Great Infidel

Abstract

Kelso tried to reinvent himself as a public lecturer, giving talks describing his military adventures but also voicing radical views on marriage and religion. To earn a living, however, he had to return to itinerant school teaching. But he also kept writing, producing hundreds of pages of poetry, essays, and lectures, including freethinking treatises on God and the Bible and a book-length verse satire. He participated in the civic life of Modesto, a railroad boomtown that had sprouted next to vast wheat fields and was run by its saloon bosses—except on those occasions when vigilantes donned masks to clean up the town. In 1881, he climbed a Colorado mountain he dubbed “Great Infidel,” in honor of himself, and pondered his “desolate and storm-beaten life.”