Gideons International association would be to unite traveling salesmen for evangelism. In July, 1899, Nicholson, Hill, and Will J. Knights met at the YMCA in Janesville. Two of them continued with the distribution of the Bibles. Gideons began distributing free Bibles, the work they are chiefly known for, in 1908, when the first Bibles were placed in the rooms of the Superior Hotel in Superior, Montana. The organization describes its link to the story of Gideon: "Gideon was a man who was willing to do exactly what God wanted him to do, regardless of his own judgment as to the plans or
Beecher's Bibles and possibly in boxes identified as "machinery" and even in German immigrant trunks. Beecher himself contributed funds for the purchase of Sharps carbines and, after the interception of shipments by pro-slavery men, is said to have issued bibles and carbines to individual abolitionists bound for Kansas. The weapons were intended for the conflicts fought over slavery in the Kansas Territory leading up to its induction into statehood. As decreed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the issue of slavery in the new state was to be determined by popular sovereignty, thus unleashing a wave of bloody violence between pro- and anti-slavery forces