USA > Oklahoma > A standard history of Oklahoma; an authentic narrative of its development from the date of the first European exploration down to the present time, including accounts of the Indian tribes, both civilized and wild, of the cattle range, of the land openings and the achievements of the most recent period, Vol. I > Part 22
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The American Board had opened mission work among the Creek Indians before they came West but, shortly after their arrival in the Indian Territory, the Creek council forbade the preaching of the Gospel in the Creek Nation.11 The field was thus left for the Baptist and Methodist missions to occupy, then the prohibitory ruling of the Creek Council was modified. The American Board never at- tempted to establish any missions among the Seminoles. Its work
Indian Territory with the migrating Choctaws and established the mission at Pine Ridge. He occupied a large place in the religious and educational uplift of the Choctaw people, among whom he con- tinued to live and labor even after the sustaining missionary society had withdrawn its support and patronage because of the existence of slavery among the Choctaws. He died June 27, 1870.
Da Rev. Ebenezer Hotchkin was born at Richmond, Massachu- setts, in 1803. He had a good common school education but never had the benefit of college or seminary training. He entered the missionary service as a teacher, at Goshen, in the old Choctaw country, in 1828, where he remained until the removal of the Choc- taws to the West, in 1832, during which year he was licensed to preach. He was stationed at Clear Creek for a time after reaching the new Choctaw country but removed to Good Water in 1837. In 1841, he was ordained as a minister. He continued to labor in the Choctaw Nation until the discontinuance of the missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in that section, in 1859, and, subsequently, under the auspices of the Presby- terian Board of Missions. His death occurred at Lennox, Massa- chusetts, October 28, 1867. His wife, to whom he had been married in 1831, died less than a month later.
10 Among the teachers employed at Spencer Academy in 1858-9 was Sheldon Jackson, who afterward became famous as a Presbyte- rian missionary leader, pioneer, educational director and publicist in Alaska.
11 Statement of Samuel Checote, History of the Indian Mission Conference of the M. E. Church, South, p. 200.
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in the Indian Territory (after the departure of the Osages) was therefore confined to Cherokee and Choctaw Nations, though it reached many of the Chickasaw people in the last mentioned nation. In all, from first to last, the American Board sent over 300 mis- sionaries, lay and clerical, to labor among the Indians of the tribes which came to Oklahoma from the East. Although some of the earlier missionaries were employed only while the Indians were still living in their old home-lands, east of the Mississippi, by far the most of them saw service in the Indian Territory.
While the missions of the American Board were perhaps less mobile than those of the Baptist and Methodist bodies, and therefore not so well adapted to wilderness conditions, yet the excellence of their schools and the relatively larger amount of work done, in the way of translating and publishing books, tracts and papers in the several tribal languages, gave it an influence and beneficent value that extended far beyond denominational lines. Although founded and largely supported and carried on by Congregationalists, the Presbyterians eventually fell heir to the denominational results of their work. There may have been a few of the workers that were found wanting in stamina or other essential qualities, yet, in the main, it may be said that the missionaries of the American Board in the Indian Territory were a heroic band of men and women, devoted to their calling, patient and self-sacrificing and, con- sidering the difficulties under which they had to labor, they were remarkably efficient.
BAPTIST MISSIONS AND MISSIONARIES
Among the prominent mixed-blood Cherokees who came West with the migration of the main body of their tribe in 1838-39, was Rev. Jesse Bushyhead, a Baptist minister, who, as previously stated, was the leader of one division of immigrants, numbering about 1,000 persons. In collaboration with Rev. Evan Jones, he had been engaged in making a translation of the New Testament into the Cherokee language before leaving the old home in the East. With other adherents of the Baptist faith, he formed a settlement which was named Baptist, and which was located near the present Town of Westville, in Adair County. There he opened up a farm, planted an orchard and built a house. When Rev. Evan Jones arrived from the old Cherokee country several years later, Jesse Bushyhead presented his home to the former and proceeded to build a new one for himself. The place he had first opened up and
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improved thus became the center of Baptist missionary activities in the Cherokee Nation for many years following. Jesse Bushy- head was a justice of the Cherokee Supreme Court and was the first president of the Cherokee Temperance Society. He' was dis- tinguished for his earnestness and activity as well as for his good- ness. He died July 14, 1844. He was supposed to have been born about the year 1800.
The mission at Baptist, of which Evan Jones was the real founder and the administrative head, engaged in educational and industrial activities as well as pushing its evangelistic propaganda. The Cherokee Female Seminary, a well equipped school, which was established and operated in conjunction with this mission, was opened for the reception of pupils in 1842 and was conducted regu- larly thereafter for nearly twenty years. In 1843 Mr. Jones in- duced the Mission Board at Boston to furnish his mission station with a press and type. H. Upham, a printer, came with it and was thereafter the manager of the publishing interests of the mission. In August, 1844, there was published the first number of the Chero- kec Messenger, a sixteen-page octavo publication. This was the month before the appearance of the initial number of the Cherokee Advocate, so the Cherokee Messenger was really the first paper ever printed in the Indian Territory. Most of its contents were printed in the Cherokee language and text, with occasional articles or items in English, and consisted principally of translations from the Bible, "Pilgrim's Progress" and "Parley's Universal History," together with a selection of local news items. The mission press also printed parts of the Bible, hymn books, tracts, etc. By far the greater part of the work of the mission under the direction of Evan Jones was among the Cherokec people of pure Indian blood, who could be reached only through the medium of their own language. There were several very effective preachers among the Cherokee Bap- tists, Rev. Jesse Bushyhead, who has already been mentioned, and Rev. Lewis Downing (who was lieutenant-colonel of the Third Indian Home Guard Regiment in the Union army during the Civil war and, still later, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation) being among the most noted.
In 1842 there was organized the American Indian Mission Asso- ciation, a missionary society of people of the Baptist faith which was to be devoted entirely to the evangelization of the people of the American Indian race. Rev. Isaac McCoy was the corresponding
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secretary and active executive agent of this society,12 the heaquar- ters of which were established at Louisville, Kentucky.
A Creek Indian named Joseph Island, from studying the Bible, began to preach in 1842, without baptism and without ordination.
12 Isaac McCoy was born near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, June 13, 1784. His early life was spent in Kentucky. In 1817 he became a missionary among the Miami Indians in the Valley of the Wabash. Subsequently he labored among the Pottawatomies and the Ottawas. He became impressed with the belief that he could achieve more in the way of elevating the Indians if they could be removed from the contaminating influence of certain vicious ele- ments that were to be found in many of the frontier white settle- ments. He accordingly visited Washington and laid his plans for the removal of the tribes of the (then) western states to the wilder- ness beyond the Mississippi, before John C. Calhoun, secretary of war, who approved the same. After continuing his agitation for several years he was named as a member of the commission to arrange for the removal of the Pottawatomies and Ottawas, in 1828. From that time until his death he was almost constantly engaged in aiding other tribes to select new reservations in the West, and to move to the same. He took the contract to survey the Cherokee Outlet, in 1837, the actual work being done by his son, John C. McCoy. It was at that time that he placed the western limit of possible successful agriculture in the Indian Territory at an undefined line drawn from north to south, beginning at a point in the Western part of the present Kay County. He first visited the present State of Oklahoma in 1828, with a delegation of Choc- taws, Chickasaws and Creeks, coming southward from Kansas. In 1831 lie returned, bringing his family with him and making his home for a time at Union Mission, where he was on the best of ternis with the Presbyterian missionaries. One of his children died and was buried there. He visited Washington nearly every winter on business connected with the various Indian tribes. The journey one way sometimes consumed as much as five weeks when steamboat traffic was stopped by ice and the only means of travel was by stage or on horseback. He visited the Cherokee and Creek nations again in the autumn of 1832. He was the author of "A History of Baptist Indian Missions," and of a number of pam- phlets, including the several numbers of his "Annual Register of Indian Affairs Within the Indian Territory," of which four issues were published, 1835 to 1838 inclusive. He probably did more traveling than any other man ever engaged in Indian mission work, with the possible exception of Father DeSmet, of the Roman Catho- lic Church. It does no injustice to any other missionary among the Indians to state that the influence and beneficent results of the labors of Isaac McCoy have not been exceeded by those of any other worker in the same field, either during his own time or since. He died at Louisville, Kentucky, June 21, 1846.
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There was still much open and aggressive hostility toward the preaching of the Christian religion among the Creek people at that time. Rev. Sidney Dyer, who was sent out as a missionary to the Creeks by the American Baptist Missionary Association, came into the vicinity where Joseph Island was preaching. The latter wel- comed him, gave his own home for a church, moving into a small cabin until he could build a new one, and affiliated with the Bap- tist denomination in which he became a zealous and devoted worker. There was much persecution. Many of Island's converts were whipped and he was often threatened. He attended the session of the American Baptist Missionary Association which was held at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1847, where his personality and his mnas- terly appeals for the uplift of the people of his race made a most profound impression. He died soon afterward.
Rev. Evan Jones visited the Creek Nation in 1842, and Rev. Charles R. Kellam did likewise during the following year, for the purpose of inspecting the work and its prospects. About that time the nonprogressive element which was in control in the Creek scribing severe punishment for any Indian or negro in the nation Council, passed a law forbidding white men to preach and pre- who should be caught either preaching or praying. Then Rev. Eben Tucker was appointed a missionary to the Creek Indians. He counselled the faithful Creek Baptists to assemble for worship at convenient points just across the line in the Cherokee Nation. Taking the hint, some who lived in the southern part of the Creek Nation likewise went across into the Choctaw country to attend religious services. Also, among the Seminoles (who were then in- cluded as a part of the Creek Nation) there were many who declined to recognize the binding force of such a tribal law, so the persecuted Creek Christians were not without friends among the other tribes.
The usual punishment for the violation of this law was the application of fifty lashes on the bare back. "The progress of religion in the Nation," wrote Mr. Tucker, "is checring. Five in- dividuals have been scourged and remain faithful." Indeed, though many (not only Baptists, but Presbyterians and Methodists as well) were whipped, there was no report that any ever recanted or denied their faith.13 The powerful and influential McIntosh
13 Only a few years ago there still lived at her home near Eufaula, an old Creek Indian woman, who was affectionately known as Aunt Sallie Logan, and who was said to have been the last Indian in the Creek Nation who was whipped for praying. As the lash was laid on with unmerciful severity, she fainted under the cruel tor-
.
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family was strong in its opposition to the work of the missionaries but, eventually, the whole clan united with the Baptist Church and three of the grandsons of Gen. William McIntosh became Baptist preachers.
Other Baptist missionaries were sent into the Creek country from time to time, though some did not tarry long. Of those who came and remained to find their life work in that field, two were most notable. One of these was Rev. H. F. Buckner,14 who came to the Creek Nation in 1847, and the other was Rev. Joseph S. Murrow,15 who came to the same people eight years later. Mr.
ture thus inflicted. Wounded and bleeding she crept to a spring of water near by, where she bathed her lacerated back and, thus refreshed and comforted, she walked ten miles to attend Divine services a few hours later. She carried the scars of the whiplash on her back the rest of her life.
14 H. F. Buckner was born in Pulaski County, Kentucky, in 1820. His education was such as could be obtained in the common schools of the day. He was married in 1822 to Lucy Ann Dogan. He began preaching in Kentucky and served as a missionary in the mountainous region in the eastern part of that state from 1846 to 1849. In the last mentioned year he accepted an appointment as missionary to the Creek Indians. He first came to the Ebenezer Mission, near the old Creek Agency. At first the Indians overtaxed his hospitality and it looked for a time as if his scant allowance by the sustaining mission board would not be equal to the strain thus put upon it. His first appointment was for the term of two years but long before it had expired he knew that he had found his life work. His striking individuality was such as might have been expected of one coming from a family which has produced gallant soldiers as well as militant preachers. When his work was broken up by the outbreak of the Civil war he went to Texas where he engaged in pastoral work until its end. He then returned to his desolated field in the Indian Territory and sought to help the Creek people in their efforts to again get settled and resume their peaceful avocations. He remained in the work until his death, which occurred in 1880.
15 Joseph Samuel Murrow was born at Louisville, Richmond County, Georgia, June 7, 1835, the son of a Baptist minister. He was educated at Mercer University. In September, 1857, he was ordained to the ministry and was appointed by the Domestic Indian Mission Board as a missionary to the Creek Indians. The next month he was married and set forth for the Indian Territory, arriving November 11. He was associated with Doctor Buckner of the Creek Mission during his first two years in the Territory, after which he went to open up a work among the Seminoles. At the outbreak of the Civil war the Seminole tribe was divided, part adhering to the Union and the rest taking sides with the seceding
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Buckner was in some respects one of the most remarkable mission- aries of any denomination who came into the Indian Territory during the period of its greatest missionary activity. He was a powerful and persuasive preacher of very marked personality. He came into the Creek Nation while yet there was much hostility to preaching and preachers. The Creek Council did not consent to his presence, though it suffered him to remain. Slowly and pa- tiently at first, and then in his own more natural and impulsive way, he won the confidence and esteem of the Creek people until his influence among them became powerful and widely felt.
Rev. J. S. Murrow came to the Indian Territory in 1857. Pass- ing through the Choctaw country, he entered the Creek Nation, where he became associated with Rev. H. F. Buckner. With the aid of a negro interpreter, he began preaching to the Indians almost at once. Within a year after his arrival in the mission field, his young wife and child were taken from him by death and his
states. Those siding with the South asked the Confederate Gov- ernment to appoint Mr. Murrow as their tribal agent, which request was granted. Eventually all of these people had to leave their homes and take refuge near the Red River, in the Southern part of the Choctaw Nation. Thither their young agent followed them and, incidentally, refugces from other tribes-Osage, Caddo, Comanche and Wichita-were attached to his agency. Although he handled much money and large amounts of supplies, hc accounted satisfactorily for the expenditure or distribution of every item and, when the war ended, was ready to turn the affairs of his agency over to the Federal authorities, which was something none of the other Confederate tribal agents made even a pretense of doing. After the war he settled at Atoka where he has ever since made his home. He organized the Choctaw-Chickasaw Bap- tist Association in 1872, and it is the oldest association of its kind in the state in the matter of continuous organization. In 1881 he withdrew from the service of the Mission Board of the South- ern Baptist Association and accepted the superintendency of the Indian Missions in the Indian Territory for the Baptist Home Mission Society of New York. In 1884 he established the Indian Missionary, a monthly denominational periodical, which he edited and published at Atoka for a number of years. He also founded and for some years actively superintended the Murrow Baptist Indian Orphan Asylum. He is sometimes called the "father of Free Masonry in Oklahoma," being one of the founders of the work of that fraternity in the Indian Territory and having filled many of its most important offices. Several years ago he was advanced to the thirty-third degree. He is passing the evening of his life in Atoka, where, amid the scenes and associations of his active career, he holds the estcem and good will of friends whose name is legion.
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own health was seriously impaired. But soon he had a field of his own, among the Seminole Indians, with whom he was living and working when the great war broke out in 1861. The greater part of his ministry among the Indians of Oklahoma has been per- formed sinee then, but he still survives, in 1916, the last surviving veteran of the noble band of men and women who labored among the Indians of the old Indian Territory in its haleyon days, to link the present with the long gone and almost forgotten past, to whose knightly manhood and moral worth a later generation yields a due measure of sineere respeet and veneration.
In 1844 Armstrong Academy was established in the southwest- ern part of the Choetaw Nation. It was a tribal sehool but was condueted under contract with the ehoetaw authorities by mission- aries of the Baptist Church. Its first superintendent was Ramsey D. Potts, who had formerly been conducting the Baptist mission sehool at Providence, near Fort Towson. Associated with him were Revs. P. P. Brown and H. W. Jones, who were under appointment from the American Indian Mission Association. Professor Potts, who was ordained as a minister several years after coming to the territory, remained at the head of Armstrong Academy for ten years. In 1854 he was sueceeded by Rev. A. G. Moffatt, who was under appointment of the Baptist Home Mission Board. Four years later, Armstrong Academy was transferred to the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, under the auspices of which it was conducted until it was abandoned at the outbreak of the war, in 1861.
The Muskogee Baptist Association was organized in 1851. (The organization of this association lapsed between the years 1860 and 1874, however, so it has not been in continuous existenee all these years.) In 1860 a Baptist association, known as the Ramsey Asso- ciation (in honor of Ramsey D. Potts, the pioneer mission teacher and preacher), was organized. It was composed of the ehurehes in ' the Choctaw Nation and its organization eeased to exist during the Civil war. Rev. Willis Burns was sent by the Home Mission Board as a missionary to the Choctaws in 1859. He opened his work at Skullaville. About the same time Rev. R. J. Hogue was also sent out by the Home Mission Board as a missionary to the Chiekasaw Indians. He organized a congregation at Panola, where a church was built.
THE CHEROKEE SEMINARIES
In 1849 the Cherokee Nation began the construction of the buildings for two institutions of learning of higher grade than any of the schools yet established in the Indian Territory. These two
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schools, which were respectively designated as the National Male Seminary and the National Female Seminary, were located between Tahlequah and Park Hill.16 Excepting a limited number of dis- trict or neighborhood schools, these seminaries were the first secular schools in Oklahoma, all of the rest being under the patronage or direction of some one or other of the various mission boards.17
The two Cherokee seminaries were opened for the reception of students in 1851 and the first classes were graduated in 1855. Two years later their doors were closed, because of the lack of funds for their maintenance and operation, and they were not re-opened until more than fifteen years later. Although they were operated for such a comparatively short time, they exerted great influence in the Cherokee Nation.
The establishment of the Cherokee Male and Female seminaries is said to have been a pet scheme of Chief John Ross. After they were closed for lack of means for their support, the empty buildings were derisively referred to as "Ross's Folly." Yet the Cherokees builded better than they knew when they erected the two national seminaries. The atmosphere of dependence which clung so tenaci- ously to the mission school, even though built and largely supported at tribal expense, did not hover over these two higher schools, which were built and wholly directed and managed by the tribal authori- ties. The more perfect development of an independent, self-re- liant manhood and womanhood, which added much to the well-being and happiness of the Cherokee people, was the unquestioned result
16 The Male Seminary was located about a mile south and west of Tahlequah. The Female Seminary was located just northeast of the present town of Park Hill, and about a mile north of the old Park Hill Mission. The two institutions were about three and one-half or four miles distant from each other. The two buildings were originally nearly duplicates in plan and construction and were built of brick with stone trimmings. The Female Seminary was destroyed by fire in 1887. When it was rebuilt (1889-91) it was upon a new site, just north of Tahlequah; the new building is now occupied by the Northeastern State Normal School. Both of the seminaries were in regular operation from 1875 to 1907. The Male Seminary building was used as a hospital during the Civil war and as the home of the Cherokee Orphan Asylum in 1873-4-5. After statehood it was reorganized as a co-educational institution. It was destroyed by fire, March 20, 1910.
17 The tribal seminaries and academies in the other tribes, although built and largely operated at the expense of the tribe or nation, were invariably under the administrative control of some of the denominational mission boards.
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of the establishment and operation of the two seminaries. Closed, first because of lack of proper support, and remaining unopened because of the Civil war and the poverty which followed in its wake for many years, the two seminaries left their impress upon the
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CHEROKEE MALE SEMINARY AT TAHLEQUAH, BUILT IN 1850
sentiments and institutions of the Cherokee Nation because of the personalities of their graduates, both of the earlier and more recent periods.
THE FIRST NEWSPAPERS
The first newspaper printed and published in Oklahoma was the Cherokee Advocate, which was established and conducted under the auspices of the tribal government. Its publication office was at Tahlequah, the first number appearing on the 26th of September, 1844. William P. Ross, a nephew of Chief John Ross and a grad- uate of Princeton University, was its first editor, and James D. Wofford was translator. It was issued weekly and consisted of four pages of seven columns each. One page, sometimes more and sometimes less, was generally printed in the Cherokee (Sequoyah) text, the rest being in English. David Carter and James S. Vann were subsequent editors. The publication of the Cherokee Advo- cate was discontinued several years before the outbreak of the
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