Montana Mission began in a saloon

Brother Van Historical Video from Mountain Sky Conference | UMC on Vimeo.

Originally from Gettysburg Pennsylvania, William Wesley Van Ordsel came to Fort Benton, Montana in 1872. And as it is often said, “the rest is history.” Arriving on June 30, he preached that afternoon in the only building open to him, a local saloon. There he received the nickname that stuck – “Brother Van.” The name stayed with him for the rest of his life. For 47 years, Brother Van set the tone for Methodism in Montana. He held services almost every day and traveled by horseback 15,000 mile a year. One historian observed , “For a small Methodist constituency in Montana to maintain a college, a hospital, a children’s home and a school during frontier days was all but impossible and yet Brother Van through faith, persistence, and sacrifice somehow managed to convince people it could be done.”

He was loved by the Native Americans of Montana who gave him the name “Great Heart.” They took him on his first buffalo hunt in 1873, an event enshrined by cowboy artist Charles Russell affectionately recalling in a letter the first time he met Brother Van. Russell wrote in rough prose: I have met you many times since that, Brother Van, sometimes in lonely places, but you were never lonesum or alone, for a man with seared handsand feet stood beside you and near him is no hate, so all you met loved you.”

The rest of the story…