The Freemasons In America:. H. Paul Jeffers

Virtue Lodge No. 44. When it went out of existence in 1801, he transferred to the Widow’s Sons Lodge in Charlottesville. Clark was born in Caroline County, Virginia, in 1770. At age twenty-two, he joined the army of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne as a lieutenant. He met Lewis during the 1794 campaign against the Indians and became a Mason with the formation of the St. Louis Lodge by men of the expedition.

      With the dimensions and vast riches of this western territory revealed, Americans felt that they had a “manifest destiny” to first subdue it and then absorb it into the United States. Journeying from New York City to the Dakota Territory and becoming a rancher in 1886, an enthusiastic Freemason named Theodore Roosevelt gave voice to this objective. In a letter on June 7, 1897, to his friend John Hay, then America’s ambassador to Great Britain, he wrote, “The young giant of the West stands in a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks into the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a string man to run a race.” Initiated on January 2, 1901, by the Matinecock Lodge No. 806 in Oyster Bay, New York, he visited the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania as president of the United States on November 5, 1902, for a celebration of the sesquicentennial of George Washington’s Masonic initiation. Of his Masonic membership Roosevelt would say, “I enjoy going to some little lodge where I meet the plain hard-working people on the basis of genuine equality. It is the equality of moral men.”

      Freemasonry had reached Roosevelt’s beloved Dakotas in 1862 at Yankton, the territorial capital, in the form of St. John’s Lodge. Seven months later (July 31, 1863) it conducted the territory’s first Masonic funeral. The deceased was Lieutenant Fredrick John Holt Beaver. Born in England and educated at Oxford, he was an Episcopal minister and volunteer soldier attached to the staff of General Henry H. Sibley. He was killed during a skirmish with Sioux Indians.

      While the western frontier was being settled, Freemasons with a lust for adventure were heading north. In 1850, Elisha Kent Kane was a surgeon on the ship Advance that had embarked with another ship on a mission to locate an English exploration party that had disappeared during an attempt to reach the North Pole. In 1853, he was in command of Advance when it was trapped in ice. Kane led its crew to safety in Greenland on foot. This feat was honored in Freemasonry in the United States with a lodge for explorers that bears his name.

      Also venturing into the frozen north three decades later was one of the most famous and controversial explorers of the nineteenth century: General Adolphus W. Greeley. Born in Massachusetts in 1844, he was a Civil War veteran who between 1876 and 1879 was in charge of stringing more than 2,000 miles of telegraph line in Texas, the Dakotas, and Montana. Placed in command of building a chain of thirteen weather stations in Alaska in 1881, he would be regarded as a pioneer of the U.S. Weather service. When his construction team returned after becoming stranded and thought to be lost after three years, with all but seven having perished, the nation was shocked by a report that the others had been forced into cannibalism to survive. Greeley was also the father of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and in 1906 he supervised army rescue and relief operations during and after the great earthquake that destroyed most of San Francisco. A member of St. Mark’s Lodge, Newburyport, Massachusetts, and honorary member of Kane Lodge No. 454, called the Explorers Lodge, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor shortly before his death in 1935.

      The most famous Freemason-explorer was Robert E. Peary. A member of the Explorers Lodge, he started his career in exploration in Greenland, followed by Arctic adventures in the 1890s that culminated in him becoming the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909. In the party was Matthew A. Henson. Being a member of the Prince Hall “Celestial Lodge No. 3 of New York,” Henson was Peary’s chief assistant for twenty years. D. D. MacMillan, another member of the North Pole expedition, recalled, “As a carpenter, [Henson] built the sledges. A mechanic, he made alcohol stoves. An expert dog driver, he taught us how to handle our dogs. Highly respected by the Eskimos, he was easily the most popular man on board ship. Strong physically, and above all experienced, he was of more value to our Commander than all the rest of us put together. He went to the Pole with Peary because he was better than the rest of us.”

      Richard E. Byrd, the polar explorer, naval officer, and pioneer aviator, was the first man to fly over the North Pole. His Antarctic explorations between 1928 and 1935 resulted in numerous discoveries, including five mountain ranges and islands. Initiated into Freemasonry in 1921 at Federal Lodge No. 1, Washington D.C., he dropped Masonic flags on the North and South Poles. In the Antarctic odyssey of 1933–1935, the majority of the team were Masons (sixty out of eighty-two).

      Having completed the work of the Corps of Discovery, Lewis and Clark each served as governor of the territory they’d explored and appointed a secretary, sheriff, and four judges, all of whom were Freemasons. Members of the Craft who also explored the western frontier were Kit Carson and Zebulon Pike.

      While Lewis and Clark were off on their expedition, Pike and twenty men left from St. Louis in 1805 at Jefferson’s behest to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi. Pike is best known for the Colorado mountain peak named after him. He was promoted to captain in August 1806, major in May 1808, lieutenant-colonel in 1809, and to full colonel in July 1812. As a military agent in New Orleans (1809–1810), he was deputy quartermaster-general and saw service in the War of 1812 as adjutant and inspector-general in the campaign against York (Toronto), Canada. In an attack on April 27, 1813, he had immediate command of the troops and was killed by a chunk of rock that fell on him when the retreating British garrison set fire to the powder magazine. Although his Masonic membership is questioned by some, Pike is credited by others with a membership in Lodge No. 3 in Philadelphia. His brother, Albert, would be a revolutionary figure in American Freemasonry.

      In the years after Jefferson launched Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike on their treks into the land west of the Mississippi, lodges were founded west of the Appalachian Mountains in Ohio (1806), Louisiana (1812), Tennessee (1813), Indiana and Mississippi (1818), Missouri (1821), Arkansas (1832), Illinois (1820), Texas (1837), Wisconsin (1843), Iowa and Michigan (1844), Kansas and California (1850), Oregon (1852), Minnesota (1853), Nebraska (1847), Washington (1858), Colorado (1861), Nevada (1865), Idaho (1867), Utah (1872), the Indian Territory and Wyoming (1874), South Dakota (1875), New Mexico (1877), Arizona (1882), North Dakota (1889), and Oklahoma Territory (1892). Between the formation of lodges in Illinois in 1820 and the creation of lodges in the 1840s, Freemasons who had thrived in their expansive country and anticipated even more success and growth found themselves under severe attack and Freemasonry in the United States being nearly driven to extinction.