“The camp meeting era,” which began about the commencement of Dow’s ministry, was his great opportunity. These meetings were free, catholic, and welcomed all workers. They were the legitimate outcome of the religious necessities of the time. The land was ablaze from backwoods to sea-beech with that popular excitement which soon got the expressive name of “The Wildfire.” A host of preachers—Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers—went from camp to camp preaching, singing, exhorting. The meetings were going continuously. The country seemed to give up all other pursuits for religion. Twenty thousand often assembled at one place, coming hundreds of miles. One Granada, “the western poet,” wrote many “Pilgrim Songs,” rude but spirited, for camp meeting use, and these traveled, unprinted, on the air. That peculiar psychological phenomenon called “The Jerks,” appeared and spread like an epidemic. Penitents in this death-like trance were laid in long ranks under the trees and the weird torchlights, as if ready for interment. Three thousand fell in one night at Caneridge, Kentucky. It was common practice to prepare the camp meeting grounds by cutting all the saplings about six feet from the ground, leaving the stumps for the infected ones to grasp, to keep them from falling, and Dow records that the ground around them was torn up as if horses had been hitched there. At times a sudden influence would come over the multitude, which would strike preachers, singers, mourners and listeners speechless, so that not a word could be spoken for a period—a hush more awful and inexplicable than the jerks or the shoutings.