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This essay provides a peculiarly Catholic slant to a long-running debate in American history over the role of religion in the transition to rural capitalism. The author investigates the construction of a small votive chapel outside the village of Cold Spring, Minnesota, ostensibly built to secure relief from the locust plagues of the 1870's, and argues that the shrine in reality had less to do with insect pests and more to do with the community's need to assert traditional, precapitalist values in the face of growing prosperity and rapidly changing market conditions. He maintains further that the ritual language expressed in the chapel's dedication evoked an intensely communalist ethic, based on shared striving, sharing, and reciprocity, that was jeopardized by the transition to more commercialized agriculture.
Let us imagine a traveler on the country roads of the heavily German-Catholic Stearns County, Minnesota, on the morning of August 15, 1877. Let us imagine further that he was a Yankee and a Protestant, that on the previous day he had left Willmar, a growing agricultural center in neighboring Kandiyohi County, and that he had planned to ride east to St. Cloud, the county seat of Stearns County, for business. His route, then, had already taken him first to Paynesville, from there to Richmond-also known, mysteriously, as Torah-and then a few short miles to Cold Spring. In that village of a couple of hundred souls he had spent the night at the hotel of John Kray, German-born, but an English speaker, and an innkeeper with a reputation for both conviviality and free thought. During the course of the evening the traveler had ventured into Kiay'sgemutlich and smokey saloon, where he shared beer, tobacco, and stories with men whose English he only vaguely understood. At one point in the evening the innkeeper assumed his spot in his big deer-horn chair and in an atmosphere made richly masculine with pipe smoke and alcohol regaled our traveler and his German drinking companions with stories about his adventures during the Dakota Conflict of over a decade ago. Our stranger, though, could not but notice that his companions sometimes, amid the constant jokes and tumult of the saloon, fell silent and turned inward, it seemed, to consider the course of their lives...