Brother Van:

The Itinerant Heart of Early Montana

To speak of Montana's nascent years is to speak in the language of movement — rivers that carried steamboats, rails that stitched tent cities into towns, and people who rode the ranges and the rails in search of fortune, shelter, and community. Into that restless geography rode a man who seems, in later memory, equal parts evangelist, social architect, and poet of the prairie: William Wesley Van Orsdel, universally known as “Brother Van.” Born in Hunterstown, Pennsylvania, in 1848, Van Orsdel arrived in Fort Benton by steamboat in 1872 and began a ministry that would last nearly half a century and shape the physical and moral infrastructure of a state still learning how to be a state. 

Brother Van’s reputation as Montana’s most beloved circuit rider grows less like hagiography and more like an accurate portrait when we look at the tally: somewhere over one hundred churches and scores of parsonages, multiple hospitals and a university campus, a children’s home and deaconess school — institutions that translated the transient settlements of the territorial era into places that could hold lives. His work was not merely religious: it was civic and pedagogic. When the state’s population was scattered across ranges, gulches, and prairie townships, the structures Brother Van helped found offered continuity — places for the ill, for the educated young, and for the grieving. 

There is a story, almost folkloric in its tone but grounded in contemporary newspaper recollection and later biographies, that captures his method. Arriving in a rough town where saloons outnumbered pews, he would climb a wagon or stand at the saloon door and sing; sometimes he preached to miners, cowhands, soldiers, and Native Americans; sometimes he rebuked social ills with a quiet, ironic wit. He wore no clerical airs that separated him from the community; instead, he cultivated a kinship with every Montanan he met. That capacity to be both intimate and public, to move between the governor’s office and the cattle camp, made him uniquely effective. Governors were said to drop everything to have lunch with Brother Van, not because he sought power, but because he carried the moral capital of a man whom the people trusted. 

The practical side of Van Orsdel’s ministry deserves emphasis. Methodism’s circuit riders were, by vocation, itinerant; they rode routes, administered sacraments, and organized congregations. Brother Van, though, was also a builder and a fundraiser. He persuaded congregations and donors to invest in hospitals in Great Falls and Bozeman; he supported and helped found educational institutions that later merged and evolved into present-day colleges; and he organized the Montana Deaconess Preparatory School, an institutional innovation linking religious vocation and social service training. The deaconess school, staffed by women trained in Chicago, eventually developed into institutions that served children and families across the region — a testament to Van Orsdel’s capacity to see social problems through both pastoral and administrative lenses. 

If there is an emblematic anecdote about Van Orsdel, it is one of gentle moral theater. In one telling, during a hold-up on a train, the outlaw recognized Brother Van and, moved either by respect or a sense of paradox, handed him money rather than robbing him. In another, when accused of thievery by townspeople who refused to accept his denials, he simply climbed onto a wagon and began to sing, and the music broke the rage into laughter and then into repentance. These stories work as folklore but they are grounded in the recollections catalogued by local historians and in period press articles: the man’s personal magnetism was real, and his pastoral toolkit included humor, song, and an unshakeable presence. 

Brother Van’s life must also be read against the deeper currents of American expansion. He arrived in Montana when the old buffalo ecology had been shredded and the reservation system and homesteading were producing rapid social change. Van Orsdel ministered to newly arrived settlers and to Native Americans whose lives were being remade by federal policy and settler colonialism. His ministry was therefore complicit in, as well as responsive to, the larger processes of transformation: he provided care and community to those within the expanding settler society while moving in a moral register shaped by the missionary impulses of his denomination and era. That tension — the care he gave, and the historical frame in which he worked — is part of his legacy and part of the reason his story is so revealing about Montana’s formation. 

Historians looking back at Brother Van’s life emphasize institutional durability. The Brother Van House in Great Falls is preserved as a museum; the institutions he helped found have often been refashioned but remain recognizably descendants of his initiatives. The Montana Deaconess School’s lineage can be traced into modern social service organizations; Rocky Mountain College counts among its earliest antecedents the schools and colleges where Van Orsdel invested leadership and advocacy. These concrete inheritances — buildings, organizations, names in archives — are the measurable part of his achievement. But measuring too narrowly risks missing the other inheritance he left: a model of civic religion that helped stitch together communities across hundreds of miles of prairie and mountain. 

Biographical studies of Van Orsdel vary in tone. Early hagiographic treatments, written by contemporaries or in the missionary press, emphasize his sanctity and the miracles of conversion and institution-making. Later historians adopt a more complex stance, situating him within regional history and exploring the contradictory roles clergy played in processes of settlement, assimilation, and state-building. Reading Van Orsdel across these accounts is an instructive exercise in historiography: the older accounts tell us about public memory and moral imagination; the newer ones help us parse the limits of individual agency within structural change. For those who traverse both registers, Brother Van emerges as both larger-than-life and historically legible — a public pastor of enormous energy whose choices and charisma were channeled into institutions that would endure. 

Why has Brother Van remained so firmly lodged in Montana’s memory? Partly because he was everywhere at once: at weddings and funerals, at cornerstone ceremonies and campaign rallies, on the prairie and in the press. The stories that attend him are stories that communities tell about themselves: of making order out of risk, of building care out of scarcity. But perhaps the truest answer is this: he lived the paradox of frontier religion, a vocation that asked him to be both companion and architect. The people he served remembered not only what he preached but how he labored — building, cajoling, organizing, occasionally scolding, but always present. That persistence of presence, across decades and across distances, is the most vivid thing a historian can recover. 

In the end, Brother Van’s life reads like a chord struck across Montana’s early decades — loud in its human warmth, steady in its institutional resonance. He died in Great Falls in December 1919, and in the century since the state has preserved his memory with museums, plaques, and the steady circulation of anecdote. But the more durable memorial is the network of hospitals, schools, churches, and social services he helped imagine into being. Those institutions, like the songs he once sang on a wagon, continue to carry voice and solace into communities. When we walk into a small-town church parsonage, or into a hospital founded by a denominational board that he helped seat, we are in the presence of the practical theology he practiced: faith as public service, and ministry as architecture. 

For scholars, local historians, and poetic nostalgists alike, Brother Van’s story offers a lesson: that history is made by a mixture of stubborn people and fragile institutions. Van Orsdel was stubborn in his optimism, tireless in his travel, and uncompromising in his conviction that the frontier would be gentled not simply by law or commerce but by care. The Montana he helped shape was, at its best, the product of such persistent attentions — and remembering him remains an act of recognizing the human labor behind civic life.

Works Cited

Brummitt, Stella W. Brother Van. Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1919. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56184/56184-h/56184-h.htm

“William Wesley Van Orsdel ‘Brother Van’.” Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, 2011, montanacowboyfame.org/inductees/2011/5/william-wesley-van-orsdel-brother-van. 

Smith, Alson J. Brother Van: A Biography of the Rev. William Wesley Van Orsdel. Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1948. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/brothervanbiogra0000smit

“Best Loved Man in Montana: Brother Van.” Great Falls History Museum, 28 Mar. 2024, www.greatfallshistorymuseum.org/blog/best-loved-man-in-montana-brother-van

“William Van Orsdel.” Montana Historical Society, mhs.mt.gov/education/Montanans/van.pdf. 

“Montana Deaconess School to Intermountain.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Spring 2009. Intermountain, https://www.intermountain.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Montana-The-Magazine-of-Western-History-Intermountain-article-Spring-2009.pdf

“William Wesley Van Orsdel.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wesley_Van_Orsdel. Accessed 2024.