Brother Van

by Stella Wyatt Brummitt

They gave a mighty push and the buggy went over. But, alas! the bundle had slipped out into the water, and as they looked, it was being rapidly carried down-stream. Iliff, whowas standing on the high bank, called out, “Van, you’d better get that package. It belongs to my wife.”

In the dismay of the moment, Brother Van forgot that he didn’t know how to swim. Out he struck. With mighty splashes and flounderings, he overtook the package and brought it to shore. Then those two preachers stood and looked at each other, wet to the skin, hatless and disheveled, hands torn and bleeding, sermons no longer dry, and the package seemingly ruined. In a moment they burst into boyish laughter, and all was well. While they consulted as to the next move, a ranchman came along and took them home with him. From a promiscuous jumble of clothing the preachers were outfitted. When they were dressed and came into the light of the room and beheld each other, they laughed again like truant schoolboys. They were comical figures enough in the makeshift garments of that frontier home. They went to church in those clothes, and began a revival which meant a great deal to the life of that community.

The bundle? Oh, that was a fine black silkdress. When the preachers returned to the ranchman’s home, they found their own clothes dry and in condition for wearing. The beautiful, lustrous silk found in the package was hung in rich folds about the room to dry. The water in Madison River was crystal clear and did not injure the silk, which was of good grade.

An amazing thing about this evangelistic team was that though of the East eastern, yet they won immediate favor with the people among whom they labored. The shrewd Westerners would have detected any insincerity in the missionaries, and the cowboy’s mission in life seemed to be to “shoot up” anything not genuine. It is hard for us to-day to imagine the wild and lawless life on those lonely plains of the great West. These two men, and many other pioneers for the church, carried on their ministry in the face of severe handicaps in a frontier region. The principal difficulties grew out of the isolation of the settlements, and the slow means of communication with the older parts of the country.

The Missouri River provided the naturalmeans of access to the Northwest, and as early as 1851 fire-boats began to reach Fort Benton. For a long period only one boat a year made this hard passage; then gold was discovered, and there followed a rush of new settlers, so that in 1866, forty steamers came into the old fur-trading post. For a third of a century the stage-coach had no rival as the means of travel for passengers. One of the most famous stage lines was over Mullen’s Trail, which ran west from Fort Benton for hundreds of miles. This trail was opened through government land by Captain Mullen and his company of soldiers for the use of miners. Holliday’s Overland Stage Line played an important part in the development of the West. It ran from Atchison, Kansas, to Denver, Colorado, and to Salt Lake City, Utah, where other lines connected with it. One of these lines extended to Virginia City in what had been Brother Van’s district, and from there to Helena, a distance altogether of nineteen hundred miles, usually covered in twenty-two days.

In order to secure rapid transportation for the mails, the Pony Express was established in1861 and maintained for three years. A band of swift riders, eighty in number, would cover the vast distances of the prairie in an incredibly short space of time. One rider, for instance, would leave Sacramento, while another rider started from St. Joseph, Missouri, at the eastern end of the route. Each would ride swiftly and as silently as possible, guarding the precious mail at all hazards, and would come, after fifteen to twenty miles of riding, to a station where a fresh horse, saddled and bridled, was held by a waiting agent. The riders were allowed two minutes for the change of horses; then on they went over the ever-widening prairie to the next station. The fastest time in which a piece of mail was ever carried was seven days and seventeen minutes.

Sometimes the station was found to be but a smoking pile of ruins, and sometimes, alas, the station-keeper would be discovered scalped by wandering Indians. It is said that only one package was lost in the three years that the Pony Express was operated. This happened when the rider was killed after being robbed. Another time, the faithful pony came in alongwith the package bound safely to the saddle; his rider had been killed as he rode.

Omaha was the nearest railroad station, and to reach this distant city meant a hard journey for the miner who had made his “pile” and wished to go back home. Gold dust was the only money and it was weighed and taken at its weight’s value. The traveler could go on horseback or wagon to Fort Benton and then take passage on a steamboat to Sioux City, Iowa. Another method of travel was to follow the trail on horseback to Salt Lake City, and take the train or the stage-coach from there. The cost of the latter mode of travel can be estimated when it is known that the sending of a letter in that way cost two dollars and a half. All travel was dangerous, for with the finding of gold, desperate men had come west, who robbed and killed for the wealth so hazardously secured by the miners. Hold-ups were regular occurrences, particularly between Bannack and Virginia City, a distance of seventy miles.

Miners who had spent months of hard labor in the accumulation of a few hundred dollarswere never heard of again after starting from a mine to a distant home eastward. Men were robbed in camp, daily and nightly. Gambling and all forms of evil abounded. Many of the men who disappeared were found to have been shot ruthlessly. The nature of the country, with its canyons, gulches, and mountain passes, was especially adapted to this means of highway robbery. The unpeopled distances between the mining camps also helped the lawless element to do their bloody work. Nowhere else on the face of the earth, nor at any period since men became civilized, have murder, robbery, and social vice presented such an organized front.

The young territory determined to stop this trade of stage-robbing and formed a protecting band called the “Vigilantes.” The name is associated with some of the bloodiest episodes of frontier days. In the absence of any other protection, the Vigilantes took law into their own hands, and dealt sternly with the highway robber and murderer. Between December, 1863, and February, 1864, twenty-four “road agents” were hanged by the Vigilantes fortheir crimes against the miners. Two years later, one million and five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold was taken from Helena to Fort Benton unmolested.