| The Mustard Seed in Montana is a biography of Father Lindesmith's years at Fort Keogh and Miles City, Montana. In 1880, at age 52, Father Lindesmith, a parish priest in Leetonia, Ohio, received a commission as a chaplain in the U.S. Army, and was subsequently posted to eastern Montana, where his ministry served the religious needs of the soldiers stationed at Fort Keogh, and the laity at Miles City and in the Yellowstone Valley. Father Lindesmith's years in Montana provide an opportunity to examine important themes in American history and its historiography, themes such as immigration and how "immigrants" become Americans; the dynamic that occurs when two cultures meet, one "civilized," the other "not" civilized; race, gender, and class; and Americanized Catholicism, Catholicism that patriotically extolled the virtues of the American Republic. Father Lindesmith was a "cultural" immigrant to the American West and he undoubtedly had formed ideas about civilization, race, gender, class, and patriotism long before he traveled to Montana, but his time in the West as an Army chaplain offered him an opportunity to see how these ideas worked in the rich milieu of his receiving society on the Great Plains of the late-nineteenth century, a society consisting of other immigrants, Army troops, Indians, and African Americans.; Father Lindesmith's diaries and records suggest that his ideas concerning subjects such as "civilization," race, gender, and class were everpresent in his daily work and life, and that the form of Catholicism he preached and practiced---an Americanized form of Catholicism that extolled the ideals of democracy and civil and religious liberty and was open to all---reconciled such things as American industrialization and urbanization with God's will. Like the parable of the Mustard Seed described in the gospel of Matthew, Father Lindesmith would plant and cultivate the mustard seed of faith, the word of God, in Montana. The mustard tree, the Church, would grow and its branches would provide the order necessary for American society to progress toward its earthly promise and heavenly reward. Thus, for Father Lindesmith, Catholicism was the spirit of order and progress in the American West. |
