A slick marketing campaign and a taste for political power marked the Ku Klux Klan in the s, which spread through Oregon like a racist virus — and then collapsed. In the early years of Oregon Country, back before it was a state — back even before Idaho and Washington were separate territories — newly arrived settlers found themselves completely on their own.
There were some circumstances in which Native American tribes might help out, but most of the time, the early arrivals had to shift for themselves as best they might. That meant, of course, that folks had to grind their own wheat, whipsaw their own lumber, and birth their own babies without any kind of professional assistance.
For the most part, they made do pretty well. But one category of professional was in particularly short supply, especially in the more rough-cut districts and mining camps of Eastern Oregon: Preachers might not seem, to a secular modern reader, to be nearly as important as, say, doctors, or even blacksmiths. But to those old-time pioneers, they very much were. There was a whole lot of sinning going on, especially in those mining camps on Saturday nights.
And yes, once in a while there was a funeral to be preached on Sunday morning as a result of those sins — but most Sundays there were just several dozen grimy miners with emptied purses and repentant headaches, trying to get close enough to the Almighty to sort of whisper an apology in His ear before taking up the pickaxe and pan for another week in the toils. Marriages, in particular, posed a problem in pioneer communities. Legally, the local Justice of the Peace could do the job; but the quality of that experience varied rather widely from place to place.
Now you buss her. Like the green frontier moonshine dispensed in the nearby saloon, this ceremony was a bit rough, but it got the job done. Well, most of the time it did.
But even at its best, this quasi-legal swearing-at lacked a certain dignity and solemnity which many affianced couples looked for in a wedding celebration. One particular circuit rider — Lemuel H.
Wells, who would one day become Episcopal bishop of Spokane — seemed to have a particular knack for getting into strange situations or maybe he just had a great talent for telling a good story, and perhaps just a little human weakness when it came to strict adherence to the letter of the Ninth Commandment.
Some poor decision-making on his part occasionally played a role. One fine day, the Rev. Wells arrived in the town of Weston, near Pendleton; and he was invited to stay for the night at the home of a local Episcopalian family. When bedtime came along, he found the arrangements very crowded: Wells was to sleep on the bed with the children.
In the middle of the night, though, the four-year-old boy started having a nightmare, and with a shriek kicked out, catching poor Wells in the solar plexus.
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Now the boy really did start to scream, bringing his parents running. Upon arriving at his bedside, they found their son lashed to the bed and Wells guiltily fumbling at the knots. We can imagine how the subsequent conversation went. The next time Wells came to Weston, he was on his own for a place to stay — word having apparently gotten around.
The Circuit Preacher Chronicles: Rev. Lemuel Wells’ wild ride
So he bedded down for the night in a haystack, piled up against a fence to which he tied his horse. The horse, who knew a good thing when he saw it, spent the evening taking bites of the hay and yanking them over the fence so that he could enjoy them at leisure. In the hotel there, he requested a bath, and was told a tub would be ready for him in the morning at the head of the stairs.
It was the dead of winter, and the foyer of the hotel was about 20 degrees; so, shivering in the chilly air, the Reverend leaped into the tub to get his morning ablutions over with as fast as possible, so that he might put clothes on and get warmed back up. The first was that the water in the tub was just above freezing; he broke through a skim of ice on his way into it.
But the second discovery made Wells forget all about the coldness of the water. It seemed the tub leaked a little.
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It had been leaking out onto the floor throughout the night, forming a small puddle which had then frozen like black ice on a highway. When Wells had hopped into the icy water, the momentum of his leap had set the tub in motion on that sheet of ice. Majestically and inexorably it sailed straight toward the top of the staircase … and decanted its contents over its rim. And so the Reverend Lemuel H. Wells, shivering cold and stark naked and helpless in the hands of a cruel fate, rode a half-full washtub down the stairs of the hotel, tumbling with it to the bottom and ending up with the tub perched triumphantly atop his battered and shivering body in a great puddle of freezing water on the landing below.
This was, of course, hardly a silent procedure. The crashings and thumpings of the tub, and the terrified shrieks of its helpless passenger, roused every person in the building and probably several neighbors to boot. Everything on this Web site authored by Finn J. John is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution 4. However, please note that many of the images are not mine. The primary purpose of this site is news and education, and consequently many images here are used pursuant to the fair-use exemption of the copyright law.
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The Circuit Preacher Chronicles: Rev. Wells’ wild ride| Offbeat Oregon History | #ORhistory
Oregon's own genuine would-be fascist dictator "The Germans wouldn't submit to Communism , so they had their brownshirts and Hitler. Martin Lighthouse 'ghost' greeted keeper on his first night on 'the rock' Somewhere in the inky blackness of his little room, miles from shore, James Gibbs awoke to hear stealthy footsteps, getting closer and closer This blundering robber turned out to be Joaquin Miller's son. This small-town police chief turned out to be a murderer. Stealing a cop car? Stealing a city jailhouse?
The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo was flown by an Oregon bomb group. Had Oregon been less unfriendly, Tarzan might never have been written. These men were known as circuit riding preachers and the mark they have left upon the Appalachian mountains — and far beyond — will endure for an eternity. In no other class was the real heroic element so finely displayed.
Oh how I remember the forms and weather-beaten visages of the old preachers, whose constitutions had conquered starvation and exposure — who had survived swamps, alligators, Indians, highway robbers and bilious fevers! How was my boyish soul tickled with their anecdotes of rude experience — how was my imagination wrought upon by the recital of their hair-breadth escapes!
Cabins were often separated by miles and sparse population densities meant that churches, once a pillar of American society, were few and far between. In , there were 83 traveling preachers. By , their rank had grown to 3, In addition to being an immensely lonely profession, the work of an 18th century wilderness preacher was among the most perilous professions a man could pursue. Samuel Wakefield wrote a hymn about the perils circuit riders faced.
The final stanza says:. Yet still they look with glistening eye, Till lo! Staunchly opposed to liquor, stories abound of traveling ministers leading powerful prayers for the immediate destruction of whiskey stills and distilleries.