Saint of the Week: William Hobart Hare
5/21/2025
William Hobart Hare
Bishop and Apostle of the West
1838-1909
William Hobart Hare was an American Protestant Episcopal Church bishop, often remembered as the Apostle of the West for his decades of dedicated missionary work and effective ministry among native American tribes throughout Nebraska and the Dakota Territories. The son of an Episcopal priest, William was born in Princeton, New Jersey and educated at the University of Pennsylvania. However, he neither graduated nor attended seminary before his ordination as deacon in 1859 and as priest in 1862. He initially preached in Philadelphia at both St. Luke's and St. Paul's Episcopal Churches in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood until 1863. Relocating briefly to Minnesota, he hoped the climate change would help his wife's health but returned to Philadelphia to join the clergy of the Church of the Ascension. For three years, Hare also served as the general agent of the Foreign Committee of the Episcopal Board of Missions. In 1872, he was elected Missionary Bishop of Niobrara, named for Nebraska’s Niobrara River. But when the diocese split In 1883, Bishop Hare’s diocese actually expanded to include the new state of South Dakota. Considered one of the leading missionaries in America, he wrote several pamphlets on missionary work in the West, spending most of his time in the rural Dakotas ministering to pioneer groups and advocating for Native Americans. Indeed, learning of General Philip Sheridan’s 1874 plan to launch a military campaign into the Black Hills, territory ceded to the Sioux by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, Hare appealed directly to President Ulysses S. Grant that the operation be canceled—and it was. Although Hare died while visiting Atlantic City, New Jersey, his body was returned to South Dakota and is buried outside his diocese’s Calvary Cathedral.
