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In 1890 William D. Bloys, a Presbyterian Army chaplain at Fort Davis, Texas, began a regular outdoor service in a pasture 19 miles from the fort. Officially the "Bloys Camp Meeting," his motley gathering of cowboys and ranchers became known as the "Spiritual Hitchin' Post of West Texas." Bloys never tried to force a man to accept a faith he didn't feel he needed, but many men in that wild country did accept—and cleaned up their lives. One observer remarked, "No boy raised up at Bloys ever ended in the Jeff Davis County Jail."

Though such signs of spiritual life appeared all over the western landscape, they are completely absent from most people's visions of the nineteenth-century American frontier. Names like Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, and Wyatt Earp are almost synonymous with the West, while names like William D. Bloys, Daniel S. Tuttle, Charles Sheldon, Sheldon Jackson, and Brother Van Orsdel ring few bells. Yet if one looks at actual accomplishments, the situation might well be reversed. Most western communities owe far more to these unheralded clerics than they do to the high-profile outlaws or icons.

From about 1840 to the end of the century, these largely anonymous ministers shaped the contours of western life in three major ways. They formed the first churches and Sunday schools, which promoted social stability while reining in local violence; they developed a distinctly western style of Christianity that emphasized a non-denominational message of salvation and personal ethics; and they helped lay the institutional foundations—orphanages, hospitals, and schools—for scores of western communities.

The American West of the Civil War era was full of violence. In 1859, for example, an observer noted that the only need El Paso, Texas, had for a minister was to bury the dead. Presbyterian minister Alexander T. Rankin described Denver of 1860 as a town of no laws, jails, or courts, and thus a land with "no restraint on human passion." The bodies of six recently hanged horse thieves greeted Episcopal rector John Cornell when he first stepped off the train in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1866. Even in the 1880s, Baptist James Spencer noted that he could postmark his letters from Butte, Montana, as sent "from Hell."

The clergy naturally hoped that by organizing fledgling churches they could stem this tide. Thus their initial response was to scour their area for enough people to found a "First" (Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, etc.) church. The mobility of both pastors and parishioners, however, meant that these "First" churches remained small for years.

Frontier clerics discovered that it was often easier to organize a Union (multi-denominational) Sunday school instead. Really a Bible class for adults, these Sunday schools often developed into genuine churches. In 1914 the Presbyterians estimated that about 80 percent of their new churches in western areas had originally begun as Sunday schools.

Modest though they might have been, these churches and Sunday schools served as bulwarks of social stability. Not only did they provide venues for regular services, their rooms held a variety of social gatherings as well, thus functioning as training grounds for political democracy. The numerous church meetings introduced people to such basic democratic principles as how to conduct public meetings via accepted rules of order, how to speak to the issue at hand, and (usually) respect for majority rule. Thus, the church and political gatherings of the era overlapped and reinforced each other.

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