Hmmm, "Sky Pilot" is kind of an interesting phrase: seeing as how airplanes hadn't been invented yet. I wouldn't have expected the nautical meaning of pilot to have penetrated this far inland either.
I've seen it used for clergy in several period stories, but I don't know if any were set this far back. I think nautical metaphors were used everywhere, though; and The Pirates of Penzance, whose plot turns on the mishearing of "pilot" as "pirate," toured across N. America without confusing audiences (unlike Patience which required Oscar Wilde to go on ahead of it to explain the jokes).
P'raps he's Episcopalian, hence the relatively low turnout in the Western setting? (At least I don't *think* the frontier was a hotbed of Anglicanism.)
Just realized that almost all my churchgoing experience has been either Presbyterian or United, and in congregations where the minister wore a gown during the actual service, even if s/he wore street clothes the rest of the time; I'd forgotten many Protestant clergy just wear the collar with a suit.
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I don't think those two things can exist in my brain concurrently. Now I've got Michael Landon as Chess stuck in my head.
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"Ow! Ow! Owww! You bastards!" Chess hollered.