Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 by Anne M. Butler (review)

I

We've been waiting a long time for a book like Anne Butler's Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 to appear. The expanding historiography of women religious in the United States in the last decade has given us excellent case studies of the history of American sisters. We know far more than ever before about the roles sisters played in the realms of education, health care, and social activism in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America. And yet American Catholic historians have lacked a monograph that provides a dense and detailed portrait of the larger sweep of Catholic sisterhoods beyond establishments and institutions in settled Catholic arenas. With Butler's Across God's Frontiers in hand, I say without hesitation that this book has been worth the wait.

Across God's Frontiers provides a sweeping portrait of Catholic women religious in the western frontier and borderlands and on Native American reservations from the years preceding the Civil War through the early twentieth century. Butler meets the scholarly challenge of writing a coherent historical narrative about diverse congregations and activities in a vast geographic area over a wide time frame by eschewing a strictly chronological framework for one that devotes distinct chapters to the central structures that conditioned sisters' experiences. Across God's Frontiers explores sisters' travel westward from origins in the United States, Canada, and Europe, the work they pursued in missions and new foundations in the West, the financial arrangements and uneven relationships with largely-autocratic bishops that shaped their ministries, and the complexity of their relationships with African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans. Butler devotes a separate chapter to Katharine Drexel, and concludes the volume with a broad consideration of the ways that sisters accommodated their institutes to the unique challenges that emerged from how climate and landscape, physical isolation and material poverty, cultural pluralism and flexible patterns of authority converged in the American West.

Butler's work is less driven by a central argument than by her desire to open to her readers the warp and woof of the lives and communities sisters crafted in the West. One of the major achievements of this book is Butler's success at providing readers with an accessible and intelligible portrait of women religious in the West that respects the distinct historical trajectories of the numerous congregations included in her study. By my count, Butler's research included visits to an impressive forty-five archives in thirty-two different locations. And despite the sheer volume of data and congregational specificity she compiled, Across God's Frontiers manages artfully and often to eloquently give human faces and voices to historical developments about which most Catholics historians know only the vague outline.

Butler is writing for at least two scholarly audiences, namely historians of U.S. Catholicism and historians of the American West. To Western historians, she offers a compelling study of the contribution and complexities that Catholic women religious introduced to the West. For Catholic historians, Across God's Frontiers provides a subtle portrait of how congregational structures were stretched, and often strained, by western mission. Butler sometimes assumes that her Catholic historian readers know more about western history than they actually do, and the book would have benefitted from more direct discussion of specific dates and events in western history, including specifics about larger dynamics of expansion, settlement and statehood, Bureau of Indian Affairs policies, and the boom and bust trajectories of specific locations.

The introduction of Butler's western focus adds immeasurably to scholarship on American Catholicism in the late nineteenth century. Still, to sustain her emphasis on sisters and the momentum of their western movement, Butler sometimes allows her narrative to generalize the West as a region (which she acknowledges in her introduction) into...