When the historians of frontier revivalism turn to James McGready, they find him difficult to comprehend. Since the Kentucky Great Revival of 1797 to 1802 first arose in his frontier congregations, the historians point to McGready as the original frontier revivalist, imitated by all other revivalists. Because the origins of the frontier camp meeting were inextricably tied to his career, McGready has been described as the leading innovator of the western awakenings, who gave frontier religion its peculiar flavor. And the revivals have been described as a bizarre form of undisciplined religious barbarism, dominated by emotional intensity, primitive excesses, and pious anti-intellectualism. The difficulty with these widely accepted generalizations is that McGready was neither the model nor the advocate for the revivalism the historians said he created.