It was through many unique incidents and strange experiences that Brother Van’s work was built up. Steadily the character of the country changed and another generation was growing up. Stalwart sons and daughters of the settlers began to try to win a means of education in the desert. They looked beyond the shining mountains to college and to seminary. As Brother Van traveled from place to place he pondered over this problem. No children of his own will look to him for education, but had he not claimed spirituality in this wide land for the children? He saw that the boys and girls were eager for larger social privileges and for a higher intellectual life; so he decided that Montana should have a Christian school. For thirteen years he toiled to secure one; other men’s names appeared on the committee formed for the enterprise and in time disappeared, but the name of William Wesley Van Orsdel always headed the list. He was not an educated man as far as the study of books was concerned. Only in the School of Experience and in the Seminary of Hard Knocks had he taken postgraduate courses. But he was now determined that the young people of Montana should have first, a Christian influence, and, second, an education. Because of that thinking, planning, and praying of the missionary, there came a day when the capital city, Helena, had a new asset. Five miles from the center of the town stood a fifty-thousand-dollar brick building dedicated to the young people of Montana. The campus of two hundred and thirty-five acres was beautified, and the school was opened. The distance from town, the newness of the undertaking, the indifference of the people, all proved insurmountable difficulties to every one but Brother Van. For ten years the school struggled to succeed while the trustees felt almost constantly that they must close it, but Brother Van would not consent. Then a radical measure was adopted. The school was moved to Helena, where to-day Montana Wesleyan University stands in friendly neighborliness to the capitol building. Montana Wesleyan antedated all state schools in Montana for higher education. Brother Van watched those two buildings on Capitol Hill with a peculiar yearning. He remembered the town of Helena as it had looked when he reached it on that summer day in 1872. He remembered the first capitol building in Bannack, where it was his lot to bury the four plainsmen who had lost their lives because the Indians could not understand the coming of the white man into their hunting ground. The first legislature was held in two rooms in a log cabin. Tallow candles emphasized the gloom. Sheet-iron stoves made the pent-up air seem stifling. One desk and a bench in each room completed the furnishing of this first capitol. The library was composed of one copy of the Idaho Statutes.