Rev. Thomas Hann Cleland

The second member of the trio of Presbyterian clergymen to walk to the top of Prospect Hill and pledge and pray themselves into a commitment to "win the west for Christ" was the Rev. Thomas H. Cleland. 

The entire family of Presbyterian denominations would have to look far and wide to find fitting exemplars of mission fervor than the first, Rev. Sheldon Jackson, whose life is an action movie that would could be made, if his bio wasn't so determinedly religious. 

Jackson's very first seminary sermon used Second Corinthians 5:14 as a text, a verse which reads in more contemporary versions of the Bible this way: "For Christ's love compels us [emphasis mine], because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died." The English Standard uses the word controls instead of compels: but the KJV, which Jackson and Cleland would have recited, goes a step further with constrains. There's something almost unAmerican about the word constrains, something biting at our liberties. To say that the love of Christ constrains us risks making God's love into a bad pair of diabetic socks. Jackson seemed to have lived that way, for better and for worse.

No one else's life can square up to Jackson's, so we shouldn't expect the lives of the other two pastors noted on the monument to come close to the marks Rev. Jackson's. Three men ascended Prospect Hill that night, after a long church meeting. Three men pledged themselves to bring Christianity to the west, being helped in that cause by the golden spike laid into the iron tracks of the recently completed transcontinental railroad.

No doubt on Jackson's request (or demand), Thomas Hann Cleland went to Alaska too, then very much a frozen frontier, where he became active in education, as Jackson had. There is little written about his time there, but he didn't stay in the Great White North. Instead, he returned to the States, where he was involved in education, specifically Presbyterian education, even more specifically at higher education in the Presbyterian church. He served on the board of Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, and McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. 

Most primary to his profession, however, were the churches he served here in the lower 48, fellowships in Council Bluffs and Keokuk, Iowa; Springfield, Missouri; Duluth, Minnesota; and New Albany, Indiana. When he died, he was living in and serving yet another congregation in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

He and his wife had five children, one of whom became yet another Cleland Presbyterian minister.

The meeting held at the place the monument stands today was not a community affair. Only three men were present, all of them ministers of the Word, the three men listed on the monument's face. A story claims that after attending denominational meetings for most of the day, the three of them ascended Prospect Hill. As they did, they passed by a body hanging from a street light, what they considered--and they were probably right--a lynching. 

There were tears, it seems, at the top of Prospect Hill that night, tears wrung from constraints, commitments, the compelling call each of them felt at the unbroken frontier far out in the broken and bountiful west.