John Lewis Dyer

(Methodist Episcopal clergyman)

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* * *

Born |  March 16, 1812
Franklin County, Ohio

Resident of:
Grant County, Wisconsin
Park County, Colorado
Castle Rock, Douglas County
Colorado
Denver, Colorado

Died |  June 16, 1901 (aged 89)
Denver, Colorado

Resting place
Cedar Hill Cemetery in Castle Rock, Colorado

Spouse |  (1) Harriet Foster Dyer (married 1833-1847, her death)

(2) Illegal arrangement with Sarah Whiting (1847- c. 1848)
(3) Lucinda Rankin Dyer (married 1870-1888, her death)
Children:
From first marriage:
Joshua Dyer (1834-1865)
Elias Foster Dyer (1836-1875)
Elizabeth "Abbie" Dyer Streeter (born 1842)
Samuel M. Dyer (born 1843)
Harriet Dyer (1846-1847)
Parents:
Samuel and Cassandra Foster Dyer

John Lewis Dyer (March 16, 1812 - June 16, 1901) was for some four decades a pioneering Methodist Episcopal itinerant preacher, first in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and then in the mining camps and other communities of his adopted U.S. state of Colorado. In Colorado he became known as Father Dyer because of his age, relative to the young prospectors.[1] He is considered one of the sixteen principal 19th century founders of Colorado.

## Contents

* 1 Background
* 2 Colorado pioneer
* 3 Remembrances
* 4 References

## Background[edit]

Dyer was born in Franklin County in central Ohio, one of eight children of Samuel Dyer (1786-1871) and the former Cassandra Foster (1792-1869)[2] and largely reared thereafter in Illinois. He had little formal education and was considered eccentric.[3] He was converted to Jesus Christ at the age of eighteen. He was a veteran of the Black Hawk Indian War of 1832.[2] The next year, he wed the former Harriet Foster (1812-1847), and the couple had five children. He farmed and then worked in the lead mines near the village of Potosi in Grant County in southwestern Wisconsin. Harriet died at the age of thirty-five, two months later, still 1847, their 13-month-old daughter, also named Harriet, also succumbed. Dyer was quickly remarried to a widow, Sarah Whiting, but he ended the arrangement when he found that she had never been divorced from a former spouse.[3] Whiting subsequently perished in a flood in 1851.[4]

One day in the mine shaft, Dyer felt that he was about to suffocate when he claimed to hear the voice of God calling to him. He left mining and dedicated his remaining years to proselytizing for Christ.[5] Dyer promptly left his four surviving children, Joshua, Elias, Elizabeth "Abbie", and Samuel, in the care of a sister while he accepted the call to the circuit riding ministry, based on the technique used in England by John Wesley.[3] The commitment kept him away from home for weeks at a time. After a decade of circuit riding in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Dyer, at the age of forty-nine in 1861, left Lenore, Minnesota, for Denver. He was likely the oldest of all the circuit riders at the time.[2]

## Colorado pioneer[edit]

Because Dyer feared the possible loss of his vision, he was determined to see Pike's Peak and the Rocky Mountains while he could. He made it to Omaha, Nebraska, when his horse could no longer carry him. and then walked with a wagon trai] the six hundred remaining miles to Denver. There he was briefly reunited with his second son, Elias Foster Dyer, who had left Minnesota the previous year to take a job as a store clerk.[3][4]

Dyer then walked another hundred miles to Buckskin Joe, a mining camp near Alma and Fairplay, Colorado, both in Park County. Having lost thirty pounds on his travels west,[5] Dyer showed renewed energy in preaching in the mining camps from South Park to the Continental Divide, the point where the Atlantic and Pacific watersheds separate east and west. In his autobiography, Dyer referred to South Park as "a view of grandeur never to be forgotten."[6]

Employed by the Methodist South Park Circuit, he was so poorly compensated that he took a second job carrying mail from Buckskin Joe to Leadville. The work paid $18 per month. To preach the gospel, he crossed 13,185 foot Mosquito Pass several times per week in all weather conditions. During winters, he used "Norwegian snow shoes" (skis) to maneuver through the snows over Mt. Mosquito. He preached in the camps three times a week and three more times each Sunday. He traversed steep, dangerous terrain by horse or mule when possible.[5] He preached against the common activities of miners, gambling, alcohol, and prostitution. He performed marriages, tended the sick, and became known as a selfless individual.[2] Dyer was aware that most of the mining revenues went to comparatively few individuals. The miners faced backbreaking and dangerous work, but he directed his ministry as a message of hope.[3] Dyer preached wherever he could find anyone to listen, even in saloons. He went as far south as New Mexico to proclaim the gospel.[3]

In his autobiography, Dyer tells of one particularly trip over Mosquito Pass which resulted in frozen feet and near death, spared only by a three-week recuperation assisted by a willing friend. Dyer was so thrifty, a necessity for his small salary, that he once walked a hundred miles from Buckskin Joe to his small cabin in Mosquito Gulch. While the trip took two and a half days, he saved $20, $2 more than his monthly pay for delivering the mail.[6] For his innovation of snow shoes and skis for general travel, even though his device was not meant for athletics, Dyer was posthumously honored by induction into the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in Vail.[7]

It was believed that few other individuals knew that part of the Rocky Mountain West to the extent that Dyer did although John Chivington, known for the Sand Creek Massacre, was also a Methodist circuit rider and later a presiding elder, but he had entered the military by the time Dyer arrived in Colorado. While others came to emulate his work on the mission field, they fell short of the success that he reached.[5][6]

In 1870, Dyer wed Lucinda Lord Rankin (1827-1888), a native of Maine and the widow of Joseph Rankin, who had died in 1862. She lived in Cherry Creek near Castle Rock, the subsequent county seat of Douglas County, south of Denver. The Dyers lived in Breckenridge in Summit County, where he was instrumental in building a church, the Father Dyer United Methodist Church. He donated land for the church building and physically worked on the construction. He preached the opening sermon in 1880. The church has since been relocated within Breckenridge and undergone two renovations. It is located at the intersection of Briar Rose and Wellington. Dyer retired from the ministry after the dedication service but returned to Breckenridge again from 1885 to 1887 as interim pastor.[3][8]

In 1882, the Dyers returned to their ranch in Castle Rock but could not make a living; two years later, they swapped the ranch for a house in Denver. In 1885, Dyer was named the first chaplain of the Colorado State Senate.[9] Dyer spent the last eleven years of his life in Denver with his daughter and son-in-law, "Abbie" and Clinton Streeter.[4] Abbie was the only Dyer child to survive their father.

In May 1894, Dyer was injured in the former town of Howbert in Park County while he was returning from preaching engagement, but he recovered and lived another seven years.[6]

## Remembrances[edit]

In addition to the Father Dyer United Methodist Church in Breckenridge, a log structure known as "Father Dyer's Chapel" is located in the restored mining community of South Park City in Park County. The building was formerly a hotel in Montgomery, Colorado, but it was dismantled and moved to Fairplay and rebuilt as a Methodist church in 1868. Dyer was the driving force behind the move.[3] After Lucinda's death in Denver in 1888,[3] Dyer began his autobiography, Snow-Ski Itinerant, which he completed in 1890.[10]

In 1900, his stain-glassed portrait was unveiled in the Colorado State Capitol. By then he was affectionately called "Father Dyer," a term first to refer to Dyer as early as 1868 at a Sunday school meeting at the Lawrence Street Methodist Church in Denver. The term has not been since adopted by the Methodist Church to refer to its ministers.[3][8]

The 13,615-foot mostly isolated Father Dyer Peak in Summit County, part of the Tenmile Range, is named in his honor.[2][11] Dyersville, Colorado, a ghost town in Summit County in central Colorado, also bears his name. Dyer was assigned to Summit County in 1862 through the Blue River Mission.[4]

Dyer's biography, written by a former minister, Mark Fiester, is entitled Look For Me In Heaven: The Life of John Lewis Dyer.[12]

Dyer died in Denver in 1901. His eldest son Joshua, a prisoner of war of the Confederate States of America, died in 1865 at the age of thirty-one in a steamship explosion off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. His youngest son, Samuel, returned from the American Civil War in 1865 with a foot missing and died thereafter in California.[4] Second son Elias, the former store clerk, became a probate judge in Chaffee County in central Colorado and was murdered in Granite by a mob in his courtroom in 1875. Judge Dyer's death was part of a general conflict called the Lake County War; his killer was never apprehended. He was first buried in Granite.[13]

Father Dyer is interred beside his wife Lucinda, his older son Joshua, his namesake grandson, John Lewis Dyer, II (1873-1947), and the re-interred graves of his father, Samuel, and his second son, Elias, at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Castle Rock, Colorado.[4]

A marble marker commemorating Father Dyer is at the top of Mosquito Pass between Alma (east) and Leadville (west).

## References[edit]

1. ↑ Father Dyer Church website, accessed November 1, 2014.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Dyer, Father, the Snowshoe Itinerant Preacher. history.oldcolo.com (June 17, 1901). Retrieved on January 18, 2014.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 Jim Fagan (December 20, 2004). Snowshoes, Saloons, and Salvation: The Life And Times Of a 19th Century Colorado Pioneer Preacher. snowshoemag.com. Retrieved on October 21, 2020.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Father John Lewis Dyer. oakdene.org. Retrieved on January 19, 2014.
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Biography of Famous Preacher Father Dyer Part 1. trivia-library.com. Retrieved on January 19, 2014.
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Laura King Van Dusen, Historic Tales from Park County: Parked in the Past (Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press, 2013), ISBN 978-1-62619-161-7, pp. 32-33, 102.
7. ↑ Colorado Ski Museum. colorado-for-free.com. Retrieved on January 19, 2014.
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Father Dyer United Methodist Church. fatherdyer.org. Retrieved on January 18, 2014.
9. ↑ Verifiable Oddities in Colorado’s History - The Snowshoe Chaplain of the State Senate. legisource.net. Retrieved on January 19, 2014.
10. ↑ (2008) The Snow-Shoe Itinerant - An Autobiography by John L. Dyer. Western Reflections Publishing Company. ISBN 978-1932738650. Retrieved on January 19, 2014.
11. ↑ Father Dyer Peak. summitpost.org. Retrieved on January 19, 2014.
12. ↑ Mark Fleisher, Look for me in Heaven: The life of John Lewis Dyer. Pruett Publishing Company, 1980, 504 pp.; ASIN: B0006E1JLE. Retrieved on January 19, 2014.
13. ↑ Elias Foster Dyer. findagrave.com. Retrieved on October 21, 2020.