From the Papers: A short letter opens a long story

Much of the energetic early growth surrounding Christian Science occurred in America’s Eastern and Midwestern cities, where Mary Baker Eddy’s students were establishing teaching institutes and healing practices. However, the seeds of this new religion were also being planted at the leading edges of the westward movement shaping the United States at that time, including in goldrush boomtowns and along expanding railway lines. Hearing of Christian Science in such places, many people sought to learn more by writing Eddy directly with questions or orders for literature.

As the Mary Baker Eddy Papers team works to annotate and digitally publish documents in the Library’s Mary Baker Eddy Collection, we encounter these letters. Examining them opens a window on an important and interesting time and place in the history of Christian Science—the western frontier of the late 1800s. And in turn it helps us understand who and what was driving that history.

We recently found such a letter to Eddy, written by Henry Ripley on January 20, 1887, from Dallas, Colorado. He wrote, “Enclosed find P. O. Money Order for $3 17/100, for which please send ‘Science and Health’ with Key to the Scriptures, by return mail.”¹ Further research introduced us to him and his wife, Martha Pedley Ripley. They were living a rugged and adventuresome life in a dynamic boom town in the Rocky Mountains. While his brief letter contained no details about his life, the Ripleys authored a book, first published in 1914 and still available today: Hand-Clasp of the East and West: A Story of Pioneer Life on the Western Slope of Colorado.² It paints a vivid picture of their frontier lives and offers perceptive observations about the times in which they lived. Although the book doesn’t discuss Christian Science directly, it provides insight into why they may have been drawn to what it offered.

An autobiography written in story format, the book’s primary theme is that solid ideas formed in the established, eastern part of the US combined synergistically with the novel frontier spirit and energy of the western region, resulting in greater benefits to both.³ The book gives example after example of how the Ripleys applied this principle to the challenges they faced, surmounting their difficulties with considerable thoughtfulness, open-mindedness, and gumption. They then turned around and helped their neighbors do the same. In like fashion, they embraced Christian Science at a challenging point in their lives and went on to share its benefits with others, thus playing a part in the advancement of Christian Science as a whole.

The Ripleys were credible commentators on the interplay of America’s eastern ideas and western sensibilities, due to the trajectory of their own lives. Born in England, they immigrated with their families to the US when they were young—he in 1851 and she in 1864. He lived for a time in Illinois, and she lived in Kansas. But each eventually continued west to Cañon City, Colorado, where they met in 1873 and married the following year. For about five years, he worked as a job printer and was the editor and publisher of the Cañon City Times newspaper.

In the 1870s gold and silver were discovered in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, inciting what was known as the “San Juan Excitement”—a rush of pioneers and prospectors into the region. Several small towns sprang up almost overnight, including Ouray, Colorado, which began as a gold and silver mining camp in 1875.⁴ Seeking opportunity and adventure, Henry Ripley and his brother William decided to relocate to Ouray and establish its first newspaper, the Ouray Times, in 1877.⁵⁶

After initial success, however, the Ripleys and their newspaper fell on hard times. In 1879 a rival newspaperman arrived and began to outcompete them. In 1885 William Ripley was killed in a mining accident. And in 1886 Henry and Martha Ripley, who by then had five children under the age of 10 and one more on the way, lost their home in a tax auction. The following year the Ouray Times was taken over by one of its creditors.⁷ Bereft of their newspaper, the Ripleys turned to homesteading in the nearby town of Dallas, Colorado. Founded as a stagecoach stop in 1880, Dallas experienced its own boom in 1887, due to the expansion of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway. However, the nearby town of Ridgway, with its more favorable climate, geography, and access to the new railroad, soon eclipsed Dallas, causing it to decline nearly as quickly as it had arisen.⁸ Today there is nothing left of Dallas—not even a ghost town. The original townsite was submerged by Ridgway Reservoir in 1989, nearly 100 years after Henry Ripley wrote his letter. In the early 1890s a national silver collapse led to an even steeper downturn in the region’s fortunes,⁹ and in 1892 the Ripleys moved again—this time northwest to the town of Montrose, Colorado, where they took up ranching and dairy farming.¹⁰

Amid this period of hardship, uncertainty, and loss, so typical of the boom-and-bust cycles on the western frontier at that time, the Ripleys found their way to Christian Science, as seen in Henry’s January 1887 request to Eddy for Science and Health. In light of the theme brought out in Hand-Clasp of the East and West, it’s not surprising that they were receptive to Christian Science. They were cognizant of how ideas originating in the east could undergird and lend strength to efforts in the west. The book claims, “I am glad we were born in the East, for I see now the West, with its great storehouses of wealth, needs the East, with its legacy of strength to overcome.”¹¹ Also, “The ingenuity of the East, united with the perseverance of the West, had worked wonders toward mastering the many difficulties presented by nature.”¹² Moreover, they must have put Christian Science to the test and found it a viable way of solving their problems; he extolled its practicality in a 1900 article in the Montrose Enterprise (reprinted in the Christian Science Sentinel):

… Christian Science is before the country, the youngest and most radical religious system extant, courting the investigation of every honest seeker after Truth. It is willing to be measured by the rule given by Jesus, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”.… Of course no honest, determined seeker after Truth will accept unquestioningly the statements of any person, either for or against, but will thoroughly investigate, follow where Truth leads, and reach their own conclusions. Such investigation Christian Science invites.¹³

Although they lived in a place considered remote even today, the Ripleys intersected with Christian Science not long after it had arrived in Colorado. According to historian Dennis Partridge:

The history of Colorado and of Christian Science may be said to be coincident in that the first edition of the Christian Science text-book, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” was published by Mrs. Eddy but a few months prior to the admission of Colorado as a state. The seed[s] of the Christian Science movement in Colorado were sown in the spring of 1885 by Geo. B. Wickersham, and later that year a class was taught in the Denver home of Mrs. Chas. L. Hall by Bradford Sherman of Chicago. By the fall of 1888 a sufficient number had thus become interested to form an organization….¹⁴

While we don’t know for certain who introduced the Ripleys to Christian Science, two likely candidates are Eddy’s students Ella Peck Sweet and Mary A. Bagley. Sweet was one of the pupils in the aforementioned class, taught in Denver by Eddy’s student Bradford Sherman in 1885. She took Eddy’s Normal class at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in October 1887 and thereafter played a large role in bringing Christian Science to some of the remotest mountain pockets of Colorado.¹⁵ Bagley, also one of Sherman’s students, may even have been Sweet’s classmate in his 1885 class. She took Eddy’s Normal class at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in February 1887 and subsequently began a healing and teaching practice in Montrose.

Regardless of how the Ripleys first heard of Christian Science, once they did, they went on to be significantly involved with it for the rest of their lives. They both took Sweet’s Primary class in Christian Science and on April 6, 1895, joined The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts. Their daughter, Mary Ripley, also joined on June 3, 1899. Both of her parents became Christian Science practitioners listed in The Christian Science Journal—he in 1908 and she from 1900 to 1931. Both were members of First Church of Christ, Scientist, Montrose, Colorado. He served as Clerk and both of them were Readers.¹⁶ Joining their efforts to those of Sweet, Bagley, and others, the Ripleys became nodes of Christian Science’s further growth in southwestern Colorado. By 1898 there was a Christian Science church in Montrose. The Montrose Christian Science Institute was incorporated in 1901. And by 1899 there was a Christian Science Society in Ouray.¹⁷

After their move to Montrose in 1892, the Ripleys became comparatively settled and prosperous. Their dairy farm was successful, and their sons struck it rich in a mine near Ouray. Inclined to reflection and desiring to impart the hard-learned lessons from the pioneering chapter of their lives to the wider world, they began writing their book together. However, he passed away before it was finished. She would later write about this:

When this book with its mission of love was but two-thirds completed it was left for the wife to finish it alone, for the husband suddenly passed over another ‘blazed trail,’ which leads not to a country of privation, but to that of greater fruition; where the longing for larger freedom is fully satisfied, and the lessons of the mountains understood.¹⁸

When Hand-Clasp of the East and West was published in December 1914, it was hailed in newspaper notices throughout the region.

While at first glance Henry Ripley’s 1887 letter from Dallas, Colorado, may appear somewhat unremarkable, in fact it yields valuable insight into the growth and spread of Christian Science. The southwestern Colorado of the late 1800s may seem almost unimaginably remote. But the Ripleys’ experiences and perspectives help us understand how relatively ubiquitous Christian Science was at that time. He alluded to this in his 1900 article:

… Its publications, from the text-book, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker G. Eddy, down to the simplest tract, can be obtained by any person desiring them. Its lecturers are abroad in the land advocating and explaining its teachings to the hungering people. Its adherents are found scattered throughout the length and breadth of the land, and there is scarcely a hamlet in this country where are not to be found living witnesses of its healing and elevating influence. These are facts patent to those who will open their eyes to what is going on about them….¹⁹

This is also an example of how even the shortest, plainest letters in the Mary Baker Eddy Collection can provide glimpses into large and colorful lives. They demonstrate people’s unique intersections with Christian Science during this formative time—and explain how, in conjunction with many others, they were building a consequential, worldwide movement.

Please note: Quoted references in our “From the Papers” article series reflect the original documents. For this reason they may include spelling mistakes and edits made by the authors. In instances where a mark or edit is not easily represented in quoted text, an omission or insertion may be made silently.