionary in Montana,” Contributions to the Montana Historical Society, vol. 6 (Helena: Historical Society of Montana, 1907), 269.
66 Reverend E. R. Dodds, Montana Churchmen, vol. 24 (August, 1906), 308.
67 Billings Gazette, May 24, 1914, 1, https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/411006454/.
68 George Beatty, “George Beatty,” in Headwaters Heritage History (Three Forks, MT: Three Forks Area Historical Society, 1983), 53–54.
69 A number of excellent place-based studies on the intersection of religion and work have been produced. See Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Callahan, Work and Faith; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
70 Callahan, Work and Faith, 50.
71 Helena Weekly Herald, April 2, 1874, 7, https://newspaperarchive.com/helena-weekly-herald-apr-02-1874-p-7/.
72 Montanian, April 2, 1874, 3 Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, Montana.
73 This is not to say that revivals created a cohesive American Protestantism, but, rather, that mining camp revivals followed a pattern similar to the episodic efforts at renewal and revival geared toward a religiously plural community that defined the Great Awakenings. See Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 177; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1939); William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 2; Richard M. Riss, A Survey of 20th-Century Revival Movements in North America (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1988), 5.
74 The success of Protestantism in the religious marketplace of the mining camp relied on the success of the sales representative (missionary) and their product (revival). See Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 17; Harry Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 35; George Thomas, Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 15; R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 11, 84; Robert W. Lind, Brother Van: Montana Pioneer Circuit Rider (Helena, MT: Falcon, 1992), 15.
75 Charles Grandison Finney, “Lecture XIV,” Lectures on Revivals of Religion (New York: Leavitt, Lord and Co., 1835), 252.
76 Lind, Brother Van, 83.
77 In regard to Brother Van's preaching, see Robert Lind, From the Ground Up (Polson, MT: Treasure State, 1961), 102.
78 Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 105.
79 “Local News,” Madisonian, February 6, 1875, 2. http://montananewspapers.org/lccn/sn86091484/1875-02-06/ed-1/seq-2/.
80 “Funeral Services,” Montana Post, February 9, 1867, 8. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025293/1867-02-09/ed-1/seq-8/.
81 Charles N. Alpers, Michael P. Hunerlach, Jason T. May, and Roger L. Hothem, “Mercury Contamination from Historical Gold Mining in California,” US Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2005-3014 (May 11, 2005). https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3014/.
82 “Holes in the Mountains,” Montana Post, August 27, 1864, 2. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025293/1864-08-27/ed-1/seq-2/.
83 Limerick, “The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West,” 32.
84 Human corporeality necessitates materiality and emplacement. Bodies are the referential centers through which the world is experienced and understood. Miners perceived their world first through their individual somatic and sensual perceptions and, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues, “Every sensation is spatial.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge Classics, 1962), 256.
85 “Local News,” Madisonian, February 13, 1875, 2. http://montananewspapers.org/lccn/sn86091484/1875-02-13/ed-1/seq-2/. See Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion, 49.
86 Hewitt, “The Homes and Churches of Montana.”
87 Smith, “The Pioneer Presbyterian Home Missionary in Montana,” 295, see also 298.
88 Moore, Selling God, 209; Richard J. Callahan Jr., Kathryn Lofton, and Chad E. Seales, “Allegories of Progress: Industrial Religion in the United States,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 1 (March 2010): 28.
89 George Logan, “Brother Van as I Knew and Understood Him” (manuscript) (Yellowstone Conference Archives, Rocky Mountain College, Billings, MT, no date), 12.
90 Monica Rico, Nature's Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 9. See Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 59, 135–36; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), chapters 10, 11; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
91 “From Salmon Mines,” Montana Post, March 28, 1868, 6. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025293/1868-03-28/ed-1/seq-6/.
92 “Our Social Status,” Montana Post, January 28, 1865, 2. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025293/1865-01-28/ed-1/seq-2/.
93 “Women's Place in Nature,” Rocky Mountain Husbandman, September 7, 1876, 5. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025309/1876-09-07/ed-1/seq-5/.
94 Laura McCall, “Introduction,” in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (New York: Routledge, 2001), 7. Much work remains to be done on the actual perspectives of women in the American West. For a more detailed look at the historiography of the subject see Jameson.
95 E. D. Aye, “The Dying Son—In Montana,” Montana Post, September 3, 1864, 4.
96 Lind, Brother Van, 53; “Golden Sheaves,” Rocky Mountain Husbandman, October 24, 1878, 5.
97 Mills, Jacob, “Record of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Sun River, Montana, 1879–1890” (New York: Home Mission Society, 1890), 13Google Scholar, Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, Montana.
98 “Quarterly Conference Record Book, Demersville, Mont., 1884–1892,” (Montana Historical Society).
99 C. W. Clarke, Baptist Home Mission Monthly, 5 (October 1883): 224.
100 Thomas, Revivalism and Culture Change, 83, 92.
101 From a single “mining camp priest,” Father Regimus de Ryckere in 1876; by 1900, 73.1 percent of Montana's population was Catholic. Walter Nugent, “The Religious Demography of an Oasis Culture,” in Religion in Public Life in the Mountain West, edited by Mark Silk and Jan Shipps (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 33. For a detailed history of space, religion, and labor in Butte, see Brennan Keegan, After Eden: Religion and Labor in the American West, 1864–1914 (PhD diss., Duke University, 2018).
102 Murphy, Mary, “Bootlegging Mothers and Drinking Daughters: Gender and Prohibition in Butte, Montana,” American Quarterly 46, no. 2 (June 1994): 174CrossRefGoogle Scholar.