HISTORY OF THE HISTORY
In 1941 the Bishop of Cheyenne, Most Reverend Patrick A. McGovern published History of The Diocese of Cheyenne (Cheyenne: Wyoming Labor Journal, Feast of the Epiphany, A.D. 1941). The editor Bishop McGovern published this history in 1941, after almost three decades of preparation, perhaps as a gesture to help celebrate the event when the diocese of Cheyenne was detached from the metropolitan province of Dubuque and included in the newly created metropolitan province of Denver. This primary source has been scanned and published on our world wide website for reference.
“Histories” or “Chronicles” of the Catholic Church in Wyoming seem more proper words to use in the title of the present work because the manuscripts available have been composed by a number of writers. The title used, “History of the Catholic Church in Wyoming,” was chosen by Bishop Hubert M. Newell in 1976. The manuscript materials that have come first into my hands are the work of two Jesuits, reports from parishes to the diocese during the period 1970-1990, and a growing number of memoirs and chronicles written by local people and members of religious orders who served in Wyoming.
Two Jesuits worked to compile and write a history of the diocese of Cheyenne. The New York Jesuit Father John J. Hoodack, who had ministered to the faithful in Wyoming parishes for several years, was inspired to do this history in 1976 at the solemn Mass celebrated in Casper on August 15 and attended by five thousand people, forty-five priests, and nine bishops; Cardinal Manning of Los Angeles preached. The bicentennial of the United States occasioned this grand affair; in normal years an annual Mass at a butte by the Green River near Daniel commemorates the first Mass celebrated in Wyoming by Jesuit Father Peter Jan DeSmet on July 5, 1840. Father Hoodack asked Bishop Hubert M. Newell for authorization and support to write a history of the Church in Wyoming, to which Bishop Newell gave his approval. Father Hoodack, with Dr. Gordon O. Hendrickson, then assistant professor of History at the University of Wyoming, formulated a methodology for the work of collecting materials. Father Hoodack’s last work on the project dated from the summer of 1981. Before he died Father Hoodack had compiled histories in manuscript, and tapes, of most of the seventy-seven parish and mission churches in the diocese, and of a few more “ghost town” churches. The work was taken up by another Jesuit Father, Harold L. Stansell of Regis College, who completed drafts of histories of the bishops of Cheyenne up to 1978 when Bishop Newell retired. Then Father Stansell died in 1992. In editing these manuscripts I looked to keep the good that has been done, to finish what has been left unfinished, and to fill in the rest as need be.
The book at present is divided into two parts. The first part presents a history of the diocese from the point of view of the bishop, to give a coherent chronological account of the affairs of the whole diocese. The second part of the book presents histories of parishes, which are grouped in the deaneries established in 1953 and ordered roughly chronologically following the foundations of the oldest churches. Thus, starting with Cheyenne we follow the Union Pacific railroad west to Rock Springs, then swing around the north of the state clock-wise, to Thermopolis, Sheridan, and Casper. For greater ease to locate within each deanery, parishes with their dependent missions are listed alphabetically.
A certain obvious methodological problem must be addressed at once. I believe that to write recent history of a local community, one ought to have some experience of living in it; I could, perhaps, write a history of the Catholic community of Rock Springs because I grew up there insensibly absorbing the deep history of the place. Moreover, because Wyoming is so big – slightly larger than Great Britain – and so sparsely populated, the communities are isolated from one another often have completely different histories with no relation to each other.
The problem of writing histories of communities is further complicated because the radical evolutionary changes effected by the Second Vatican Council vastly expanded the scope for active involvement of the community in the day to day life of the Church. Similarly, the development of diocesan-wide organizations play a role that formerly was not so prominent. With these kinds of problems in view, the tendency is to write a history of clerical appointments, numbers of sacraments celebrated or conferred, lands, buildings, maintenance, and money matters. These have their part in history, of course. But for the sake of the future let it be a challenge to the readers of these manuscripts to look to preparing their own histories in preparation for the publication of this history. Accounts written by members of parishes about their own parish are invaluable and often unique primary sources that give an authentic flavor to the histories of parishes.
Another problem that must be dispensed with concerns the history of the Indians in Wyoming. The difficulty here lies in the paucity or complete lack of sources. In Wyoming, one might say, prehistory only ended as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. Even the petroglyphs we find, though some may have been etched originally more than a thousand years ago, some were clearly new in the last century. Stories point to the existence of “ancient ones,” sometimes called “Sheep People” because they lived off the bighorn mountain sheep. But these people apparently disappeared; who knows whether they were absorbed by others, died from disease, or killed by aggressive newcomers? After the mid-seventeenth century, when the French began to supply their Indian allies with guns, many Indian nations found themselves pushed out of ancestral places in the east and forced to migrate west into the great plains. And after the mid-eighteenth century when wild Spanish horses became common and were caught and tamed, Indian nations became increasingly mobile but their movements elude us. In the end, Wyoming became the home of two Indian nations, the Shoshone, who had been allies of the United States, and the Northern Arapahos, who decidedly had not. We choose, therefore, to put aside the early history of the Indians as outside the scope of this work and deal with those who live on the Wind River Indian Reservation when we come to the history of St. Stephen’s Mission there.
Ecumenism thrives quietly in Wyoming not only because of the out-thrust of churches to each other inspired and sanctioned by the Second Vatican Council, but more fundamentally because tolerance is a necessity in small communities with a great diversity of nationalities and religions. For example, in 1960 in Rock Springs, then having a population of 10,000, there were 62 churches. Tolerance, if not taught, was learned as a matter of survival, especially in the mines, is that community.
Appendices that seem useful and an index of proper names is to be included.
Father Jan Joseph Santich, O.S.B.
St. Margaret’s Church
Riverton, Wyoming
First written, 13 December 1997.
History of the History