A Brief History
The First Missionary Bishops
Itinerant bishops were also being called to new mission fields. The region's first missionary bishop was The Rt. Rev. Joseph Talbot, whose territory included Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. Describing himself as the "bishop of all outdoors," Bishop Talbot helped found churches throughout the Great Plains and the intermountain regions.
Talbot was succeeded by The Rt. Rev. George Maxwell Randall of Boston. The region's second missionary bishop served from 1865 to 1873—a remarkable tenure for the ferocious pace Randall set. As a builder of a number of Gold Rush–era churches and schools, Bishop Randall expressed dismay and frustration to see towns rise full of promise one year only to empty the next.
John Franklin Spalding (1828-1902) became the next Missionary Bishop of Colorado and Wyoming. Before he was named the first bishop of Colorado in 1887, Spalding began his service as missionary bishop of Colorado and Wyoming in 1873; he also had oversight of Arizona and New Mexico. Having arrived from Erie, Pennsylvania, with a powerful vision of a "Cathedral system, after the English model," Bishop Spalding encouraged the vestry of Saint John's to call The Rev. H. Martyn Hart to be its fifth rector —and its first dean. The congregation had already raised the funds to build a cathedral.
The first cathedral rose at 20th and Welton Streets in 1881. Dean Hart had drawn up plans for a Romanesque Revival cathedral—only the second or third cathedral to be built in the United States. Dean Hart recalled in his memoirs that the cathedral was derided by "Eastern Clergy . . . as a piece of impudence."
Throughout this period, Bishop Spalding bought land all over the new western state and assisted in developing some 87 congregations. The bishop's wife, Lavinia Spencer Spalding, who had organized the Ladies' Aid Society, founded, funded, and managed Saint Luke's Hospital for decades. The wife of one of the first western bishops, Mrs. Spalding was also the mother of another, Bishop Franklin Spencer Spalding (Bishop of Utah, 1905–1914).
