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Bishop S. Tuttle, Missionary Bishop of Utah
DANIEL S. TUTTLE, MISSIONARY BISHOP OF UTAH
By James W. Beless, Jr.
"This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of bishop, he desireth a good work. A bishop must be vigilant, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach. . . ." The words of the epistler resounded in the ears of Daniel Sylvester Tuttle as he sat in Trinity Church in New York City on the first day of May, 1867. In a few minutes he would kneel at the altar and be consecrated the first Episcopal Missionary Bishop of Montana, with jurisdiction over Utah and Idaho.
Dan Tuttle thought of his wife and two-weeks-old son, of his parish in the green hills of Morris, New York, of the friends at Morris whom he, as an Episcopal priest, had baptized, counseled, married or buried, and he tried to project himself beyond Buffalo, beyond the Missouri, to his new responsibilities in the Far West. "Go ye therefore and teach all nations," the Gospel for the day read.
His election by the House of Bishops in October, 1866, had come as a surprise to Dan Tuttle. He had been four months short of age thirty, the minimum age for consecration. But he had the maximum requirements for a missionary bishop — a strong physique, a winning personality, and a love of people, all sorts of people. He had a maturity of judgment beyond his years, the concern of a good shepherd, and the will and perseverance to take his Lord into the far places. In the four years since he had graduated from General Theological Seminary, he had established a corps of faithful supporters in New York State who later aided his building programs and gave yeoman support to his missionary efforts in the West.
Bishop Tuttle was big enough, both literally and spiritually, to meet man-to-man the miners, ranchers, and camp followers of a rough and tumble post-Civil War Montana. He was prepared to meet the "Mormon problem" of Utah with no preconceived prejudices or zealous intentions of open opposition to the Mormon church or its practices. He determined to preach and practice his church's doctrines and to minister to his own people. His research determined that his mission field covered 350,000 square miles, with 150,000 inhabitants. Of Utah Territory's 85,000 people, Salt Lake City had 15,000, even though in Salt Lake City he was to find but three confirmed Episcopalians. The Bishop later discovered about 200 non-Mormons in the service of the stage company, 300 soldiers at Camp Douglas and Fort Bridger, 250 other Gentiles, mostly merchants, in Salt Lake City, and 250 more throughout Utah Territory, the majority being miners and traders.
Bishop Tuttle had received a letter from Warren Hussey, a banker in Salt Lake City, who encouraged the Bishop to travel first to Utah rather than to Montana by detailing the financial support that could be expected for a non-Mormon church in Salt Lake City and indicating that he had already solicited merchants and other Gentiles to support such a church. The first here would get that support. As to the Mormons he wrote:
Thus encouraged, the Bishop decided to go first to Salt Lake City. After an arduous journey, a great deal of it by stagecoach, the Bishop and his party consisting of his brother-in-law, Rev. G. D. B. Miller, Rev. E. N. Goddard, his sister Mrs. Nelly Foote and her fifteen-yearold sister-in-law, Sarah, arrived in Salt Lake City on the evening of July 2, 1867. The Rev. George W. Foote, Nelly's husband, and the Rev. T. W. Haskins, a young seminarian, had preceded the Bishop to Salt Lake City, arriving there on May 3, and on Sunday, May 8, these two had held an Episcopal service.
Before the arrival of the missionaries in Salt Lake City, a Sunday school of forty to sixty students had been meeting in Independence Hall under the guidance of Major Charles H. Hempstead, the United States Attorney who had succeeded the Rev. Norman McLeod, a Congregationalist chaplain at Camp Douglas.
Mr. McLeod had been associated in this work with Dr. J. King Robinson, an army surgeon married to an apostate Mormon. Dr. Robinson was an outspoken opponent of Mormonism, and he had become involved in a dispute with the city over the title to the Warm Springs in North Salt Lake. An unfortunate tragedy climaxed the doctor's career when he was beaten and shot by unknown assailants on October 22, 1866, shortly before midnight, and within a few rods of his home. Despite an offer of reward signed by Mayor Daniel H. Wells and another by local merchants joined by Brigham Young, suspicion was cast upon the Mormon authorities as efforts were charged lacking by the church-state to bring the murderers to justice. The affair ended in a generally unsatisfactory and inconclusive, but highly inflammatory, inquest hearing. McLeod had been in the east at the time of the Robinson incident, and discretion dictated that he should not return to Utah. Thus, when George Foote and Thomas Haskins arrived in May of 1867, Major Hempstead happily turned the Sunday school over to them.
McLeod and Robinson had been eager to attack the Mormon church and its practices, particularly polygamy. Foote and Haskins, on the contrary, immediately established a policy of friendly coexistence with the Mormons. Mr. Haskins wrote to Mrs. Fidelia B. Hamilton, one of the first three communicants in Utah, years later saying:
The day before the Bishop arrived, the two missionaries had opened a grammar school in a former bowling alley owned by the late Dr. Robinson. The two months' advance work of Foote and Haskins had borne fruit, and Bishop Tuttle was welcomed by a growing Sunday school, an operating day school of sixteen students, and eleven persons asking confirmation.
In the Bishop's Episcopal Register, which he had maintained from the date of his consecration and which was to be a daily record of his work in Utah, Montana, and Idaho for the next nineteen years, he recorded the services held during the next ten days. On July 7 the Bishop wrote:
On July 14 he entered:
On July 9, accompanied by Warren Hussey and George Foote, the Bishop called on Brigham Young at the latter's office. The visitors exchanged pleasantries with their host, and the Bishop found Young to be courteous and well versed in current events. In his letter written that evening to Harriet Tuttle the Bishop quoted items of the conversation. In response to a remark that the Fourth of July was a reminder of being in the United States, Young rejoined:
Brigham Young questioned Mr. Foote about a rumor supposedly heard by Foote that Brigham had taken the property of Amasa Lyman. Foote denied having heard the story, and as the visitors were leaving Young pursued the subject, saying:
The Bishop felt that he was civilly treated in this call, but he commented that he was not asked to call again. He concluded his letter, saying:
There is no record of other meetings between Bishop Tuttle and the Mormon leader, although the Bishop attended various assemblies addressed by Young and had official communications through channels of the Mormon church.
The Mormon reaction to the presence of the Episcopal clergy as permanent residents was expressed in a conversation between Bishop Tuttle and T. B. H. Stenhouse, editor of the Telegraph, the Mormon newspaper. Tuttle reported this conversation, Stenhouse saying:
Stenhouse then commented that he was building a fine house, hoping to sell it to some Gentile, and he added:
Having acquainted himself with church affairs in Salt Lake City, Bishop Tuttle felt that he should now proceed to Montana, which was virgin territory to the church. Spreading thin his missionary forces, he decided that Foote and Haskins should stay in Utah with the prime purpose of expanding the church school. Mr. Miller left on July 9 for Boise, Idaho, and Mr. Goddard and the Bishop left Salt Lake City for Montana on July 15.
The Bishop spent the remainder of the summer and fall of 1867 visiting the new towns of Montana and Idaho, organizing Sunday schools and holding services wherever churchmen were found. The following winter was a dreary one spent in a log cabin at Virginia City. Many sermons were rehearsed there before the Bishop's faithful companion, Dick, the white cat. But the Montana early days were productive in developing in Tuttle a tolerance and love for the vagaries of human nature as expressed in the gamblers, stage drivers, and cowboys of the mountains. On April 28 the great fire at Helena swept through the gulch. A bucket line was formed to keep wet blankets on the roofs of houses in the path of the consuming flames. In the turmoil three men gravitated to each other and led the volunteers to meet the fire and save the lower town — Bill Bunkerly, an Indian fighter, Joe Floweree, a leading gambler, and Bishop Daniel Tuttle. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported the fire incident and the comments of Bunkerly in saying of Tuttle:
Bishop Tuttle was a builder, inspired and without doubt as to the plan laid for him or the approach. By the summer of 1869 he had established congregations at Helena, Virginia City, Deer Lodge, Gallatin, and Boise. His family joined him at Helena, and during the months when travel was feasible he began visitations by stage throughout his district. He was proud to record in his register on May 24, 1868, the opening of St. Paul's Church at Virginia City with the following entry:
On June 1, 1868, the Bishop received a telegram from the diocesan convention meeting at St. Louis announcing his election on the first ballot as Bishop of Missouri. Alone in Bozeman, Bishop Tuttle faced the future, and weighing the advantages of life as a secure diocesan in St. Louis as against the mud, cold, and dust of the mountains plus the disappointments and physical dangers of a missionary bishop, he chose the latter and declined the election. He wrote to Bishop Horatio Potter, of New York, that he had prayed for guidance in his decision and he felt he should not leave the missionary field as he was now familiar with the problems and could plan wisely to meet them. A successor could not be as fit at once, he rationalized, and "Mormonism should not be dealt with by new men, and a succession of new men."
The Bishop had visited Salt Lake City in the fall of 1867 and the summer of 1868, and had received constant encouragement from his missionaries there to make his headquarters in the largest city in the Mountain West — amid the problems most perplexing and challenging to a church-builder. Finally in November, 1869, the Tuttles, by now the parents of two small boys, embarked upon the stage trip to Utah.
Corinne was a tent town four months old when the Tuttle party arrived there. With the expectation of Corinne being the railroad-stageriver and lake junction of Utah, the Salt Lake merchants were now rushing stocks of goods and bidding for sites on the town's main street. This was to be the Gentile stronghold of Utah. Already the Rev. Mr. Foote had secured a lot and was in the process of building the first Episcopal church in Utah, an adobe structure to be called the Church of the Good Samaritan. One thousand dollars had been raised on the spot, and the fifteen hundred more needed to complete the building was donated by Mrs. Robert Minturn, one of the Bishop's loyal supporters in New York State. The Bishop was aware that changes had taken place in Utah with the union of the railroads at Promontory Summit. He did not fully realize the significance of these changes, however, until he arrived in Ogden. Here he learned that already Brigham Young had countered the move of the transcontinental road and the plans for Corinne by building the Utah Central Railroad, and track was already laid half way to Salt Lake from Ogden. The last spike driven by Young himself on January 10,1870, spelled the death of the commercial hopes of Corinne and ultimately the end for the Episcopal church's mission there.
Bishop Tuttle made his episcopal residence in Salt Lake City during a period of momentous change on the Utah scene. He was to play a part for the next seventeen years in a drama enacted against a background of intrigue and power politics in a cold war atmosphere where strategy with religious overtones was carried out or countered by tactics secular, purely political or economic in nature, and where a hot Mormon war threatened continually.
Two years before Brigham Young had been able, in his conversation with Tuttle, to assume a position of isolation. He could view the problems of the United States with amused distraction and devote himself to directing the agrarian interests of his people, discouraging mining influences, and wielding tight controls. Now, in the fall of 1869, the isolation of Utah was history; Young himself was a large stockholder of the Union Pacific; the Emma Mine in Little Cottonwood Canyon was operating; ore was being shipped to San Francisco; and foreign capital poured into other Gentile operated mines. At the October, 1868, conference of the L.D.S. Church, President Young declared the self-sustaining policy of his people and the boycott of non- Mormon merchants by enunciating that "a Latter-day Saint should not trade with an outsider." At the same time the Mormon church entered upon its own co-operative venture in the formation of Z.C.M.I. The church owned the Utah Central Railroad, and Brigham Young was personally, and as titular head of his church, amassing a fortune.
Secularization was having some internal effect in the Mormon community, and the Godbeite "New Movement" had its beginning. A schism developed when polygamist merchants William S. Godbe and Henry W. Lawrence joined with editors E. L. T. Harrison of the anti- Mormon Utah Magazine and T. B. H. Stenhouse of the Telegraph and others in publicly criticizing the Mormons for equating their religion with secular enterprises and for the temporal domination of the Mormon priesthood. The Utah Magazine had sought a public quarrel with Brigham Young, and as a latter-day Socrates it had corrupted the youth by encouraging them to enter the mines.
Vice-President Schuyler Colfax first visited Utah in October, 1869, conferred with the Godbeites and headed east determined to report the Utah situation in no uncertain or favorable terms to President Grant. Thus the stage was set for the federal contest of the next twenty years over polygamy, while statehood for Utah was denied. The Liberal party entered the political arena in 1870 to oppose the People's party, which made a clear division of non-Mormons and Mormons respectively in Utah politics for the next two decades, and the lines were drawn. The uninitiated and naive had no place in this scene into which Daniel Tuttle entered determined to coexist in peace and to build his church without asking economic favors or giving doctrinal ground.
Bishop Tuttle had already made a careful study of Mormon theology, practice, and place in the community. He had positive ideas on the subject, which he set forth in his Reminiscences in later years. He was frankly critical of the anthropomorphic nature of Mormon theology, and he looked upon polygamy as an anachronism saved from expected corruption by the religious duty attached to it. He felt that by the 1880's the abrogation of the practice was due to the enlightenment of the Mormon youth. He admired the missionary force and zeal of the Mormons and approved of their ready indulgence in prayer and their practice of tithing. In fact the Bishop's opposition to Mormonism was in the union of the church and the state and the power of the Mormon priesthood in temporal matters. In Reminiscences he wrote:
Perhaps the above quoted remark prompted Orson F. Whitney, a contemporary of Tuttle's, to describe his manner as brusque, being the "blunt candor of a fearless and honest nature." Whitney reported that the Bishop gained the esteem of the Utah people through fair treatment and frankness.
On his return to Salt Lake City, the Bishop was confronted by the physical needs for permanent quarters for the church, the school, and the rectory. Church services had been continuously held in Independence Hall. St. Mark's School for boys and girls was housed in Groesbeck's store on Main Street at a monthly rental of forty dollars with the overflow of students going into two adjoining old storerooms.
Mr. Haskins had married and had been appointed army chaplain at Camp Douglas. The church had purchased a full lot with ten rod front on First South Street. A house was built thereon, and the Haskins and Foote families occupied this dwelling known at St. Mark's Rectory. The Tuttles lived in an adobe house rented from the Walker Brothers on a ten by twenty rod lot on the southwest corner of Main and Third South, rent sixty dollars a month, until they moved into the rectory in 1871.
From the beginning in 1867 the Episcopal church in Salt Lake City had been self-supporting, paying the salaries of its priests. Growth of the church had gone on without any preconceived plan, but by bent of nature Mr. Foote had taken over the pastoral work, Mr. Haskins had directed the school, and Warren Hussey had led the laity in securing local supplies and in contacting the business community.
George Foote had traveled east in the fall of 1869, visiting parishes and soliciting funds for a church building. In May, 1870, he returned to Salt Lake City with $18,000 as the nucleus for a building fund and with a set of plans drawn by R. Upjohn, the noted designer and architect for Trinity Church in New York City. Bishop Tuttle had secured an 80 by 165 foot lot on First South Street for $2,200, raising funds locally; and on July 30, 1870, the cornerstone of St. Mark's Cathedral was laid. A loan was obtained from local bankers to finish the building, and on May 21, 1871, the first services were held in the basement of the church. On the following September 3 services were held in the church proper. The local congregation and generous supporters of the Bishop in the East paid off all debts on the building, and consecration took place May 14, 1874. St. Mark's congregation continued to grow, and soon a mission was organized under the direction and sponsorship of St. Mark's parish, which became known as St. Paul's. St. Paul's Chapel, the second Episcopal church to be built in Salt Lake City, was located at Main and Fourth South and constructed in 1880 as a memorial to Jane Mount, of New York City.
On his eastern trip George Foote had interested a young seminarian, the Rev. James L. Gillogly, in the Utah work. Accordingly, after his graduation Gillogly proceeded to Ogden to begin missionary work among the railroad workers who were then making Ogden their home. A freight car, the Union Pacific passenger waiting room, and an old saloon were the sites for his first services. In March, 1871, the Bishop purchased for $1,500 an old tannery located on the site of the present Post Office, where services were held until the stone structure of the Church of the Good Shepherd was completed and consecrated in February, 1875. Again the Bishop's eastern contacts proved the genuineness of their interest in the church and its missionary outpost when John W. Hammersley, of New York City, donated $11,000 to complete the building as a memorial to his deceased daughter, Catherine Livingstone. Mr. Gillogly subsequently built a brick schoolhouse adjoining the church. He personally had saved a little money, bought some town lots in Ogden and realized a $2,000 profit on a quick sale, which he donated to the school building project.
Meanwhile, the Episcopalians in Salt Lake City had met on November 15, 1870, and organized St. Mark's parish. Wardens elected were Warren Hussey and J. P. Taggart. The other vestrymen chosen were T. F. Tracy, A. W. White, E. R. Humphreys, W. Nowele, and G. B. Moulton. Bishop Tuttle was chosen rector, but before accepting this call he defined the responsibilities of this cathedral parish and his relationship to it. He would belong to the mission field primarily, and he would personally nominate his assistant who would be pastor of the parish. This organization continued during the Bishop's remaining sixteen years in Salt Lake City. George Foote served as pastor until February, 1871, when he accepted the rectorship of a parish in San Jose, California, being succeeded at St. Mark's by the Rev. R. M. Kirby.
Bishop Tuttle had an almost Jesuit-like feeling for education and its place in the community. This attitude he so instilled in his clergy that Thomas Haskins later wrote, "The Episcopal Church considers education as the chief handmaid of religion." 14 The Bishop had taught Latin, Greek, and mathematics in a preparatory school associated with Columbia University. He was a great defender of the public school system in an age when the schools were subjected to the criticism of secularization and godlessness. His defense lay in his belief that the living example of the well-trained Christian teacher was far more efficacious than any book learning.
Utah was without a free public school system until 1890. Such grammar schools as existed met in Mormon meetinghouses, payment of tuition was exacted, and Mormon doctrine was taught. Brigham
Young in his last Circular of the First Presidency in 1877 announced that hereafter education should be free to Mormon children and that "the teachers should be Latter-day Saints, so that the children might learn only what they ought to know."
As noted earlier, the first act of the Episcopal missionaries in 1867 had been to open a day school in Salt Lake City. St. Mark's grammar school, for boys and girls, met in the rented storerooms, bowling alley, and Independence Hall until 1873 when a school building erected opposite the City Hall on First South east of State Street was first occupied. St. Mark's girls' school was housed in the basement of St. Mark's Cathedral after 1871 until it merged as the primary department of Rowland Hall, a boarding and day school for girls. Charlotte E. Hayden was the teacher and manager of the girls school. The lot and building for Rowland Hall on "A" Street and First Avenue were purchased with beneficences of the Benjamin Rowland family, of Philadelphia, and the boarding school opened in 1881. Bishop Tuttle taught in the schools. Mr. Haskins served as headmaster to 1873, Rev. J. M. Turner to 1875, and Rev. George Miller until 1889.
The Bishop found the need for schools a pressing one. Students came not only from Gentile but also from Mormon families. The Ogden School of the Good Shepherd was opened in 1870. In 1873 St. John's School, Logan, and a school at Plain City were opened. In Logan and Plain City all scholars came from Mormon homes. Tuition was charged where feasible, and a system of forty dollars a year per student scholarships was devised for poor children. Five hundred such scholarships were provided up to 1886, some extending for a period of many years. As other grants and memorials many of these aids to students came from eastern benefactors. The Bishop reported that Episcopal Sunday schools furnished 221; churches, 87; individual women, 145; and men, 47. 16 The Bishop was satisfied as to the lasting effect of the schools. Eight pupils and three teachers became Episcopal clergymen, including Mahlon N. Gilbert, later to be Bishop Coadjutor of Minnesota. In St. Mark's School and Rowland Hall, 3,186 boys and girls had been taught by 1886. The Episcopal schools had become a real part of the Utah scene, and as early as 1869 Secretary of State William H. Seward had signaled the importance of the work, when he said:
In his annual address to the convocation of the missionary district in 1877 the Bishop wrote:
The Episcopal schools continued in operation until a free public school system was inaugurated, at which time they had fulfilled their purpose, and, with the exception of Rowland Hall, the schools were closed.
Salt Lake City in 1869 was a community with three doctors, including the army surgeon at Camp Douglas, to minister to over 15,000 people in the immediate vicinity, and no hospital. The Mormon plan of bishops' aid to the poor and the sick had sufficed until the advent of mining and the railroad brought about the industrial accident. By 1872 the need for a hospital was acute. Bishop Tuttle found a committee of three waiting on him for advice and the support of his office. These three, two of them vestrymen at St. Mark's Cathedral, Dr. John F. Hamilton, a former post surgeon, and Major Edmund Wilkes, a mine manager, and the Rev. Mr. R. M. Kirby, presented a plan for the mining companies and other businessmen to subsidize the hospital, which would operate under the auspices of St. Mark's with Mr. Kirby superintendent.
Thus began St. Mark's Hospital on April 30, 1872, in a rented adobe house located at Fourth South and Fifth East streets. Twentyone patients were admitted during May, and by the first of November 116 had received treatment. The hospital was from the beginning a self-supporting institution. The Bishop, as a trustee for fourteen years, was proud of its operation and its unique position as the only haven of mercy for a number of years between Denver and the Pacific Coast.
The Bishop continued to guide the missionary work of the three-territory district until 1880 when the Episcopal General Convention set apart Montana as a separate missionary district and assigned and styled Daniel S. Tuttle as Bishop of Utah with jurisdiction in Idaho. The Bishop had made annual visitations to the growing mining towns of Montana, and every mile traveled by him in that territory (estimated over 40,000) had been made by stage or horseback. The people of the territory were among his dearest friends, and in 1904 at the St. Louis Exposition, as first citizen of Montana, he had the distinction of opening the state's building at the centennial fair. His love for his mountain flock was fully reciprocated.
As today's commercial travelers ponder the newest in airline and streamliner equipment as sort of an occupational hobby, so Dan Tuttle had become familiar with the stage lines and their drivers, who were among his closest and most respected friends. He was one of the best known and most sought after passengers in the West. His reputation for good fellowship spread among the drivers, and he always found a welcome on the top of the stage next to the driver. His aversion was the "jerker," or five passenger stage, as contrasted to the relatively comfortable fourteen passenger Concord, nine within and five on top.
Top: Dr. John Fl. Hamilton, front, a member of the committee which met with Bishop Tuttle to organize St. Mark's Hospital. Mrs. Hamilton, rear, one of the first three Episcopal communicants in Salt Lake when Bishop Tuttle arrived. Child is unidentified. Photo Courtesy Bishop Watson
Bottom: Early picture of St. Mark's Hospital located in north Salt Lake. First organized by Bishop Tuttle in 1872, it was the only such institution between Denver and the Pacific Coast for a number of years. Photo Courtesy Bishop Watson
Twice he was in stage upsets, once in Echo Canyon and again in Port Neuf Canyon in Idaho. Never was he in a stage holdup, but he traveled equipped, often carrying a revolver; he knew that the road agents seldom attacked passengers, but his kinship with the drivers gave him an interest in the stage and its cargo. In later years the days on the stage were a source of pleasant memories. The only truly unpleasant experience he could recount was a three day trip in a "jerker" from Salt Lake to Boise, where he arrived completely exhausted and physically ill after the constant pounding of the springless stage. The Concord coach manufacturers had his full blessing.
The Bishop felt a high sense of responsibility for the members of his flock who were isolated by distance and weather from the church. His Episcopal Register is a running record of the birth and growth of new communities in the mountains, of services held wherever "two or three are gathered together" in Masonic halls, miners' cabins, and saloons, and of baptisms in ranch houses, and burials in new cemeteries on open hillsides.
The Bishop's first convocation of the clergy and laity of his district was held in 1873 at St. Mark's Cathedral in Salt Lake City. Annually thereafter convocation was held at different churches of the district. The Bishop's addresses at convocation each year set forth guides to his clergy and their congregations which established a continuing policy for the district. He admonished his people to seek self-sufficiency and self-reliance. He expressed his thankfulness for aid received from eastern benefactors, but he suggested that his churches take outside aid only when honestly needed. He urged that children be exposed to the church's services early, even in preference to Sunday schools, and he strongly advocated the family type service and family prayer. He believed that a priest should be ambidextrous as a preacher and a pastor, with the entire community, not just Episcopalians, as the charge of the pastor. Available means of public notice should be utilized in publicizing church services and functions. The Episcopal church stresses Christ in ascension, and the Bishop directed that his churches should observe Ascension Day as having equal importance with Good Friday, Easter, and Christmas.
He had reason to report satisfaction in the accomplishments of the district. By August, 1886, in Utah alone since his arrival in Salt Lake Valley there had been 1,274 baptisms, 411 confirmations, and the three original communicants had multiplied to 324. St. Mark's Hospital had cared for 4,776 patients, and St. Mark's School and Rowland Hall had taught 3,186 boys and girls. There were 763 pupils in the Episcopal schools in Utah in attendance in 1886.
May 27, 1886, found the Bishop on a visitation to southern Utah. The lumbering stage with Dan Tuttle atop, covered thick with dust, stopped at the Wells Fargo office at Silver Reef. A telegram was handed up, and the Bishop read the advice of the convention of the diocese of Missouri of his election as Bishop of Missouri. The diocesan convention called for his deliberate reflection, recalling his rejection of the call in 1868. The Bishop conducted services at Silver Reef and returned to Salt Lake City to consult with his family, his district clergy, and the vestry of St. Mark's. With nineteen years of episcopal experience behind him he could no longer plead youth and inexperience to cope with the responsibilities of a diocesan bishop. He was now forty-nine years old, and felt that the demands of a mountain missionary bishop were for a man at least no older. He had conducted services in forty-four places in the past year. Even limited to Utah and Idaho, his visitations covered the entire period from April to November. He felt that the call to Missouri must be considered as a demand for his services, and his personal conveniences and desires must be subordinated to a call to duty in new fields. On June 16 he accepted the call to Missouri, subject to the consent of the bishops of the church. August 9 found the Bishop at Soda Springs, Idaho, where he received notice of the certification of his election and the consent of the bishops and standing committees of the church. He was now Bishop of Missouri, and his work in the mountains was at an end.
The years from 1886 to 1923 tell a whole new story for Bishop Tuttle. Beloved by his Missourians and a civic leader in St. Louis, his last twenty years were spent as Presiding Bishop, the highest administrative position of the church. There he directed his church through a period of growth and changes in organization. His was the responsibility for the chaplaincies of World War I and the participation of the church in the Anglican Communion at Lambeth in England.
Bishop Tuttle's love for the Mountain West never waned. He was on a trip through Idaho visiting friends of the early days on August 18, 1899, when he received word from St. Louis of the sudden death of his wife and helpmate, Harriet Tuttle. In 1903 he served once more for a year acting as Bishop of Salt Lake, a newly created missionary district, after the death of Bishop Abiel Leonard, who had been his immediate successor in Utah. He remained vigorous in health and an active preacher and pastor to the end. At the time of his death at eighty-six he had been planning one more trip west. But the Bishop wrote his own finale to the mountain people when on August 9, 1886, he added the final entry in his Episcopal Register, reporting his receipt of certification of his election to Missouri, and as was his habit in quoting the psalmist, concluding, "This my record is closed. Miserere mei, Deus.
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