When Brother Van reached the settlement of Great Falls on his first visit, it was nothing but a great undeveloped possibility. “Here we must have a church,” said this apostle of first things. An ambitious, far-seeing group of men constituting the Townsite Company was interviewed. They gave several lots to the enthusiastic dreamer of a greater day for Montana. With the assured membership of two devoted souls and the gift of land, a church was started.
Is this record of “first things” beginning to make you dizzy? Does the recounting make you weary? But suppose you were the missionary! Through heat and cold, through drought and rain, over green prairie and bleakdesert, you would have to travel. You would have met plainsmen and Indians, friends and foes. You would have endured hunger and thirst. You would have rested under the stars on the open prairie and in the rude shelter afforded by the ranchmen’s bunks. You would have been obliged to be the leader in the building of first churches and first parsonages. All this costs energy and vitality, as Brother Van, seemingly tireless though he was, once discovered.
BROTHER VAN WAS “HAIL FELLOW WELL MET” WITH THE PEOPLE
One day death seemed about to claim the scout-missionary. He was very weary and very ill, for mountain fever had him in its firm hold. Then how the little churches rallied to their friend! After much praying and after careful nursing, he was sent on a vacation that he might get well. This was the only sick leave that he has ever had. Forty-five years Brother Van has spent with his “shoulder against the horizon.” He has pushed the frontier back and back, and in all those years he has never been ill but once; then nature demanded a rest.
Leaving his friends greatly concerned over his condition, Brother Van went to Seattle,Washington, to recuperate. That rest period turned out to be something of a joke. In an old record of the Battery Street Church in Seattle, there is an entry showing that certain meetings were held in the church at this time, and noting that the evangelist was W. W. Van Orsdel. He had gone away in October. In December he was back in Montana holding revival meetings from Helena to Glendive, a distance of two hundred and forty miles.
CHAPTER XI
BROTHER VAN AND NEW MONTANA
THE building of railroads through the state of Montana brought a rapid development. The section around Great Falls became a prosperous farming country. The settlement, therefore, formed a new center for the church, and Brother Van came to this district, not as a missionary at large, nor junior preacher, nor circuit-rider this time, he came now as a presiding elder, or district superintendent for all of that part of Montana east of the Rocky Mountains and north of the Musselshell River. It was known as the North Montana Mission and was about five twelfths of the total area of the state. Let us get some idea concerning this new work with which Brother Van was busy by making a comparison. The whole of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland,and the District of Columbia could be placed within the bounds of the district and still leave four thousand square miles of territory.
In all this area there were three hundred and fifty-five members of Brother Van’s church and fifty-three probationers. There were ten church buildings altogether. This property was valued at twenty-five thousand dollars. There were four parsonages valued at four thousand dollars. The twenty Sunday-schools had a membership of nine hundred and twenty-five. The ten preachers received five thousand, six hundred and fifty-one dollars a year, or an average of five hundred and sixty dollars each. The churches gave four hundred and seventy-six dollars to benevolences.