Diggers, Hatters, Muckmen, and Sourdoughs: Montana Miners

The West has been variously defined. Territorially, the West has been regarded as the twenty-six states west of the ninety-eighth meridian and the Mississippi River, where, climatically, excluding the Pacific Northwest, the average annual rainfall is less than twenty inches and the harsh, unpredictable weather has made settlement patterns both difficult and innovative. Alternatively, using the rubric of cultural identity, Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley were once considered part of the American frontier. The Rocky Mountain West—a subregion that encompasses the U.S. Rocky Mountains and serves as the imagined Old West setting for countless dime novels and contemporary films—contains more than fifty of the nation's tallest peaks, extreme temperature variations, and a historically low population density. The West is a site of multiple and contested histories and, as Brandi Denison notes, “is best understood as a product of historical imagination … [and] cultural memory”—a cultural product that those who emigrated through its porous borders had to grapple with, just as they re-created it.Footnote ¹⁸

Montana, one of the United States's largest in area and lowest in population, stands as the northern entrance to this subregion. In an 1864 speech, the first Territorial Governor, Sidney Edgerton, remarked, “[T]he vast richness of our Territory, its climate, mountain scenery, &c., [are] beckoning the honest emigrant to this ‘Switzerland’ of America.”Footnote ¹⁹ Carved by the movement of glaciers some twelve thousand years ago, southwestern Montana's “big sky” is composed of sharp and rugged peaks separated by wide, dry, grassy valleys.

In the 1840s, Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean de Smet built the first permanent Euro-American settlement in what would become Montana as a mission outpost to the Flathead Indians, one of twelve Indigenous communities native to the area.Footnote ²⁰ Cattle ranches began to flourish on the eastern plains in the 1860s, but the early gold rush towns rarely proved lasting until the discovery of copper. As Patricia Limerick notes, mining in the western interior was markedly different from the California Gold Rush, in part because of the dramatically rougher landscape and climate.Footnote ²¹ Additionally, and unlike other Rocky Mountain states, Montana did not contain portions of the Oregon, Mormon, Santa Fe, or California Trails. The lack of white movement through the territory limited the need for trading outposts, which, in other western territories, eventually grew to be the first towns and cities. As Elliot West notes, although the seizure of California during the Mexican War and the California Gold Rush redefined national visions of the United States, the heart of the nation remained empty: “[T]he national destiny reached out over the continent, but it did not yet cover the continent.”Footnote ²² The Pike's Peak Gold Rush began the process of filling in the center, but Montana remained north of center for another two decades. Thus, the mining centers of Bannack, Virginia City, Nevada City, Garnet, Pony, and Last Chance Gulch (later Helena) marked the first large-scale intrusion of white migrants to the Territory in the 1860s and 1870s.

As miners altered the landscape in search of mineral deposits, they ascribed their own sense of place to the land, displacing and overwriting the Indigenous geography of the region.Footnote ²³ To define space is to wield power. Miners’ efforts on a local level were predicated on those of federal surveyors, who worked to subdivide the American landscape into a grid of townships and farms, creating a matrix for a scientific order directed toward the containment and management of peoples and lands. This nationalist project, as geographer Henri Lefebvre argues, creates abstract space, that which constantly normalizes and reproduces class and racial hierarchies under the explicit understanding that one set of rules govern society, commerce, and the religious body. To Lefebvre, the production of abstract space is actively authoritarian and conceals a vast network of differentiated places.Footnote ²⁴ The process of displacement, removal, and relocation of Indigenous peoples following the discovery of precious metals has been replicated across the United States, in gold rushes from California to the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory.

Indeed, federal officials cast Montana miners as participants in a national project of economic expansionism and American exceptionalism. As President Abraham Lincoln commented to Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax in 1865: “[The western miners’] prosperity is the prosperity of the Nation, and we shall prove in a very few years that we are indeed the treasury of the world.”Footnote ²⁵ Mineral wealth powered progress itself, igniting the imagination to visions of human potential and the salvation of modern civilization. As the first newspaper of the Territory proclaimed: “No richer diggings exist. … The amount of precious metal existing in these lands will not be known for hundreds of years; for none can estimate the period when they will be exhausted. … [T]he future of Montana Territory is bright and dazzling.”Footnote ²⁶ In the eyes of the nation, Montana miners were the new Adam, reinventing the Garden of Eden in the American West as robust agents in the drama of the American pageant.

Prospecting for gold was an abstract form of labor, translated into cash through trade, and mediated by nonlocal national and transnational market forces. As historian David Goodman argues, an emergent “equalitarian republicanism” emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, which reconciled an ideology of self-aggrandizement with the growing imperialism of the nation. That is, the growing laissez-faire ideology of the United States encouraged the single-minded pursuit of wealth found in gold rush communities as a form of patriotism.Footnote ²⁷ As Paul Reeve notes in regard to Utah, “A hierarchy of Americanness emerged that favored the miners as the embodiment of American progress, industry, and quest for wealth.”Footnote ²⁸ The conquest of the West became a major victory under a “capitalist culture of systematization,” in which nature was abstracted according to a cultural script of progression and material output.Footnote ²⁹

Gold mining communities in the Territory of Montana were fully entrenched in the extraction of mineral resources. First through the use of simple hand tools, such as picks and shovels, and later by way of hydraulic mining and mechanical rock drills, miners physically altered the landscape to separate precious metal deposits from gravels. The pursuit of gold dominated the economy of town and region and influenced the makeup of community life. As early miner Cornelius Hedges noted, in Helena's first decade the mining camp resembled the “New Jerusalem only in one respect, that its streets were paved with gold, a misfortune in our case, for this paving was torn up and run through sluice boxes.”Footnote ³⁰

Mining camps served as epicenters for trade and leisure, and offered miners the promise of a hot meal and a warm (and likely filthy) bed after six days standing in a freezing stream, hammering stone, shoveling gravel, and sleeping on the ground at individual mining claims. In 1864, Virginia City miner John Grannis journaled, “I feel the need of Rest. a years [sic] hard work in the mine has made me feel ten years older.”Footnote ³¹ These camps were a far cry from picturesque. Streets were churned to mud by the many freight teams, quartz wagons, and merchants carrying staples in and gold dust out. As the Helena Herald commented in 1867:

Wooden sidewalks were hastily constructed to commute a procession of miners attempting to spend their newly or, in most cases, yet-to-be-acquired fortunes.

The propaganda found in Eastern handbooks, broadsides, and newspapers vaunting the rich prospects of Montana were often overstated. Spoiling his romantic imaginings of Western life, the Earl of Dunraven was disappointed to find Virginia City to be a “street of straggling shanties, a bank, a blacksmith's shop, a few dry goods stores, and bar-rooms. … The whole place was a delusion and a snare.”Footnote ³³ In contrast to many professions practiced in the East, gold mining was largely a game of chance. This shift from a near-certain reward for labor or production was replaced by an uncertain reliance on mine output, affecting people's worldview more broadly. As psychologist Kee van den Bos argues, “[U]ncertainty deprives one of confidence in how to behave and what to expect from the physical and social environment within which one finds oneself. … [T]oo much personal uncertainty threatens the meaning of existence.”Footnote ³⁴ Thousands traveled to Montana mining communities with the promise of economic salvation, but the muddy and cold wait was at times insufferable.Footnote ³⁵

Yet, this wait also fed a self-proclaimed identity of tenacity: “The great features of our people are enterprise, restless activity and contempt of danger or privation. … Some people would grumble about cold if they lived in an oven—and such fossil remnants of a slumbering age had better stay in the States.”Footnote ³⁶ The Territory of Montana was deeply entangled in national trends and movements. The individualism, single-minded pursuit of wealth, and laissez-faire attitudes connected miners to the prevailing social ideologies of late-nineteenth-century America. But what was celebrated in social theory and economics was feared as a social reality.Footnote ³⁷

Missionaries bemoaned the moral negligence of miners who spent their leisure time in the many saloons, gambling halls, and brothels of the community. As Rev. J. Hewitt of the American Home Missionary Society noted: “Drinking and gambling saloons flourished. … Many even of those who had been carefully trained at home in the school and the church, grew careless and forgot to pray. Nearly all forgot the Sabbath, and remembered God's holy name only to use it in curses of malice and thoughtlessness.”Footnote ³⁸ Ten years after Montana became a territory, Episcopal Bishop Daniel S. Tuttle remarked on the continued plight of Christian community in Montana:

Unlike the settled agricultural communities of the West,Footnote ⁴⁰ male laborers dominated the fleeting and disorganized mining communities, which lacked the presumably Christian constraints of wife, family, and church.

Victorian ideologies of True Womanhood or the Cult of Domesticity advocated strictly regulated gender roles, in which women acted as the sacred center by which men could morally redeem themselves after a day in the world of business and commerce: “A man is sometimes overtaken with misfortune; he meets with failure and defeat; trials and temptations beset him, and he needs one to stand by and sympathize.”Footnote ⁴¹ As Susan Armitage argues, Victorian women became staples of Western lore as “gentle tamers,” whose passive presence “was enough to make rough and rowdy men think about polite behavior.”Footnote ⁴² However, in addition to the racist ideology underlying the assumption that the West only became “civilized” with the arrival of white women, the nineteenth-century Rocky Mountain West was never a place of ornamental women.Footnote ⁴³ And in Montana, the relative absence of wives and mothers challenged this Protestant ideal.

Like women throughout the mining West, Montana's women faced limited options because the industry only employed men. And, as Butler notes, western mining districts harbored conditions favorable to prostitution, including “volatile and destructive cultural contacts, lopsided power relations and population demographics between men and women, fiscal instability in western industries, and poor management of military personnel at both urban and rural garrisons.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Contrary to stereotypes of “good” white women as Christian civilizers and hypersexual “bad” women as prostitutes, however, a diversity of women played complex and vital roles in the emerging communities.Footnote ⁴⁵ Most found work providing domestic services at home or for pay, while others turned to prostitution.Footnote ⁴⁶ What remains true, however, are descriptions of the extreme gender imbalance. As late as 1920, the U.S. Census counted 120 men for every woman in Montana.Footnote ⁴⁷

The places produced by the labor of gold were gendered male. As sites dominated by commerce, with few permanent homes and most services catering to the exclusively male miners, women's presence was perceived as deviant. As one newspaper lamented, “What can we say to women who voluntarily fling themselves into circumstances when they know that they will lose their tenderness, their modesty, their unselfishness, their devotion?”Footnote ⁴⁸ As we will see, although few wives joined their transient husbands in the mining camps from the 1860s to 1880s, and women's physical presence was often regarded as aberrant, successful missionaries called on their imagined presence as a corrective to male society. In Montana, the relative absence of Christian women, just as it presented challenges, became a tool of missionary efforts.

Standard missionary practices did not fit the social and economic places produced by the male miners in pursuit of gold. Long, drawn-out theological expositions did not appeal to the miners whose daily lives were circumscribed by back-breaking work in a place dedicated to economic gain. As one miner noted: “I am glad I do not have to attend church and sit on a bench two hours listening to some fellow telling us how much hotter it would be somewhere else, and that we were headed for that particular spot.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The structures of Eastern evangelical piety could not be transplanted into the Western landscape. Yet, nineteenth-century Montanan newspapers often printed entire pages relating the daily events of multiday revivals, summaries of sermons noted large audiences, and clerical diaries tell a triumphant history of Protestant interest and conversion. As the Helena Herald recorded in 1874, “There has [sic] been a number of revivals of religion within our bounds and scores have been converted and added to our Church, which is stronger than ever before.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The home missionaries who appropriated miner social patterns in their evangelical practices—those who participated in the production of new religious registers—were responsible.

Building New Foundations: Home Missionaries

In the nineteenth century, thousands of home missionary societies, located primarily in the northeast, embraced the idea that the West was a crucial staging ground for the postmillennial divine plan and a site of national deliverance. As William Wesley “Brother Van” Orsdel, a leader in the Methodist movement in Montana, proclaimed: “[T]here is a voice inside me, calling, pleading with me to way out west.”Footnote ⁵¹ Urban industrialism and non-Protestant immigration threatened Protestant leaders’ conceptions of the United States as a Christian nation.Footnote ⁵² Thus, as Maffly-Kipp demonstrates, mid-nineteenth-century Evangelicals “located their hopes for human redemption in the promises of a region unsettled and largely unexplored by Euro-Americans.”Footnote ⁵³

The future of this region depended on the efforts of home missionaries: “There is a history before this people, and whether it shall be sad or bright, must depend upon Christian effort sustained, or the absence of it.”Footnote ⁵⁴ It was not merely a romantic ideology of divine providence, however. In postbellum America, Eastern church leaders did not miss the economic value of Western mines. As Bishop Matthew Simpson of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia proclaimed, “[T]here is wealth enough there when our debt is paid off, to give every soldier … muskets of sliver. … Such wealth never was a matter of contest among all the powers of the earth before.”Footnote ⁵⁵ It fell to Christian missionaries to guide Western aspirations toward promised salvation, both spiritually and materially, as part of a sacred American destiny.

Yet, when crossing into the American West, home missionaries had to recalibrate their understandings of proper Christian piety. The lack of resources, both financial and human, as well as a shortsighted investment in mining communities, often translated to a lack of established religious institutions and the construction of physical houses of worship. There was no community stability to support regular Sunday services for multiple denominations or the financial backing to build churches and employ clergy: “There was no Presbytery, no church, no Sabbath when I entered Montana. It was hard ‘prospecting’ in those days.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Virginia City, an early capital of the Territory, went from ten thousand fortune hunters in 1865, to two thousand by the end of the 1860s, and dwindled to six hundred by 1890.Footnote ⁵⁷ Outside of Butte and Helena, communities that came to be dominated by Catholic immigrants, Montana had few permanent white settlements until the early twentieth century.

Home missionaries were appalled by the violation of the Sabbath by shopkeepers and miners alike: “Stores are open; business men are engaged, and hold their employes [sic]. This state of affairs interferes with all kinds of Christian work, and experience to arrest it is a serious question.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Six-day workweeks meant church services literally competed with auctioneers, liquor shops, and “hurdy-gurdy houses” eagerly accepting miners’ wages earned after a week spent in the trenches. As Bishop Tuttle remarked of Helena on August 14, 1867: “The miners all around do not work on Sunday. It is their day for trade.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Religion was only one option of many in the developing marketplace of Western society.

Without permanent church structures, town halls, courtrooms, saloons, sawmills, and tents stood in as sacred space for itinerant preachers. As the Reverend A. M. Hough noted, missionaries literally occupied the miners’ space: “I preached the first sermons in most of the places, sometimes in saloons or private cabins, and often on the streets.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In some cases, it was pointless to build a church edifice at all, as the mine would eventually run dry, leaving a ghost town and an empty church in its wake. By 1906, ten Methodist churches had been abandoned in the Helena district alone. For “[t]he American miner is a migratory animal, who will always leave five dollars a day for the possibility of twenty.”Footnote ⁶¹ The places created by mining communities were constantly in movement, tied to unreliable discoveries of gold—a stark contrast to the established communities of the East.

Bolstered by the political and economic value of Montana, home missionaries recognized the territory's spiritual value, but the rapidly developing and lawless mining communities, and even the very existence of gold itself, presented problems for missionaries from the start. As the Reverend Milton Badger remarked in his memoirs, “It would seem as if God had placed the gold in such centers of physical desolation to show how small an agency God has in making men happy.”Footnote ⁶² The financial instability, isolation, and environmental and social dangers made it more difficult for missionary societies to secure missionaries to the Territory of Montana than it was to convince people to travel abroad to Asia and Africa: “The great trouble about the work in Montana is the want of men of the right sort to go and stay … men of enterprise, who had the work at heart.”Footnote ⁶³ While the West may have been calling, Montana's dramatic landscape, and the community of rough and rowdy men drawn there, complicated the divine plan.

Many Protestant preachers had come and gone with little success. Montana miners made strong demands on the clergy. As Alice S. Barnes, a Congregational minister, wrote: “Montana is no place for the dude divinity students or pastors who stand on their dignity. … Manhood is the standard of society in this rough but hearty land.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Miners’ lives were based on physical exertion for the next paycheck and survival in a harsh climate. Degrees from seminaries and intellectual ramblings on doctrine were irrelevant. In communities where leisure time was spent in the saloon and gambling hall, a sermon on temperance (a popular topic in the Eastern pulpit) was a sure ticket home. After claiming “All Helena's drunk on Christmas day” in an 1873 sermon, one preacher remarked, “Some would not speak to me. … On entering the store of one of my congregation he shook a warning finger and bade me look out for myself.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Missionaries who appropriated the hardworking and independent ideals of the Montana lifestyle were more likely to have followers: “Never was there a time when character, or a place where conduct counted for more than they do here today. The missionary's life is an unspoken sermon which is forever preaching to others.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Like the individualism perpetuated by the miners themselves, miners looked to missionaries not as bastions of denominations, but as individual men with a message. Those ministers who adapted to the Western societies prospered, while those who held rigid visions of genteel behavior quickly returned to Eastern homes, and were permanently labeled “tenderfoot.”

Without the support of an established church system, all efforts fell to the missionary, providing him with a unique, but challenging, quest. As the Billings Gazette reported, “[A missionary] must build his foundations on the excavations of his own digging, erect the superstructure of his own planning, and pay the workman with the funds of his own creation.”Footnote ⁶⁷ To make matters worse, mining camps were defined by poor living conditions and a high price tag. For example, miner George Beatty recalled standing in the center of Virginia City, holding an eight-pound watermelon when someone offered “$2.50 in gold for the melon.”Footnote ⁶⁸ (Adjusted for inflation that would be roughly $41 in 2020). The high cost of living in mining communities necessitated missionaries to find alternative forms of income, which largely meant joining a claim. In this way, many missionaries literally participated in the material worlds and experiences of those to whom they preached.

Unlike the coal and hard rock mining communities of Appalachia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, or the company towns of New England, placer gold communities were temporary and heterogeneous, and miners often worked alone or in small teams. But like other communities predominately dedicated to a single occupation, the spaces and social structures of the communities reflected the work and labor of the community.Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, they were produced in tandem. As Callahan argues, “[R]eligion was itself a form of work—an ongoing work of interpretation and orientation, in thought and imagination as well as in behavior and interaction with the world.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Religious forms from back East could not be simply transmitted into the landscape. Rather, missionaries had to constantly work to produce and reproduce religious frames that fit the place-based needs of Montana's gold mining communities—communities that were likewise constantly shifting and articulating new spatial relations.

The Gospel Train Is Comin’: Evangelical Revivals

On April 2, 1874, Virginia City experienced its first revival, filling Templar Hall to capacity for two weeks. As a Helena newspaper reported, “We are glad to hear it, for no town in Montana needs reformation more, and we hope it may continue until every sinner in the place shall be brought to a realizing sense of his depraved and wicked condition.”Footnote ⁷¹ As the Montanian newspaper opined, “The large daily attendance, and the marked interest manifested by our people in general, is conclusive evidence that the movement is heartily endorsed here, and we hope it may prove a lasting good.”Footnote ⁷² In the places produced by gold mining, lacking infrastructure and the Eastern foundations of Christian community—families, church buildings, regular Sunday services, and schools—Protestant missionaries had to adopt alternative tools of evangelism to fit the particularities of place. And the easily enacted “get-saved-quick” approach of revivals, or protracted meetings, appealed to the “get-rich-quick” lifestyle of mining communities.

Western mining camps may have been physically isolated in the rocky crags of the Tobacco Root, Absaroka, Bitterroot, and Elkhorn mountain ranges, but through the movement of miners, missionaries, and minerals, they were connected to a multiplicity of spaces. Revivals connected Montana mining camps to a diverse history of American Christianity, from Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield to future revivalists Billy Sunday and Billy Graham.Footnote ⁷³ Home missionaries in the Territory adopted a commodity approach to evangelical revivals as practiced by their forebearers in the northeast and in the Ohio-Mississippi River Valley. As Harry S. Stout argues, modern evangelicalism emerged in tandem with the rise of an Anglo-American commodity culture in the early eighteenth century. Along with other leisure-time activities, “religion increasingly represented a product that could be marketed” and revivals flourished in regions dominated by market forces. Religion had to become “profit conscious” within a moral landscape dictated by economic gain.Footnote ⁷⁴

As Charles G. Finney warned, “[T]he ten thousand exciting and counteracting influences that bear upon the church and upon the world” will distract men from Christ, “without very exciting preaching, and sufficient novelty in measures, to get the public ear.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The entertainment offered by revivals was regularly recorded in Montana's newspapers and personal reminisces, marked by singing and pragmatic and emotional appeals to miners, not drawn out theological expositions. Brother Van wrote in his diary: “Any persons who were skeptical about the ‘old-time religion’ had their minds disabused by the singing, praying and shouting at these meetings.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The embodied religious practice of revivalism resonated with miners whose lives were dedicated to physical labor.

Eliciting powerful waves of emotion and joyful responses, revivals were noted for the physicality of preaching:

Trading on the experiences of misfortune, revivalists were not afraid to “trigger deep emotional reactions in their hearers, convinced from their own experience that such a process was the only way to produce genuine conversion.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Contrary to the earlier revivals of the East, however, permanent church structures did not exist to maintain religious fervor, nor did antigambling and temperance societies take root. Instead of serving as a stepping stone to institutionalized religious community, the revival remained center stage, its fleeting and emotionally intense form matching that of the migrant miner.

In 1875, another revival fired up Virginia City, as the Madisonian announced: “‘The Gospel Train’ has steam up. … The conductors are eager to sell tickets, and the brakemen are keeping the train steady on the track leading to salvation, with the terminal station ‘Eternity’ in view.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Utilizing discursive categories that encompassed modern technology of the time, revivals were advertised as entertaining and progressive displays of morality. They captured miner excitement for participating in the forward movement of time and, yet, asserted a message that oriented the miners to their present circumstances. In the lives of Montana ministers and miners, religion was always in process, never static, but continually adapted to fit within the structures of everyday life presented by the mining camps.

The realities of gold mining afforded a brutal existence. Most miners came to Montana without the technical skills necessary to safely build or work mining claims. Particularly during the early years of mine operation, many workers died or were injured on the job. When Samuel Moore died from wounds sustained in Oro Fino Gulch, near Virginia City, the Reverend A. M. Hough “delivered an eloquent and impressive discourse on the brevity and uncertainty of human life.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Miners broke down placer ores—alluvial deposits composed of fossilized clay and gravel—with picks and trowels and washed the broken rock down hydraulic mining pits to wash away debris. Liquid mercury was then applied to form a gold-mercury amalgam that could be more easily recovered.Footnote ⁸¹ As mining progressed into deeper pits, ladders were used to drop miners into the bowels of the earth. After a particularly hard day of labor, some miners simply did not resurface. In an article explaining drifting, or the use of horizontal tunnels, the author notes, “frequently the piling gives way, and the unfortunate miner is intombed [sic] in a vault dug with his own hands.”Footnote ⁸² If not injured or killed in a mining accident, mercury fumes and ore waste offered a constant threat to the health of workers. And in contrast to the imagined West where ailing people went to recover their health, the instant-towns of the Rocky Mountain West “became a horror in public health and sanitation.”Footnote ⁸³ Open sewage, rotting food, and a lack of commitment to bathing made mining camps hazardous on numerous fronts. The place created by the materiality of the gold mine and, therefore, the haptic engagement of the laborers resulted in a social system that folded outward from the body and into the mining community and region.Footnote ⁸⁴ The toils of labor marked and united miner bodies in a shared identity.

But labor in the often harsh, unpredictable Western landscape also reflected inward, orienting miners to their new surroundings and aiding them in a search for meaning. Revival ministers expounded a message of personal salvation, in which miners could take their religious destiny into their own hands. This was a compelling narrative for nineteenth-century Montana miners, who imagined the individual at the center of cultural order and social change: “Every man's religion is his own concern, and he is alone responsible to God for the correctness of his opinions, and the subject should never be a matter of public decision.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Revivals came to reflect subjective religious experience over systematic church instruction. The Presbyterian Reverend J. D. Hewitt, of Helena, concurred, noting, “It is not necessary to dwell upon the state of the moral and social atmosphere when the only element of which society was composed was man.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Just as the missionary had to function without institutional support, miners’ pursuit of wealth and salvation stood alone.

Home missionaries did not condemn mineral wealth as a negative force, as the entire social system was built on the pursuit of gold. The Reverend Grantham's first sermon in Virginia City was I Timothy 4:8, “Godliness is profitable unto all things,” in which he “made it eminently practical and tried to show them whatever good and profitable was in anything, was in godliness.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Miners’ greed could be forgiven and earthly delights could be translated as rewards for the hard working and righteous, as a means to participate in God's abundance. Materialism and industrialism were not categorically opposed to the spiritualism and moralism of religion, but entwined as “mutually constituting an orientation to modern life that promotes industrial technologies and habits as rightly religious.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Brother Van “kept Hell out of his songs, prayers and exhortations. None of these had the smell of brimstone. … Yet he so interpreted the Bible as to believe in a personal devil as much as a personal God.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Rampant greed was not endorsed, but Evangelicals expressed a willingness to accommodate their message to the rising consumer culture and focused instead on themes of human sinfulness and divine redemption for sinners.

Unique to temporary mining camps, male laborers were the primary targets of home missionary activities. Scholars of American masculinity note that “a mythic West reassured and inspired white middle-class men shaken by economic change, women's rights movements, immigration, and labor unrest.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Mining camps became sites by which men imagined they could resolve the anxieties of evolving gender relations through honest labor. As one newspaper asked, “[I]s there a single point on this coast that presents to the laboring man so fair a field for the investment of his muscle as right here in this basin?”Footnote ⁹¹ In the mining camps, male miners celebrated the dialectic of the rowdy, but honest, man: “There is a sort of rough, though genuine courtesy much in vogue among the mountaineers, that makes them excellent companions in danger or hardship.”Footnote ⁹² Revival leaders re-created this myth by preaching about a God who embodied the masculinity venerated by male miners: “It is the Father, the Saviour, [to] whom we pray, not to abstract force. … [I]t is man whom we worship in his ideal[,] man [whom] we credit with possibilities of god head, and the attainment of absolute perfection, great gravitation, electricity.”Footnote ⁹³ Just as God represented the masculine ideals of the Western miner, revival leaders simultaneously called on the watchful gaze of romanticized female relatives to encourage miners to religion.

While there was not a singular female experience in nineteenth-century mining communities, women, in their physical absence, were employed as an evangelical trope and called on from afar “as exemplars of morality” to outline “the boundaries of acceptable social behavior.” Women were called on not as living and individual people, but as an idealized image of Victorian chastity and Christian grace, employed as foils for an “oppositional male identity.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Male miners regularly expressed their own longing for female support in times of hardship: “Could I have thee by me, mother, / In this dark and trying hour, / I could face the surging billows, / And heed not their mighty power.”Footnote ⁹⁵ By appealing to men's sense of nostalgia, ministers reminded the miners of their obligations to mothers and wives left behind in the space of the home, arguing that, like the eyes of God, the eyes of the “naturally” religious sex extended west to hold miners accountable for their actions. For, “were it not for the sweet and tender influences shed by them, the world would ere now have fallen into a confused heap of moral roughness.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Protestant home missionaries labored to channel miners’ gospel of gold to the service of God through the production of new religious orientations. Revivals espoused the same masculine ideals of self-discipline and individualism celebrated by the miners in particular western locales, and played to their nostalgic longings by calling on distant female companions. Religion was not simply transported to mining communities, nor was it separate from the listening miners, but was produced in tandem with their shifting and lived experiences, beyond and within a diversity of places.

Statehood and Religious Change

Although revivals reached miners on their own terms, missionaries did not always garner the success they desired. Reliance on revivals, rather than established churches, left ample room for backsliders. As missionary Jacob Mills lamented, “If they are stirred a little at one service before the return of another it has subsided and the same work must be done over again.”Footnote ⁹⁷ As late as 1891, the Methodist Episcopal conference of the mining camp Demersville noted that “there have been no additions to the church during the last two quarters from the fact that it has been totally impracticable to hold any protracted services.”Footnote ⁹⁸Annual reports, however, would often be written with hopes for future years. This reflected the cyclical nature of the Montana economy of boom and bust. In a bust economy, with too infrequent revival meetings, backsliders were rampant. With boom resources to support missionaries in the expensive mining towns, revival meetings could be held and converts could be won.

Increases in the scale of industry, the completion of the Utah and Northern Railway in 1881, and the decline of the success of the individual miner broke down the efficacy of the revival message at the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, underground quartz mines outpaced placer mines in production and mineral wealth, and most men worked for large companies and absentee owners. In this era of shifting labor demands, men increasingly stayed West, calling for their wives and families to join them. As Baptist missionary C. W. Clarke noted, “Henceforth the old conditions of things will pass away and the new state of affairs will be like ‘the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.’”Footnote ⁹⁹ Permanent settlers forged new religious landscapes in Montana.

Finally, with statehood in 1889, Montanan miners and missionaries found themselves entangled in new spaces of industrial capitalism. Whereas miners had once imagined themselves as individual citizens participating in a federal system, state politics came to dominate economic and social decisions, diminishing the power of the individual at a local level.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Settled clergy, more reliable congregations, and permanent houses of worship became rote with the increased settlement of women and families. At the end of the century, Irish Catholics from western Cork's mining communities arrived in droves to work in underground copper mines, greatly altering the religious makeup of the state.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Butte, Montana, not the once-rich gold mining camps of Bannack, Garnet, Pony, and Virginia City, became the urban center of the newly minted state. And yet, despite Montana's constitution making all forms of gambling illegal in 1889, Butte upheld a reputation for gambling halls, drinking establishments, and brothels. As historian Mary Murphy notes, “Butte women made, sold, and drank liquor in unprecedented fashion.”Footnote ¹⁰² The gritty spaces produced by Montana's working-class laborers continued to defy the imagined West of Christian salvation. Christian communities in Montana functioned in distinct, but interconnected ways, seeking to answer religious questions born of the everyday practices of labor underground.