ALEXANDER TAYLOR RANKIN (1803-1885), HIS DIARY AND LETTERS: A Pioneer Minister Who Fought Lawlessness with Religion on the Prairies of Eastern Kansas and the Frontier Settlements of Denver Where Life Was Harsh and Brutal

Boulder, Colorado: Johnson Publishing Company, 1966. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine. This is Number 64 of 400 copies signed by the editor. Quarto: 188 p. with a frontispiece and 3 illustrations. Original brown cloth binding, with gilt stamping. A fine copy.

This account of Rankin's pioneering missionary work in eastern Kansas and Colorado on the eve of the Civil War that emerges from his journal and letters is one of the few first-hand narratives of home missionary activity in the Trans-Mississippi West to be published to date. (Most are personal memoirs published long after the fact or posthumous biographies compiled by family members.) A native of Tennessee, Rankin pastored Presbyterian churches in Ohio, Indiana, and upstate New York before being called by the Old School Presbyterian Board of Domestic Missions in 1859 to serve as one of its two home missionaries in Kansas Territory. For the next 16 months, Rankin traveled thousands of miles to establish more than a dozen new churches, deliver hundreds of extemporaneous sermons, baptize, marry and bury people and witness life on what was then the western frontier - what Rankin called "the verge of civilization".

Rankin hunted buffalo on the open plains, came close to losing his life when his horse, spooked by wolves, disappeared 30 miles from the nearest settler, and on his first day in Denver witnessed the editor of the Rocky Mountain News being threatened with murder. The self-confident Rankin ("The people come in crowds to hear me preach. Indeed this is the case wherever I go.") includes tart assessments of his denominational rivals ("heard an Episcopalian read prayers & preach - Thank God I am not an Episcopalian - it was dull, dull") with moral outrage about the corrosive effect of the frontier ("One man whom I have met was at one time a popular preacher in Connecticut, now is an infidel and violates almost every command of the decalogue") and personal observations about events leading up to the war ("Now that Osawatomie Brown [John Brown] has received his just dues, and his accomplices in crime are sent to their own place, I trust peace and quiet have returned").