Gospel Tracks through Texas: The Mission of Chapel Car Good Will, and: Pistol Packin' Preachers: Circuit Riders of Texas

These two works show the pluses and minuses of "amateur" history. Those who write out of love for their subject can sometimes lack academic rigor, but they usually end up telling a pretty good story. Both Barton and Taylor tell good stories. Barton is the better storyteller, but Taylor has a clear edge in professional presentation.

Barbara Barton is a rancher and schoolteacher in Knickerbocker, and she writes on the side, having self-published four histories and sold eighty-five magazine articles. In Pistol Packin' Preachers she tells the stories of the men who brought religion to Texas from the 1830s into the 1920s, from the Austin colony to the age of the automobile. The characters include itinerant circuit riders and those who established the early Protestant churches, often one and the same. European (German and Wend) and black churchmen also receive treatment. Coverage of Catholic priests in Texas is somewhat perfunctory.

The stories range beyond the church work of the characters. Brief bio-graphical sketches deal with early lives, marriages, work and military experience, and usually a conversion occasion if not an experience. There are side trips to religious encampments, Indian adventures, the services themselves, and the banditry, business ventures, and other sidelines of the preachers.

The author uses illustrations and maps, but the maps aren't necessarily appropriate to the story. The narrative is sometimes hard to follow as it has no setchronology. One moment we're in colonial Texas; the next, we're in the Civil War or the 1920s. Also, Barton fails to define a circuit rider or establish the circuits clearly. She sometimes loses chronology and continuity. Also, the book lacks footnotes, although it does contain a bibliography.

Barton is clearly enthusiastic about her subject. Her writing style is relaxed, sometimes folksy, and usually able to generate an interesting or amusing anecdote that provides an insight into the experiences the early preachers went through in bringing religion to Anglo Texas between 1830 and 1920. Those who would read it should be prepared to read it through—taken in small doses it's a bit bewildering, but the whole thing does provide a good kaleidoscopic image of life on the religious frontier of Texas in the nineteenth century—cowboys, Indians, and, oh yeah, preachers.

Gospel Tracks Through Texas has a narrower topic than Pistol Packin' Preachers. Special cars brought civilization—circus, chapel, and other specialties—to the immigrant and ranching frontiers. For about a decade at the turn of the twentieth century, a specially-outfitted chapel car traveled through Texas. The dozens of small railroads in Texas at the time provided free transport for both the car and the preacher. As well as the Baptists, the Episcopalians and Catholics provided similar cars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to bring religion to both the workers on the railroad and the somewhat isolated or otherwise religiously underserved communities along the way. Sponsored by the northern Baptists, the train was also intended to promote the Baptist Church in towns where the available churches were Methodist or other Protestant denominations or Catholics. At each town, the gospel car Good Will parked on a siding, either convenient or not depending on the religious temper of the stationmaster. It provided the basics for a Baptist church service as well as living space for the preacher and, sometimes, his wife during its eight-year run between 1895 and 1903.

The approach is chronological, from the identification of the need for a Baptist presence in Texas to the development of chapel cars, to the sending of the Good Will on its eight-year run through a hundred towns on dozens of railway lines. From the Piney Woods to the Panhandle, from the Red to the Rio Grande, the train kept rolling.

Taylor has previous experience with the topic, having coauthored This Train is Bound for Glory: The Story of America's Chapel Cars, and her work has all the scholarly trappings and an abundance of illustrations. She provides pertinent context for her train's travels, including interesting short sketches of the towns the train visits, intra-Baptist conflicts, the prohibition movement, and the difficulties of life aboard the train as well as good biographical sketches of the various pastors.

Taylor has provided a well-researched, well-illustrated examination of ashort-term missionary effort that reached not only the railroaders but thereligion-starved people of a somewhat wild and debauched community in near-frontier conditions. She also brings the story of Good Will to the end of its line in 1978, when it finally retired after thirty-five years of service beyond Texas.

Although their styles are distinctly different, each author brings enthusiasm and competence to the story she tells. Texas religious history is better for these two works.