¹ The frontier colleges of the Great Plains and the West have received little scholarly attention. The premier studies of American education focus on the elite institutions of the Northeast with some reference to the Pacific Coast universities such as Stanford and the University of California and passing nods to “western” institutions such as Michigan, Wisconsin, or Illinois. See Veysey, Laurence R., The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Rudolph, Frederick and Thelin, John R., The American College and University: A History, paperback reprint of original 1962 edition, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); and Thelin, John R., A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Even studies that focus on religious colleges or collegiate education in the second half of the nineteenth century give little attention to the Western frontier. See Ringenberg, William C., The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006) and the fine collection of essays in, Geiger, Roger L., ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000). In the introduction, Geiger states that the book is about the Eastern, Midwestern, and Southern colleges, and indeed only a few paragraphs speak about schools in the Far West. The several fledgling colleges of the frontier played important roles in the educational and social development of the region; many of these institutions had short lives but others continue today. With minimal treatment in the scholarly literature, the stories and impact of these colleges on the frontier must come from the limited number of institutional histories that exist, and many of these accounts have marginal value.Google Scholar

² Although many frontier ministers started educational institutions, including religious colleges, only two other individuals of the time compare to Tenney: Joseph Ward, Congregationalist minister and founder of Yankton College in the Dakota Territory, and Presbyterian evangelist and educator Jackson, Sheldon. Jackson was superintendent of the Rocky Mountain district of Presbyterian Home Missions and founded at least fourteen schools in the Mountain West before serving most of his career in Alaska, eventually as General Agent of Education who created the public school system in that territory. See Durand, George H., Joseph, Ward of Dakota (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1913). The literature on Jackson is extensive. For samples, see Stewart, Robert L., Sheldon Jackson: Pathfinder and Prospector of the Missionary Vanguard in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska (New York: Fleming, H. Revell Company, 1908); Bailey, Alvin K., “Sheldon Jackson, Planter of Churches,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 26 (September 1948): 686–94; Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society (December 1948): 193–215; and Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 27 (March 1949): 21–40; Jackson, Sheldon, “Sheldon Jackson Invades the Rocky Mountains, 1869–76,” Journal of Presbyterian History 37 (1959): 122–28 [an autobiographical account written in 1876]; Hinckley, Ted C., “Sheldon Jackson and Benjamin Harrison: Presbyterians and the Administration of Alaska,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 54 (1963): 66–74; Bender, Norman J., “Sheldon Jackson's Crusade to Win the West for Christ, 1869–1880,” The Midwest Review 4 (Spring 1982): 1–12, and Bender's fuller development, Winning the West for Christ: Sheldon Jackson and Presbyterianism on the Rocky Mountain Frontier, 1869–1880 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Hinckley, Ted C., “Sheldon Jackson: Gilded Age Apostle,” Journal of the West 23 (January 1984): 16–25; and Haycox, Stephen W., “Sheldon Jackson in Historical Perspective: Alaska Native Schools and Mission Contracts, 1885–1894,” The Pacific Historian 28, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 18–28.Google Scholar

³ Tenney and others tended to view the indigenous inhabitants monolithically, usually referring to the various Spanish populations as “Mexicans.” For an excellent discussion of nomenclature, the complexity of the Spanish and Indian populations of the region, and the prejudices inherent in the use of labels, see Nieto-Phillips, John M., The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004); Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Yohn, Susan M., A Contest of Faiths: Missionary Women and Pluralism in the American Southwest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Getz, Lynne Marie, Schools of Their Own: The Education of Hispanos in New Mexico, 1850–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); and the body of writings by Weber, David, Gonzales, Philip B., Gutierrez, Ramon A., among others, address terminology, race, ethnicity, and class within these communities and the evolution of the debate from the late nineteenth century on.Google Scholar

⁴ Tenney, Edward P., An Attempt at Founding a Pioneer College, pamphlet, December 1, 1887. This limited-circulation pamphlet dealt with Colorado College, not the College of California, which is only mentioned in this source. Found in Special Collections, Colorado College Tutt Library.Google Scholar

⁵ None of Tenney's writings mention either involvement in the abolitionist movement or the Civil War. We can only speculate about why he apparently played no role in either cause. He was in his late twenties during the war years, possibly a bit old for military service, but the debilitating health issues that plagued him during most of his life probably were more important. The topic must have been important to many of his parishioners and his failure to mention the war is a bit odd for someone who seemed compelled to explain his entire life. Possibly the zealot about education may have considered the war a secondary issue.Google Scholar

⁶ Tenney, Edward P., Looking Forward into the Past (Nahant, MA: Rumford Press, 1910), 11–29.Google Scholar

⁷ Ibid, 30–53.Google Scholar

⁸ Loevy, Robert D., Colorado College: A Place of Learning, 1874–1999 (Colorado Springs: Colorado College, 1999), 8–12. For fuller treatment of Palmer, William Jackson and the railroad, see Athearn, Robert G., The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad: Rebel of the Rockies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977). Paperback edition, hardback original by Yale University Press, 1962.Google Scholar

⁹ Palmer recalled this in an article that he wrote for the Colorado Springs Gazette, Carnival edition, August 3, 1896. Cited in Loevy, Colorado College, 11.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Loevy, Colorado College, 5–12. This was also a classic case of what Daniel Boorstin labeled “booster colleges.” See Boorstin, Daniel J., “The Booster College,” The Americas: The National Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 686–94.Google Scholar

¹¹ Loevy, Colorado College, 13–16.Google Scholar

¹² Ibid., 16–23. Tenney provides two seemingly conflicting accounts of his selection as president. In Founding a Pioneer College (p. 2), he reports that the Colorado College trustees entered into correspondence with him about heading the college in 1875; but in Looking Forward into the Past (p. 58, 66), he states that a clerical colleague, who was in Colorado in 1876 for health reasons and serving as an itinerant missionary, recommended him to the secretary of the board of trustees and correspondence followed. It is possible, however, that the two accounts are complementary rather than contradictory or that Tenney in his memoirs written many years later misremembered.Google Scholar

¹³ Ibid.; Tenney, Founding a Pioneer College, 2.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Tenney, Looking Forward, 73–80.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Ibid., 75.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The American Education and College Society (AECS) formed in 1874 from a merger of the American College Society (ACS), founded in 1815, and the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West (SPCTW), founded in 1843. Both of the earlier organizations were cooperative agencies, products of the 1801 Plan of Union with the Presbyterians, but the new AECS was strictly Congregationalist, which reflected the demise of the Plan of Union and the more sectarian directions within Protestantism by the 1870s. The ACS and SPCTW predecessors had an impressive record of founding and supporting academies and colleges in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, Great Plains, and Far West. AECS and its predecessors did not run colleges and boards of trustees could not be ecclesiastical. The agencies provided support through an annual financial canvass and wealthy Congregational philanthropists usually wanted to know that an institution met agency approval before providing independent financial support. See three articles by Findlay, James, “The Congregationalists and American Education,” History of Education Quarterly 17, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 686–94; “The SPCTEW and Western Colleges: Religion and Higher Education in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” History of Education Quarterly 17, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 36–62; and “Agency, Denominations, and the Western Colleges, 1830–1860: Some Connections between Evangelicalism and American Higher Education,” in Geiger, The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 115–26.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Tenney, Looking Forward, 65–69. Tenney reported that the local trustees were men with whom the New Englanders could work and he was particularly reassured that Bartlett, Enoch N., the secretary of the board, as a boy had been a student of Tenney's father in northern New Hampshire.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ibid., 69.Google Scholar

²⁰ Ibid.Google Scholar

²¹ Ibid., 71–72.Google Scholar

²² Ibid., 66.Google Scholar

²³ Ibid., 80.Google Scholar

²⁴ Ibid., 71.Google Scholar

²⁵ See Tenney, Edward P., The New West: As Related to the Christian College and the Home Missionary (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1878). One commentator called Tenney's book, which went through five printings in two years, only slightly less significant than Josiah Strong's later Our Country (1885) as a Protestant manifesto for the post-Civil War frontier, in the same vein that Lyman Beecher's A Plea for the West (1835) and Horace Bushnell's Barbarism the First Danger: A Discourse for Home Missions (1847) did in the pre-Civil War period. See Szasz, Ferenc M., The Protestant Clergy in the Great Plains and Mountain West, 1865–1915 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 17–18. With the strong appeals to religious responsibility, moral development, republican values, and a perceived threat to those virtues by alien religious expressions, Tenney's The New West echoed some of the themes of A Plea for the West. However, Tenney's concerns about the dual threat of Mormons and Jesuits did not match the vehemence of Beecher's nativist, anti-Catholic tract. The evangelical college campaigns in the Great Plains and Mountain West were a continuation of earlier ones in the Ohio and Mississippi Valley areas. Although significant similarities existed in terms of the civic mission and the concerns about alien faiths, the differences in the two areas in physical space, number of colleges founded, and social environment were pronounced. The New England financial backers of colleges in both regions sought religious hegemony, but that did not happen. On the debate over the issues of religious conformity versus pluralism in the Midwest, see David Potts, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism,” History of Education Quarterly 11 (Winter 1971): 363–79; James Findlay's two articles above, “The SPCTEW and Western Colleges” and “Agency, Denominations, and the Western Colleges, 1830–1860”; and Smith, Timothy L., “The Ohio Valley: Testing Ground for America's Experiment in Religious Pluralism,” Church History 60 (December 1991): 461–79. For an interesting compilation of essays on the diversity of the forty-two surviving independent colleges and universities in Ohio, most of which were founded during this period, see Oliver, John W., Jr., Hodges, James A., and James, H. O'Donnell, eds., Cradles of Conscience: Ohio's Independent Colleges and Universities (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

²⁶ The literature on the early Mormons is voluminous. The best book on the Utah founding is Leonard Arrington, J., Brigham Young: American Moses (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). The definitive source on Mormon history is Walker, Ronald W., Whittaker, David, and Allen, James B., Mormon History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), an encyclopedic, book-length historiography.Google Scholar

²⁷ Tenney, Looking Forward, 100–25, and E. L. Hood, The New West Education Commission, 1880–1893 (Jacksonville, FL: H. & H.B. Drew Company, 1905), 9–15.Google Scholar

²⁸ Tenney, Looking Forward, 111–25; quote found in Hood, The New West Education Commission, 79.Google Scholar

²⁹ Hood, The New West Education Commission, 33–42, and Tenney, Looking Forward, 157. The struggles, successes, and failures of the various academies each varied by individual situation, but securing ongoing consistent funding was a universal challenge.Google Scholar

³⁰ Tenney, Looking Forward, 127.Google Scholar

³¹ The Chicago Circular is reprinted in Tenney, Looking Forward, 129–36.Google Scholar

³² Statement by Cook, Reverend Joseph, found in Tenney, Looking Forward, 134.Google Scholar

³³ Hood, The New West Education Commission, 67.Google Scholar

³⁴ Tenney, Looking Forward, 131.Google Scholar

³⁵ Ibid., 137–45.Google Scholar

³⁶ Ibid., 158–59, and Hood, The New West Education Commission. Lyon, T. Edgar, the prominent student of nineteenth century Mormon history, treats the New West Education Commission briefly in his influential Ph.D. dissertation, “Evangelical Protestant Missionary Activities in Mormon Dominated Areas, 1865–1900,” (PhD dissertation, University of Utah, 1962).Google Scholar

³⁷ Tenney, Looking Forward; Hood, The New West Educational Commission; and Szasz, Protestant Clergy in the Great Plains and Mountain West, quote, 148. Unfortunately, relatively few personal accounts by the young female teachers who staffed the schools exist. A notable exception is the Abbie Parish Noyes Papers, Utah State Historical Society, Mss. B 172. During her year at the Ogden Academy, 1889–1890, Miss Noyes wrote extensively to her parents and to her brother, Noyes, James Young, a student at Colorado College, in which she discussed in great detail her daily experiences and her perspectives. Her papers also contain letters from her three former female colleagues at the school, her replacement, and her former students in the year after she returned home to Massachusetts to take care of her seriously ill father. These documents constitute a rare insight into the daily existence, problems, and glories of the Utah educational effort. Protestant women as well as a few Catholic women went to Utah as teachers during the era, and a few Mormon women from the East also served. For the story of two Gentile sisters, who converted to Mormonism upon arrival and devoted over twenty-five years to education in Utah, see Jill Mulvay, “The Two Miss Cooks: Pioneer Professionals for Utah Schools,” Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (Fall 1975): 396–409.Google Scholar

³⁸ Second Annual Report of the New West Education Commission (Chicago: New West Education Commission, 1882), 13. See also Rev. Noble, F.A., “The Mormon Iniquity: A Discourse Delivered Before the New West Education Commission in the First Congregational Church, November 2, 1884,” [fourth anniversary] (Chicago: New West Education Commission, 1884); Rev. Phillips, George Whitefield, “The Mormon Menace: A Discourse Before the New West Education Commission on its Fifth Anniversary, at Chicago, November 15, 1885,” (Chicago: New West Education Commission, 1885); and Hood, The New West Education Commission, 96. The annual reports, housed among other places, at Harvard University are available on-line through Google Books. Among many other anti-Mormon tracts of the era is Colorado College professor George, N. Marden's pamphlet, The Growth and Grip of Mormonism (Boston: Frank Wood, 1885).Google Scholar

³⁹ See Lyon, “Evangelical Protestant Missionary Activities in Mormon Dominated Areas, 1865–1900,” 172–98. A letter from missionary Charles Bliss, R. to the American Home Mission Society, July 2, 1892, complained about the schools competing with the churches.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Ibid.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid.Google Scholar

⁴² Tenney, Looking Forward, 161.Google Scholar

⁴³ For further information on the dual system of parochial and public schools in territorial Utah, see Bennion, M. Lynn, Momumism and Education (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1939; Moffitt, John C., The History of Education in Utah (self-published, 1946); Ivins, Stanley S., “Free Schools Come to Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 22 (July 1954): 321–342; Hough, C. Merrill, “Two School Systems in Conflict: 1867–1890,” Utah Historical Quarterly 28 (April 1960): 113–28; Lyon, T. Edgar, “Religious Activities and Development in Utah, 1847–1910,” Utah Historical Quarterly 35 (Fall 1967): 292–306; Vinatieri, Joseph A., “The Growing Years: Westminster College From Birth to Adolescence,” Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (Fall 1975): 344–61 [which also treats the Presbyterian primary and secondary school efforts]; Dwyer, Robert J., “Catholic Education in Utah: 1875–1975,” Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (Fall 1975): 362–78; Peterson, Charles S., “A New Community: Mormon Teachers and the Separation of Church and State in Utah's Territorial Schools,” Utah Historical Quarterly 48 (Summer 1980): 293–312; and Buchanan, Frederick S., “Education Among the Mormons: Brigham Young and the Schools of Utah,” History of Education Quarterly 22 (Winter 1982): 435–59. On the same topic in New Mexico through the early 1890s when the New West Education Commission ended, see Clark, James E., “New Mexico's Educational Policy,” New Mexico Journal of Education 7 (February, 1911): 15–19; Twichell, Ralph E., The Leading Facts of New Mexican History (Cedar Falls, IA: The Torch Press, 1912) and Compilation of the School Laws of the Territory of New Mexico (Santa Fe: El Boletin Popular Printing Co., 1903); Atkins, Jane C., “Who Will Educate: The Schooling Question in Territorial New Mexico, 1846–1911,” (PhD dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1982); Jenkins, Myra E., “Early Education in New Mexico,” NEA-NM School Review (Mid-Winter 1977); Everett, Dianna, “The Public School Debate in New Mexico, 1850–1891,” Arizona and the West 26 (Summer 1984): 107–35; and Biebel, Charles D., “Cultural Change on the Southwest Frontier: Albuquerque Schooling, 1870–1895,” New Mexico Historical Review (July 1980): 209–30. Despite the years in the subtitle, Getz's fine book, Schools of Their Own: The Education of Hispanos in New Mexico, 1850–1940, begins her account in the 1890s with only an introductory summary of the previous decades.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Tenney, Looking Forward, 164–65.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Quote by Ellsworth, James Drummond, a pioneer public relations practitioner who served Bell Telephone Systems from 1907–1930, found in Cudip, Scott M., Fund Raising in the United States: Its Role in America's Philanthropy (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 19. Stone, Wilbur F., ed., History of Colorado (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1918), 623–625, provides a detailed history of the growth of students during the Tenney years. Interestingly, in 1881–1882, the institution had 122 students but only nine were in the college; the rest were in the preparatory school or in certificate programs. The first two B.A. degrees were awarded in 1882 and in that same year, a graduate of an accredited high school could enter as fully qualified freshmen. East Denver High School was the first secondary school to have the accredited status. In the interim years between the end of the Tenney presidency and the arrival of President William, F. Slocum in 1888, the number of students declined dramatically so that the college was almost moribund by that point.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Tenney, Looking Forward, 187–99. The economic venture calls to mind the assertion of Julian Sturtevant, one of the group of Yale theology students, called the “Yale Band,” who dedicated themselves to evangelism and education on the frontier in the 1830s. Sturtevant, who served as the second president of Illinois College, observed that “the mania for college building… was the combined result of the prevalent speculation in land and the zeal for denomination aggrandizement.” See Boorstin, , The National Experience, 155.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Ibid.; Tenney, Founding a Pioneer College, 20–30; Reid, J. Juan, Colorado College: The First Century, 1874–1974 (Colorado Springs: Colorado College, 1952), 27–33; Loevy, Colorado College, 38–42.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Letter to the editor, Colorado Springs Gazette, Death of a Territorial Pioneer,” published 29 July 1916. James Hutchison Kerr Mss., Special Collections, Colorado College Tutt Library, Vol. V, 454–456.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Kerr, “The Pioneer Days of Colorado College.” See the extensive correspondence between Kerr and Tenney, E.P. from 1911 until Tenney's death in 1916. Kerr Mss., Box 1, Folder 6.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Tenney, Looking Forward, 201–5.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Tenney, Founding a Pioneer College, and Tenney, Looking Forward, 213–23.Google Scholar

⁵² Tenney, Looking Forward, 221.Google Scholar

⁵³ His wife survived, Ellen, but their two daughters had preceded him in death many years earlier.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Ibid., 211.Google Scholar