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Everett N. Dick
Everett Newfon Dick (July 10, 1898-January 16, 1989) was American historian of the Great Plains and the American West who focused on the cultural, social, and religious history primarily related to American frontier settlement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Dick, although considered primarily an American frontier historian, was also influential in development of the history of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (Adventism) and the Millerites movement including Latter-day Saint Millenarianism history and the history of Union College. He was a professor of history at Union College (Nebraska), a private Seventh-day Adventist college, beginning in 1930 until shortly before his death in 1989.

Alma Mater

 * Union College (1925) B.A. (History and English)
 * University of Nebraska at Lincoln (1925) M.A. (History)
 * University of Wisconsin-Madison (1930) Ph.D. (History)

Youth
Everett Newfon Dick was born July 10, 1898, in Ozawkie, Kansas to Granville Gentry Dick and Hannah Fanny Dick (Smalley). He and his three older brothers grew up on their parents' large dairy farm in Jefferson County, Kansas. Everett first came to Union College in the fall of 1913 where he attended Union College Academy for one year. He then attended Oswego Academy in Kansas (Enterprise Academy, Kansas) however during his senior year to join the United States Marine Corps on May 19, 1917, shortly after the outbreak of World War I. Although he never saw combat, he earned a medal for sharpshooting while in the USMC. He was discharged from the Marines Corps on March 29, 1918, and graduated from Oswego Academy in May of that same year.[ii]

Academic Training
Everett enrolled at Union College in the fall of 1919. After one year, he took some time off to go adventuring. He and a friend undertook an extensive motorcycle journey to California in 1920, when “there were few gas stations and fewer paved roads.”[iii] The next school year he spent teaching elementary school on a ranch in the mountains of Montana. He then returned to Union College in the fall of 1922. He played on Union College’s basketball team and “played jokes on the men's dean.”[iv] He also at that time became acquainted with Opal Wheeler of Ottawa, Kansas, when they “were assigned to sit at the same table in the cafeteria for six weeks. They were married the next summer, August 15th, 1923, in her parents' home.”[v]

Opal and Everett took their honeymoon trip in an aging Model-T Ford, camping along the way to Castle City or Town, Montana, where Everett taught at a small elementary school in the mining community, soon to become a ghost-town and best known for its’ one-time resident, Calamity Jane.[vi] According to his granddaughter Linda Dick, “Their first home was an old log cabin near Castle City. Thanks to correspondence courses and summer school, Everett graduated from Union College in 1924, and began graduate work immediately at the University of Nebraska (UNL).”[vii] At UNL, the history of the American frontier caught his interest under the direction of Populist historian and fellow Kansan John D. Hicks, who had strong connections with the University of Wisconsin’s History department and aided Dick gaining admission to Wisconsin.[viii] Dick’s Master’s thesis was entitled The Long Drive: The Origin of the Cow Country, which examined the nineteenth century development of the cattle trade in Texas, under the advisement of Hicks.[ix]

After graduating with his master’s degree in the same year that he earned his undergraduate degree from Union College, Dick went on to attend the Ph.D. history program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1927 with the recommendation of Hicks.[x] Dick’s doctoral advisor at UW-Madison was the acclaimed American frontier historian Frederic L. Paxson.[xi] Paxson taught at Wisconsin (1910 to 1932) as successor to Frederick Jackson Turner and had recently won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for history for his work, History of the American Frontier, 1763-1893.[xii] Paxson may have been intrigued with Dick’s master’s thesis at UNL, as Paxson was acquainted with John D. Hicks and had previously published an article entitled The Cow Country (1917) in the American Historical Review.[xiii] Dick’s dissertation at UW-Madison, The Adventist Crisis of 1843-1884, was a groundbreaking, in-depth study of William Miller and the Millerite Movement. Dick would graduate with his Ph.D. in history from UW-Madison in 1930.[xiv]

Academic Career
Everett Dick began his academic career teaching history in the spring of 1930, when he was hired by Union College as a replacement for a teacher on a one-year sabbatical.[xv] The teacher Dick replaced never returned to his position at Union College, and Dick continued teaching history there for more than 40 years, eventually becoming chair of the UC’s History department and Academic Dean in 1942.[xvi] Dick never officially retired and was designated as a research professor by Union College in his later years while he continued to give guest lectures. Although Dr. Dick taught a variety of American history classes, he is most remembered for his classes on the history of the American frontier at Union College, and “his funny stories and songs, his detailed descriptions and his own experiences made the past come alive.”[xvii]

According to his granddaughter Linda Dick, his students were instructed in “sound research methods and how to write clearly and interestingly. He offered them counseling on career and personal concerns, took carloads of them to historical society meetings, and kept in touch with many of them through Christmas cards adorned with his elegant, steel pen-shaded script. To Dr. Dick, earning a Ph.D. meant learning to be a lifelong scholar, and he never forgot that definition.”[xviii]

Medical Cadet Corps (MCC) at Union College
Following the first World War, several faculty at Adventist colleges believed that pre-military training and guidance would benefit students of draft age. In the fall of 1933 Dick presented a proposal to Union College president Milian Andreasen which led to a sustained program of the Medical Cadet Corps (MCC). Dick initially asked Andreasen to “present his idea to the Youth Department at the Adventist’s General Conference Autumn Council.”  When leaders of the Youth Department postponed the proposal at the meeting, Andreasen returned to Union College and encouraged Dick to begin work on the MCC, despite the setback.[xix]

With the backing of the Nebraska Army National Guard and Major Emil H. Burger, the first Union College Medical Corps class was held on January 8, 1934. Dick stated that the intention of the MCC was to give the “Adventist recruit an orientation enabling him to fit into a place where he could serve God and his country conscientiously.”[xx] By 1935, the General Conference recommended that all Adventist schools and colleges adopt the medical cadet training model that had been instituted by Dick at Union College.

According to the World Service Organization of Seventh-day Adventists, “The training consisted of drills, first aid, and military etiquette. Participating students received credit for physical education, but both the name “Medical Corps” and the training emphasized medical skills. Several Adventist colleges soon asked Dick about starting similar programs on their campuses. When the General Conference met for its Autumn Council in 1939 shortly after fighting broke out in Europe, and Dick and two other leaders met with officials of the U.S. Surgeon General’s office to establish a unified curriculum for the MCC. This started a twenty-year relationship between Dick and officers of the Surgeon General’s office. This relationship resulted in a curriculum continuously revised to meet evolving military standards and recognition for Adventist soldiers which routinely placed them in the Army’s Medical Corps.”[xxi]

Writings
Dick was the author of over 30 books and numerous articles and research papers, and his notable publications included The Sod-House Frontier (1937), Vanguards of the Frontier (1941), The Dixie Frontier (1948), Tales of the Frontier (1964), Union, College of the Golden Cords (1967), The Lure of the Land (1970), and his final work, From Horses to Horsepower: Life in Kansas, 1900 to 1925 (1986). While he furnished the Seventh-day Adventist church with one popular book of denominational history, Founders of the Message (1938), Dick's research on the Millerites remained largely forgotten until the work, William Miller and the Advent Crisis, was published posthumously in 1994.[xxii]

Dick’s works are reflective as salient to the development of twentieth-century work on social history, and contemporaries consider his historical scholarship for its’ ability to capture the essence of frontier living in both captivating and historically detailed accounts. Dick set forth a comprehensive range of environmental adaptations and determinisms, including historical developments that frontier farmers endured and promoted. This is especially observable in The Sod-House Frontier, A Social History of the Northern Plains from the Creation of Kansas and Nebraska to the Admission of the Dakotas and Vanguards of the Frontier: A Social History of the Northern Plains and Rocky Mountains from the Fur Traders to the Sod Busters. Dick’s historical works are noted for their extensive bibliographies which provide ample references to primary and secondary sources, including diaries, recollections, and wide-ranging period newspaper and publication references.

The Sod-House Frontier, 1854-1890 was perhaps Dick’s most influential work, given a full-page review by the New York Times in September of 1937 and recognized by a group of eminent historians as one of the “twenty most important books on American History published between 1930 and 1950.[xxiii]  First published in 1937, Dick’s expansive social history examines the first decades of frontier settlement in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas in 35 chapters and utilizes a substantial collection of primary and secondary source documents, all listed in a ten page bibliography. Likewise, Dick’s The Dixie Frontier: a Social History of the Southern Frontier from the first Trans-Montane Beginnings to the Civil War is also representative of his ability to provide accurate and well-researched regional social histories.

Selected Publications
·        The Long Drive: The Origin of the Cow Country (1928) Master’s Thesis and Publication, UNL

·        The Adventist Crisis of 1843-1844 (1930) Dissertation, UW-Madison

·        Founders of the Message (1938)

·        The Story of the Frontier: A Social History of the Northern Plains and Rocky Mountains from the Earliest White Contacts to the Coming of the Homemaker (1941)

·        Life in the West before the Sod-House Frontier (1947)

·        The Dixie Frontier: A Social History of the Southern Frontier from the First Transmontane Beginnings to the Civil War (1948)

·        Medical Cadet Corps Training Manual (1955)

·        Vanguards of the Frontier: A Social History of the Northern Plains and Rocky Mountains from the Fur Traders to the Sod Busters (1965)

·        Union: College of the Golden Cords (1967)

·        The Sod-House Frontier, A Social History of the Northern Plains from the Creation of Kansas and Nebraska to the Admission of the Dakotas (1967)

·        The Lure of the Land: A Social History of the Public Lands from the Articles of Confederation to the New Deal (1970)

·        The Great Nebraska Drouth of 1894: The Exodus (1973)

·        People of the Plains and Mountains; Essays in the History of the West (1973)

·        Conquering the Great American Desert: Nebraska (1975)

·        A Century of Adventism in Nebraska: Nebraska Souvenir Program, 1877-1977 (1977)

·        Nebraska Conference Centennial, 1878-1978: 100 Years of Organized Work (1978)

·        The Founding of Union College, 1890-1900 (1979)

·        The American Pioneer Woman (PBS Video, Nebraska Educational Television) (1983)

·        From Horses to Horsepower: Life in Kansas, 1900-1925 (1986)

·        William Miller and the Advent Crisis, 1831-1844 (w. Gary Land) (1994

Union College Legacy and Later Life
Linda Dick, in an obituary given in Union College’s student newspaper in February 1989, best summarizes Dick’s legacy and final years by stating that in the early 1970s, the college president asked Everett and Opal Dick to visit alumni all over the country to raise money for a new administration building on the Union College campus. “Not a stranger to traveling, Dr. Dick reluctantly agreed because he did not consider himself "any kind of a fund raiser." Through his visits, alumni pledged more than $685,000 to the capital campaign. In 1978, much to his surprise and humble pleasure, the newly completed building was named, in his honor, the Everett Dick Building. Everett Dick loved Union College, but he loved his family, too. His three children, Donald (my dad), Arthur, and Lorie, all graduated from Union. Grandpa had ten grandchildren, including me, and he loved to tell us stories. He was a Husker fan, out of a sense of duty, I think, and groaned through the Orange Bowl with them last month. He liked to garden and eat corn-on-the-cob or stewed rhubarb on toast, and he whistled all the time. He and my grandmother were married sixty-one years. After she died of cancer in 1984, only his work at Union kept him going. Then, in 1986, he married the widow of one his favorite students. He and Blanche were as in love as teenagers and had two and a half happy years together. During the last days of his illness. Grandpa told his family (as if we didn't already know), "I've always loved Union College. I want to do whatever I can to help it prosper." He asked that, rather than giving flowers, people make any memorials to him gifts to the Union College scholarship endowment. He died in Blanche's arms eight days later, January 16,1989, after battling cancer.”[xxiv]