“Los Angeles gasped at the costumes worn” by Ontario-born Pentecostal evangelist, radio preacher and faith healer Aimee Semple McPherson when she testified before a committee of the California legislature during impeachment hearings of state Supreme Court Judge Carlos Hardy, the Vancouver Sun reported, February 5, 1929. McPherson had given Hardy a $2,500 cheque, an alleged […]
English-born Methodist minister Robert K. Peck, Alberta, 1910. “Wearing cowboy clothes, the Reverend Peck used to ride around the country preaching,” notes Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. Glenbow Archives NA-101-13. The passing of the fiery itinerant preachers, who galloped by horse throughout Canada, from hamlet to hamlet, to spread the gospel in the backwoods of nineteenth […]
A young Anglican missionary, 14 months out from England, talks to a Regina Standard reporter about the challenges of his parish, a prairie wilderness that extends from Calgary to the American border, September 11, 1891. “My parish is 100 miles long and forty miles wide, and at least once a year I am expected […]
The Hollywood image of the old west gold mining camps as lawless, lustful and licentious did not apply to peaceful, law-abiding Canada, judging by a report on September 19, 1864 in the Vancouver Times (Victoria, Vancouver Island). The biggest complaint of Vancouver Island miners appeared to be a lack of clergymen on Sundays. The editor […]
Booze 1829 — 1920 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. For more than a century-and-a-half, Europeans had been killing North America’s Indians by giving them firewater—whisky, brandy, rum, port, sherry—in exchange for furs. Now, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Canada’s pioneer settlers were killing themselves with their […]
A daring female preacher in Nova Scotia was “completely extinguished,” the Halifax Novascotian reported, April 3, 1828 in the following item. We received by the Mail from Miramichi, a printed discourse, delivered at Newcastle, by a Mr. Coony, from the text “Let your women keep silence in the churches.” It was delivered for the purpose of […]