Nathan Bangs was born in the Eastern
States in 1779, where he received a good New England
common-school education, although his father failed in his
project of giving him a classical one. Subsequently that
father, who was self-instructed, taught him the art of
surveying. At the age of thirteen his father and family
removed to what was then a wilderness part of New York,
somewhere on the East Branch of the Delaware. While there,
the family were in great distress for a time on account of
his mother and little sister who were lost, and spent a night
in the woods. During their residence in that place, Nathan
sometimes heard the Methodist preachers, who had followed up
the settlers to their wilderness homes, and by whom all the
family, except the father, were ultimately brought into the
Methodist Church. Three of his brothers, as well as himself,
became preachers in the issue. For the present, Nathan
repelled conviction, and provided a salvo for his conscience
by finding subjects of sarcasm in the humble servants of
God. Impelled by the pioneer spirit of the age, on the 9th
of May, 1799, he started for the still further wilds of
Canada. He took his surveying instruments with a view to his
exercising his profession in a country which promised to
furnish ample opportunities for its employment. He was
accompanied by a devoted sister and her husband. Their way
lay through the forest, and the only conveyance for the lady
and their few effects was an ox-sled. They passed by the
spot where Buffalo now stands, where they found only two or
three log huts. They crossed Niagara at Fort Erie, and
coasted downwards to the neighborhood of the great cataract
[Niagara Falls]. The poetry of his nature was fed by its
ceaseless roar—the dark woods stretching away on every
hand—and by the reading of Milton's Poems, Bunyan's
Progress, and Hervey's Meditations, which he found in a
small but well-assorted private library. How sweet is
communion with books in the solitude of a new settlement, as
some of us can well attest; still he was unhappy, for he had
not found the peace of God. But through his pious sister's
exhortations, and the salutary influence of the Rev. James
Coleman's goodly character and conversation, whom he found
laboring in the settlement, he was prepared for the more
mature counsels of the Rev. Joseph Sawyer, who succeeded
him, and through whose instrumentality he was converted and
joined the Church. Soon after, by the instrumentality of
Christian Warner, a pious class leader, he entered into the
possession of "perfect love," a state of salvation of which
he never lost sight for the rest of his life. This occurred
in [6 February] 1801.[*] And in the latter part of that
Conference year, (1801-2), after some humbling failures in
the outset, he began to travel the Circuit he lived in, as
an assistant to Mr. Sawyer. After a little experience in
that way, he was sent by the Presiding Elder, Jewell, to
develop the Long Point extremity of their field of labour
into a separate Circuit, to embrace much new ground. He went
there in December 1801, where fortunately he was soon hemmed
in by the uncrossable state of the Grand River, else he had
surely fled under the impulses of some of his early
discouragements. But soon instructive dreams, marked
conversions, and an extensive revival, encouraged him to
hold on to the end of the year, by which time, he had no
misgivings about allowing himself to be proposed to the
Conference to be received on trial. There was an increase on
the whole ground covered by the two branches of the Circuit,
Niagara and Long Point, of three hundred souls.
* See Stevens's biography 58ff.