The places for holding meetings were of the most primitive kind.  A log school-house was a luxury; the squatter cabins were too small; but we had to use them during the winter.  The groves of timber along the streams were always waiting; but, we only could use them in fair and pleasant weather, and for six months in the year.  As for hearers, we were never lacking an audience, we were never lacking for a crowd that were ready to listen with honest good-will to the message which we brought them.

It was an eventful summer.  More rain fell than in any season I have known.  The streams were always full, the bottoms were often flooded, and crossing was sometimes dangerous; but I had a good horse and was not afraid.

In religious matters everything was broken up, and men were drifting.  But this good came of it, that they were ready to listen to this strange and new thing that was brought to their ears, in which so much was made of the Lord’s authority, of apostolic teaching and apostolic example, and so little of traditions, theories, and time-honored observances, of which the Bible knows nothing, but which have been sanctified by universal acceptance.

As for myself, there had been romances enough about my life to make the people wish to see me, and I was proud to know that the boys could remember my sermons and repeat them.  The men with whom I was immediately associated in this work, and who had sent me on this errand, were of inestimable advantage to me.  They were well and favorably known as men of unblemished reputation in Eastern Kansas and Western Missouri.  “Old Duke Young,” as the father of Judge William Young had been affectionately called in Western Missouri, had been an eminently popular frontier and pioneer preacher, and Judge Young had inherited an honorable distinction as being the son of such a father; and when it was known that I was acting with the concurrence and under the approval of such men, the arrangement was generally accepted as satisfactory.

And now I had my heart’s best desire.  I was in the field as an evangelist; the harvest was abundant and the grain was already ripe and waiting for the sickle.  But above all, and beyond all these, was peace in the land.  We all had had a lover’s quarrel, but we had made it up and were the better friends.  Everywhere they had their joke with me, as to my method of navigating the Missouri River, and to the attire I sometimes put on; but I had come out the upper dog in the fight, and could afford to stand their bantering.  There is a warmth, freshness, and enthusiasm in the friendships formed under such conditions that can never be transferred to associations of older and more orderly communities.  As a result of this summer’s work, here were seven churches full of zeal and rapidly growing, and occupying a field that had been almost absolutely fallow, for outside of the towns there was no religious movement except our own.