MRS. MECKLENBERG, MRS. WILSON, AND THE CHURCH OF THE LITTLE SWEET PINE

(This is a continuation of the Early Methodist Church history on the Blackfeet Reservation begun earlier.)

Mrs. Mecklenberg, in the traditional way of wives being extensions of husbands, managed a group of Indian women who did beadwork for sale. She reported on the practice of calling on full-bloods as follows:
“We make a few casual remarks about the weather, the health of the children, or admire some new . . . blanket, or . . . piece of beadwork that an old grandma is working on. Then on giving our invitattion to them for a social at the church or urge their presence at the Sunday services. We feel they have appreciated our call for they have asked us to come again.”

Ironically, the Methodist lack of a strong sacramental element freed them to be more tolerant of Blackfeet sacraments, while the Catholics went head-to-head over the competing liturgies. But in another irony that cut in the other direction, the Methodists were way behind when it came to anthropological and linguistic skills that the Catholics had been honing since the New Continent was discovered. Probably the Methodists simply didn’t take Blackfeet ceremonies very seriously, while someone like Father Mallman at Heart Butte was bitterly opposed, though he was wise enough to tolerate an occasional horse sacrificed on a grave if it would avoid confrontation.

Mrs. Mecklenberg wrote: “If we want to take away [Blackfeet] religion, we must give him something to take its place . . . we cannot condemn his religion if we can’t replace it with soething better. The thing to do is to draw out from his religion the good that there is in it and gradually get him to come into the Xn realm. He worships a great Spirit and so do we.” This easy tolerance was based on blindness to the actual content of Blackfeet beliefs, a trivialization and underestimation, as well as what leaps to the contemporary eye as gender conflation, particularly relevant since Blackfeet religion depends in large part on women, esp. virtuous and very aged women. Not Madonnas.

For Mrs. Mecklenberg material culture was everything. At a white cattleman’s house she noted: “At first sight you could not detect it from the average white home. There is a piano, perhaps a violin, there are books and magazines, good furniture tastefully arranged, and the occupants are dressed as good as the average white person and often they are dressed better.” Probably her own house and clothing was not as nice, so she is to be commended for not letting jealousy overcome virtue.

The Rev. Mr. Mecklenberg seemed to pursue a strategy that left the hub in Browning to white folks (Junior and Epworth League, Ladies’ Aid, Brotherhood, Camp Fire Girls, and Boy Scouts) while maintaining Sunday schools and other forms of religious education in East Glacier, at the Boarding School and other points. One has to giggle a bit at Camp Fire Girls and Boy Scouts, organizations meant to impart the romantic worldview of American Indians to white children across America, right there in the middle of the very real phenomenon. In short, the church was managing mostly by compartmentalization and lack of realization.

Mecklenburg left in 1926. Mrs. Wilcox, wife of the next minister, Allen C. Wilson, continued the practise of journaling. She reported that “the parsonage was a 4-room house with a coal stove in the kitchen-dining room, and coal heater in the liviing room. Outdoor plumbing, and all water carried in and out. Two bedrooms upstairs and no electricity.” “We had to work hard, and get up early because the Indians came to our house both early and late. . . They had great faith in Allen’s prayers and he would be called any time in the night to pray for the sick.” However, his prayers for money to improve the parsonage where the family included small children were not effective. The denomination itself was struggling. It was the Great Depression.

The ugly details of the worsening situation are recorded in correspondence traced by Harrod in “Mission Among the Blackfeet.” Only one official managed to get to Browning and witness. His urgings were also ignored. Finally the denomination turned on their missionary and blamed him, saying that he had mismanaged everything. Philadelphia headquarters took two conflicting points of view, one being that the thing to do with Blackfeet was to offer charity in the form of old clothes they could clean and repair and the other was to forget about Indians and take care of the white people in town.

Wilson ignored them both and out of his own sense of mission created a small institution still mourned on the reservation: The Church of the Little Sweet Pine. In 1932 it arose spontaneously from the community along the South Fork of Cut Bank Creek, fourteen miles north of Browning. Walter Torbert, church official said it “is a very comfortable building. The Indians like it. I think it cost entirely too much money -- but that is neither here nor there -- it has been done.” Nevertheless, he considered it a sort of playhouse of little importance.

This is what the Indians said, according to Mrs. Wilson: “Long before our grandmothers can remember [a] Medicine Lodge. . . was held here. Instead of using the cottonwood and the quaking aspen trees as they did then and do now, on this particular Lodge they used the Sweet Pine branches. After that this creek was known to all as Sweet Pine Medicine Lodge Creek. We want to call our church “The Church of the Little Sweet Pine.”

Harrod reports “Soon the Church of the Little Sweet Pine became a social center as well as a place for the celebration of the significant events of life -- birth, death, marriage, and baptism. It was distinctively an Indian church and dominated by Indians.”

This was a true grassroots synthesis between old and new ways, but it was doomed. Not everyone was as clear-eyed as the Wilsons. They saw competition for a dominant institution -- at least they intended for it to be dominant! When the creek undermined the foundation of the cabin, a crew of white men went up and sawed the Church of the Little Sweet Pine into firewood. Wilson had left in 1945.

EARLY METHODIST BLACKFEET MISSION

This is the first part of a developing overview of the Methodist presence on the Blackfeet reservation in northern Montana in terms of their clergy. Because of accidents of economics, dynamics within the Methodist denomination and between Protestant identifications, and changing social expectations, the present church has developed an awkward organizational structure. On one hand is the traditional missionary desire to convert and civilize and on the other hand is the concept of the local self-sustaining congregation of the dwellers in the area.

Most of this material is taken from ”Mission among the Blackfeet” by Howard L. Harrod, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Professor Harrod taught religious studies at Vanderbilt University for many years but has now passed on. It is time for a new review of the situation. Changing demographics and major shifts in the paradigm of misson have left the sources of income marooned on one side of the issue while a tiny congregation struggles to find a new identity in a new world where white mainline denominations are shrinking.

When I have recorded as much as seems prudent, I’ll post the whole thing and create a booklet, but I’ve discovered that once I post a blog on a subject, I get many additions from the readership, so here’s a bit of bait to get you started!

EPWORTH PIEGAN MISSION
1893-1899 E.S. Dutcher
1899 - 1913 Francis Asbury Riggin
1913- 1921 A.W. Hammer

In the 1880’s “thirty-seven ministers arrived in Montana, twelve of whom remained in the state for the remainder of their lives. In the next decade and a half, one hundred and forty Methodist ministers were appointed to churches in Montana.

In 1891, one hundred and sixty acres of reservation land was granted to the Brooklyn and Bay Ridge branches of the Woman’s National Indian Association. Rev. and Mrs. E.S. Dutcher went to the reservation in 1893 as employees ofthe association. Dutcher was a member of the West Nebraska Methodist Conference but was transferred to the North Montana Mission upon his arrival at the reservation. In July, 1894, the mission was transferred from the Women’s National Indian Association to the Methodist church and was placed under the administration of the Missionary Society.

The new Epworth Piegan Mission was located on land adjoining the agency boarding school on Willow Creek. Agent Steell reported in 1893 that Dutcher was busily “engaged in completing a residence for himself and family. A chapel is to be erected soon. The chapel, about twenty-six by forty-five feet in size, was built with the assistance of interested Indians. When this lumber for the Methodist venture arrived at Durham Station,some three and one-half miles from the church site, Indians came with twenty-two teams and hauled the lumber to the location."

"Dutcher proved to be an extremely vigorous man, well-equipped to survive the frustrations of life on the reservation. He also brought to his work previous experience as a missionary among the Navajos. . . . His conception of the mission’s goals very closely followed the ideology of his time. Thus, the twin themes of civilization and Christianization, enunciated by the government and pursued by the Roman Catholic missionaries, became the organizing principles for Dutcher’s work as well." When necessary, Dutcher hired himself out as a carpenter at $4 a day.

Riggin was actually a leader who lived in Helena. There was a shortage of Methodist ministers at this time, so no one was living in the mission buildings. This is about the time Young began to give out candy at Christmas, and this seems to have been the chief mission activity altogether, since Young was Methodist.

Hammer arrived as a missionary and was appalled at the condition of the buildings: “. . . in a deplorable condition . . .the church had 48 window lights broken out and the snow was from two to three feet deep over the entire floor. There had not been a service held in the church for several years, and all the other property was in like neglected conditons. There were no records to show who had been members or who had been baptized or married.”

During his first year the mission was moved into the town of Browning where a small group of white Protestants had been meeting. Within a year he had a congregation of seventy-one persons, mostly white ranchers and BIA employees. Browning incorporated in 1919 and was growing.

In the meantime, the Presbyterian church had formed a congregation which was served from 1912 to 1926 by Rev. James D. Gold, a highly educated Scot, whose son, Douglas Gold, built the first Browning public school and instituted a trachoma amelioration project by bringing opthamologists from Pennsylvia where the Golds had previously lived. Douglas Gold became the superintendent of the Browning schools. James Gold, plagued by depression, spent his later years in Warm Springs while Doug Gold went on to a career in state education circles. He was the author of “A Schoolmaster Among the Blackfeet.” The Presbyterians eventually merged their congregation with the Methodists. The entire Gold family kept their identification with the area and are buried in the Cut Bank cemetery.

BROWNING INDIAN MISSION
1921 - 1926 Henry Mecklenburg
1926- 1945 Allen C. Wilcox PLUS Church of the Little Sweet Pine
1945 - 47 Stephen C. Smith
1947 - 1954 Edgar Bernard Smith
1954 summer Paul Hollenbeck
1954- 56 George Ritchey
1956-58 George P. Cox
1957 - summer Dave Olson (intern) Babb, Heart Butte
1958-59 Charlotte Bridges
1959-67 James E. Bell Babb, HButte
1963 - Harry E. Pearson Blackfeet United Methodist Parish (lay)
1965- 68 Conrad Himmel
1963-64 Richard D. Fiero Heart Butte

Meclenburg handled the doubleness of his congregation (white and mostly full-blood Blackfeet) by holding morning Sunday service for the whites and evening services for the Blackfeet. The system persisted until 1930. Since the Protestant churches had no sacramental dimension, they made it their business to visit homes and build friendships, as well as helping in practical ways, but in those days the full-bloods were still mostly Blackfeet speakers and the Methodist clergy had no expertise in the language. Members included Split Ears, Eagle Child, White Dog, Little Dog. Torn Weasel Head and Two Guns White Calf. The clergy probably did not realize that these are also the names of prominent ceremonialists in the old Blackfeet way: “Bundle Keepers.”


BROWNING UNITED METHODIST PARISH
1974-1981 Walter F. Mason
1981-93 F. Richard and H. Marine
1983-1985 James R. Bentley (PM)
1986-87 Ron Barr
1987 - 88 Mary Scriver
1989 Richard (Jake) Jacobson
1989 -90 Peggy Salois
1990- 1994 Donna Lee Martin
1994 - 1998 Rowland Freeman

TO BE CONTINUED