SOURCE: McKinsey, Elizabeth R. “Christopher Pearse Cranch.” In The Western Experiment: New England Transcendentalists in the Ohio Valley, pp. 34-41. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.

In the following excerpt, McKinsey provides a brief overview of Cranch's career as a Transcendentalist writer in the West.

Christopher Pearse Cranch, like Clarke, was twenty-three when he went west in 1836. He shared a sense of dedication to the Unitarian mission, but had no definite role into which to fit himself. He went not to fill a particular pulpit but to visit his cousin, William Eliot, the Unitarian minister in St. Louis, and he stayed in Cincinnati (where his older brother Edward was a lawyer) as “minister at large.” This meant he would establish some sort of ministry among the poor, outside the formal structure of the church, and would be expected to act as substitute in pulpits empty because of travel or illness...