Marcus and Narcissa Whitman
AMERICAN INDIAN MISSIONS: SEEKING THE “NOBLE SAVAGE”
Redskins.” “Aborigines.” “The noble savage.” “The lost tribes of Israel.” No other native population of the world has been more ardently solicited and pushed around by government officials, politicians, and church leaders than the native American Indians. For centuries, Native Americans were a prime target of Christian evangelism. Both Catholics and Protestants invested heavily in this mission endeavor. The story of American Indian missions is an intriguing one—a story of deep emotion, of great courage, and of spiritual devotion, but ultimately a story of failure. How could so much concerted effort result in so little fruit? Two centuries of aggressive land grabbing, cultural clashes, and slow extermination tell the story.
The first missionaries to come to North America were Roman Catholics. In the sixteenth century, Spanish priests, mainly from the Franciscan order, began working among the Pueblos in what is now the southwest United States. A number of missions were established, and there was great interest in the new way of life that the friars introduced. They brought domestic animals, an array of food plants, metal tools, and weaponry. In exchange, many of the Pueblos were baptized and attended Mass, yet continued to practice ancient religious traditions. The Franciscan friars made little effort to translate the liturgy or the Scriptures into the native tongue, and they moved frequently from place to place and from one language group to another. Yet by 1625 they reported large numbers of converts—tens of thousands within a few short decades of mission work.1
Missionaries of European decent, whether Catholic or Protestant, immediately discovered major cultural differences between themselves and the Native Americans. The concept of land was of enormous significance. This was true of the Pueblos as with all other tribes from coast to coast. Unlike the Europeans, who viewed the land—the natural world around them—as resources for their own benefit, the natives viewed the land in spiritual terms. They saw the land as sacred and felt a oneness with the environment around them. The land was their ancestral land. It could not be bought or sold; it belonged communally to the living and the dead. And the natives themselves were a communal unit. European individualism was unknown. “Anyone setting himself apart from others was more likely to be ridiculed than honored.”2 Most of the early missionaries adjusted to the communal nature of Native American life, with the recognition that individual conversions were unlikely.
A century after the Franciscans came to the Southwest, French Jesuits, under the leadership of Jean de Brèbeuf, entered the St. Lawrence Valley (present-day Ontario) and began working among the Hurons. True to Jesuit mission strategy, the worldview of the natives was studied and appreciated. The Jesuits believed that in many ways the native religion was compatible with Christianity. Both recognized a “god above” and divine forces in everyday life, gave rituals and ceremonies great importance and placed a great emphasis on supernatural experiences such as dreams and visions. “One group sprinkled tobacco on a lake and talked to fish spirits before setting traps,” writes Henry Bowden, “the other venerated saints and performed novenas, but at bottom the way they conducted themselves from day to day was easily understandable to each other.”3
To present the gospel to the natives, the Jesuits were willing to compromise in critical areas. For example, they did not refer to eating the body or drinking the blood of Christ (an essential aspect of the Mass) because to the Hurons this would have been associated with cannibalistic rituals. Rather, Brèbeuf presented the Mass as a memorial of thanksgiving. Because the natives attached positive significance to the color red, the Jesuits used red freely—especially for the cross. Likewise, the Hurons’ confidence in dream interpretation was employed by Jesuits in encouraging them to see their dreams as leading them to Christianity.4
One of the unique aspects of the Jesuit work among the Hurons was Bible translation. Unlike early Protestant missionaries who frequently doubled as Bible translators, Catholics were usually content to translate liturgy and creeds—and perhaps a few scattered portions of actual Scripture.
Located some 750 miles from the nearest city, the remote mission outpost among the Hurons was primitive by European standards. By 1732, when Paul Le Jeune arrived, the Jesuits had established a school for native children, but there was little else to show for their seven years of work. Le Jeune, born in 1591, might have seemed ill-suited for the task at hand. Nearly forty, with an academic background in theology and philosophy from the University of Paris, he was wholly unprepared for the privations he would encounter. His reason for being there was simply obedience. “I thought nothing of coming to Canada when I was sent here,” he confessed. “I felt no particular affection for the Savages, but the duty of obedience was binding.”5 His assignment was to translate the Scriptures.
The winters were bitterly cold and the summers hot, humid, and buginfested, and the temptation to give up was sometimes almost overwhelming. “It is true that God does not allow himself to be conquered,” he wrote, “and that the more one gives the more one gains; but God sometimes hides himself, and then the Cup is very bitter.”6 What Le Jeune was experiencing was a common lament of missionaries—ones whose setbacks were only exceeded by their sacrifices. Where was God in the midst of such hardship?
With no preparation as a linguist or translator, Le Jeune struggled to make headway in the very difficult Huron language. Complicating the situation were native helpers whose moods ranged from trickery to lethargy. Sometimes he caught them “teaching him obscene words in place of the right ones.” On other occasions the work bogged down to a standstill: “I was compelled sometimes to ask twenty questions to understand one word, so changeable was my master’s way of teaching.” Le Jeune recognized the intelligence of the natives; the biggest problem was their lack of motivation. The solution came unexpectedly in a shipment from back home: “Oh, how grateful I am to those who sent me some tobacco last year. The Savages love it to madness. Whenever we come to a difficulty, I give my master a piece of tobacco, to make him more attentive.”7
The goal of Le Jeune’s arduous labor was converts. At times the situation seemed utterly hopeless, but there were moments of optimism, as he penned in his journal:
On the 14th of November, the Savage la Nasse being with us, I instructed him about the Creation of the world, the Incarnation, and the Passion of the Son of God. We talked well into the night, everyone being asleep except him. Returning to his cabin, he said to Pierre that he was much pleased to listen to such talk.
Seeing us praying to God one day after dinner, he sighed deeply, saying: “Oh, how unhappy I am that I am not able to pray to God as you do!”
La Nasse often said to Pierre: “Teach that man as soon as you can,” speaking of me, “in order that we may be able to understand what he says.”8
In 1639, seven years after Le Jeune began his mission work, there were fewer than one hundred converts in this tribe of some ten thousand, with ten resident Jesuits. But within two decades and an increased missionary force, it was estimated that half the tribe had been converted. But then disaster struck. The Iroquois League launched an all-out military campaign against the Hurons, and before it was over, most of them were either killed or scattered. Jean de Brèbeuf was tortured and murdered, and an era of Jesuit missions to the Hurons was over. Work continued in Quebec and elsewhere, but not with the enthusiasm it had once had.
Later on, Roman Catholic missionaries began working among Indians on the Great Plains and in the Oregon Territory, but it was the Protestant missionary venture more than the Roman Catholic that made a lasting impact on the North American Indians.
From the very beginning of English exploration of the New World there was a strong impulse to win the native population to Christianity. Evangelizing the natives became a powerful rationale for colonialism, and colonial charters emphasized this. The Virginia charter of 1606 opens with the king’s blessing on the colonists “in propagating the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance.” The Massachusetts Bay charter pledged to “wynn and incite the natives of the Country to the Knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of Mankinde, and the Christian fayth.” And the seal of the colony testified to this need; its emblem was a figure of an Indian crying out “Come over and help us.” The charter of Connecticut asserted that “evangelization” was the “onlye and principal end” for the colony’s establishment. Likewise, Pennsylvania and other colonies were founded with the declared purpose of converting the Indians.
In most instances, however, these pronouncements meant nothing. As settlers staked out their land claims, the “poor savage” became a threat and hindrance. Greed overpowered the sentiments of humanitarianism and evangelism, and the work of the missionaries was openly despised. Thus, missionaries encountered not only a hostile native population but also strong opposition by their own people. There were exceptions. Massachusetts, more than any other colony, sought to fulfill its charter obligations. Ministers were charged with a dual responsibility of serving a congregation and evangelizing the Indians. Most, however, were too busy to devote time to both facets of their ministry, and the latter was neglected.
One who stood out in his determination to take both roles seriously was John Eliot, often referred to as the “Apostle to the Indians.” But despite his achievements as a missionary, his primary vocation was his ministry at the Roxbury church. Eliot was born in England and educated for the ministry at Cambridge, graduating in 1622. Although he was ordained in the Anglican Church, he was a Nonconformist, thus limiting his opportunities in England. After serving for a time as a schoolteacher, he set sail for Massachusetts in 1631. Within a year, he was joined by his three brothers and three sisters as well as his fiancée.
Eliot soon became the minister of the congregation in the small frontier settlement of Roxbury, just two miles outside Boston, and there in October of 1632, he married Hanna Mumford. His early years in the ministry were filled with the needs of his congregation. There were Indians close by, but their occasional visits to Roxbury attracted little attention. They were peaceful, and the settlers accepted their presence with little thought of evangelizing them. In fact, many New Englanders, including ministers, looked on the growing death rate of Indians due to imported European diseases as God’s means of “clearing the land” for “His people.”
Not until 1644, when Eliot was forty years old, did he seriously begin his missionary endeavor. There was no Macedonian call. There was no solemn commission. There was simply a need, and he was available. His first step was language study—two years of mental anguish learning the Massachusetts dialect of the Algonquin tongue, an unwritten language composed of guttural sounds and voice inflections. This difficult task was aided by Cochenoe, a young Indian captured in the Pequot War. Cochenoe served as Eliot’s teacher and also accompanied him as an interpreter and assistant.
John Eliot, Puritan missionary to the Algonquin Indians.
In the fall of 1646 Eliot delivered his first sermon to a group of Indians who lived nearby. This was the first crucial test of his ability to communicate effectively. Despite his best effort, his message fell on deaf ears; the Indians “regarded it not” nor gave “heed unto it, but were weary and despised what I said.” A month later Eliot preached again, this time to a larger group of Indians who congregated at Waban’s wigwam. This time the Indians listened for more than an hour, and when the sermon was over, they asked questions—questions Eliot later described as “curious, wonderful, and interesting.” Eliot answered some of the questions, but then with perceptive missionary psychology he closed the question time and “resolved to leave them with an appetite.” Before leaving the encampment, he passed out treats, including sweetmeats and apples for the children and tobacco for the men. He had his first taste of success, and he “departed with many welcomes.”9
Two weeks after this encouraging meeting he returned, accompanied by two pastors and a layman (as he had been on his first visits). Following his opening prayer, he drilled the children in recitation of catechism, the parents learning while they listened. He then preached on the Ten Commandments and on Christ’s love, to which some Indians responded with tears and weeping. Again there were questions that followed—the most difficult of which to answer was, “Why has no white man ever told us these things before?”
Eliot continued making biweekly trips to Waban’s wigwam in the months that followed, always with catechism lessons and evangelistic sermons that were carefully prepared and rehearsed in the complex Algonquin language. Although he carried a heavy share of the ministry himself, he actively recruited the help of others, including neighboring pastors and his own parishioners. Their enthusiasm buoyed his spirits and kept the mission going during difficult times. Travel was always slow and cumbersome. Trudging through the rugged wilderness trails was fatiguing, but his optimism could not be dampened: “We never had a bad day to go preach to the Indians all the winter. Praised be the Lord.”10
As the weeks and months passed, some Indians were converted and noticeable changes were seen in their lives. A report published less than a year after Eliot’s first meeting documented the following progress:
The Indians have utterly forsaken their powwows.
They have set up morning and evening prayers in their wigwams.
They not only keep the Sabbath themselves, but have made a law to punish those who do not.
Whoever profanes it must pay twenty shillings.
They begin to grow industrious and are making articles to sell all the year long. In winter, brooms, stoves, eelpots, baskets; in spring they sell cranberries, fish, strawberries.
The women are learning to spin.11
One of Eliot’s first concerns was to have an area of land specifically designated for the Christian Indians. His rationale was that new converts needed to be separated from those who had no interest in the gospel. The Indians, like-wise, wanted some place to call their own. White settlers had been building homes and fences, leaving the Indians restricted in their hunting and fishing. Eliot made an appeal in their behalf to the General Court, and the Indians were granted several thousand acres eighteen miles southwest of Boston, where they established the settlement of Natick, commonly referred to as a “praying town.”
Natick was not a typical Indian settlement. Streets were laid out, and each family was given a lot. Some buildings, through the encouragement of Eliot, were constructed European style, but most of the Indians chose wigwams for their own homes. A biblical form of government, based on Jethro’s plan in Exodus 18:21, was set up by Eliot; the town was divided into tens, fifties, and hundreds, each division with a ruling adult male. The white man’s civilization became the standard, and Christian Indians were expected to simply accept it. To Eliot, true Christianity not only changed the heart and mind but also changed the lifestyle and culture. He could not envision a truly Christian community apart from European culture, and this factor, in hindsight, is seen as the one grave weakness of his ministry.
There were problems in establishing Natick, particularly from white settlers who resented the Indians’ permanent residence among them, but Eliot periodically petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for more grants of land, and by 1671 he had gathered more than eleven hundred Indians into fourteen “praying towns.” His ministry was scrutinized by the General Court, and he eagerly accepted all public funding they appropriated for his projects.
Although Eliot spent time and effort with temporal matters, his primary concern was the spiritual welfare of the Indians. He was slow and meticulous in his evangelism, and though he witnessed his first conversions after preaching to them only three times, he did not rush the process. In fact, he purposefully delayed baptism and church membership until he was convinced that they were committed to their new faith. The first baptisms were delayed until 1651, five years after the first conversions. Likewise, the establishment of a church was put off until he and his fellow ministers determined that the Indians were adequately prepared to assume church offices.
Eliot was interested in more than professions of faith. He sought spiritual maturity in his Indian followers, and in his view, that could be accomplished only if they could read and study the Bible in their own language. Thus, in 1649, three years after his first sermon at Waban’s wigwam, amid a hectic schedule, he began his translation work. His first completed project was a catechism printed in 1654. The following year the book of Genesis and the gospel of Matthew were published; and in 1661 the New Testament was completed, with the Old Testament following two years later. Despite this noteworthy accomplishment, he was harshly criticized for wasting his time in the Indian language when he could have been teaching the Indians English.
As the years passed and as the praying towns grew in numbers and the Christian Indians grew spiritually, Eliot concentrated more and more on training Indian leaders. By 1660 twenty-four Indians had been trained as evangelists to minister to their own people, and several churches had ordained Indian ministers. Schools were established in every town, and the Indians were seemingly adapting to European culture. On the surface the future looked bright, but time was running out. Decades of European encroachment on Indian lands could not go unchecked indefinitely. The land grabbing, dishonest bargaining, and ill-treatment of the Indians were bound to bring retaliation. There was unrest among the Indians of the Northeast, and even the praying Indians would not escape the horror looming on the horizon—the bloodiest war in American colonial history.
King Philip’s War broke out in the summer of 1675, after three of the chief ’s braves were hanged for the murder of an Indian agent who had tipped off a colonial governor of the chief ’s plan to attack. The war was nearly lost by the settlers, and before the fighting was over more than a year after it began, thirteen towns and many more settlements had been utterly devastated. Whole families—grandparents, aunts, uncles, and little children—were obliterated from the registers of colonial record books.
The saga of the praying Indians during this bloody war was a tragic one—a story repeated again and again in American history. Although the praying Indians had complained bitterly about encroachment on their land and, in the words of Eliot, “the business about land giveth them no small matter for stumbling,”12 they nevertheless stood by the white settlers when the Wampanoags and later other tribes attacked. In fact, they aided the colonial militia as scouts and fighters, so much so that their aid tipped the scales in favor of the settlers. But this service was ignored. Tensions were high. Hundreds of Christian Indians were exiled to a “bleake bare Island” in Boston Harbor—“harried away” before they could even gather possessions, forced to endure a harsh winter without sufficient food or supplies.
Eliot visited them during that dire winter and pleaded with officials on their behalf for more food and medicine, but he found little sympathy for his cause. Yet these exiled Indians fared better than the families they left behind. Many who remained were indiscriminately murdered by cowardly settlers. When the violence ended, most of the surviving Christian Indians trickled back to their devastated towns. Efforts were made to rebuild, but life was never the same. The Indians had been weakened not only numerically but also spiritually. Many of those who became soldiers were enticed by the white mans’ liquor.
King Philip’s War was a tragedy for the many Indians and whites directly involved as well as for the seventy-two-year-old John Eliot. He had poured decades of selfless service into his missionary work, and it was difficult to view the wreckage of the war. But he was not one to give up: “I can do little, yet I am resolved through the grace of Christ, I will never give over the worke, so long as I have legs to go.”13 As the years passed, his output decreased, but he remained faithful to the work until his death in 1690 at the age of eighty-five.
Although much of Eliot’s work was ravaged by the devastation of war, his example as an evangelist and Bible translator paved the way for further missionary efforts among the natives, and his influence in the founding of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), a missionary arm of the Anglican Church that actively worked in the American colonies, was significant.
What was the secret behind Eliot’s exceptional life of service? What carried him through the years of opposition, hardship, and disappointment? Three characteristics are worth noting: his unbending optimism, his ability to enlist the help of others, and his absolute certainty that God, not he, was saving souls and was in control of the bad times as well as the good.
Eliot was only one among several colonial New England pastors who was ministering effectively among the Indians. Another noteworthy mission to the native population was conducted on Martha’s Vineyard by the Mayhew family. Thomas Mayhew Sr. came to America in the 1630s at about the same time that Eliot arrived. Soon after he arrived, he settled on Martha’s Vineyard, where he purchased the proprietary rights and became governor. His son, Thomas Jr., studied for the ministry, was ordained in his early twenties, and then returned home to Martha’s Vineyard to serve as a minister.
Although young Mayhew’s primary ministry was to white settlers, like Eliot, he conducted mission outreach to the nearby Indians. His first convert, Hiacoomes, became an interpreter and evangelist, and in less than a decade there were nearly three hundred converts. Mayhew opened a school and sought support from others for the work. In 1655, in his early thirties, he set sail for England to publicize the work there. But he was lost at sea, leaving behind a wife and young children.
When it became apparent that his son would not return, Thomas Mayhew Sr., the seventy-year-old governor and landlord of Martha’s Vineyard, took over the mission work. Though not a minister himself, he was respected by the Indians because he had honored their land titles and social structure. With a grave sense of responsibility, he assumed his son’s duties and served as a missionary for twenty-two years until he died at the age of ninety-two. His grandson, John Mayhew, was also associated with the work. And after his death, Experience Mayhew, the fourth generation of Mayhews, took over the work for thirty-two more years.
The most well-known missionary to the American Indians is David Brainerd, an heir of New England Puritanism and a product of the Great Awakening. Bringing the gospel to scattered wandering tribes of Indians was his single mission. He spent his life for that cause. However, his place in history is based largely on the inspiration his personal life has had on others. His journal, diary, and biography, published by Jonathan Edwards, are classics of Christian literature; and missionaries through the centuries, including William Carey and Henry Martyn, have been deeply influenced by his life. Brainerd’s methods of evangelism, which differed markedly from those of his great missionary predecessor to the American Indians, John Eliot, have been questioned, however; and in spite of the intensity of his efforts, the results of the work were meager. At the age of twenty-nine, after a mere five years of missionary work, he died as a result of his strenuous labors.
David Brainerd was born in 1718 in Haddam, Connecticut. His father was a country squire who lived with his wife and nine children on a substantial estate overlooking the Connecticut River. When David was eight years old, his father died, and six years later his mother also died. Death was thus very real to him, and in many respects he missed the joys of a happy, carefree childhood. He was sober and studious and deeply concerned about the condition of his soul. From his youth, his spiritual journey took him from peaks of lofty spirituality to valleys of mortifying despair. At the age of twenty, after living with his sister and working on a farm for a time, he returned to Haddam to study in the home of an elderly minister, who counseled him “to stay away from youth and cultivate grave, elderly people.”14
In 1739, at the age of twenty-one, Brainerd enrolled atYale College at a time when the school was in transition. When he first entered the school, he was distressed by the religious indifference, but the impact of George Whitefield and the Great Awakening soon made its mark, and the atmosphere changed. Prayer and Bible study groups sprang up overnight—often at the displeasure of school authorities, who were fearful of religious “enthusiasm.” It was in this atmosphere that Brainerd made an intemperate remark about one of the tutors, commenting that he had “no more grace than a chair,” and judging him to be a hypocrite. The remark was carried back to the school officials, and Brainerd was expelled after he refused to make a public apology.
This was an unfortunate situation for Brainerd, causing him distress for years afterward and contributing to his melancholy disposition. Despite his own efforts and those of influential friends, he was not reinstated or allowed to graduate. During his student days, however, he had heard Ebenezer Pemberton deliver a stirring message about the opportunities for missionary work among the Indians. He never forgot that message, and in November of 1742, following his expulsion from Yale, he met with Pemberton to discuss mission opportunities. Pemberton was an American minister who also served as field secretary for the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. Only recently had the society inaugurated its work among the Indians, and Brainerd was being considered as one of two missionary appointees whose ministry would be funded.
Although Brainerd viewed himself as unworthy of the task, the commissioners saw otherwise and enthusiastically offered him the appointment. After several months of itinerant preaching, he was assigned to work among natives of the Bay Colony. His mission outpost was a day’s travel from Stockbridge, where veteran missionary John Sergeant was serving with his wife Abigail. “There was much that Brainerd could learn before taking the forest trail to his new station,” writes David Wynbeek. “But he did not tarry.”15 Independent and eager for his own converts, he plunged into the task alone.
His first days as a missionary were lonely and depressing: “My heart was sunk…. It seemed to me I should never have any success among the Indians. My soul was weary of my life; I longed for death, beyond measure.” Though he later was assisted by an Indian interpreter from Stockbridge, for several weeks he attempted to preach to the Indians without an interpreter. His efforts were fruitless and his life was miserable:
I live in the most lonely melancholy desert…. I board with a poor Scotchman; his wife can talk scarce any English. My diet consists mostly of hasty-pudding, boiled corn, and bread baked in ashes…. My lodging is a little heap of straw laid upon some boards. My work is exceeding hard and difficult: I travel on foot a mile and a half, the worst of ways, almost daily, and back; for I live so far from my Indians.16
The following summer Brainerd built his own hut near the Indian settlement, but his attempt to evangelize the Indians remained unsuccessful. His first winter in the wilderness was one of hardship and sickness. On one occasion he was lost for a time in the woods, and on another he “was very much exposed and very wet by falling into a river.” In March of 1744, after a year of mission work, he remained deeply discouraged. But despite offers from established churches to serve as their pastor, he “resolved to go on still with the Indian Affair.”17
Brainerd’s next assignment was in Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia within the Forks of the Delaware River. Here he was well received by the Indians and was often allowed to speak to them in the chief ’s house. Progress was slow, however. His new Indian interpreter, Tattamy, had a serious drinking problem, and Brainerd viewed his own prospects for winning converts “as dark as midnight.”
After several months at the Forks of the Delaware, he traveled west to reach Indians along the Susquehanna River. “We went our way into the wilderness; and found the most difficult and dangerous traveling by far, that any of us had seen; we had scarce anything else but lofty mountains, deep valleys, and hideous rocks to make our way through.” To make matters worse, his horse fell and broke a leg, which left Brainerd with no alternative but to kill it and continue on to the nearest house some thirty miles away. After preaching with little success, he returned to the Forks of the Delaware where, except for frequent travels, he remained during his second year of missionary service.18
Illness and depression continued to plague him. His high hopes of revival among the Indians had long since dimmed. With the exception of Tattamy and his wife, who had been converted and were apparently making remarkable spiritual progress, he regarded his year at the Forks of the Delaware a loss. He was guilt-stricken, believing he had accomplished nothing for his pay, and he was tempted to quit. His “self-preoccupation was so intense,” writes William Hutchinson, “that his Indian charges and their problems figured as little more than intrusions.”19
Brainerd blamed himself for his lack of success, but he also blamed the Indians. He found them “brutishly stupid and ignorant of divine things” and given to asking “frivolous and impertinent questions.” Yet, in hindsight, their questions appear astute. Why, for example, was Brainerd seeking to convert them to Christianity when the Christians behaved so much worse than did the Indians? The Indians reasoned that the whites were seeking to convert them in order to take their land and enslave them. Brainerd’s private reflections were that they were “some of the most jealous people living, and extremely averse to a state of servitude” and that they regarded their own way of living as “vastly preferable to the white people.” They, likewise, had no desire to go to the white man’s heaven, but rather preferred “to go with their fathers when they die.”20 In summing up Brainerd’s attitudes toward Native Americans, Hutchinson writes: “Modern readers may wonder … whether Yale College in officially expelling Brainerd for rudeness may actually have sought to rid itself of one of its dimmer scholars.”21
In the summer of 1745 Brainerd’s spirits brightened. He heard about a group of Indians eighty-five miles to the south, in Crossweeksung, New Jersey, who were more open to the Christian message. Once again, he pulled up stakes and moved on. But this time his fortune would improve. The Indians in New Jersey were more eager to hear the gospel. Soon Indians as well as whites were coming from miles away to hear him preach. Anxious for results, he baptized twenty-five converts within a matter of weeks, and the following winter he organized a school.
David Brainerd preaching to the Indians.
Later that summer, Brainerd witnessed a revival among the Indians. Although he still depended on an interpreter and the Indians understood only the most elementary tenets of Christianity, they responded to his preaching in the emotional and physical ways that were so characteristic of the Great Awakening. His diary shows that this was an exhilarating time for him as he witnessed the visible results of the people to whom he was preaching:
August 6. In the morning I discoursed to the Indians at the house where we lodged. Many of them were then much affected and appeared surprisingly tender, so that a few words about their souls’ concerns would cause the tears to flow freely, and produce many sobs and groans.
In the afternoon, they being returned to the place where I had usually preached among them, I again discoursed to them there. There were about fifty-five persons in all, about forty that were capable of attending divine service with understanding. I insisted upon 1 John 4:10, “Herein is love.” They seemed eager of hearing; but there appeared nothing very remarkable, except their attention, till near the close of my discourse. Then divine truths were attended with a surprising influence, and produced a great concern among them. There were scarce three in forty that could refrain from tears and bitter cries.
They all, as one, seemed in an agony of soul to obtain an interest in Christ … and the more I invited them to come and partake of His love, the more their distress was aggravated, because they felt themselves unable to come…. It was very affecting to see the poor Indians, who the other day were hallooing and yelling in their idolatrous feasts and drunken frolics, now crying to God.22
In the spring of 1746, Brainerd convinced the scattered Indians in New Jersey to settle together at nearby Cranbury, and soon thereafter a church was established. More revivals followed, and his converts numbered more than a hundred. But Brainerd’s health was broken. His fourth and final journey back to the Susquehanna, though more successful than previous preaching tours, was too much for his frail constitution. He was dying of tuberculosis. His missionary work was over.
After spending the winter in the home of a friend in New Jersey, Brainerd traveled to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he spent his last months in the home of the great preacher and scholar Jonathan Edwards, whose daughter, Jerusha, he hoped to marry. This dream, however, was never realized. For nineteen weeks Jerusha tenderly nursed him, but to no avail. He died on October 9, 1747. The following Valentine’s Day Jerusha joined him, dying of consumption that she apparently contracted from him.
If Brainerd was disorganized and lacking direction in his ministry, there were others among his contemporaries who presented developed strategies for Native American missions. Among them was Dr. Eleazer Wheelock, a minister and educator who graduated from Yale in 1733. Ten years later, in 1743, he brought an Indian youth, Samson Occum, into his home and spent four years educating him. His success with Occum led him to develop a concept that historian R. Pierce Beaver has termed “the most original scheme of operations in the entire history of New England missions to the Indians.”23
Wheelock’s plan was to bring Indians and whites together for training in missionary service. In the process, the white students would learn the language and culture of the Indians, and the Indian youths would receive a classical education and learn the ways of whites. Both would be trained for Indian evangelism, though there would be an emphasis on recruiting natives who would not have to cross cultural barriers and who could live and work on far less financial support than their white counterparts.
Wheelock opened his school in Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1754 with two Indian students sent by John Brainerd, who had succeeded David at the New Jersey mission (and was a far more successful missionary than his famous brother). The school met in a house donated by Joshua Moor, and the institution became known as Moor’s Training School. At its peak there were twenty-two students enrolled, and Wheelock’s missionary work was the most extensive of any in New England. Altogether he trained nearly fifty Indian students, and approximately one-third of those returned to their home communities to serve as evangelists or teachers.
Wheelock’s experiment, however, was not a shining story of success. What the project demonstrated in innovative ideas it lacked in effective leadership. Wheelock’s domineering personality obstructed the path of progress. Instead of mutual sharing of culture, the school became dominated by white culture. Wheelock could never overcome his contempt for Indians and their culture. Though he trained Indian students and sent them out to minister, he was unable to work with them as equals—particularly Samson Occum, his first student, who became a highly respected missionary in his own right. As time went on, Wheelock’s school declined in numbers and was eventually moved to Dresden, where it was eventually transformed into Dartmouth College.
The greatest thrust for Indian missions during the colonial period came from New England, but there was effective work going on elsewhere in the colonies, in many cases carried out by European missionaries—particularly Moravians. The most noted Moravian missionary to the Indians was David Zeisberger, who labored amid tragedy and hardship for sixty-three years. His story is just one of many that graphically illustrates the cruel injustices dealt to the Native Americans as colonists took over the land.
Soon after Zeisberger began his ministry in 1744 in the Hudson River Valley, he and his associate were arrested and confined in jail for several weeks. As a missionary to Native Americans, he not only endured strong opposition to his calling but also faced prejudice against his faith. Moravians were “sect people,” who were looked down upon by members of Protestant denominations. Despite setbacks Zeisberger persisted. In 1746 he helped establish Gnadenhuetten, a Christian Indian village in Pennsylvania that became a prosperous farming community of some five hundred Indian residents. So respected was he that the Indians made him a sachem and “keeper of the archives.”
The good times did not last, however. Both whites and unfriendly Indians viewed Gnadenhuetten with suspicion, and in 1755, at the outbreak of the French and Indian War, a band of raiding Indians attacked the settlement, killed eleven people, and burned the buildings. While most of the residents fled for their lives, Zeisberger remained with a segment of Indians who did not scatter and tried without success to establish a permanent settlement in Pennsylvania. Finally, in the 1770s, he secured a tract of land in Ohio.
For several years he and the Indians lived peacefully and prospered in their new land, but again the calm was broken. The American Revolution brought unrest to the frontier, and in 1781 Zeisberger and his associates were accused by the English forces of being spies. The Indians were evacuated to the Sandusky River, where they nearly starved during the harsh winter. The following spring more than one hundred of these Christian Indians returned to their settlement in Ohio to gather unharvested corn. While they were there, ninety of their number (including thirty-four children) were brutally murdered by a company of American militia. Of this incident, Zeisberger wrote:
Warriors came in, bringing a prisoner, from whom we now get certain news that all our Indians in Gnadenhuetten and Salem were put to death, and that none were spared; he said the militia had 96 scalps, but our Indians only numbered 86, who went away from us. The rest then must have been friends, who did not belong to us….
The news sank deep into our hearts, so that these our brethren, who as martyrs, had all at once gone to the Savior, were always day and night before our eyes and in our thoughts, and we could not forget them.24
For the next decade Zeisberger and his Christian following moved from place to place in northern Ohio and southern Michigan, and then finally settled in Ontario in 1792 when Zeisberger was past the age of seventy. There he established a mission station that survived for more than a century. In 1798 he returned to work among the Indians of Ohio, where he remained until his death a decade later.
Protestant missions to the American Indians changed considerably during the late eighteenth century. The Great Awakening that had fanned the flames of colonial missions had died down, and for many years following the American Revolution there was a lull in Protestant missions. With the steady march of colonization westward, Indians were pushed farther and farther into the uncharted wilderness. Those who sought to evangelize them followed the wagons westward, pushing beyond the white settlements to reach the Indians.
As the Indians were pushed westward, there was a renewed interest in Indian missions—perhaps because many people found missions at a distance more compelling than missions close to home. Among the first of the Methodist missionaries of this era was John Steward, a black man from Ohio who, after his conversion at a camp meeting, felt called to preach to the Wyandot Indians at Upper Sandusky, Ohio. He was well received by the Indians when he arrived in 1816 and was surprised to learn that another black man, Jonathan Painter, a run-away slave from Kentucky, was living among them. Steward asked him to serve as an interpreter, but he declined: “How can I interpret the Gospel to the Indians when I have no religion myself?” That night he “got religion,” and together he and Steward preached to the Indians. Steward was licensed as a Methodist preacher, and in 1819 the Methodist Missionary Society was formed, and missionaries were appointed to the Upper Sandusky area.
Baptist missions to the Indians began with Isaac McCoy and his wife, who opened a mission at Fort Wayne in 1820. From there they moved to southern Michigan, where they founded the Carey Mission with substantial government funding. A U.S. military officer visiting the mission only seven months after its establishment found an impressive, efficiently run mission compound that included a large mission house, a school, a blacksmith shop, and other buildings as well as well-cultivated, enclosed gardens and pastures. The school enrolled some forty children, and the mission showed every sign of success, but within two years McCoy was once again moving on, fearing the encroachments of whites and the dire consequences such encroachments would have on Indians.
McCoy was convinced that the only solution was removal of the Indians. In 1823, by his own testimony, he “formed the resolution” that “providence permitting, [he would] thenceforward keep steadily in view and endeavor to promote a plan for colonizing the natives in a country to be made forever theirs, west of the State of Missouri.”25 In 1824 he traveled to Washington to offer his plan at the annual meeting of the Baptist Board of Missions. With the board’s approval, he set up a meeting with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who supported the proposal. From that meeting onward, McCoy was primarily a political lobbyist. He headed a commission that traveled to Kansas to select a tract of land for the resettlement of the Pottawatomies who were removed from their lands in Michigan.
Although Baptists historically fought for the separation of church and state, it is paradoxical that through McCoy’s influence Baptist Indian missions became closely tied to the government—especially in the forced removal of Indians from their lands. The most notorious case in which he became embroiled was the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia. McCoy’s rationale for Indian removal was that Indians had to be segregated from whites to be Christianized, and he supported the state of Georgia in its claims on Cherokee land. He had no qualms about initiating this controversial and drastic measure, and he readily accepted a government commission to explore and survey land in the West suitable for an Indian colony.
The removal of the Cherokees was one of the greatest injustices committed by the U.S. government in the nation’s history. In 1837, several years after the discovery of gold on their lands, the peaceful and culturally advanced Indians of the Cherokee nation were forced, by government decree and nine thousand troops, to leave their homes in Georgia. They were herded into stockades while their property was auctioned off. Thousands of them were then transported by riverboat, while others were forced to march overland beyond the Mississippi River. It was a perilous journey.
McCoy’s strong support of this removal policy was not representative of all missionaries. In fact, many missionaries valiantly fought against the measure. Four Presbyterian and two Methodist missionaries were arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to hard labor because of their sharp protests. Accounts of missionaries being dragged from their homes in chains were not unusual. Missionaries also accompanied the Cherokees on the “trail of tears” westward. Among them was Dr. Elizur Butler, a medical missionary with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. “God knows, even the storms, the elements conspired to afflict this people,” he observed. His estimate was that one in five of the Cherokees had died. “From the first of June,” he wrote, “I felt I have been in the midst of death.”26
Although McCoy was one of the strongest advocates of removal, he did have the courage to condemn the wanton cruelty in carrying out the government mandate. While he did not personally benefit from the Cherokee removal, many of his fellow Baptists in Georgia quickly laid claim to the native lands. In the end, this forced removal was a setback for mission work. Belatedly, McCoy “discovered that the policy which he had so earnestly and persistently advocated would not produce all the results for which he had hoped.” Indeed, while they were still on the trail of tears, “white settlers followed the Indians and entered as squatters upon their land.”27
The Louisiana Purchase and the exploration into the far West gave birth to a new breed of missionaries—courageous men and women with a spirit of adventure. Among them were Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, whose mission work in the Oregon territory might be all but forgotten today but for its very sad ending.
Born in the early years of the nineteenth century, they both experienced spiritual awakenings as young people (Narcissa in New York and Marcus in Massachusetts). Narcissa, the daughter of Judge Stephen Prentiss, became a kindergarten teacher, but her sense of calling was to mission work. The missionary challenges of Reverend Samuel Parker as well as the oft-repeated story of the Nez Percé Indians pleading for someone to bring them the “Book of Life” weighed heavily on her mind. Parker traveled extensively in the East, raising funds and recruiting missionaries for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The need for volunteers was great, but the American Board did not accept single women.
Marcus, too, had long been interested in missions, but he could not afford the cost of seminary. Entering the field of medicine was a more realistic option, and at the age of twenty-one he began “riding with a doctor.” In the years that followed he taught school part-time and took formal medical training. Then, like Narcissa, he was influenced by Samuel Parker in the direction of Indian missions. Marcus applied to the American Board as a single man, though he had heard through friends that Narcissa Prentiss was available. With the possibility of marriage in mind, he visited her to discuss mission work. He was planning an exploratory trip west, and if he found the journey to be suitable for a woman, he would return to marry her. He left with no promises. It was not a love affair or an engagement. It was a business arrangement.
Following their meeting, the thirty-two-year-old Whitman, accompanying Reverend Parker, traveled to Missouri to join up with the American Fur Company in its expedition west in the spring of 1835. The intended destination was Oregon, but in late August Whitman turned around and returned home with a caravan of fur traders, arriving only months after he had left. He and Narcissa were married in February of 1836, and the following day they left for Missouri in order to join the expedition to Oregon in the spring.
Narcissa Whitman, wife of Marcus Whitman.
The Whitmans were not the only American Board missionaries heading for Oregon that spring. With them were Henry and Eliza Spalding. Though Spalding was a well-trained minister, his personality was not suited for the teamwork required for the Oregon project. Moreover, he had known Narcissa years before, and her refusal of his marriage proposal caused bitterness that would surface for years to come.
Strenuous travel, illness, and personality problems combined to make the overland journey a very difficult one, but there were delightful moments along the way. Narcissa found the journey less arduous than she had anticipated, and she wrote often of the beautiful scenery. She was happy and she was in love, and somewhere under the night sky between the Elkhorn and the Loup, she conceived their first and only child.
After nearly two thouand miles of difficult travel, the expedition was approaching its destination, the missionary party being much poorer than when it began. Precious possessions had to be thrown out all along the way to lighten the load. “We scatter as we go,” Narcissa lamented, concluding that it would be better to travel with nothing, “then you lose nothing.”28 This same conclusion could have been applied to missionary colleagues. By the time the Whitmans had reached Oregon, they had already decided to part company with the Spaldings. After nearly five months of traveling together and sleeping together in the same tent, their relationship was so strained that they could no longer work together. Contemporary reports generally placed most of the blame on Spalding and his jealousy of Whitman, though Whitman himself, by many accounts, was not easy to deal with.
More than one tribe of Indians was asking for missionaries, however, so their decision to work separately was beneficial. Whitman settled in Waiilatpu, a lush green valley, while Spalding settled at Lapwai, a bleak, dry mountainous area. Spalding may have looked at Whitman’s site at Waiilatpu with envy, not realizing that ultimately his location would prove to be the superior one. His mission was to the Nez Percé Indians, who welcomed him and seemed eager to learn of his God. Whitman, on the other hand, sought to reach the Cayuse, a more hostile tribe of only a few hundred, who resented the coming of the white man.
On December 10 the Whitmans moved into their new house—a lean-to with few of the amenities of back home. Waiilatpu was a desolate and lonely place that winter, but spring brought new hope. On March 14, 1837, the eve of Narcissa’s twenty-ninth birthday, a baby daughter, Alice Clarissa, was born.
Henry Spalding, missionary to the Nez Percé Indians.
The first summer in Oregon was spent in constructing buildings and fences and in planting and harvesting crops, with little time for medical work, language study, and evangelism. Unlike the Catholic missionaries, who lived simply and sometimes followed the wandering Indians, the Protestant missionaries often built compounds and in some instances maintained large farming ventures. The task was enormous, and the Whitmans pleaded for additional recruits. The fall of 1838 brought three new missionary couples, whose presence brought further conflict. In the words of one biographer, “It seemed that the ‘reinforcements’ had brought not help, but dissension only.” Instead of fellowship and harmony, the joint planning meetings of these missionaries were often stormy and bitter. One of the wives described a typical flare-up: “It came on so sharp that I was compelled to leave…. It is enough to make one sick to see what is the state of things in the mission.”29
Part of the difficulty was a much-overcrowded mission house, and Narcissa was not receiving the help she needed from the other women. But Narcissa herself was not without blame. She was often critical of the other women without explaining what she needed them to do, and sometimes she did not come out of her room for a whole day. Lack of leadership was the single most pressing problem among the missionaries—and not just with Narcissa and household management. There was no leadership designated by the American Board, and no one individual rose up with leadership qualities to guide the mission work during this troublesome time. “Without any leaders to establish clear goals and direct the mission’s energies,” writes Julie Roy Jeffrey, “competing interests and conflicting personalities caused ill will.”30
There were times of unity, but they were sometimes the result of tragedy. Such was the case in the summer of 1839. Sympathy and sorrow healed the wounds of bitterness as the Whitmans suffered the pain of a heartrending tragedy. On a late June Sunday afternoon at Waiilatpu—a day of rest from the week’s heavy labor—Marcus and Narcissa were engrossed in reading, and little Alice was playing close by—or so they thought. When they suddenly realized she was missing, it was too late. The little two-year-old had wandered off and drowned in a nearby stream. The Spaldings came immediately to share the sorrow at the first funeral for the Oregon missionaries. A year later a package arrived from back east with the little shoes and dresses Narcissa had requested from her mother. A weaker woman could not have endured, but Narcissa was stoical. It was God’s divine purpose, and she resolutely accepted his will. Though she could see the little grave on the hill every time she stepped out of her door, she knew her dear Alice was in God’s care: “My thoughts seldom wander there to find her.”31 Yet, in the years that followed, Narcissa’s grief was often manifested in physical illness and bouts of depression. Though she had tried to accept the tragedy “without murmuring thought,” she later wrote to her father that she suffered from “dejection considerably” and felt “desponding and cast down.”Again, she lamented: “I often look up to that place of rest where my dear babe has gone and feel that I shall soon follow her.”32
But time marched on at Waiilatpu. There was work to be done, and sorrow was not permitted to stay the progress. The Whitmans’ time was consumed with more than medical missions. They were farmers—and prosperous ones at that. After only six years at Waiilatpu, their “plantation” consisted of a large whitewashed adobe mission house, a guest house, a gristmill, and a blacksmith shop, all surrounded by well-cultivated fields. Dr. Whitman was not the only Protestant missionary in Oregon to be tempted by the richness of the land. Jason Lee, a Methodist missionary, had fallen prey to materialism and spent his time in politics, immigration, and land ventures.
In the case of Whitman, the materialism was not so blatant, but the consequences were far greater. Waiilatpu became a receiving station for new missionaries and other immigrants as well as a school for Indian and white children. For that reason Whitman had to concern himself with more than subsistence farming. Soon Waiilatpu resembled an immigrant inn more than a missionary compound. The Whitmans began selling produce to immigrants as they passed through and were often accused of overcharging and exploiting their circumstances. On hearing such rumors, the American Board scolded him for the secularization of the mission, but the letters were slow in coming, and they knew little of the actual circumstances under which he worked.
The greater condemnation came from the Cayuse, the Indians the Whitmans came to serve. Though Marcus sacrificially worked among them as a minister and doctor, the Indians resented his prosperity and all the white immigrants they believed he was attracting to their land. Narcissa wrote of this resentment of the Indians who feel “we are rich and getting rich by the houses we dwell in and the clothes we wear and hang out to dry after washing from week to week and the grain we consume in our families.”33
For Henry Spalding, the situation was different. He had less time for worldly pursuits. He was too busy with his missionary activities. He established a church among the Nez Percé, and Eliza ran a school for the children and made hand-painted books and translated hymns into their language. With her artistic talent, she made large brightly colored charts illustrating Bible truths. (She had heard how Father François Blanchet’s famous “Catholic Ladder,” depicting Bible history, had intrigued the Indians, and she was not to be outdone in visual aids.) The Spaldings faced opposition, but they also heard confessions of faith at their revival meetings.
By 1844, after less than eight years in Oregon, the Whitmans’ missionary work for all practical purposes was over. Narcissa had long since lost the excitement and zeal she initially had for Indian missions. She spent her days feeding and housing immigrants and her adopted family, including the seven Sager children whose parents both died on the overland trip from the East. Marcus, too, was consumed by the needs of the white immigrants. He continued treating the Indians’ physical needs, but he was discouraged by their lack of response to spiritual values, and like so many other missionaries throughout history, he could not separate salvation from civilization. If the Indians refused the white man’s civilization, including his work ethic, how could they be saved?
Time was running out for Waiilatpu and the Whitmans. Despite repeated warnings, they never fully appreciated the Cayuse’s reputation for treachery. It was a difficult period for the Cayuse. In 1847 the new immigrants numbered more than four thousand, bringing their diseases with them. The Cayuse villages were ravaged by a plague, and within the space of eight weeks nearly half of the four-hundred-member tribe had suffered painful deaths. Though Whitman had tried to help, the situation only grew worse, and suspicion mounted among the Indians that he was purposely poisoning them with his “medicine.”
The massacre at Waiilatpu in 1847.
The end for Waiilatpu came suddenly. On a dreary late November afternoon in 1847, two Indians, one with a personal vendetta against Marcus, appeared at the mission house door. Others were stationed outside. Without warning, the massacre began. It was not a mass uprising with a hoard of savage Indians suddenly descending on a helpless compound. There were seventy-two people living at the mission, including more than a dozen men, and the murderers were Indians whom the Whitmans knew well. Pulling tomahawks out from under the blankets they were carrying, the small party began the slaughter, starting with Dr. Whitman. When it was over, fourteen were dead. With the exception of Narcissa, the women and children had been spared, only to be held in terrifying captivity until their release some five weeks later.
News of the Whitman massacre spread rapidly. American troops were sent in, and the missionaries in the interior were ordered out. In the spring of 1850 the five Cayuse Indians responsible for the murders were brought to trial, convicted, and sentenced to die; and on June 3 all of Oregon, it seemed, came out to watch the hangings.
For generations following the massacre, Protestants promoted the Whitmans as “noble martyrs to their faith.” But in recent decades, the Native American perspective has been taken more seriously. On the last page of her biography of Narcissa Whitman, Julie Roy Jeffery quotes lines from a Mass celebrated by a Roman Catholic bishop in Brazil—lines that offer a sad perspective on mission work:
And we missionized you,
betrayed errors of the gospel,
driving the Cross into your lives
like a sword,
the Good News ringing
a death knell.34
Not until 1871, twenty-four years after he was ordered out, did Spalding return to Lapwai, without Eliza, who had long since died. There he witnessed revival among the Nez Percé and Spokane Indians and claimed to have baptized more than a thousand. After three years of service, Spalding died among the Indians that he so loved, thus ending a difficult and controversial era of Protestant missions in Oregon.
The work at Lapwai was taken over by two single sisters, Kate and Sue McBeth. A training school for Indian preachers was set up, and the Nez Percé, perhaps more than any other Indian tribe, became active in evangelizing other Indian tribes. Sue assumed the leading role in this ministry, and of her Nez Percé students she wrote: “I do not think any one could have more interested, earnest and diligent pupils…. They are all farmers—and busy ploughing and sowing nearly every day. But they are here every morning by 7 o’clock.” Their diligence was no doubt inspired by their teacher. Robert Speer referred to Sue McBeth as a woman of “apostolic zeal” who “trained preachers, taught and preached.”35
As the nineteenth century progressed, missionary work among the Indians decreased. The emphasis, instead, was on exotic foreign lands where the native population could not interfere with the advance of American society. Many scholars agree that Indian evangelism, as a whole, was not a story of success, the greatest reason being the intense conflict between the two cultures for supremacy over the land. But perhaps equally important was the deep-seated belief of white America that Indians were racially inferior and that their culture was not worth saving.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beaver, R. Pearce. Church, State, and the American Indian. St. Louis: Concordia, 1966.
______. Pioneers in Mission: The Early Missionary Ordination Sermons, Charges and Instructions. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966.
Berkhoffer, Robert F., Jr. Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862. Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1965.
Bowden, Henry Warner. American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Drury, Clifford M. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Opening of Old Oregon. Two vols. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1973.
Edwards, Jonathan. Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Chicago: Moody Press, 1949.
Ehle, John. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Hinman, George W. The American Indian and Christian Missions. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1933.
Humphreys, Mary G., ed. Missionary Explorers among the American Indians. New York: Scribner, 1913.
Hutchinson, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Jones, Nard. The Great Command: The Story of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Oregon Country Pioneers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959.
Olmstead, Earl P. David Zeisberger: A Life among the Indians. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997.
Winslow, Ola Elizabeth. John Eliot, “Apostle to the Indians.” Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
Wynbeek, David. David Brainerd: Beloved Yankee. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961.