About fifteen years after John Lewis Dyer began traipsing around South Park on homemade snowshoes, even traversing Mosquito Pass, the Colorado State Constitution was formulated in Denver. After the framers completed the task, the people of Colorado approved their work on July 1, 1876. On August 1, 1876, President U.S. Grant signed the proclamation admitting Colorado into the Union.
Interestingly, the original Colorado Constitution explicitly provided that all persons possessed a “liberty of conscience” regarding religious matters, and no one could intrude on that inalienable right. No one could be compelled to support any religious sect’s dogma.
Father Dyer, as he was known in Park County, was an itinerant Methodist preacher who, among other things, said, “I have for many years thought that dancing causes more of the evils in society throughout the nation than any other institution of the devil. …the people should not expect anything from a preacher but opposition to dancing since John the Baptist lost his head through the flirtations of a silly girl.”
Whether Dyer’s belief that dancing was the root of evil was shared by other Methodist preachers and ardent Christians roaming the Colorado countryside doing good or ill in God’s name is unsure. All, however, were practicing the divinely inspired principles of Manifest Destiny.
Manifest Destiny was first coined in 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan, a Jacksonian Democrat. Although the term was not generally used to characterize what was happening then in the West, it nevertheless describes it well.
Manifest Destiny gave American citizens of European descent the right and responsibility to head west, civilize, Christianize, and otherwise take dominion over native peoples and the fields, valleys, canyons, and mountains in God’s name. American expansionism and exceptionalism were components of Manifest Destiny, all necessarily qualified by the most significant issue of the day: the expansion of slavery into the ever-expanding movement westward until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
Colonel John Chivington was a Methodist preacher who ordered his Colorado Territory Volunteers to attack the Cheyenne and Arapahoe at Sand Creek in 1864. It was the right thing to do, or so he said to someone who’d asked him if he thought killing children was okay: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! … I have come to kill Indians and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”
Nathan Meeker, a Christian zealot who in 1870 started the Union Colony near Greeley (a utopian enterprise based upon Christianity), was baptized as a Disciple of Christ as an adult. The sect allowed members to have opinions that differed from church doctrines and insisted members respect those differences. However, respect for the Ute people’s views about culture, history, spiritualism, and survival, which had developed over about two millennia of life upon the earth of northwest Colorado, was not in the cards for Meeker. As the White River Indian Agent (the reservation had been established in 1868), he sought to civilize the Ute people, turning them toward a Christian God and, more destructively, toward agriculture. Utes were hunters and gatherers, valuing their ponies above most other things in life. Meeker was so intent on changing the essential character of the Ute that he requested federal troops stop Utes from leaving the reservation to hunt. When Meeker plowed up the landscape where Ute ponies fed and destroyed a track where they raced their ponies, the scene was set for what became known as the Meeker Massacre.
A Ute sub-chief shoved Meeker in anger when he discovered what Meeker had done. Meeker responded by calling in the cavalry, and the battle of Milk Creek ensued. When news of the fight reached the Utes at the White River Agency, the Utes killed Meeker, eight of his employees, and two civilians. This resulted in the Congressional Ute Removal Act of 1880. “The Utes Must Go” was Colorado Governor Pitkin’s 1880 campaign slogan for his second term in that office, which he won.
Fred Pitkin, the first governor of Colorado after statehood, and his wife, Fidelia, were active Methodists. Interestingly, there is no record of Pitkin ever stepping foot in the county that bears his name.
John Lewis Dyer was an intriguing, physically adept, and atypical Christian dogmatist who understood Manifest Destiny for what it was and spread the Good News to rarely receptive miners and others over the vast spread of South Park in the latter part of the 19th century. We can’t fault him for that. Or can we?
If you think about it, the current Christian Nationalist sect of the Republican Party espouses an eerily similar ideology to that of Manifest Destiny. Even here in Park County and, indeed, throughout the country. In the words of Dave Williams, the Chair of the Colorado Republican Party, “We have to fulfill what the Lord has told us to do, to make disciples of all nations, spreading the gospel, the truth.”
The mindset of predominantly white Christian ethno-culture so-called patriots see their mission, much like Williams and Dyer, to civilize and Christianize the heathens. And who are the heathens? Well, that’s anyone who isn’t them. As Dyer said, “It is impossible to tame and educate an Indian until he is subdued.” The current crowd of dogmatic Christian ethno-culture patriots harkens back to the Good Ol’ Days, a time when all foes were subdued, tamed, and educated in the Word whether they liked it or not. A “Blut und Boden,” Blood and Soil belief, which, if you think about it, was the essence of Manifest Destiny and is the foundation of the Christian Nationalist sect of the Republican Park.
