Capture These Indians for the Lord: Indians, Methodists, And

capture these indians for the lord

Capture These Indians for the Lord Indians, Methodists, and Oklahomans, 1844–1939

Tash Smith

tucson The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2014 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2014 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 6 5 4 3 2 1 Jacket designed by David Drummond Jacket photo: A reunion of White and Indian ministers, Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Tash. Capture these Indians for the lord : Indians, Methodists, and Oklahomans, 1844– 1939 / Tash Smith. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-3088-5 (hardback) 1. Indians of North America—Indian Territory—History. 2. Indians of North America—Oklahoma—History. 3. Indians of North America—Religion. 4. Indians of North America—Missions—Indian Territory. 5. Methodist Episcopal Church, South— History. 6. Methodist Episcopal Church. Indian Mission Conference 7. Indians of North America—Cultural assimilation—Indian Territory. 8. Indian Territory—Race relations. 9. Indians, Treatment of. 10. Whites—Relations with Indians. I. Title. E78.I5S65 2014 299.7—dc23 2013047782 c This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Contents

List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3

1. The Mission Begins: Origins of the Indian Mission Conference, 1844–1865 19 2. R ebuilding the Mission: Efforts among the Five Tribes, 1866–1889 47 3. Expanding the Mission: The Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Agency after 1887 75 4. T he Mission Changes: From the Land Run to Statehood, 1889–1907 105 5. M arginalizing the Mission: Indian Work after Statehood, 1907–1918 133 6. T he Mission Reborn: The New Indian Mission, 1918–1940 154

Conclusion 187 Notes 195 Bibliography 229 Index 241

v Illustrations

Figure 1. Preachers on the Choctaw Circuit, circa 1890 38 Figure 2. The Five Tribes in the 1880s 49 Figure 3. Samuel Checote 63 Figure 4. Willis Folsom 66 Figure 5. J. J. Methvin 82 Figure 6. Indian Territory in 1889 109 Figure 7. A reunion of white and Indian ministers in eastern Indian Territory, circa 1900 127 Figure 8. A Creek congregation at Springfield Indian Methodist Church, circa 1900 135 Figure 9. Communities within the former Kiowa-Comanche- Apache Reservation’s boundaries 174 Figure 10. Delos Lonewolf 179

vi Acknowledgments

This project evolved from my graduate school experience at the Univer- sity of Oklahoma. In particular, I would like to thank my adviser, Warren Metcalf, along with Albert Hurtado, Robert Griswold, Gus Palmer, Fay Yarbrough, and Elyssa Faison (even after what she made me read in sem- inar) for their input at various stages. Besides the History Department at OU, financial support came from the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History (which published portions of my work in its January 2012 issue of Methodist History), Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University, the Phillips Fund for Native American Research at the American Philosophical Society, and my present institution, St. Gregory’s University. Additionally, this research was supported in part by a grant from the Oklahoma Humanities Council (OHC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Findings, opinions, and conclusions do not necessarily represent the views of the OHC or the NEH. I would also like to acknowledge members of the Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference and its current superintendent, David Wilson, for sharing their history with me. On a more personal note, I would like to thank those who helped me navigate the academic and real worlds during this book’s development. Sunu Kodumthara probably read more than she wanted to, but I valued her suggestions, so I made her do it. Tom and Darlene Smith provided immeasurable support, like the good parents they are, even though I am not their first born, while my wife, Patricia, suffered alongside me with the late nights and early mornings of work and other responsibilities.

vii viii · Acknowledgments

This is as much her book as it is mine. Most important, I would like to acknowledge my children, Maren, Amos, Zeni, Decker, and Lincoln, who had to put up with a dazed father hunched over the laptop for days at a time. capture these indians for the lord

Introduction

On the surface, Oooalah Pyle’s letter in November 1907 to the Christian Advocate was like many that the newspaper routinely published. As the national organ for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the Nash- ville, Tennessee–based newspaper was often used by Southern Methodist preachers to publicize their work and win the continued support of the larger church body. Pyle was no different in that regard. Reporting on the just- finished annual meeting held by Southern Methodist churches in the Twin Territories of Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory, Pyle discussed the future of a region undergoing dramatic changes. After several years of political maneuvering, the government was poised to unite the Twin Territories into the single state of Oklahoma just one month later. White citizens, whose population had increased steadily over the previous two decades, dominated the region’s political, social, and religious institutions, and they now demanded the same rights and representation as their neighbors in the states. For Southern Methodism, this demographic shift meant changing its denominational organization and attitudes. Since 1844, the Southern Methodist Church had conducted its work in the region under the administration of the Indian Mission Conference (IMC), but the majority of Oklahoma’s Southern Methodists viewed this organization as a relic of an antiquated era of missions. Eager to move into the future that statehood promised, Southern Methodists rechristened their organization the Oklahoma Conference. Pyle, however, did not represent this new majority of white Southern Methodists, who controlled the Oklahoma Conference. Instead, he was

3 4 · Introduction one of the conference’s many Indian preachers, with most of his own ministerial work occurring among his fellow Creek Indians near the town of Okmulgee. Almost one-fifth of all the preachers in attendance at the conference’s 1907 meeting were Indian, Pyle told the Christian Advo- cate, and the future of their work excited Pyle. Even though these ministers did not fit the profile of mainstream Southern Methodist ministers in the early twentieth century, he did not question their commitment to the church and to the cause of Christianity. “[S]ome of them [are] full- bloods unable to speak English,” Pyle wrote, whose “lives are devoted to bringing the bread of Eternal life to their people.” And their efforts had already produced great results for the church. “Today the civilizing influences of Christianity have spread themselves over the land and Churches and school-houses are found on every hand,” he wrote. “The Methodist Church has been the pioneer in this grand work and in consequence many of the converted Indians are members of that church.” Yet Pyle also tem- pered his enthusiasm by discussing some of the problems these communities faced. Chitto Harjo had rallied “perhaps 3000 fullbloods of his tribe” in opposition to white society’s assimilationist agenda, which especially concerned Pyle because Harjo promoted traditional Native beliefs at the expense of missionary work and Christianity.1 To make sure the Christian Advocate’s predominately white readership understood the problems in Oklahoma caused by Harjo and his full-blood Creek followers, Pyle employed two biblical analogies to place the situation in a Christian context. As Pyle described, Harjo’s movement was like the followers of Baal in 1 Kings, chapter 18, because these full-blood Creeks promoted another religion against God as the ancient Israelites had. This evil, Pyle wrote as he moved on to his second analogy, put Southern Methodist ministers in a situation similar to Moses and Aaron’s encounter with Pharaoh’s priests in Genesis. Like the two brothers who struggled to lead God’s chosen people, Pyle and his fellow Indian ministers were the lonely pickets protecting their congregations from the hordes of Harjo’s full- blood followers. “The Creek country is likely to be the scene of the last conflict between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, between paganism and Christianity, between the false and the true,” Pyle warned his Southern Methodist readers.2 Pyle’s comments, which framed Creek country as the front lines for Christian forces in its centuries-old battle against heathenism, revealed much about American Indians’ status in a larger Christian society. By referring to events in Creek country in biblical terms, Pyle appealed to like- minded Christians, who understood the missionary aspects of their Introduction · 5 religion or, more specifically, of Southern Methodism. The difficulties faced by Christians in Oklahoma were not that different from the Israel- ites of the Old Testament—a comparison that Southern Methodists across the country could appreciate. For much of the Southern Methodist public, Pyle represented the “civilizing” aspects that their faith had for Indian peoples, as evidenced by his Christian testimonial written in English and published in a national newspaper. When they read Pyle’s letter, Southern Methodist readers could rest assured that their church, and by extension themselves, were succeeding in Christianizing the Indian population. For all its optimism, Pyle’s letter also exposed another aspect of Chris- tianity in American Indian lives that the church confronted. Even at the time of Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907, a sizable minority of Southern Methodist preachers were Native. Some of them, as Pyle reminded his readers, were “full-bloods unable to speak English” yet as dedicated to spreading the Christian message to their fellow Indians as whites were in their own communities. Pockets of Christian Indians who eschewed other forms of assimilation still existed in the region, even after more than seventy- five years of mission work, much to the dismay of Southern Meth- odist leaders. The reality of these communities stood in stark contrast to the “civilizing” aspects of Christianity that many non-Indian Christians and the government’s assimilationist agenda promoted. Capture These Indians for the Lord examines the interaction and shared history of the Southern Methodist Church’s white and Indian members in Indian Territory (and later Oklahoma) from the creation of a separate administrative organization, the Indian Mission Conference, in 1844 to the reunification of the northern and southern branches of American Methodism in 1939. During the years that saw the region transformed from an alien land on America’s frontier to a state in the Union located deep within the nation’s heartland, both whites and Indians turned to church- created structures to promote or protect their own narrow interests. Whites operated from a belief in their own cultural superiority, which underscored their attitudes toward “uplifting” and “civilizing” Indians with the power of Christianity. What many missionaries did not anticipate was the degree to which Indians accepted Christianity on their own terms and for their own needs. Using many of the same administrative outlets that whites considered vital to the church’s operation, Indians forced missionaries and national church officials to bend to their demands. As preachers, laypeople, and translators, Indians exerted great influence in the region’s Southern Methodism, much to the consternation of white missionaries officially in charge of the church’s work. 6 · Introduction

The ensuing actions of Native converts often left whites conflicted. On the one hand, Indian churches mimicked mainstream Christianity in basic form and practice, albeit in an imperfect way. Indian congregants held regular meetings with assigned ministers who preached similar theological points as white ministers in mainstream churches. Because white members saw Indian congregations as “Christian” in function and purpose, they tolerated their existence and remained confident in their church’s civilizing efforts. On the other hand, the influence of a distinctly Native viewpoint within a congregation that whites could not or would not understand left missionaries on the outside of Indian life. This led some missionaries to redouble their efforts for conversion, while others gladly turned toward the region’s white settlements and used preexisting structures created for Indian missions precisely for that purpose. What was built for Indian missions instead became tools for whites to serve other whites. Indians, meanwhile, infused Christianity with elements from their own culture, which differentiated their churches from the mainstream. These Indian congregations tapped into the resources of white-dominated organizations through the common threads of Christianity and missionary outreach, but Native ministers and members established churches that served their own spiritual needs and were firmly “Indian” in appearance. Indian churches provided a buffer zone for those feeling the pressures of encroaching white neighbors and a dwindling land base, and they allowed for what Rosemary McCombs Maxey referred to as “indigenous expression in a Christian mode.”3 These churches became outlets for traditional customs and Native leaders, who used the advantage of being part of a larger church body to benefit their own communities. Native churches became a distinct space surrounded by a larger white community, both literally and figuratively, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth century. Scholars studying the relationship between white missionaries intent on expanding Christianity and the Indian communities forced to confront this onslaught of Western culture have moved from one extreme to the other. Early literature bordered on hagiography in histories described aptly by James Sandos as “Christophilic Triumphalism.” Initially, these works depicted white missionaries as selfless heroes spreading the Gospel and the benefits of Euro-American culture among heathens throughout the west. Even those scholars who opposed such obvious hagiography still promoted a white-centric viewpoint that stressed the actions of white missionaries at the expense of their Indian congregations. From the early years of Herbert Bolton to later works by Francis Paul Prucha, Indian agency remained mostly in the background, which conveyed an attitude that “whites acted Introduction · 7 while Indians reacted.” The polar opposite of this focus on the heroic deeds of white missionaries, or what Sandos referred to as “Christophilic Nihil- ism,” made missionaries into “monsters who committed genocide against native peoples in the name of religion.”4 Articulated most forcefully in George Tinker’s Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide, missionaries became purveyors of destruction and another tool in the prolonged Euro-American assault on the indigenous peoples of North America. Inspired in part by Tinker’s work, the latest historiographical trend places Indians at the forefront of the narrative and reevaluates what Christianity meant to Native communities, as evidenced in edited volumes from James Treat and, most recently, from Joel Mar- tin and Mark Nicholas. Employing a stronger ethnohistorical and micro- historical component, this approach analyzes how Indians incorporated Christianity in culturally significant ways and discusses the meaning of being both “Christian” and “Indian.”5 While taking certain cues from this latest trend, Capture These Indians for the Lord envisions the missionization process as a complicated series of encounters both between and among various factions of whites and Indians, with tensions mounting as each group sought to protect its own interests. While we couch our modern-day interpretations in terms like “genocide,” “colonialism,” and “ethnocentrism,” it is important to remember that the men and women engaged in missionary work often believed that their efforts were altruistic and in Native society’s best interests. Mis- sionaries operated under the idea that salvation through Jesus Christ was necessary for all peoples, Native or not, even as they argued over how best to eradicate Indian culture. At times ill-prepared for the work they engaged in, their beliefs and interactions with one another and with the Native populations they encountered clarifies part of what happened. Likewise, the existence of Christianity among modern Native communities, with thousands worshiping Christ each Sunday in their own churches, demon- strates how some Indians accepted the new religion even as they fought to preserve their own cultural traditions. As Homer Noley wrote, Indian men and women “were the true vehicle through whom the message of Christianity took root among the Native people,” an observation not only of Indians embracing Christianity but also of how they promoted it themselves outside the watchful eyes of white missionaries.6 Understanding this complex and seemingly contradictory nineteenth-century relationship between genocidal/altruistic missionaries and Indians obdurately protecting their traditions while promoting an alien religion helps explain the shape that churches and denominations took in the twentieth century. 8 · Introduction

Explaining the contours of the missionization process requires a more complete understanding of individual denominational issues as well as the issues involving Native communities and tribes. Placing missionary work under the larger rubric of “Christianity” ignores the differences in theology, culture, and organization of the various American denominations. As it is important to break down Native communities into smaller segments of tribes or nations when possible to avoid the monolithic or essentialized idea of “Indians,” it is equally important to discern the denominational differences among the churches and avoid the larger monolithic terms of “Christian” or “Protestant.” Church members, both white and Indian, were keenly aware of denominational differences and often highlighted the inadequacies of their fellow Christians in order to establish their own doctrine’s dominance. With Christianity playing an important role in the opening of the American West in the nineteenth century, denominations wanted to establish their preeminence in the region as a sign of their superiority, and in this regard Indian missions were vital because they were often the foundations for later work among white communities. Further- more, denominations at times created or amplified internal divisions that existed within individual Indian communities in order to increase their own church membership. A larger approach that discusses “Christianity” overlooks the nuances of American religion and Indian culture. Theological beliefs and organizational structure illustrate two obvious forms of denominational difference. Ever since the sixteenth century, Prot- estantism had fractured into smaller groups based on their respective interpretations of Christian teachings, which in turn gave rise to different forms of religious expression and social attitudes over the following years. Addi- tionally, political and social disputes occurring within the United States further affected these denominations in the nineteenth century. Focusing on one specific denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (commonly referred to as the Southern Methodist Church), provides a specific framework to examine how Indian converts adapted to a larger national organization. The fact that Southern Methodists concentrated their Indian missions in one organization in Indian Territory/Oklahoma amplifies this method. It provides a strict organizational boundary limited in geography while taking advantage of the diversity offered by the territory’s Indian populations. The roots of American Methodism, which was the largest Protestant denomination in the nation during the nineteenth century, extend back to the early eighteenth century and the work of John Wesley in England. Founded as a reform movement within the Church of England, Methodism Introduction · 9 spread throughout the American colonies during the First Great Awaken- ing. Wesley adopted the teachings of Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, which taught that an individual’s free will allowed anyone to achieve salvation through faith and not works, a belief in opposition to the religious determinism of Calvinism practiced by Presbyterians and Baptists. With salvation much more tenuous, an individual’s later sins could, literally, damn them to hell. Wesley infused his Arminian beliefs with a strong sense of social justice, and his ministry was notable for its interest in all classes of English society. Individuals “connected” themselves to their fellow Christians through classes, group meetings, or laypeople (including women), and not solely through the efforts of an established class of highly trained ministers. By the 1770s, a loosely organized Methodism supported by itinerant ministers existed in many colonies. Recognizing that the United States’ independence had split American Methodists from the main body in England, Wesley relented in 1784 to the creation of a separate Methodist church for the nation, later dubbed the Methodist Episcopal Church.7 Under the auspices of Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke, American Methodism exploded during the Second Great Awakening largely due to its use of itinerant preachers to reach areas in the American hinterland ignored by more established denominations. As the country spread west, so too did the denomination, but not without controversy. Anger over the growing tensions between elite church bishops who guided the church (a point of church polity that Wesley avoided) and the democratic independence of individual congregations led to its first major schism in 1828, when a small faction founded the Methodist Protestant Church. More significantly, the debate over slavery bitterly divided the denomination in 1844, when southerners, fearing that northerners would drag the church into the abolitionist movement, left and organized the Methodist Episco- pal Church, South, the following year.8 These sectional divisions, especially in the generation before and after the Civil War, greatly influenced theological issues within the Southern Methodist Church and its work in Indian Territory. Southern Methodists, as with other southern-dominated branches of the Presbyterian and Baptist churches, defined slavery and its accompanying racial attitudes in biblical terms and tolerated it as a part of its culture. As a result, southern-leaning congregations were often at odds with northern churches and missionaries. These sectional attitudes added an extra layer of animosity, for instance, among Protestant missionaries in the Cherokee Nation, where northerners like the Baptist Evan Jones and the Presbyterian Samuel Worcester competed with Southern Methodists 10 · Introduction for souls in a Cherokee society itself divided along the lines of slavery. With this lingering resentment between northerners and southerners from the Civil War era extending well into the twentieth century, sectional attitudes colored many missionaries’ views of other denominations and the significance of their own work. Of equal importance to theological and sectional differences were the differences in organization and structure among the denominations. While theological issues often boil down to issues of faith and belief, with primary evidence from the hereafter difficult to locate in order to learn which denomination chose wisely, organizational differences are easier to analyze. The various American denominations had different bureaucratic structures to oversee mission efforts at a national, regional, and local level, with some organizations exerting a greater top-down authority over its members than others. These differences affected every decision a national church made, from licensing and replacing ministers to raising and spending missionary funds. Indian converts identified ways in which a particular denomination, perhaps inadvertently or out of indifference, provided them with authority over their own churches through avenues of hierarchy and structure. The fact that Indian congregations created their own space within a larger Christian community was typically related to how they used denominational organization to their own benefit. One key organizational difference among various denominations, particularly when making comparisons at the local level, was the difference between churches with a congregational form of government and those with a connectional form of government. In a congregational form of church government, prominent, for example, with Baptist churches, the emphasis was on the local congregation, and authority was derived from that body. Individual congregations held great power over their minister and church affairs while maintaining a looser, though never absent, connection to larger regional or national organizations. In contrast, Southern Method- ism adhered to a connectional form of government that was hierarchical and placed authority over a region in the form of a conference. This distinction diffused the power of the national church and created an arrangement whereby pastors were beholden to their local conference rather than to an individual congregation. Methodism’s practice of circuit riding and yearly appointments complete with time limits ensured that the denomination spread to a conference’s surroundings. It also required that preachers rotate through various congregations over the course of their careers rather than establish themselves in one community. As the old Methodist saying went, Introduction · 11

“If you have a good preacher, then let someone else have him. And if you have a bad preacher, then let someone else have him.” Southern Methodist Indian churches operated in a slightly different sphere than mainstream Southern Methodist congregations, and they used their connectional status to a larger church body for their own benefits. For instance, Indian preachers were less likely to move out of their own communities, typically because cultural or linguistic concerns made that rotation difficult. This fact was understood by both conference and national church officials. Individual Indian ministers derived some authority, prestige, or education from their official connection to the Southern Methodist Church and still expected to spend most of their career close to their own people. In turn, church officials benefited from the connections Indian ministers provided to their larger Native community. Though instances of Indian preachers moving across tribal lines or even into white churches occurred, it was more common to move from one church to another within their own tribe. The importance between connectional and congregational structure is evident when comparing Southern Methodist Indian communities in Oklahoma with Seminole Baptists, whom Jack Schultz analyzed. In The Seminole Baptist Churches of Oklahoma, Schultz identified the early twentieth century as a period when individual Baptist churches led by Seminole pastors became “a distinct, vital, and traditional Seminole entity within the dominant Anglo world.” According to Schultz, Seminole Baptist churches provided “changes” that were “structured in culturally meaningful ways, allowing a social group to sustain its identity while being engaged in changing circumstances.”9 This was a characteristic shared by many Southern Methodist Indian churches during the time. By the 1930s, Southern Meth- odist officials and ministers, especially Native leaders with more say in the national church’s newly reestablished Indian Mission, called for increasing the use of Native language–speaking pastors and translated hymns within their churches, thereby preserving elements of their own culture in a church-related context. Yet, as Schultz also shows, the congregational structure of Seminole Baptist churches protected their autonomy, which they asserted by rejecting financial help from nearby white communities and by replacing ministers from within the congregation rather than from a local Baptist university, as their white counterparts did. In contrast, Southern Methodist Indians sought out the benefits from a connectional structure that a larger white-controlled denomination provided, like financial aid for individual congregations or a college education 12 · Introduction for ministers, in order to help their own communities. Money from outside sources helped congregations build churches and parsonages, which were vital elements for Southern Methodist circuit riders and badly needed by the poorer Indian communities. Southern Methodist missionaries and ministers understood the importance of tapping into national funding sources to support their work, yet the decentralization of Methodist authority to the individual conference ensured that most decisions were made at the local level, where Indians could, in theory, exert greater influence. National organizations, especially in the nineteenth century, served more as funding agencies than as administrative partners. This arrangement was by no means a perfect situation, as paternalism, racism, and ignorance influenced white church leaders’ decision making, and it would be many years before Indians assumed more control over their own conference’s affairs. Even so, the story of Southern Methodist Indian communities from the pre–Civil War decades and into the twentieth century is a story of how Indians developed autonomy and exploited the resources of a larger church structure. The specific focus on Southern Methodism provides a more consistent approach than a study including multiple denominations because of the relationship of Indian missions to the Southern Methodist Church. For Southern Methodism, “Indian work” or “Indian missions” referred to the efforts of the Indian Mission Conference in Indian Territory and the IMC’s successor institutions after Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907. A few other Southern Methodist conferences made limited attempts to reach Indian communities within their boundaries, such as the Holston Confer- ence’s temporary mission to the eastern band of Cherokee in Georgia and Tennessee, or the Mississippi Conference’s work among the Choctaw in the state, but these efforts were temporary and did not achieve the IMC’s status in the national church’s eyes. Invariably, when church officials wrote generically of “helping the Indian,” “promoting Indian work,” or “supporting Indian missions,” they were discussing the church’s efforts with the tribes of Oklahoma. Furthermore, Southern Methodists encountered an increasingly diverse population in Indian Territory over the course of the nineteenth century. Initially, this diversity included the “Five Civilized Tribes”—or the Cher- okee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians—along with other removed tribes, such as the Delaware, Shawnee, Potawatomi, and Kickapoo. But American expansion after the Civil War resulted in new Native populations being relocated to Indian Territory. Beginning in the late- 1860s, federal officials used reservations created in the western half Introduction · 13 of the territory as settlements for Plains Indians like Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Arapahos. The national church’s white members saw little change when the IMC expanded its work after 1887 to include the “blanket Indians” among the Plains tribes other than a potential increase in the conference’s Native membership. Those working in the IMC, however, did not share this same cultural ignorance. The inclusion of these tribes under the umbrella of the IMC provides another useful analytical avenue for studying the Native communities in Indian Territory and Oklahoma. Studies ranging from classics in the field written by Angie Debo and Grant Foreman to modern works by Andrew Denson and Clara Sue Kidwell concentrate on Indian communities within an individual tribal or cultural context. Even Foreman’s seminal The Five Civilized Tribes, which discussed the collective history of the Five Tribes following removal, dealt solely with the formerly southeastern Indians and ignored the diversity that Plains Indians brought to the region. More so, these works end with the loss of Native sovereignty or autonomy, whether it be the Plains Indians’ forced resettlement on the reservations in the 1870s or the disintegration of tribal governments among the Five Tribes in the wake of Oklahoma statehood in 1907. David La Vere’s Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory is one of the few exceptions to this trend, as it discusses the interaction between the various Plains Indians in the West and the removed tribes in the East, though he too ends his narrative with the coming of statehood. As La Vere argued, interaction between the Plains Indians and the removed tribes “did little to bring about any melding of these two types of peoples. If anything, their differences became only deeper and wider, more exacerbated, and the turn of the twentieth century saw them no closer than at the turn of the nineteenth century.”10 By focusing on an organization that included both Plains Indians and the formerly eastern tribes, Capture These Indians for the Lord provides a more inclusive study of Oklahoma’s Native history, and the narrative’s end point just before the outbreak of World War II argues against the prevailing notion of what David Daily identified as the “vanishing mission,” or the misperception that Indian missions disappeared in the twentieth century.11 Although the larger Southern Methodist public outside the region ascribed to the belief that “an Indian is an Indian,” those working in Indian Ter- ritory routinely confronted the diversity between and within tribes. From 1844 to 1887, the IMC maneuvered through the factionalism of the Five Tribes as different groups fought over various social, cultural, and political issues. When the IMC initiated missions to the Plains Indians after 1887, 14 · Introduction conference officials were quick to differentiate between the eastern and western tribes. Ministers in eastern Indian Territory trumpeted the sophis- tication of their Indian congregations and their own success with assim- ilating these people, while missionaries in the west, feeling the pressure of working among a people with less exposure to Anglo-American society, stressed Native cultural differences to justify their own lack of results. Much as La Vere noted, the interaction between these two sets of neighbors in the Southern Methodist Church increased in the twentieth century, but it did not unite them in a common cause. The national church as well as local officials promoted church-sponsored outlets such as schools or missionary societies to educate Indians from varied backgrounds in a shared Southern Methodist culture. Instead, individual ministers and congregations used the opportunities the Southern Methodist Church gave them for the benefit of their own Indian communities with little consideration for other Native groups in the region. Another element of diversity that the Southern Methodist Church encountered in Indian Territory was the introduction of white settlers, especially after the land run of 1889. Since this study depicts the changes in Southern Methodism in Indian Territory/Oklahoma as occurring within the context of challenges faced by both white and Indian communities, the diversity of the increasing white population gives an equally important perspective largely ignored in the literature. In one sense, the story of Oklahoma fits the broader themes of expansion evident in the larger American West, though admittedly with unique features unseen in other western regions, such as the rapid redistribution of land brought on by land runs or the sheer number of Indian tribes in such a small geographic space. The Southern Methodist Church was but one aspect of white society’s larger push for civilization and assimilation brought to bear on the area. But Oklahoma was also a region on the border of a strictly southern society, and this society permeated many of its social and political institutions. Though it did not exist as a state, Indian Territory leaned so much toward the Confederacy during the Civil War that the United States government “reconstructed” it after the war’s end in 1865. For decades, a strong southern identity, especially evident in the Southern Methodist Church, saturated the region. When the white population increased after 1889, Southern Methodists found their work under assault not only from other denominations determined to make their mark on the territory, but also from Yankee interlopers and government officials who scoffed at the region’s southern identity. Understanding the internal struggles of Oklahoma’s larger white population explains in part the nature of its relationship with Indian Introduction · 15 communities. White ministers called to the region as Indian missionaries but quickly discouraged in their work found justification for reaching out to whites instead, usually in the form of denominational competition and a desire to shape the region’s overall Christian character. As the prestige of Indian missions in the Southern Methodist Church declined around the turn of the century, so did the money, which made white communities more attractive for the IMC. Soon thereafter, church officials used tools created for Indian missions to support their work among white congregations. For the Southern Methodist Church in Oklahoma, Indian missions were more than just a relic of the past; they were a resource to be exploited for the benefit of their own white-centric religious community. In analyzing the often complex and strained relationship between the Southern Methodist Church’s white and Indian membership, this study’s narrative moves chronologically, with its eras defined by the important events involving the national church or the region of Oklahoma. Chapter 1 details the origins of the Indian Mission Conference as it laid its foundation in Indian Territory in the years preceding the Civil War. After years of conducting mission work among the removed tribes as a side project of white- dominated organizations, the Methodist Episcopal Church’s general conference in 1844 created a new organization strictly for Indians living in Indian Territory. This decision was not without controversy, as critics expressed fears over too much Indian autonomy at the expense of white authority, while proponents argued that the church’s hierarchy and connectional style of government would check Indian control over the church’s work. What followed after 1844 was a denomination trying to implement its church government over Native members even as the political and social circumstances of Indian Territory forced the IMC to defer to Indian authority. As a southern denomination that supported slavery and the Confed- eracy, the IMC found much of its work in Indian Territory wiped out by the Civil War. Chapter 2 focuses on the IMC’s problems in the postwar decades as it struggled to rebuild. Facing an uncertain future amid an era of government-decreed reconstruction, a “boomer” movement calling for increased white settlement, and Indian struggles for self-government, the IMC turned to the same missionary techniques it had employed prior to the war. Once again, it relied on the support of Indian converts to enlarge the church’s work, though white IMC leaders continually expressed frustration with Indian interference in their affairs. What made this era different was the growing importance of the region’s white population, who promised the IMC a brighter future unhindered by Indian councils. 16 · Introduction

Southern Methodist attitudes in the IMC were changing, but for the time being, Indian communities retained the upper hand. Chapter 3 breaks from the work’s chronological narrative and moves its geographic focus from eastern Indian Territory to the southwest. In 1887, the IMC expanded its missionary work to include the Plains Indians at the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Agency in southwest Indian Territory. This move added an additional layer of cultural diversity, which the IMC had not seen in years. The work among the Plains Indians led by J. J. Methvin provided some of the same problems faced decades earlier by a previous generation of Southern Methodist missionaries, though it came under a different set of attitudes from conference officials. Missionaries among Kiowas and Comanches encountered a population with only limited exposure to Southern Methodism and Anglo-American culture, certainly less than what missionaries among the Five Tribes experienced. These problems led to accusations of failure on the part of Kiowa and Comanche workers by church leaders who considered work among the Five Tribes as the baseline for missionary expectations. Just after the IMC expanded into this new field, the entire population of Indian Territory underwent a drastic change following the land run of 1889. The period between 1889 and Oklahoma’s eventual statehood in 1907, which is the subject of chapter 4, saw the very framework of South- ern Methodism in the region evolve from an Indian-dominated organization to a white-controlled denomination. The IMC’s newly arrived white membership, eager to cement their preeminence in the region, reshaped church institutions for their own needs as they ignored the Indian congregations around them. Legitimacy in the eyes of white members who gradually seized control of the IMC after 1889 meant following in the traditions and practices of the Southern Methodist communities that they had left behind, not in promoting an antiquated system of Indian missions that only distanced them from mainstream Southern Methodist culture. In anticipation of statehood, the IMC officially became the Oklahoma Conference in 1907 and cemented its overall change from an Indian mission to a white-centric organization. This change, discussed in chapter 5, ushered in the next major phase of the region’s Southern Methodist churches. Indian missions dropped to their lowest ebb during this period as the Oklahoma Conference shifted Indian congregations to the side and questioned their usefulness and need, while whites focused on building up their own Methodist congregations to achieve preeminence in the new state. Previous investments in Indian communities in the form of land Introduction · 17 for schools or churches became vital resources for the conference’s white members, who were eager to profit from their decades of mission work. Recognizing the failure of their Indian missions in this social climate of Oklahoma, the national church organized a new Indian Mission in 1918 to oversee its Indian congregations, a move discussed in chapter 6. This new mission created several problems for church officials. White members, who now dominated mainstream Southern Methodism in Oklahoma, cared little about Indian missions, though they insisted that white officials retain some control over Indian congregations. Indians, on the other hand, saw the Indian Mission as an opportunity to reassert their independence in church affairs. While mission officials resumed their paternal policies, designed to assimilate Indians into the national fabric, Indian members protected their autonomy and pushed the denomination in directions that best served their own needs even at the expense of the church’s larger agenda. The conclusion briefly ties together several themes as it discusses the collective historical memory of one of the IMC’s more prominent missionaries, J. J. Methvin, and the challenges faced by a Kiowa congregation as they built their own church in the 1940s. In 1939, the Southern Methodist Church reunified with the northern branch to form the Methodist Church, which subsequently changed the dimensions of Oklahoma’s Methodism. In the midst of these changes, both whites and Indians reconciled their religious past with a postwar future as Native members pressed for more autonomy within an era increasingly dominated by social activism.

chapter one

The Mission Begins

Origins of the Indian Mission Conference, 1844–1865

For years, the Methodist Episcopal Church conducted Indian missions as a distinct part of mainstream white organizations. Operating with an assimilationist mindset shared by many early missionaries, Methodists believed that converting Wyandottes in Ohio, Cherokees in Georgia, or Choctaws in Mississippi would pave the way for the white population advancing west. But the removal of Indians from their eastern lands during the 1830s changed the nature of Methodist Indian missions by moving dozens of missionaries and thousands of converts to the edge of the nation’s frontier. To serve the Indian congregations that ranged from the Missouri and Kan- sas rivers in the north to the Red River in the south, the national church initially relied on smaller, white-dominated organizations in the bordering states of Missouri and Arkansas to divert some of their resources to neighboring Native populations. This approach changed in 1844 when the national church established the Indian Mission Conference, which signaled a fundamental shift in the Methodist church’s relationship with Indian communities. By putting its missions in Indian Territory under the administrative umbrella of a conference, the church elevated these congregations to the same level as their white counterparts in the rest of the country. It was a distinction that Methodists, both then and later, understood well. The IMC’s first meeting in October 1844 at Riley’s Chapel in the Cherokee Nation “was the commencement of a new state of things in the Indian missionary work,” Bishop Thomas Asbury Morris noted. “All their work is missionary,” he

19 20 · Chapter One wrote, stressing the difficulties of the field to national audiences. A later writer, commemorating the career of one of the IMC’s first white ministers, labeled the meeting as “so important an epoch in the history of missionary effort among the Indians.” The tireless “self-denying missionaries” present at the meeting, the writer proclaimed, were akin to early Methodist leaders who had founded the church in America. “The three thousand souls gathered into their Churches, the thousands of children in their schools, besides the great company that had already crossed over the river in the triumphs of a living faith, were their epistles, known and read of all men,” he concluded.1 In all the celebration of this new era of missionary work, white observers ignored one simple fact: the Indian Mission Conference was an Indian- dominated organization. It existed in a land comprising various Indian peoples, from Shawnees in the north to Choctaws and Chickasaws in the south, each of whom had their own history, culture, and language. The IMC’s survival, much less any hopes it entertained of expansion, demanded Indian cooperation. White missionaries of the era knew this well because they experienced the struggle firsthand of introducing Chris- tianity to a Native population suspicious of white outsiders. Without the help of Native converts, whether as ministers, interpreters, or simply friends of the mission, their work would fail. Allowing Indians any control over the work, however, proved controver- sial for many elites within the national church. Some worried that white missionaries would “go Indian” from living among Native peoples; others questioned the wisdom of giving Indians, so far removed from the benefits of American civilization, any say over funds supplied by white congregations; and still others questioned how segregation would aid assimilation, which they assumed was the ultimate goal of Indian missions. To assuage these critics, church officials argued that the organizational structure of the Methodist Episcopal Church (replaced almost immediately in 1845 by the newly created Methodist Episcopal Church, South) would protect their interests in the IMC, and to be safe, they added new administrative elements to ensure white control over the conference. Yet, even with these safeguards, the reality was that Indians did have a large amount of autonomy in the early days of the IMC. Indians were the single largest group of members in the IMC, with most coming from the Cherokee or Choctaw nations, and Native ministers continually outnumbered whites. Furthermore, living or working inside the borders of an Indian nation forced the church to defer to Indian authorities on issues ranging from mission-run schools to residency requirements for white The Mission Begins · 21 missionaries. Finally, Indian members understood Native culture better than whites. Without translators, many white missionaries grew frustrated in their efforts, while Native preachers could access Indian communities that rejected whites entirely. The IMC could not avoid Indian authority over the conference, at least in this initial era. The story of the IMC from 1844 to 1865 is of the conflict between dueling societies struggling for dominance over one another. One society was decidedly grounded in its church background. The IMC brought with it not only the ethnocentrism of Anglo-American culture shared by many other denominations, but an organizational structure unique to the Southern Methodist Church. Crafting an Indian Mission Conference that shared the same administration as conferences in the rest of the nation was the objective of the national church. The other society was Indian in appearance, though it was significantly less centralized. Composed of a multitude of Native peoples each with their own culture, these Indian communities wanted to guard themselves from white missionaries and an encroaching white population. To do so, Indians would find ways to exploit the IMC to protect their own cultural integrity.

By the time the Methodist Episcopal Church established the IMC in 1844, just prior to its division along sectional lines, formal Methodist Indian missions had existed for nearly a quarter of a century. In fact, Indian missions had been the driving force in the creation of the church’s Mis- sionary Society more than two decades earlier. In 1819, John Stewart, an African American lay preacher from Virginia, journeyed up the Sandusky River in Ohio and worked among the Delaware Indians. Recognizing the need for some official support for Indian missions in general and Stewart’s work specifically, and relenting to competition from rival denominations, a group of concerned Methodist laymen in New York organized their own missionary society, which received official sanction from the Methodist Church’s General Conference in 1820. Once in place, the society quickly supported other efforts to reach Indian communities throughout Ameri- can territory.2 While Methodist missions continued north of the Ohio River and even spread to the Pacific Northwest under missionary Jason Lee, the roots of the IMC were in the church’s work among the Indians in the American South, commonly referred to in the nineteenth century as the Five Civilized Tribes. Beginning in 1820, Methodist conferences in the southern states of South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Georgia sent out white missionaries to the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw populations 22 · Chapter One within their borders. These Methodists began a pattern of work that later missionaries continued for much of the century. White ministers, such as William Capers and Alexander Talley, guided their denomination’s efforts by opening mission schools, while Native converts, like the Chero- kee leader Turtle Fields and Choctaw chief Greenwood Leflore, gave the denomination prestige and access to their respective communities. By the end of the decade, Methodist missionaries founded many thriving congregations and schools among the Five Tribes, with both the Cherokees and Choctaws claiming over 1,000 members in 1830.3 The first major crisis facing Methodist missionaries among the Five Tribes occurred during the removal era of the 1830s. As the American population increased along the trans-Appalachian frontier, so did the demand for Indian land, and missionaries found themselves caught in the larger political battle between Indian rights and white expansion. How Meth- odist missionaries reacted to the removal battle varied from individual to individual. Among Choctaws, Alexander Talley supported removal by arguing that the debasing habits of the Choctaws’ white neighbors hindered his work. Once moved farther west, Talley believed, he could renew his mission free from whites’ corrupting influence. Talley went so far as to participate in treaty negotiations between Choctaws and the federal government, though the government rejected his suggested treaty provisions. Eventually, Talley led a Choctaw contingent into Indian Territory during the winter of 1830–1831 and settled the group near Fort Towson. At the same time, Methodist missionaries among the Cherokees, Rich- ard Neely, James Trott, and Nicholas Scales, each married a Cherokee woman and rejected appeals to remove west. When the ministers unani- mously approved a resolution in September 1830 calling for all Methodists to express opposition to President Andrew Jackson’s removal policies, the Missionary Society censured the men. Trott’s anger eventually led him to quit the church. But from the national church’s perspective, few problems exceeded what they faced among Creeks. Like other southern Indians that fractured over removal pressures, rival factions of Lower Creeks and Upper Creeks vied for control over tribal affairs, and the situation became so tenuous for Methodists that they abandoned their Creek missions in 1829 before returning three years later once Creeks had relocated to the new Creek country in Indian Territory. Once again, however, Method- ists found themselves caught up in internal Creek politics. Slaveholding Creeks accused Methodist missionaries of being abolitionists for preaching to slaves, while conservative factions, still reeling from removal, opposed missionaries for their connection to white society. In a grand council in The Mission Begins · 23

1836, the two factions expelled white missionaries from the Creek Nation and threatened practicing Christians with public lashings. Official opposition to Christianity in the Creek Nation remained in effect until 1848.4 In the midst of these larger political conflicts, missionaries wanted to introduce Christianity into communities already steeped in their own religious culture. Methodist missionaries saw only the absence of Christianity in Indian society and recognized Native practices as nothing but various forms of paganism. From the Five Tribes’ perspective, however, spirituality coursed through their daily lives and was most evident during ceremonial acts practiced either by the entire community or by smaller groups of clans and individuals. Creeks, for instance, structured their communities around sacred camp fires, some of which they carried with them on their exodus to Indian Territory, and they met regularly at stomp grounds for communal events. During the green corn festival, a late summer harvest celebration held by the former southeastern tribes, men and women came together and, over several days, performed dances and other rituals in thanksgiving to renew relationships within the community. In this spiritual climate, missionaries sought to restructure Indians’ religious thinking by introducing concepts that were, at times, foreign to Native traditional beliefs. This included ideas of an omnipotent Christian God, the divin- ity of Jesus Christ, or the concept of sin and the inherent evil within all individuals. From a Native perspective, traditional customs like renewal ceremonies or dances reinforced an individual’s connection to power and community, which were the central components to their religious beliefs. Missionaries strained to reorient Indian cultures and focus on a belief system built on an individual’s sin and giving complete power to a singular, omnipresent deity.5 Caught within this complex world of tribal politics and Native spirituality, Methodist missionaries tried to define Indian society in terms they could understand. Like many other whites of the nineteenth century, missionaries often lumped individuals into categories of “full-blood” or “mixed- blood,” as commonly understood by their contemporaries. Besides being highly inflammatory to modern-day readers, these terms oversimpli- fied the social and cultural attitudes of Native peoples and intensified the racist undertones of the assimilationist policies of Anglo-American society. Rather than reflect an individual’s actual blood quantum, the terms “full- blood” and “mixed-blood” revealed the malleability of Indian society and the difficulties that white missionaries had in spreading Christianity. The IMC, along with other groups working with the Five Tribes, defined mixed- bloods as those Indians most closely aligned with Anglo-American 24 · Chapter One culture. From their perspective, mixed-bloods were more likely to attend boarding schools, convert to Christianity, speak English, own slaves, or embrace other elements of Anglo culture. Full-bloods, they believed, rejected Anglo society and instead adhered to traditional ways. Although full- bloods initially controlled tribal politics, the troubles arising from removal in the 1830s followed by the increasing pressures from the United States weakened full-blood authority, even though they remained the numerically superior group. For example, 1830 estimates gave full-blood Cherokees a three-to-one advantage over the more acculturated mixed- blood population, yet it was the mixed-blood faction that dominated tribal interests in the 1840s and 1850s. Complicating matters further, John Ross, a Cherokee chief with only one-eighth Indian blood, represented Chero- kee full-bloods for much of the mid-nineteenth century, while his main rival, Stand Watie, was three-fourths Cherokee and a prominent leader of the mixed-blood Cherokee elites who supported removal. In the years before and after the Civil War, internecine conflict thrived throughout the Cherokee Nation and the rest of the Five Tribes, with factions forming among full-blood and mixed-blood communities.6 For Methodist missionaries with the Five Tribes, identifying Indians as either full-blood or mixed-blood spoke directly to the perceived difficulties of their work. In their eyes, the full-blood/mixed-blood divide represented the differences between the “traditionalists” and “progressives” within Indian society.7 Church officials felt that those groups labeled as full- blood demanded more effort and money on their part, while mixed- bloods required significantly less. “[W]e have had some interesting meetings among the real Chickasaws,” Erastus Duncan told a government agent in 1846 about Southern Methodist missions among full-blood Chickasaw communities, before explaining that the IMC had quit the field because he had no translator.8 Henry Benson, a Southern Methodist minister teaching at the IMC-run Fort Coffee Academy in the Choctaw Nation, grumbled over a “full-blooded Choctaw” named Jones who lived on the school’s land. “It would not do to dispossess him of his home, rob- bing him of his improvements,” Benson wrote, obviously conflicted over his Christian duty as a missionary, “nor was it desirable to have him so close to our mission; for his habits were bad, and his example would be baneful and corrupting to the morals of the pupils of the Academy.”9 Fort Coffee’s superintendent, who admitted mostly full-blood children, wrote that his students’ “manners were, of course, rude and unpolished.”10 The terminology conference officials used when referring to specific Indian communities, congregations, or individuals was indicative of their own The Mission Begins · 25 outlook on assimilation, as they conflated someone’s blood quantum with their degree of civilization. As Methodists rebuilt their Indian missions after removal, debates over the slavery question consumed the national church. Seeking a national audience, Methodism initially reflected the uneasy acceptance of slavery that permeated American society in the early nineteenth century. But the nation’s increasing polarization over slavery by the 1830s soon infected the Methodist Episcopal Church. Northern members called for excluding slaveholders from the church, while southerners opposed the church’s intrusion into civil and political matters that directly affected their communities. The slave question came to a head in 1844 when antislavery forces attending the church’s general conference in New York voted to suspend Bishop James Andrew, who had acquired slaves through marriage years earlier. Angry over the fear that abolitionists were hijacking their church with this treatment of a southern bishop, southern malcontents called for separation from the Methodist Episcopal Church. Over the next several months, Methodists throughout the South voted for dissolu- tion and subsequently elected representatives to a general meeting held in Louis ville, Kentucky, in May 1845, where delegates formally incorporated the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Buried beneath the debates over slavery at the 1844 general conference occurred a more important event for Methodists in Indian Territory. On May 10, the Committee on Missions offered a resolution to create an Indian Mission Conference that would stretch from Arkansas in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west, and from the Red River in the south to the Missouri River in the north. According to the resolution, this area covered twenty-one tribes with a total population of more than 60,000 people, yet it held only twenty preachers. Sensing an opportunity, the committee wanted to create an Indian-centric conference “entitled to all the rights and privileges of other annual conferences.” When the delegates took up the issue five days later, they immediately questioned not only the need for separating Indian churches from white congregations, but the role that Indians themselves would have in mission work. Several supporters of the resolution stressed how the change would benefit Indians in their transition to American civilization. These Indians, Edward Ames argued, “were not wandering hunters, nor roving vagabonds through the forest, but they followed trades, and had a permanent home.” Uniting the tribes into one mission organization, Henry Slicer believed, “would materially aid in the work of softening down the asperities of the various tribes, as it would bring their influential men together.” James Finley concurred. The 26 · Chapter One proposed conference would be an impetus for the Indians of the region “to form and establish some general system of government for themselves.”11 Not all delegates, however, agreed with the resolution establishing an Indian Mission Conference. John McFerrin, who had been a missionary to the Cherokees for two years earlier in his career and was one of the few delegates with any experience in the Indian field, believed that creating a separate organization for Indian missions would ultimately hurt Native communities. “I do not think their standing, either in a moral, religious, or intellectual point of view, is sufficient to justify their having a separate annual conference,” McFerrin told the other delegates. “You will cut off the sympathy existing between the Indian tribes and the conferences next to them.” McFerrin believed that Indian missions needed direct oversight from white officials, which was more likely if the fields stayed under the control of church organizations in Missouri and Arkansas. Furthermore, the work was so difficult that most missionaries, himself included, burned out after two years, and a separate, Indian-dominated conference was unprepared for the stress of finding trained ministers. “It behooves us to guard the door, or you will have the mission field crowded with inexperienced men,” he said. McFerrin concluded with a warning. “I cannot go for it—I do not think they are ready for it. The country is too new, and the Indians not sufficiently improved. And I will venture to predict, that after an experiment of four years, you will find that the work has not been carried on as you expect.”12 Other delegates shared McFerrin’s concerns about creating an Indian- only organization, especially one that might give Indians too much authority. Critics already questioned the Indian Mission Conference’s control over funds allotted by the national church, especially since the Liberia Mission Conference that the church had created in 1840 did not include similar provisions. Beyond financial issues, some delegates worried about the potentially diminished role for whites. William Ratcliffe from the Arkansas Conference, one of the organizations that operated missions in Indian Territory, opposed creating a separate conference because of the undue influence Indians would have over white preachers. Representing what he said was the general feeling of his conference, Ratcliffe “thought there was a danger of the preachers, by being too long among the Indians, becoming Indians themselves.” It was best, he concluded, that white preachers from other conferences remain in charge of the work.13 Jerome Berryman, a member of the Missouri Conference engaged in Indian missions, did his best to address many of these complaints. First, it was imperative that missionaries commit to more than two years of service The Mission Begins · 27 to “not only obtain [the Indians’] confidence, but for his own information also. We know as little about them as they do about us.” This was particularly an issue with regard to Native languages, as many whites would need more than two years before being able to preach without an interpreter. And besides, he continued, a two-year limit for white ministers would do more harm than good. By putting Indian missions on a permanent foundation, frustrated ministers would be more likely to invest themselves in Indian communities “if they knew that there was no early prospect of deliverance from them.” Second, staying under the authority of white- dominated conferences was impracticable, largely due to the reticence of Indians to accept whites. “[I]f you separate them, and give them a conference of their own,” Berryman argued, “native preachers may be raised up, whom, with their families, the Indians would cheerfully support. But they would never support a white man’s family.” Yes, Berryman agreed, separating the work might lead to apathy from nearby whites, but the autonomy given to Indians would more than compensate.14 As the debate wound down, A. L. P. Green, a Tennessee delegate who felt his youth along the Tennessee and Alabama frontier made him “an Indian in all but birth,” told the conference that “the best they could do was to make of the west of America a separate conference” because Indians “entertain against all strangers a strong prejudice.” With that as the last word, the conference passed a resolution creating the Indian Mission Conference. Still, not everyone observing the general conference enjoyed the debates over the intricacies of Indian missions. “Most of the morning was occupied in the discussion of the proposition to form an Indian Mis- sion Conference,” a reporter from the Wesleyan Methodist Connection of America wrote. “It was lengthy and void of interest to the general reader, and I shall not be guilty of a repetition of the sins already committed by the speakers, by inflicting it on your readers.”15 By founding the Indian Mission Conference in 1844, the Methodist Episcopal Church elevated its Indian missions along the western border of the United States into an organization on par with its older, white- dominated conferences in the eastern half of the country. This was a significant step understood by all Methodists in the country because the annual conference was a vital element of Methodist polity. For church leaders, placing Indian missions within the administrative structure of a conference was one more step in the long process of assimilation. The IMC extended the denomination’s grasp into Indian communities, and its ministers and congregations would be held accountable to the national church’s standards. But, as the aforementioned debates in the general 28 · Chapter One conference revealed, many feared that giving Indians any authority over the conference would work counter to the church’s goals. Those fears would eventually prove prescient. Methodism’s reliance on administrative structure to uphold its standards developed from the early ministry of John Wesley. Wesley believed that Methodism needed the “supporting power of organization,” one prominent Methodist historian wrote, and he organized early members into bands, classes, and societies. Over time, American Methodism continued Wesley’s tradition of organization when it created quarterly, district, annual, and general conferences.16 Each of these layers of church hierarchy had its own focus, moving from local to national issues, but this connectional authority, as it was called, guided the work of ministers and the behavior of church members. Unlike other denominations that relied on congregational authority, which gave great leeway to individual congregations and their ministers, connectional authority grounded churches in the practices, attitudes, and expectations of a larger organization. It was within the nooks and crannies of denominational organization that Native members in Indian Territory now found themselves, and it was this same church structure that they would use to their benefit. From a ministerial point of view, the basic unit of work occurred at the circuit level. The itinerant or traveling preacher, commonly referred to in the nineteenth century as the “circuit rider,” earned his moniker by preaching to various settlements in a specific region (called a “circuit” by the church), which might stretch for miles across sparsely populated terrain. Ideally, the circuit rider regularly visited preexisting congregations while also expanding the church into the nation’s hinterlands. The facilities the circuit rider encountered varied greatly, however, particularly in less populated areas. Successful congregations in cities and towns met in buildings paid for by members, but along the edges of the frontier, traveling preachers preached wherever they could. This was especially true in Indian Territory, where circuit riders relied on informal “preaching places” in schoolhouses or private homes. For instance, in an 1846 report about the denomination’s Cherokee work, Thomas Ruble told the government agent that the IMC had divided the Cherokee Nation into four circuits with seventy-two preaching places. Yet, as the experiences of Henry Ben- son demonstrated, these preaching places lacked the sense of permanency the church wanted. Benson, who worked in the Choctaw Nation in the mid- 1840s, recalled visiting Nat Folsom’s property, where the congregation met in a vacated house and the porch doubled as a pulpit and an altar. Bishop George Pierce, who presided over the IMC in the late-1850s, The Mission Begins · 29 viewed circuit riding in the territory as “[t]he most material drawback on the comfort of this work. . . . The appointments are far apart, the trails lonely, and the only relief to the wayfarer is in the beauty of the scenery and the piety of his meditations.”17 When enough circuits existed in an area, officials created a district to supervise the work. Since districts had a strong geographic focus, in the IMC they usually contained all the work surrounding a particular Indian tribe or nation. At its inaugural 1844 meeting, the IMC comprised three districts—the Kansas River District, which consisted primarily of the Indian Manual Labor School at the Shawnee Nation outside Kansas City, Kansas, along with small settlements of Kickapoo, Wyandotte, Potawatomi, Ponca, and Wea Indians; the Cherokee District, which included Chero- kee communities and nearby settlements of Seneca, Quapaw, and Creek Indians; and the Choctaw District, which covered the IMC’s Choctaw and Chickasaw congregations. To maintain Methodism’s “supporting power of organization,” each district was led by a presiding elder, or an experienced minister, who, besides being vested with the authority to carry out church sacraments, administered the church’s government in the district. Since presiding elders were instrumental in the day-to-day operation of the IMC, their appointment was one way for the church to maintain control over the conference and oversight of its Indian congregations. With this need in mind, the IMC appointed Nathaniel Talbott, David Cumming, and Learner Stateler as its first three presiding elders, all white ministers who hailed from eastern conferences.18 To manage its circuits and districts, Methodists implemented two types of low-level meetings: the quarterly conference and the district conference. Both meetings included ministers, elders, deacons, stewards, school superintendents, and other church members engaged directly in a congregation’s work in a specific circuit or district. With the district’s presiding elder usually in charge, attendees reported on the denomination’s work in their respective congregations, aired grievances and heard complaints from church members, and licensed or recommended individuals for various ministerial positions. In 1870, the Southern Methodist Church added the district conference, which held many of the same responsibilities as the quarterly conference, though it covered more physical territory and met less frequently. Within the IMC, quarterly and district conferences gave voice to many of the denomination’s lesser-trained or inexperienced ministers who carried out the day-to-day work of the church. Since membership at these meetings extended to the church’s more informal ministers, known as exhorters or local preachers, these individuals could 30 · Chapter One participate in Methodist functions as peers of the more experienced ministers. In Indian Territory, this allowed Indian members, who made up the majority of the IMC, to influence the work on the local level. Nonetheless, because quarterly and district conferences were also limited in authority, white members who controlled the levers of power in the IMC still held a check over Indian congregations. This was evident at the IMC’s 1844 annual conference, when the group rejected the Creek District Quarterly Conference’s recommendation that Daniel Asbury, a Creek minister, be admitted on trial.19 As evident in Asbury’s case, the annual conference held the most authority for the Methodist church in a specific region. It governed the actions of Methodist members within its boundaries while also linking its churches to national organizations, a distinction that delegates at the 1844 general conference understood well when they created the IMC. Because of these responsibilities, the annual conference was both an organization and a meeting. As an organization, the conference provided the leadership for its connected churches while carrying out the national church’s policies. This was particularly true for the IMC, since it was a “mission conference” and not a regular conference like those back east. Due to its special status as a mission, the IMC depended on national sources such as the Missionary Society (or, later, the Board of Missions) for funding assistance. The IMC then doled out these appropriations to individual ministers or churches, which gave the conference leadership great leeway in the church’s direction in Indian Territory. This issue was obvious in 1848 when two IMC ministers, Thomas Bertholf and James Essex, accused conference leaders of playing favorites when it appropriated missionary funds.20 The conference made many of these important decisions at its annual meeting, where a bishop presided as the national church’s representative. The annual meeting brought together all the traveling preachers and presiding elders from across the conference, where the group licensed elders, deacons, and ministers; levied financial assessments and made appropriations; and assigned individuals to their fields. All these decisions guided the conference’s work for the following year. For ministerial assignments, the bishop conferred with presiding elders to discuss the needs of various circuits and districts before appointing ministers, though the bishop always had the final say. Because of the itinerant nature of nineteenth-century Southern Methodism, it was not uncommon for ministers to change circuits every few years, but in an area like Indian Territory, with its far-flung congregations and different Indian cultures, these rotations could bring additional hardships and potential instability. Learner Stateler, for example, The Mission Begins · 31 left the Indian Manual Labor School and its predominantly Shawnee and Delaware students near Kansas City in 1844 to take up a new appointment nearly three hundred miles away at Fort Coffee Academy in the Choc- taw Nation, where he worked for a year before moving back following his re appointment to the Indian Manual Labor School in 1845.21 Because of the importance of the annual meeting, the bylaws of the Southern Methodist Church restricted the membership of these meetings. This decision created a situation where a conference like the IMC had, in effect, two different types of members—one for each of its dual purposes as an annual meeting and as a larger organization. Unlike quarterly or district conferences, the annual meeting limited its membership to traveling preachers who passed formal exams offered at previous annual meetings, while excluding lay preachers and exhorters who lacked the formalized training and full-time responsibilities of the traveling preacher. Sub sequently, the decisions made at the annual meeting were done by a select group of individuals charged with representing the needs of the larger Southern Methodist population. The annual meeting also reinforced the power that this small group had over the conference as a whole. This distinction in membership explained why the IMC’s first meeting in October 1844 involved only twenty-seven members, nearly three-fourths of whom were white ministers, even though the church claimed slightly more than 3,000 Southern Methodists in the conference, of which 2,992 were Indian.22 The conference’s authority over its members and churches naturally included their spiritual and administrative affairs but could also extend into secular issues. At its inaugural meeting, the IMC passed a resolution allowing presiding elders to withhold pay from any appointed minister who shirked his pastoral duties by failing to visit his congregations.23 Eleven years later, the conference passed another resolution calling on presiding elders to file formal disciplinary charges, such as suspending these ministers.24 Unsurprisingly, the conference was especially concerned that its ministers adhere to Christian principles and took action whenever that might be in doubt, such as an 1848 investigation as to whether Thomas Bertholf “had not solemnized the rites of matrimony between certain parties contrary to the word of God,” or an 1854 suspension handed down to Daniel Asbury for the crime of “immorality.”25 In other situations, individuals sought out the IMC for redress rather than Indian or federal courts. In one case, a Choctaw minister appealed to the IMC for reimbursement of the remaining balance of an 1858 loan the minister had given to Edmund Sehon, a member of the denomination’s Missionary Society. Unwilling to 32 · Chapter One cover someone else’s debts, the IMC refused the minister’s request.26 In a more humorous instance, the conference formally admonished W. D. Collins after an internal committee found him “guilty of a high degree of imprudent conduct in shooting and killing Mr. John R. Strickland’s horse.”27 Since many ministers relied on the conference for financial support because of their status as a mission field, and since Southern Meth- odist polity depended on the Southern Methodist rule of law, following conference orders was imperative. The Southern Methodist Church’s final conference of note was the general conference, held every four years by the national church. At this quadrennial meeting, national church officials along with delegates from the various annual conferences took up the important social, political, and religious issues facing the denomination. At these meetings, the church’s elites held great sway over the denomination, and if the common church member or layman felt left out at the annual conference, he held even less power at the general conference. Most rank-and-file members of the church had little regular contact with national officials save for the occasional sermon by a visiting bishop or what they might read in various church publications, though they certainly felt the effects of the general conference, which could range from changes to Southern Methodist law to changes in conference boundaries. While these administrative elements were normal for most conferences, the IMC also had additional bureaucratic oversight. First, as a mission conference, it relied on financial assistance from national sources more so than other conferences, which explained why questions over financial control arose at the 1844 general conference. Officials initially promised that the presiding bishop would protect the national church’s interests, but the bishop’s infrequent visits due to the field’s remoteness made more direct control necessary.28 Second, the nature of the IMC’s work among Indian tribes required frequent communication with the federal government and various Indian councils. Each of the Five Tribes, along with the Indians to the north who were originally included in the IMC, had their own layer of federal bureaucracy and treaty agreements that governed their existence in Indian Territory. Navigating these complex relationships was tricky for any organization, and even more so for the IMC. To address these difficulties, the Missionary Society appointed a superintendent over the IMC “[f]or the purpose of more effectually adminis- tering the financial concerns of the Indian Mission Conference, as also promoting its spiritual welfare.” According to the Missionary Society, the superintendent would be a conference member whose responsibilities The Mission Begins · 33 included promoting the work throughout the territory and with federal officials in Washington, DC. He would also have power of the purse over the conference’s financial matters, especially those related to schools and ministerial pay.29 Some conference members objected to this bureaucratic intrusion in their affairs. The superintendent’s position “was a sinecure, serving only to clog and complicate the machinery by creating a system of threefold superintendency and sub-superintendency between the foun- tain of authority and the actual operatives,” complained founding IMC member William Goode. “The simpler all the machinery of our missionary organization the better, and the more directly responsible all its functionaries are for their acts the more smoothly and efficiently will the wheels roll on.” Regardless of these complaints, the Missionary Society selected Jerome Berryman, a former member of the Missouri Conference appointed to the Indian Manual Labor School, as the IMC’s first superintendent. When Berryman left the IMC in 1847, conference officials renewed their objections by asking that he not be replaced.30 This was the multilayered framework of administration that governed the lives and work of Native and white Methodists in Indian Territory. Since the IMC expected its annual conference members to be experienced ministers who would uphold Southern Methodist principles, whites, and not Indians, guided the majority of the conference’s work. This decision was not done solely out of a racist desire to keep Indians from control of church affairs, though many local and national officials openly questioned Indians’ abilities. Instead, it originated more from an ethnocentric mindset that favored Anglo-American culture over Indian society. Becoming a traveling preacher, and subsequently a member of the annual conference, required passing certain examinations and “trials” conducted at the yearly meeting, and to be admitted into full connection with an annual conference, a preacher had to be engaged in itinerant work for at least two years.31 The assumption that Indians “lacked civilization,” at least according to how Anglo-Americans defined it, explained some of the reticence to give immediate authority to Indian members. To correct this perceived deficiency, the IMC pushed mission schools as the proper way to train the next generation of Indian Methodists. As purveyors of assimilation, both missionaries and the government promoted schools as one of the best means of indoctrinating Indian communities in American civilization. In the years after removal, the IMC operated several schools among the Five Tribes alongside its Indian Manual Labor School outside of Kansas City, with funding coming from various church, government, and Indian sources. While the IMC envisioned a school system 34 · Chapter One that stressed traditional Anglo-American and Christian values, what they encountered was a relationship that often put the IMC’s needs secondary to the demands of Indian peoples. In an 1857 report to the government about the Chickasaw Manual Labor School, J. C. Robinson detailed how the arrangement worked between the IMC and the Chickasaws. The IMC paid for and appointed the superintendent “in whom is vested the government of the school and control of the whole affair,” such as hiring additional school personnel. “He is accountable to the board, the conference, and the authorities of the Chickasaw nation; and all employed are accountable to him—the presiding elder of the district, the immediate arm of the church, being his supervisory.”32 What Robinson described was a system of conference oversight that also included control from Indian governments, who regularly made demands of the conference. Wilson McAlister, superintendent of Fort Coffee Academy, complained in 1846 that the Choctaws sent only older students too advanced in life to be teachable. “They are confirmed in habits opposing close application, either in or out of schools,” McAlister vented to the government agent at the Choctaw Agency. “Better a thousand times for the nation that they send us children, by no means over fifteen years.”33 A few years later, Choctaw demands increased as they forced the IMC to appoint two separate superintendents, one for the male students at Fort Coffee and another for its female students at New Hope Seminary. Similar problems existed in the Muscogee Nation, where the superintendent of the IMC’s Asbury Manual Labor School blamed its declining enrollment in 1851 on Creek parents who “took from us some fifteen of our most promising pupils” after a national school opened in their neighborhood.34 Indian authority extended beyond just school-related matters. At the first annual conference, Thomas Ruble offered a resolution that required all ministers to live within the IMC boundaries. While practical in theory for the church’s work, the reality was that several removal treaties gave Indian nations power to restrict white migrants. In his 1846 report to the government’s Cherokee agent, Ruble stated that none of the IMC’s three leading white ministers in the Cherokee field actually lived in the Chero- kee Nation. One man, Edward Peery, lived among Wyandottes, while the other two, Ruble and David Cumming, resided in Missouri. Furthermore, Ruble said, the Cherokee National Council ignored the IMC’s pleas to build a parsonage for the preachers. A year later, Ruble reported similar problems with Creeks. Now working at the IMC’s Asbury Manual Labor School in the Muscogee Nation, Ruble stated that the school struggled to attract white teachers because Creek laws forced them to leave their The Mission Begins · 35 families in the states. It was “[t]he leading policy of the nation,” Ruble complained, to oppose building any permanent home for white ministers.35 The rejection of white ministers and the micromanaging of schools by Indian governments frustrated the IMC because Indian nations continually demonstrated their power over mission work. These obstacles forced the conference to adjust its strategy and place more emphasis on Native converts to guide missionary work. These Native ministers might never become licensed traveling preachers and, subsequently, official members admitted into full connection with the annual conference, but they were in many ways more vital to the church’s efforts than white officials. In the IMC, the two most important positions that Indian ministers filled were as translators and local preachers. Neither position carried with it full membership in the conference’s annual meeting, nor did they require extensive training in Southern Methodist theology. Translators and local preachers allowed the conference to carry out its work among the varied Indian communities spread throughout the territory, while the mere presence of Native workers gave the conference access to communities that shunned most white contact. This was true among Creeks, where anger at white society had led the Creek Council to ban Methodist, Bap- tist, and Presbyterian missionaries in 1836 and enact public whippings for Creek citizens who practiced Christianity. Because of these restrictions, W. D. Collins told the government’s Creek agent in 1845 that Native ministers carried out most of the IMC’s work among the tribe.36 Since most white ministers in the IMC did not speak any Indian language, the IMC could not exist without Native translators. These jobs could be informal positions used by traveling preachers when they arrived in a community, or they could be formal appointments made for use at larger church gatherings, such as camp meetings or quarterly and district conferences. White ministers were well aware of the need for translators and often protested when none could be found. Erastus Duncan complained in 1845 that his inability to find a translator limited his preaching to English- speaking Chickasaws. “Could this difficulty be avoided,” he believed, “we should be enabled, by the blessing of God, to exert a moral influence that would tell well upon the destiny of this nation.”37 A year later, he again decried his lack of a translator, which, Duncan told the Chickasaw agent, meant that his work “could not be continued.”38 When translators were present, white ministers understood just how important they were and how much rested on their skills. “Much depends upon an interpreter; his capacity and fidelity,” one Southern Methodist preacher commented. “He may either make or mar a discourse.”39 Bishop George Pierce explained 36 · Chapter One that preaching through an interpreter in the IMC required great patience on the minister’s part because a regular forty-minute sermon could last more than two hours. “An idea which I could convey in a dozen words,” he wrote, took the interpreter “a minute or two to explain.” Pierce added, “Some of our long-winded parsons would break down in the legs, at least, if they did not quickly learn to diminish the number of sentences and curtail them in length.”40 Initially, the IMC wanted to curb the need for translators, though none of their suggestions provided an immediate fix. Writing about the state of Indian missions in the 1850s, Pierce declared, “The necessity to learn our language ought to be thrown upon them by refusing to translate our laws or to print a paper in their mother-tongue. In our Church movements,” he continued, “we should rely far more upon Protestant Christian schools for the rising generation, than upon the translation of the Bible and preaching to the adults.”41 Indeed, the entire philosophy behind the church-run school system was assimilation to Anglo-American ways. The IMC’s superintendent at Fort Coffee Academy in the Choctaw Nation said a school’s “true policy” should be “to educate the Indians in English solely. . . . Language stands closely identified with habits and prejudices, cherished and keeps them alive.” The superintendent continued, “These must be removed before any permanent change can be wrought in their condition and character.”42 Whatever dreams the IMC had about an English- speaking Indian membership would have to wait, because for the time being, the IMC needed translators if it expected to thrive in Indian Terri- tory. This need explained why John Harrell, presiding elder of the Chero- kee District, reported five interpreters in the list of ministers he submitted to the government in 1860. “These interpreters are all licensed preachers,” he wrote, “and preach in their Native tongue when not employed in interpreting for their white brethren.”43 The Native ministers Harrell referenced were local preachers, the second position filled by Indians that was vital to the IMC’s operations. A unique class of ministers within both branches of Methodism, local preachers lacked the status or responsibility of traveling preachers or appointed preachers in charge, and they were not official members of the conference’s annual meeting. Instead, local preachers were licensed ministers who mixed lay responsibilities with clerical duties and met the needs of a congregation in between the infrequent visits of the itinerant preacher. “They are engaged in secular pursuits, and yet devote what time they can to the regular ministry,” one prominent Northern Methodist theologian wrote in the 1880 Cyclopedia of Methodism. “Their The Mission Begins · 37 field of labor is local or circumscribed. Their office, however, is truly ministerial. . . . They are supposed, like itinerant ministers, to be moved by the Holy Ghost to preach the gospel.”44 Though local preachers were ministers in every sense of the word, they occupied a lower rung in Meth- odist hierarchy nonetheless. For the IMC, Indian local preachers filled an important need, because too many Native communities remained suspicious of white interlopers, which explained why all nine Southern Methodist workers in the Cher- okee Nation’s Saline District in 1845 were Native. Pierce Butler, the government’s Cherokee agent, stated that Cherokees “more readily receive moral instruction from their own race than from whites, which is especially indicated by the increased numbers of native preachers. . . . This is a fact owing not to any doctrinal differences derived from or existing in their religious creeds, but either to their characteristic jealousy of the whites, or to some innocent partiality or preference for a native divine, whose injunc- tion they more implicitly obey, and whose example they more readily follow.”45 And the use of Native preachers, the IMC knew, provided many dividends. One Creek minister reported in 1853 that due to his work at Concharty, several Creek citizens, including the town’s “principal chief,” had joined the conference.46 Because of the demands by Native communities for Native preachers, the IMC saw a continual increase in the number of Indian workers leading up to the Civil War. In 1844, the IMC reported twenty- eight traveling preachers and twenty-seven local preachers. By 1858, it was thirty-four traveling preachers to fifty-five local preachers. Two years later, the IMC had sixty-four local preachers.47 The IMC’s use of Native preachers was one of the advantages inherent within American Methodism that allowed the church greater access to Native communities and that increased Indian participation in the missionization process. Its own democratic structure encouraged action from below to spread the church, which in the IMC gave room for Native preachers. Though they might be cut off from higher levels of authority, these individuals knew the ways in which Christianity could be integrated into Indian society. Unlike most white ministers, who viewed Indian culture as anathema to Christianity or who linked Christianity to their definition of civilization, Native preachers understood that spirituality and religion permeated most aspects of their communities.48 Indian culture had its own religious rhythm, separate from white society and specific to each tribe, which preachers could use to introduce Christianity. Native preachers were best positioned to see these connections, though observant whites could too, assuming they even looked. 38 · Chapter One

Figure 1. Preachers on the Choctaw Circuit, circa 1890 (Mrs. C. M. Coppage Collection, Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society).

One of the ways in which Native preachers showed their importance to the IMC was during a camp meeting. Long a tradition of white communities on the frontier, Methodist camp meetings brought together settlers for days at a time. Importing this custom to Indian society, which had its own history of communal gatherings ripe with highly emotional activity, reflected the thin line that existed between the religious traditions of both peoples. Southern Methodist camp meetings prominently featured Native minsters as both preachers and interpreters, lively revival sermons that were emotionally exciting, and the loud singing of Native-language hymns.49 In many cases, they were also intertribal gatherings, like the 1844 camp meeting Henry Benson visited that included Choctaws, Cher- okees, Chickasaws, and Creeks, in addition to a number of slaves. “O, how difficult it is to preach clearly and profitably to such a people,” Benson remembered.50 Recalling his own visits to Indian camp meetings, Bishop Pierce wrote that the Indians “sang, prayed, wept, clapped their hands, and seemed as much at home in the business as we do at a camp-meeting. The strange sounds, all barbarian to me, amused me.”51 Indeed, to some observers, Indians seemed more comfortable with camp meetings than The Mission Begins · 39 whites did. “It requires but little effort for Indians to prepare for a camp meeting, so little deviation being required from their ordinary mode of life,” one white minister wrote about a Choctaw gathering at James’s Fork, “ [w]hile our good brethren and sisters in the States have such terrible apprehensions of the effects of exposure to the ‘night air,’ and seem to think that a great feat has been performed by spending a week ‘in the woods.’ ”52 Condescension from white ministers aside, Southern Methodist camp meetings complete with Native preachers allowed Indians to confront Christian principles, such as sin and salvation, within a communal context rather than through the strict doctrinal approach of the pulpit, which typified many white churches.53 John Page was indicative of the role Native preachers held in the IMC. Described by one white minister as “a fine, sprightly young Choctaw, full- blood, very dark complexion, pious, cheerful, and agreeable,” Page converted to Christianity when he attended the Choctaw Academy as a youth. He received his license to preach years later from the Arkansas Conference in 1842 before becoming a deacon at the IMC’s 1844 meeting. While the IMC appointed white missionaries to superintend its Choctaw mission schools, like Fort Coffee Academy and, later, New Hope Seminary, Page’s responsibilities included preaching to the students and to the schools’ surrounding Choctaw population. Officials expected Page to interpret for school services while they hoped that his example of Christian redemption would inspire the same from their students. Page was called “a reliable man” by Nathaniel Talbott, superintendent of New Hope Seminary, and “a man of unflinching integrity and moral worth” by Henry Benson at Fort Coffee. But, as Benson concluded, he was also a man held back by the limits of his Indian culture. “He loved his nation devotedly,” Benson wrote, “and was indefatigable in his efforts to advance their interests.” When Page preached at Fort Coffee, his sermons were “plain,” and he spoke English “intelligibly, but not correctly.” Instead, Benson wrote, Page’s “custom was to preach to his people in the native tongue.”54 Even though the dependence on preachers like Page helped the conference reach Native communities, it also reinforced the IMC’s status as a “foreign” field within Southern Methodist society. White ministers became increasingly frustrated with their subordinate position to Indians and criticized them when problems erupted. Explaining in 1856 why the IMC provided the national church with incomplete statistics unlike other conferences, IMC officials groused that much of the information had “to be gathered through native interpreters, which is often found very embar- rassing.” “Second,” officials continued, “many of our native men who have 40 · Chapter One charge of the work do it in so loose a way that it is next to impossible, in winding up matters for Conference, to bring all the ends together.” If their mission struggled in any way, IMC officials faulted their Native preachers. The Cherokee work, they complained, suffered from poorly-educated ministers, and the Creek work saw too much backsliding. “[M]any of our native members and helpers, who stood like the beaten anvil in times of trial, thereby doing credit to themselves and the noble cause they have espoused, have, under a change of circumstances, proved less firm and decided in the religious profession,” officials exclaimed. “Our native men, under all the circumstances, have not rendered the Church the valuable service anticipated.”55 For all their bluster about lack of “valuable service” from its Native ministers, IMC officials could not escape the fact that many of their white ministers suffered from similar problems. In normal circumstances in regular conferences, young ministers gained experience under the watchful eye of their Methodist superiors, but in a mission field, trained ministers could not supervise younger missionaries with consistency. Further complicating matters, loopholes in Methodist rules allowed ministers to bypass certain licensing and examination requirements if they first worked in a mission field before transferring to a regular conference. Finally, one of the few ways in which white men could gain entrance to Indian Territory in the antebellum period was through missionary work, which led some unscrupulous whites to use the church to enrich their own worldly affairs. All these factors drove the IMC toward Native preachers, even as the conference emphasized the need for high-quality white ministers. IMC officials took “decisive measures” at its inaugural 1844 meeting, as Bishop Thomas Morris stated, to ensure that its ministers worked for the conference’s goals and were not “any mere hangers-on” who used the church for their own needs. “Any brethren who may wish to become identified with the Indian Mission conference must calculate to go in for the work, the whole work, and nothing but the work,” Morris wrote, “or to be furnished with ‘walking papers’ in short order.”56 Morris’s tough stance toward “hangers-on” highlighted the IMC’s existence on the physical edge of mainstream American society, which was one reason the conference struggled to find experienced ministers. For the conference’s white members, living in an alien culture proved difficult and, at times, insurmountable. Family concerns were the reasons given by both Jerome Berryman and Nathaniel Talbott for leaving the IMC. Berry- man, who was the IMC’s superintendent at the time, quit his work in 1847 following the death of his wife and transferred his family to the St. Louis The Mission Begins · 41

Conference. Likewise, Talbott cited his struggles in preaching to Choctaw communities coupled with the need to provide for his family as his reason for leaving in 1855. In other cases, internal Methodist politics drove white ministers out of the IMC. Both William Goode, superintendent of the IMC’s Fort Coffee Academy, and Henry Benson, one’s of Goode’s teachers, cited their refusal to support a proslavery denomination as the cause for leaving the IMC in 1845, after it officially joined the Southern Methodist Church.57 By the late-1850s, the dearth of white ministers in the IMC led church officials to chastise older conferences for not sending out more men to fill the conference’s roster. “Where are those, called of God to preach, who could not get into the Georgia Conference because there was no place to work,” Bishop Pierce asked while criticizing the IMC’s lack of white preachers.58 Even as white officials dealt with administrative and staffing problems, outside observers noticed the difference in Southern Methodist operations from other denominations. The government’s Cherokee agent, James McKissick, outlined some of these differences to federal officials in his 1846 report. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) operated five mission stations in the Cherokee Nation, two of which were run by Native preachers, yet these five stations totaled only 249 members. In contrast, Southern Methodists reported eight traveling preachers, four white and four Indian, with nearly 1,400 members. “Their system of ministerial labors appears to be judicially arranged,” McKissick noted. “[W]hile some are assigned to local duties, and more circumscribed bounds, others are required to extend their services over more comprehen- sive circuits, and thus, by a methodical system, which appears to be bene- ficially adjusted, their religious example and moral influence are extended to all parts of the nation.”59 McKissick’s comments detailed one of the primary organizational differences between Southern Methodists and other Protestant denominations in Indian Territory. Like Methodists, Presbyterians had worked among the Cherokees since the preremoval era and had subsequently reestablished their work in the years after, led primarily by Samuel Worcester, who labored in the field until his death in 1859. But the five mission stations that the ABCFM controlled (Park Hill, Fairfield, Dwight, Honey Creek, and Fork Hill) were expensive operations with limited accessibility to Native communities. By using a mission station, a denomination hoped Indians would come to them, which also explained why many stations included schools (and why other denominations put so much effort into their own school operations). Stations and schools appealed to missionary groups because they provided a central base of operations and, if placed right, 42 · Chapter One constant contact with hubs of Indian society. But a policy based on attracting nonbelievers to a mission station assumed that nonbelievers recognized the benefits of what the mission offered. These facilities also required plenty of financial support, which for Indian Territory meant relying on outside sources. This factor alone could ruin a mission operation, as the ABCFM learned in the years before the Civil War. Since it was a northern antislavery organization, the ABCFM was politically embarrassed by the use of slaves at its stations in Indian Territory and subsequently withdrew its support in 1859 for missions in the Cherokee and Choctaw nations.60 On the other hand, sending out missionaries, especially if they were Native ministers, was considerably less expensive and, as Southern Meth- odists and Northern Baptists both demonstrated, potentially more effective. Like the Methodists, Baptists had engaged in Indian missions among Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws since the preremoval era and continued this work once the communities resettled in Indian Territory. And like the Southern Methodists, Northern Baptists also used Native preachers to great effect. In the Cherokee Nation, which was a stronghold for Northern Baptists in the pre–Civil War era, Evan Jones’s work rivaled the Southern Methodists in number, with both denominations claiming more than one thousand members throughout the 1850s.61 Though the denominations argued over theology, with issues concerning baptism (such as propriety of baptizing infants or the need for full immersion for adults) generating some of their most heated debates, what mainly differentiated the Southern Methodists from the Northern Baptists in their Indian mission work was slavery. The two groups represented different factions of the larger slave debate gripping the nation in the 1840s and 1850s. Northern Baptist missionaries opposed slavery like their Pres- byterian counterparts, who were also financed by northern-based groups, but the integration of slavery in Indian life made being an antislavery missionary dangerous. All of the Five Tribes were slaveholding people, though the nature of slavery differed from tribe to tribe, as did the acceptance of blacks in Indian society. What did emerge as a common characteristic across the Five Tribes was the identity of slaveholders. By the 1850s, the mixed- blood elites, who were more closely aligned with Anglo-American society, were the dominant slaveholders, while the traditionalist-oriented full- bloods opposed the practice in Indian society.62 Unlike other mission groups prevalent in Indian Territory, the IMC embraced slavery from its very beginning. The IMC overwhelmingly approved of the division resolution offered by southerners at the 1844 general conference in New York and quickly appointed two representatives to The Mission Begins · 43 attend the Louisville meeting in 1845, which would see the formation of the Southern Methodist Church. William Goode, one of the two IMC representatives to the Louisville meeting (selected against his wishes since he opposed both slavery and division), claimed that the IMC never even debated the underlying issue of slavery. This could be expected since several of the conference’s leaders, such as David Cumming, James Essex, and its first superintendent, Jerome Berryman, all hailed from southern states like Arkansas and Tennessee, and some of them had been slave owners previously. But beyond the background of its leaders, the conference also discovered that its Indian members favored a proslavery stance in church affairs. Goode admitted that earning the reputation of an “abolitionist” among the Choctaws could severely hamper the conference’s work, which he was encouraged to avoid by hiring slaves at the Fort Coffee Academy. William Graham, an antislavery Methodist minister traveling through the IMC in 1845, saw firsthand how the issue permeated the conference’s churches as he witnessed IMC’s ministers inciting their congregations against abolitionists. “To oppose the whole body of the traveling ministry, and run against the inflamed passions of the slaveholding population and their desperate minions,” Graham wrote, “seemed madness.”63 Slavery in Indian Territory became more divisive by the 1850s. Thomas Ruble told his Methodist superiors in 1856 that “the influence and work- ings of Northern fanaticism have been seen and felt” throughout Choctaw and Chickasaw communities.64 The problem was worse in the Cherokee Nation. The slavery issue was “producing much excitement in the nation,” the government’s Cherokee agent, George Butler, wrote in 1856. The cause of these troubles, he elaborated, were “the anti-slavery missionaries in the nation, who, instead of attending to the real object of their mission, have, by the course they have been, and are now pursuing, rendered the slave population discontented with their lot, and fostered thoughts and feelings in their minds from which no good can be expected, but on the other hand, much evil.”65 Butler feared the growing Keetoowah Society, an antislavery group of full-blood Cherokees organized in part by Evan Jones. Unlike other missionaries, such as the Presbyterians, who sought a m iddle ground between their own antislavery sentiments and the proslavery society they worked in, Jones actively promoted abolition in the Cherokee Nation. He was also a bitter opponent of Southern Methodists, who, he complained to his mission board in 1856, “en masse go for slavery. . . . They admit slaveholders and make capital out of the fact that the Presbyte- rians speak against slavery and the Baptists have cut off all connection with it.”66 By 1860, proslavery ministers found it dangerous to hold meetings 44 · Chapter One in full-blood Cherokee communities with the Keetoowahs nearby. That year, Elias Rector, the superintendent of the Southern Superintendency, warned of the troubles in the Cherokee Nation caused by these secret societies. “Murders are continually committed, and other outrages perpe- trated,” Rector reported. “Great excitement now exists among them; and the cause of all this trouble, anger, excitement, and violence, is believed to be the intermeddling, by the missionaries, among them, headed by Evan and John Jones, with the institution of slavery.”67 The outbreak of the Civil War soon enveloped Indian Territory much as it did the rest of the nation. In mid-1861, Confederate official Albert Pike negotiated treaties with the tribes under the assumption that Indians would rather side with a fellow slaveholding nation that promised their protection than with the federal government responsible for their removal and which struggled to uphold its treaty obligations. Some tribes, such as the Choctaw and Chickasaw, quickly signed the treaties, while others, like the Cherokee, espoused their neutrality in what they viewed as strictly a white man’s war. This stance changed once the federal government abandoned its forts and withdrew its forces from the region. Sensing the balance of power shifting both within his own tribe and within the territory, Cherokee chief John Ross, the last major holdout, officially allied with the Confederacy in October 1861. As long as Indian Territory remained under Confederate control, then the IMC, with its proslavery, pro-South attitudes, could continue its work with little disruption. Between 1860 and 1861, the conference experienced only a slight dip in its overall membership. At its October 1861 annual meeting at the Chickasaw Manual Labor School, the IMC carried out its duties like normal with the war’s biggest disruption being the absence of a presiding bishop. The meeting concluded by making appointments for its four districts for 1862 before adjourning until its next planned meeting at Fort Gibson the following year. Unbeknownst at the time, this meeting was the IMC’s last for several years. Back east, federal troops comman- deered the Southern Methodist Church’s publishing house in Nashville, Tennessee, which also housed the headquarters for its Missionary Society. With a major source of its funding now under the control of the Union army, the IMC withered without its national appropriations.68 The Union presence in Indian Territory and the ensuing chaos were even more devastating for the IMC. By mid-1862, federal troops from Kan- sas invaded the region and controlled much of the northern portion of Indian Territory, especially in the Cherokee Nation. With the Confederacy focused on the eastern theater, Indian Territory became an afterthought, as a grueling guerrilla war descended on the region. Union-sympathizing The Mission Begins · 45

Indians fled north into Kansas, while pro-Confederate Indians journeyed south into the Choctaw Nation and Texas. Those who stayed behind, like the IMC’s James Essex, faced constant danger. Essex died under mys- terious circumstances at Fort Gibson in the spring of 1864 as a Union prisoner.69 Of its experience during the Civil War, IMC officials wrote that the conflict “made terrible havoc of our little Conference. Districts, circuits, societies, and schools, were all annihilated.” The conference’s Doaksville Circuit, located in the Choctaw Nation, reported that due to the war “the Church has suffered greatly, many have died & removed.”70 In Creek country, the superintendent of the conference’s boarding school blamed marauding Cherokees for most of the school’s destruction and property loss. Conference officials reported later that they cancelled meetings at the district and territorial level after 1861, because Union forces had “gotten possession of our Indian Territory.” The lack of Southern Methodist ministers and the return of federal troops emboldened northern denominations to enlarge their work at the IMC’s expense, and church historians even claimed that other, unnamed missionaries encouraged Indian attacks against known conference members during the war.71 At the Chickasaw Nation’s Eastman Schoolhouse in the fall of 1864, the IMC held its first annual conference since the beginning of the Civil War, and the war’s effects were obvious when only eight members attended the meeting. The IMC reported that “some of the preachers have been partially keeping up their work. Others have been driven from their homes and work. Some are within the Federal lines, and consequently their condition is not known.” Furthermore, it continued, “[m]ore than three fourths of our Territory is now in a desolated state, from the ravages of war.” The conference’s plan for the upcoming year was for “the mere maintenance of its organization” because anything else was simply “impracticable.” Reflecting on this troublesome time after the war, IMC officials said that “the name of the Conference was about all we had to boast of.”72

By 1865, the Indian Mission Conference was in disarray. With its churches destroyed, its white missionaries and conference leadership recalled to other states or traveling with military units, its funding from national sources suspended, and its Indian members scattered from Kansas to Texas and points beyond, there was little left of the IMC at the end of the war. Rebuilding the work in Indian Territory would be difficult for the conference and for the Southern Methodist Church, a task made worse during the Reconstruction period by the changes in federal-Indian relations in Indian Territory and the IMC’s status as a “secessionist” organization. 46 · Chapter One

In the broad scheme of things, Methodist missions had gone through this once before. Removal had also produced problems for the church more than two decades earlier, and at the time, Methodists had turned to a style of mission work mirroring the techniques that had contributed to the denomination’s overall growth in the nineteenth century. Circuit riders and local preachers, whose education varied from person to person, traveled across the countryside and into rural areas to reach a population spread out over many miles. Through this work, they converted Natives to Christianity and established preaching places they hoped would blossom into active congregations of Indian converts. By 1844, the national church followed up their efforts by instituting an administrative structure over the territory’s Methodism that imposed a sense of rule and order in its ministers and congregations. Doing so, they believed, was one more step in the region’s assimilation, as whites asserted control over Indian congregations. But the demands of Indian Territory, with its diverse Native cultures and languages as well as Native autonomy in missionary efforts, differentiated the IMC from other Southern Methodist conferences and showed the divide between the IMC and the rest of the national church. White Southern Methodists quickly discovered the limitations in their authority and training when working with an Indian settlement, and instead, the conference leaned on its Indian preachers to fill the gap. While whites assumed the conference’s leadership positions, Indian ministers carried out the day-to-day work of the church. As translators, they literally and metaphorically interpreted the Christian message for potential converts. As local preachers, they attended to the congregation’s needs regularly and in between the infrequent visits of the preacher in charge. As circuit riders themselves, they traveled the countryside on foot or horseback to reach small, isolated churches shunned by whites. This was the reality of the Indian Mission Conference between 1844 and 1865. National church officials might dream of dedicated white ministers capably extending the church and American civilization to a heathen population within their denomination’s approved and time-tested administrative framework, but what they got was a visibly different conference. For all their efforts to create a system where white oversight could check the power of Indian members, they instead worked within a region where Indian autonomy trumped missionary expectations. What the IMC and national church did not anticipate, though they might have welcomed it, were the changes that Reconstruction and the postwar period would have in their relationship with the Indian nations. chapter two

Rebuilding the Mission

Efforts among the Five Tribes, 1866–1889

In the Civil War’s aftermath, the IMC focused on its short-term problems, oblivious to the long-term changes the war had brought to Indian Territory. Beyond the physical destruction exacted on the land and its people, the sectional strife exacerbated troubles within Indian nations, which played out against the backdrop of the larger conflict. Since each of the Five Tribes, along with smaller tribes like the Shawnee, Osage, and S eneca, allied with the Confederacy, the federal government viewed them as complicit in the war’s disastrous effects and enacted a separate reconstruction policy for Indian Territory. This policy gave whites greater access to the region’s resources at the expense of its Native inhabitants, who would fight for years to maintain their autonomy against an encroaching tide of white intruders. The Reconstruction Treaties of 1866 between the United States and the Five Tribes had three major effects. First, the Five Tribes sold the United States land previously given to them in perpetuity via removal treaties, which significantly scaled back the territory controlled by each of the tribes. With this land, the federal government subsequently removed more Natives to the region through a renewed effort to cleanse the frontier of Indians. Second, the reconstruction treaties ended the practice of slavery in Indian Territory and dictated that each nation accept their former slaves as members complete with the same citizenship rights as Indians. Finally, the government forced the tribes to accept missions, schools, federal courts, and railroad lines to speed up the process of assimilation and

47 48 · Chapter Two the region’s incorporation into the United States. Each of these institutions increased the power of the white population in Indian Territory, who soon chafed at living under Indian authority and demanded that the federal government protect their rights regardless of any Indian treaty. Of these three major outcomes of the reconstruction treaties, only the third had an immediate effect on the IMC. Though there were black members in the IMC in the nineteenth century, their numbers were small. In 1873, the IMC had four “colored charges” to serve its minority black membership, and by 1890, the total number of black members in the conference dwindled to only twenty-three. Both the African Method- ist Episcopal Church, a northern-based denomination, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1870 with support from the Southern Methodist Church, attracted blacks to their burgeoning mission work in Indian Territory.1 Likewise, the IMC showed little initial interest in reaching the Plains Indians brought to the region by the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. The IMC’s immediate concern was on rebuilding preexisting work, not expanding into a new field, and it would be twenty years after the Medicine Lodge Treaty before the conference would make a concerted effort to reach the Plains Indians. The government’s insistence on missionary and educational efforts, along with the introduction of the railroad and its ensuing commercial development, had the most significant effect on the IMC’s post–Civil War future. From the church’s perspective, Christianity and education struck at the heart of Indian culture and held the most promise for assimilation. This attitude previously invigorated Methodist missions, and the renewed emphasis in the reconstruction treaties gave the IMC additional justification for its work. Meanwhile, railroads introduced new corporate interests, commercial development, and non-Indian workers, all of whom wanted to exist under the laws of the United States and not under the authority of Indian nations. With these developments, the non-Indian population steadily increased throughout the postwar decades, and by 1890, non- Indians outnumbered Indians in the territory by more than two to one. These settlers, the 1890 census stated bluntly, “can obtain no land by purchase. They are mere campers, intruders, or licensed locaters for a limited term, and their number increases each year.”2 For the IMC, these changes were either alarming or exciting, depending on your perspective. For Indian members, who rooted their churches in their Native community, whether it be Cherokee, Creek, or Choctaw, rather than in the customs of the larger Southern Methodist Church, the postwar reality threatened their autonomy within the larger church Rebuilding the Mission · 49 body. For white members, whether older missionaries working for Indian assimilation or new migrants seeking the benefits of white civilization, the demographic changes promised a bright future, assuming they could rid the region of Indian authority. Building new church facilities or operating boarding schools could not be done without the consent and oversight of national councils, which made the IMC subordinate to Indian governments. At first, white missionaries accepted this fact as a reality of mission work in the region, but in time, whites increasingly viewed it as a sign of the IMC’s backwardness and its inability to integrate into the larger Amer- ican society. As white membership grew in the 1870s and 1880s, the conference’s Indian-centric mission became a relic of a bygone era. In 1889, the IMC reported 4,954 Indian and 3,616 white members.3 It was the final year in which Indians outnumbered whites.

Figure 2. The Five Tribes in the 1880s (Tash Smith and Maren Smith). 50 · Chapter Two

Preaching in the Cherokee town of Vinita on Sunday, May 25, 1884, Joseph Thompson took his text from Deuteronomy 1:2: “The Lord God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you.” Thompson’s sermon that Sunday commemorated the one-hundredth anniversary of American Methodism by highlighting the denomination’s work among his fellow Cherokees. “There are times when churches, as well as individuals and nations, may profitably pause in the hurrying highways of time,” Thompson told the congregation, “and take such lessons from the unreturning past as may better qualify them to grapple with the responsibilities of the future.”4 A mixed-blood Cherokee elite and leading minister within the IMC, Thompson had firsthand knowledge of the challenges faced by both the church and the Native communities in a post–Civil War Indian Territory. A lieutenant colonel in Stand Watie’s Confederate mounted Cherokee regiment, Thompson entered the ministry in 1870 and eventually rose to the position of presiding elder. He spent much of his early ministerial career in the Cherokee Nation’s rural areas before becoming the superintendent of several Methodist-run schools. “Dark indeed was the prospect to the missionary of the M. E. Church South,” Thompson recalled of those postwar days, “as he mournfully viewed the desolation of many happy homes, the lone chimney, the mute memorial of a war of extermination. His church charged with being a rebel church; the missionary treasury empty, with many outstanding obligations due and pressing.” The war, he reminded the congregation, “deprived the Indian Mission Conference of a large membership, chiefly colored members, Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandottes, Kansas Indians, Pottowotamies, Kickapoos and Quapaws.”5 Thompson’s centenary sermon, designed as an uplifting account of Methodism’s progress in Indian Territory, also reminded the congregants of the war’s destruction. It was not until 1866 that the IMC finally recon- nected with the national church and resumed operations, albeit in a way severely handicapped with uncertainty. That year the annual conference met at Bloomfield Academy in the Chickasaw Nation, and for the first time since before the war had begun, a bishop presided over the meeting. Bishop Enoch Marvin’s presence meant that the IMC could return to its regular relationship with mainstream Southern Methodist society and receive direction and support from the national church. But Marvin’s attendance did not solve the immediate problem of funding. The war’s devastation throughout the South led to declining receipts for the national church, which a mission field like the IMC desperately needed to boost its own limited resources. With only seven members attending the 1866 Rebuilding the Mission · 51 meeting, and with its churches just starting to rebuild, the chances that the IMC could fund its own work without outside assistance were nil. Fortu- nately, Marvin personally promised five thousand dollars to keep the conference alive, money he had earned mostly from fees generated through the sale of his pamphlets and books. With this act, Marvin became “the savior of the Indian Mission Conference.”6 “No man could have treated our little band with more courtesy and Christian affection,” John Harrell, the IMC’s superintendent in the postwar era, wrote in admiration of the bishop, whose actions came at a desperate time when all the conference’s preachers “were in great want.”7 While efforts to secure its financial foundation progressed, Superinten- dent Harrell focused his attention on the IMC’s personnel situation, which he believed was too dependent on Native ministers. “We need more white men to preach to our people—men who are willing to suffer and work for eternal rewards,” Harrell wrote in 1871 to the Board of Missions. He complained that the reliance on “our native brethren, who only speak the Indian tongue” limited the IMC’s reach and, perhaps more important, cut it off from mainline American culture and the Southern Methodist Church. Because Indian preachers “cannot read English, have no access to our Commentaries, or any books on theology,” he feared that they did not understand Southern Methodist doctrine and might promote a corrupted Christian message. Harrell thought that an influx of trained white preachers was the only way to establish the church firmly in Indian Terri- tory and to overcome the inadequacies of Native ministers, “[b]ut we fear to invite such men to come and help us owing to the embarrassed condition of the treasury.”8 Fearing any undue influence from Native preachers, Harrell wanted to re-create an Anglo-American church culture similar to other southern conferences that stressed “proper” doctrinal principles as the pathway to salvation. Yet the reluctance or inability of Indian members to embrace this same culture stymied IMC officials. No matter how much they wanted to mimic the appearance of other Southern Methodist conferences, IMC officials had to accept Indian influence in their churches because most of their members were Indian. Besides demonstrating a preference for white ministers, Harrell’s 1871 report to the Board of Missions touched directly on two of the major issues affecting the IMC’s efforts in Indian Territory: money and language. Both issues complicated the conference’s work and forced the IMC to make concessions to reach Indian communities. As time wore on, and white membership increased, these issues also came to differentiate the IMC from mainstream Southern Methodist society. These differences frustrated 52 · Chapter Two

IMC leaders, who instead wanted a modern conference to stand alongside or perhaps surpass other Southern Methodist conferences in the national church. For these men, Indian assimilation into white society raised their own status by “normalizing” their conference and bringing it in line with the Southern Methodist Church. If its congregations became well-funded and English-speaking, and more closely resembled white churches in the South, then the IMC would stop being “one of the outposts of Southern Methodism” nearly a half-century after its beginnings.9 Of the two major issues, money was the most pressing need for day-today operations and in theory the easiest to rectify. However, money issues directly tethered the subordinate IMC to the national church’s fortunes. Mission fields routinely required funding from larger sources, and the IMC’s physical presence within the United States made it no different than missions in South America or Asia in that regard. For much of the 1870s, the board’s annual appropriations for the IMC totaled near or more than ten thousand dollars per year, an amount equaled only by South- ern Methodism’s growing work in China.10 Conference officials were well aware of their reliance on the national church for funding and other basic needs. “Hope our dear friends in the States will not become weary of well- doing,” Harrell admonished the board. “Let us remember the words of the Lord Jesus: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ”11 Even with its large appropriations and its position as one of the national church’s first mission fields, the struggling status of the South’s postwar economy meant that actual receipts for the IMC usually fell far short of what was promised. The board reported that heavy debt incurred during the war, along with the ensuing “drought, mildew, short crops, low prices, and great pressure in the finances of the country,” severely restricted what it could provide for mission fields.12 These broken promises meant that conference officials failed to extend their work into new communities, struggled to provide for existing ministers, and paid for supplies on unful- filled lines of credit. The answer to these problems, conference officials soon realized, was to concentrate on their more prosperous congregations and established churches. The IMC’s difficulties in securing outside funding became obvious in the communication between the board and IMC officials. The board’s secretary, John McFerrin, reported to its executive committee in 1870 that workers in the IMC “were suffering for the common necessaries of life,” but the board’s financial problems meant that it could send only “partial” support. Even doubling the amount the board gave to the IMC, McFerrin believed, would equal only the minimum the conference needed for its Rebuilding the Mission · 53 ministers. “If these brethren do not get help,” McFerrin told the board bluntly, “they will be compelled to abandon the work to provide bread for their families.”13 Undelivered appropriations and a lack of funds created friction between the board and the IMC for many years. Harrell consistently wrote to the board pleading for appropriations or emergency funds, especially after the board paid only three hundred dollars of a promised one thousand for a church building at Fort Gibson in the Cherokee Nation, forcing Harrell to take out an unpaid draft on the account. At one point, Harrell visited the board personally in Nashville, Tennessee, and enlisted the help of Bishop J. C. Keener to press the board to pay its IMC-related debts. In 1885,. W. S Derrick, the IMC-appointed superintendent of the Seminole Academy, approached the board after Potawatomi leaders offered the IMC 640 acres of tribal land and an annual payment of five thousand dollars to operate a school. “[T]his is certainly the best opening our Church has in the territory in the way of schools, and also for the conversion of a tribe of Indians,” Derrick wrote. Yet the board offered only lukewarm support and refused to provide any money for building costs, leading the IMC to scrap the idea. The IMC’s ministers also struggled because of the board’s lack- luster support, as Albert Averyt learned during his first IMC appointment in the Chickasaw Nation. Assigned as a traveling preacher to the impov- erished Johnson Circuit, near the Arbuckle Mountains, Averyt received only food as payment for his services and was forced to share a home with a non-English-speaking Chickasaw family.14 One significant way in which the IMC could establish its legitimacy and permanence in the national church’s eyes was by building proper facilities such as parsonages and churches. Church buildings were physical reminders of a denomination’s presence and motivating factors for many congregations. In a place like Indian Territory, however, where few railroads existed and populations were small, funding and building church facilities were not always practical. John Tufts, the government agent at Union Agency, described the inauspicious facilities among the Five Tribes as “not expensive or ornamental, but . . . built for use.”15 Many smaller or remote congregations met in whatever facilities they could find, such as individual homes, schoolhouses, or other public facilities. The IMC’s Tahlequah congregation, for instance, met in the local Masonic Lodge’s lower room, while its Okmulgee congregation used the House of Kings’ chamber in the Creek Council House for several decades. In other cases, Methodist congregations held “Union” services in community churches built and shared by several denominations, a troublesome alternative for 54 · Chapter Two some IMC officials, who worried how this might affect the conference’s status in Indian Territory. Bishop Charles Galloway, who presided over the conference in the 1880s and 1890s, admonished the IMC for its lack of churches, which he linked to the long-term health of the conference. Without its own facilities, Galloway stated, “we de-vitalize the spiritual life of the congregation, and the more difficult it is to develop self-support and connectional loyalty.”16 The need for proper church facilities combined with the lack of outside funding forced the IMC to turn to its individual congregations for assistance, which only amplified pressures for Indian assimilation and increasing white membership in the conference. Writing in the IMC’s official newspaper, Our Brother in Red, in September 1883, Edwin Shapard, presiding elder of the Choctaw District, laid out his vision of the future. Shapard saw the “unsettled membership” of whites in his district as the conference’s best hope for financial stability, assuming Choctaw officials changed some of their restrictive laws. As he explained, the board paid for only one missionary in the Choctaw District and expected Choctaw congregations to support their own preachers. At the same time, the Choctaw government forbade whites, who made up the majority of this “unsettled” membership, from owning land. This fact, Shapard continued, meant that whites were less likely to financially support their church because they “do not feel the ties of home, of family, of neighbor, for they know not how soon they may be removed.” As a result, congregations could not build their own church facilities and instead met in those less-than-desirable places like schoolhouses.17 Shapard’s comments showed the connection between financial support and religious legitimacy. For the IMC’s white members, legitimacy meant church facilities, pastoral representation, and connectional authority. A lack of funds threatened not only individual congregations but the entire IMC as well, because it could not afford the basic necessities required of a “proper” Southern Methodist conference. To solve this problem, Shapard wanted whites to become “settled” members, which required removing the meddlesome aspects of Indian authority. Changing the legal system in the Indian nations so that whites could own property would encourage their participation in church functions and in church funding. In short, the financial future of the “Indian” Mission Conference lay in its white members, not in its Indian congregations. The IMC’s Indian ministers were not oblivious to the changing attitude of the conference and its potential effects on Indian congregations. Robert McLemore, a preacher on the IMC’s Flint Circuit and full-blood Rebuilding the Mission · 55

Cherokee, also known as Tsu-ga-do Da, noticed some of the same trends developing in the Cherokee Nation that Shapard had observed in the Choctaw Nation. Disappointed over the IMC’s decline in the Round Springs community, where waning support meant that Methodists met only on the infrequent fifth Sunday of the month in the preacher’s rotation, M cLemore bemoaned the status of the conference’s Indian congregations. “Our preachers have to preach where ‘they can do the most good’ and where the people will prepare a house for them to preach in,” he understood. But that was no reason for the IMC to neglect Indian congregations and communities, he believed, and no reason Indian congregations could not be vital members of the conference. “We may not be the same in color,” McLemore reminded his fellow white church members, “but we are the same in heart.”18 Problems over funding left the IMC in a situation seemingly at odds with its stated missionary purpose, to convert a population unfamiliar with Christianity. The IMC depended on the board for funds to do so, but the board’s subsequent struggles to fulfill its financial commitments forced the conference to become more self-reliant. This move affected the direction of the conference, however, and left it with two conflicting options. It could stretch its limited finances in an effort to reach as many Indians across the territory as possible and continue to act as a “mission” conference in purpose and deed, or the IMC could narrow its focus to the successful congregations who were financially capable of supporting themselves and the conference at large. Adding an additional layer of concern for the IMC was the nature of the Indian communities living within the boundaries of the conference. IMC officials recognized that besides the tribal identity that separated Native groups from one another, such as the distinction between Cher- okees in the north and Chickasaws to the south, blood status often separated communities into full-blood and mixed-blood camps. Unlike the traditionalist-oriented full-bloods, the IMC achieved more success with mixed- blood communities, who were now located in prosperous towns like Vinita, Tahlequah, and Muskogee. The fact that the territory’s growing white population by the 1880s was more likely to attend these mixed-blood churches gave the IMC a clear choice. Following its original purpose, which would undoubtedly entail more full-blood work, ensured that the IMC remained both an “Indian” and a “mission” conference for the time being, and its churches would retain their distinctly Native characteristics. But focusing its work on mixed-blood congregations connected to white society through language, marriage, and economic ties promised a 56 · Chapter Two brighter future. If respectability in the eyes of the national church meant churches more akin to their eastern counterparts, then the IMC’s pursuit of mixed-blood congregations with white members who could support the ministry financially seemed logical. “[W]e will be self-supporting through the whole country,” Shapard promised the Tahlequah-based editor of the Cherokee Advocate in 1884.19 Once again, the IMC’s Indian members were not ignorant of the conference’s emphasis on mixed-blood communities over full-blood communities. A writer identified as Wapha complained in 1886 in Our Brother in Red about the “Dangerous Drifting” the IMC committed by abandoning its Indian roots. Wapha claimed that the conference “drifted” away from full-bloods at the same time that Indians “drifted” away from conference leadership positions. Contrary to popular sentiment in the IMC, he believed the conference should give more authority to Indian preachers rather than relying on white preachers. “It would seem now few, if any, foreign missionaries would be needed to man the work,” Wapha wrote. But he also acknowledged that money played an important role in the direction the IMC took, because low pay drove full-blood preachers away. To ensure that Native ministers remained active in the IMC, Wapha suggested increasing their salary so “that [the IMC] can justly claim all their time.”20 Milton Clark echoed some of Wapha’s comments a year later in his own letter to Our Brother in Red. A presiding elder who served in both the Muscogee District and the Cherokee District, Clark attributed the church’s decline with full-bloods to the lower standards applied to full- blood preachers. “With little source of knowledge among themselves, and very little carried to them from the outside, what wonder is it they have progressed no further than they have,” he asked rhetorically. But the sim- plest solution, Clark knew, was not financially feasible. Raising the standards among full-bloods to meet the expectations of “regular” Southern Methodist conferences meant employing more whites at a cost of two to three times as much as an Indian preacher because of the need for interpreters. Since the IMC could not afford it, Clark suggested financing a team of white ministers to travel to Indian camp meetings each summer, preaching “the gospel of the Son of God.”21 Clark and Wapha represented two differing perspectives, though the central issue was the same to both men. Money was needed to further the IMC’s work, and money was in short supply. For Wapha, a full-blood Indian who supported the growth of the Indian mission, it meant fun- neling more money to Indian preachers. For Clark, the white missionary, stationing expensive white preachers in full-blood communities was the Rebuilding the Mission · 57 answer. But the larger question that trumped both men’s suggestions was whether the Indian Mission Conference, with a growing white membership and influence, was prepared to take its limited money and resources and apply it to nonwhite communities. Doing so promised limited financial and spiritual results at the expense of distancing the IMC from mainstream Southern Methodism even more. Closely linked to the debate over the IMC’s efforts in full-blood communities was the second major issue affecting the IMC during this era: Native languages. Language underscored the cultural divide between white missionaries and Indian congregations, and to critics, the persistence of Indian languages provided more evidence of the IMC’s secondary status in mainstream Southern Methodism. The Board of Missions’ 1873 annual report clearly linked the importance of English to Christianity when it claimed, “Wherever [English] is spoken, or written, the Christian religion must prevail.”22 For many whites, English not only represented the dominance of their culture throughout the United States, it defined the proper contours of Christianity. As long as Indian languages remained a necessary part of the IMC, the conference could not claim victory in its battle against heathenism. At times, issues of money and language were connected, such as efforts to translate the Bible into Indian languages or concerns over paying for district interpreters. IMC officials knew that whatever available money there was to meet language needs must be spent wisely. If the Christian message (or, more specifically, the Southern Methodist–interpreted Christian message) was translated improperly, then white officials might question the authenticity of an individual’s conversion. With this in mind, white missionaries wanted translated materials and interpreters to stress theological principles and Southern Methodist rules that, in their eyes, would lead to Indian assimilation. This attitude reflected white society’s larger belief that Christianity and “civilization” were inextricably linked. For the national church, accepting Christianity in ways that whites sanctioned ensured that Indians were on the proper path to assimilation. The Eurocentric interpretation of Christianity that guided many American churches left little room for other religious beliefs, and since so many social institutions in American society were grounded in Christian teachings, proper understanding was paramount. Native converts, however, did not view Christianity in such rigid terms and instead emphasized how the Christian experience could complement Native society. Converts might readily accept the duality of being Indian and being Christian and did not see the distinction between Native customs and Christian teachings as white missionaries wanted. For 58 · Chapter Two these people, partaking in Indian culture did not preclude someone from also being Christian. In fact, to the chagrin of missionaries, some Indian converts believed that Christianity could maintain their distinct communities and protect their culture from encroaching whites.23 When John Harrell hinted to the Board of Missions in his 1871 superintendent’s report about the inability of many Native converts to read English and their subsequent lack of access to church publications, he was addressing the larger language problem within the IMC. For much of the era, the IMC had had a mixed record when it came to translating material, partly due to the expense and effort required and partly due to the desire to eliminate the reliance on Native languages. Initially, the IMC recognized that the “permanency of our cause in many places” required more books printed in Native languages, which explained why one of its first acts at the 1844 inaugural meeting of the IMC was a resolution for more translated materials. This attitude had changed greatly by the 1880s. By then, the lack of translated materials was attributed to the inherent inferiority of Native languages. As the editor of Our Brother in Red wrote in 1887, “Many abstract thoughts cannot be given in Indian tongues.”24 To address the larger issue of an untrained ministerial class prevalent throughout the denomination in the nineteenth century, the Southern Methodist Church implemented a series of educational requirements for its licensed preachers, elders, and deacons, which it published in A Manual of the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. This manual of church regulations, updated after the quadrennial general conference, covered not only the outline of Southern Methodist theology but also the rules governing administration of its individual churches. Though the principles laid out in The Discipline evolved over the years in response to various issues facing the church, the purpose of the manual was clear: create a standard that united the various conferences into one large denomination. This approach ensured that its members, and especially its licensed ministers, could transfer from conference to conference without too much variation in theology. With The Discipline stipulating a multilevel program to ensure proper ministerial training, admission into full connection with a conference took several years of study followed by yearly examinations before more experienced preachers.25 The rules set forth in The Discipline assumed an English-speaking ministry, which ostensibly excluded the IMC, since many of its members could not read the English-language materials the church required. Yet the IMC never lacked ministerial staff because under the bylaws of the church, individual conferences examined and licensed their own ministers, not Rebuilding the Mission · 59 the national church. This gave conferences like the IMC flexibility to follow the rules. Indian ministers who might never pass an examination in another Southern Methodist conference, for their lack of either English or biblical training, could still get licensed in the IMC. This was the simple reality of the Indian Mission Conference. The difficulties of Indian Terri- tory forced conference officials to balance the needs of the field versus the rules of the national church. As time wore on, however, this balancing act was a constant reminder of the IMC’s distance from mainstream Southern Methodist society. On occasion, the IMC translated materials for its Indian members without prior approval from the national church. Several times the conference’s Committee on Books and Periodicals moved to acquire translated materials, though practical and bureaucratic conflicts within the IMC and with the national church scuttled their efforts. With the bulk of the IMC’s membership during this era coming from the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations, translations would have to be done in several languages. This promised to be a costly and time-consuming effort, which required the IMC to locate knowledgeable translators for each language, and the problem would reoccur whenever the IMC wanted to expand into new Indian communities. In other instances, the IMC turned to other sources outside the church for needed materials. Ann Eliza Worcester Robertson, daughter of the famed missionary Samuel Worcester and herself a noted Presbyterian missionary to the Creeks, regularly translated materials for the IMC. When she finished her Creek Testament in 1884, Milton Clark spread it among Creek Methodists through his camp work and encouraged all his ministers to secure their own copy.26 In later years, Our Brother in Red published Robertson’s translations of letters from Creek- speaking ministers, while an official resolution passed by the Board of Missions placed “a high estimate upon the service rendered the Church by Mrs. Robertson” for her work translating The Discipline.27 In other circumstances, Indian members bought publications translated by popular non-Methodist organizations like the American Tract Society or the Union Publishing House, even though the conference openly chastised its members for doing so.28 Clearly, the IMC’s Indian members desired religious materials in a language they could understand, which the conference and the larger church body struggled to fulfill. Using these alternatives, with or without the blessings of church officials, presented a separate set of problems for the IMC. For one, Robert- son’s translations were limited to only Creek readers. In order to reach the majority of the IMC’s Indian members at that time, the conference needed 60 · Chapter Two versions in Choctaw and Cherokee as well. More important, the quality of the translation and its doctrinal interpretation was subject to scrutiny. Protestantism in general divided numerous times over the years because of differing doctrinal interpretations, and that was just among mainstream white society. Ensuring that translated material also carried with it the “approved” Southern Methodist message was a daunting task for the IMC. At its annual conference in 1873, IMC officials criticized Choctaw and Chickasaw members for purchasing unapproved books published by non- Methodist organizations. “[T]hough we have no quarrel with any church or denomination,” the IMC’s Committee on Books and Periodicals stated in its report, “we are not willing for these works to be circulated in our bounds, making these impressions, and take no notice.” Still others questioned the worth of Native languages in the first place. After rejecting a Presbyterian minister’s translation of the book of Matthew on doctrinal grounds, Thomas Mitchell, presiding elder of the Creek District, believed it to be “very difficult, if not impossible, to make a correct translation of the scriptures into the Creek tongue.”29 One way to avoid troubles with translated materials was to require white missionaries to learn Indian languages as other denominations did. Rob- ertson and John B. Jones, both children of established Indian Territory missionaries, were fluent in Creek and Cherokee, respectively, and used it successfully in their work. Jones, son of the Baptist missionary Evan Jones, even parlayed his Cherokee knowledge into an appointment as the government’s Indian agent after the Civil War.30 But beyond the ethnocentrism displayed by men like Mitchell, Southern Methodism relied on English as its sole language for practical reasons, because its connectional system of church organization discouraged ministers from making such investment in one particular Native society. Under the circuit rider system, which helped Methodism spread among white communities on the frontier and positioned it as the largest Protestant denomination in the nineteenth century, conference officials regularly transferred individual ministers from one community to another. Rules laid out in The Discipline, though not always rigidly enforced, called for ministers to spend no more than four years in one appointment. In the IMC, this requirement could mean that a minister worked in a Cherokee church first, moved to a Creek community next, and then was appointed to a Choctaw congregation after that. Demanding that a minister in Indian Territory learn a Native language became an additional burden with only limited usefulness. Indian assimilation, therefore, became the logical solution. Rebuilding the Mission · 61

The growing reluctance of the IMC’s white members to support Indian missions explains only half the situation. Even with money and language issues causing troubles for the conference, Indian membership in the IMC still grew. In the Chickasaw District, for instance, it increased more than tenfold in the two decades after the Civil War, jumping from 200 in 1867 to 2,153 by 1884.31 This growth was due more to the actions of Indian preachers and members than to white conference leaders. These individuals were creating a space within the Southern Methodist community in Indian Territory that allowed for Indian autonomy and fostered Indian culture. What conference officials understood all too well was that Indian autonomy ran counter to the IMC’s twin goals of Indian assimilation and church legitimacy. In part, the difficulties of travel throughout Indian Territory, c oupled with the reluctance of white missionaries to brave these difficulties, explained the reliance on Indians, especially as lesser-trained local preachers. In 1868, the IMC sent five men into the Cherokee Nation to rebuild their work, three of whom were Native. On large circuits like the Chickasaw Nation’s Doaksville Circuit, where the appointed minister needed three months to visit each congregation, local preachers kept the church alive as they tended to the needs of a congregation in between the infrequent visits of the regular minister. In 1873, the IMC reported more than four times as many local preachers than preachers in charge, which was a higher ratio than any other conference in the Southern Methodist Church. With their closer connections to Native communities, whether through family ties or language, Indian preachers simply had better access to some congregations than whites did. And white ministers were not averse to letting Indian preachers reach the more remote and poorer churches when circuits like Long Creek in the Chickasaw Nation paid less than nine dollars per quarter for its two ministers.32 Outside observers noticed this autonomy and the growing demand displayed by Indian communities for Indian ministers. In several annual reports in the early 1880s, John Tufts, the government’s agent at Union Agency, noted that Indian congregations among the Five Tribes “have no use for those in whom they have no confidence, and it would be better for all concerned if such were sent to some other field of labor,” a statement aimed at white missionaries ill-prepared for work in Indian Territory. “The number of native preachers is increasing,” Tufts reported a year later. “Education and a little drill will make them very effective missionaries, especially the full bloods.”33 62 · Chapter Two

Tufts’s comment about “confidence” hinted at another characteristic of Indian preachers that frustrated conference officials in the postwar period. For much of the IMC’s work during this era, several noted Indian preachers were also high-profile officials in their respective Indian governments. A service of “deep interest” during the IMC’s Fifteenth Annual Confer- ence in Skullyville in 1858 illustrated this point. That year, the conference ordained “[m]inisters of four different tongues—one English and three the Red men of the Forest.” Each of these three men was also a national official within his respective government. Walker Carey was a judge from the Illinois District in the Cherokee Nation, while John Page, previously upheld by IMC officials as a symbol of Christianity’s positive effects on Native individuals, was a judge, council member, delegate, and treaty commissioner for the Choctaws. The final man, James McHenry, became a major in the 1st Creek Regiment for the Confederate army, a judge for the Coweta District, and speaker of the House of Kings.34 Of the three men, Jim McHenry earned some of the greatest accolades from white officials. Church historians described McHenry, who served as a preacher in the Coweta Circuit as well as an elder and a deacon, as “the most picturesque preacher of the Indian Mission Conference.” But McHenry was also a dedicated defender of Creek rights. In the old Creek country, McHenry had fought removal and was so hated by white Alabamans that they had put a price on his head before the federal government eventually sent him to Indian Territory. Instead of remember- ing McHenry’s stance on Creek rights, Bishop George Pierce emphasized the power of Christ when he discussed McHenry. Recalling how he had presided over McHenry’s admission into the IMC in 1855, Pierce wrote, “The lion has become a lamb—the brave a preacher. The war-whoop is hushed: the midnight foray is with the past: the Bible and Hymn Book fill the hands that once grasped the torch and tomahawk. . . . The bold, valiant savage, who spread consternation among the peaceful settlements on either side of the Chattahoochee now travels a circuit, preaching peace on earth, good will to men.”35 When McHenry died in 1883, the principal chief of the Muscogee Nation, Samuel Checote, wrote, “The Nation, as well as the Church, sus- tains a great loss.”36 Checote was well placed to make such a statement because he, like McHenry, was a Creek official as well as an IMC minister. Born in 1819 to full-blood Creek parents, Checote later served as a lieutenant colonel of Creek Confederate forces during the Civil War. After the war, Creeks elected him to the office of principal chief three times, the first time under the new Creek constitution in 1867, when he guided Rebuilding the Mission · 63 his people through postwar rebuilding and the lingering fight between full- blood and mixed-blood communities. Checote’s importance to the IMC and to the larger Southern Methodist Church was also well known. Converting to Christianity under the guidance of John Harrell, Checote’s enthusiasm for ministry prompted the Creek Council to ban Christian preaching under punishment of fifty lashes, a law that he ignored and that the council ultimately repealed. Checote joined the IMC in 1852 and after the war served as a circuit rider and presiding elder. Few individuals in the Creek Nation were as well respected for their work in the IMC as Checote, who often held prayer meetings and camp meetings in his home. Recognizing his standing, the national church selected him as a delegate to an international ecumenical conference of Methodism held in London, England, in 1883, though health issues prevented him from attending.37 Although church leaders stressed the Christian character of men like McHenry and Checote to trumpet the conference’s success, their conversion did not mean they embraced assimilation and white society. As

Figure 3. Samuel Checote (Alice Robertson Collection, Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society). 64 · Chapter Two historian Angie Debo noted, “[N]o other Creek leader ever worked so vigilantly [as Checote] to guard the racial integrity of his people against white and negro immigration,” an allusion to Checote’s feelings on the limits of Indian/non-Indian integration and how carefully he guarded his Creek community from outside influence.38 Claiming important leaders like Checote and McHenry gave the IMC a heightened sense of status in Indian Territory, a notable consideration in light of the competition raging among the region’s various denominations, but it also revealed Indians’ influence over the conference. Christianity might be a gateway to assimilation, as many white missionaries hoped, but it could also provide a way for Indian converts to hold white society at bay. As white migration increased in the postwar years, the IMC increasingly expected its Indian ministers to forgo their tribal needs and work solely for the cause of Christ, a stance not necessarily shared by preachers themselves. Indian ministers who engaged in politics soon became targets for some of the conference’s more vocal critics. “The ministry qualifies them to be leaders; the principles of godliness which they profess point them out as men to be trusted,” one critic, using the pseudonym Frater, wrote in Our Brother in Red in 1887, and “the next thing is they are candi- dates for political office, and their usefulness to the church ceases.” Indian preachers used the ministry, and by default the IMC, Frater continued, “as a stepping stone” to improve their own status and the needs of their Indian community, all of which came at the expense of the conference’s goals. Drawing on his experience as a presiding elder, Edwin Shapard also saw the political aspirations of his Choctaw ministers as detrimental to the conference’s work. Shapard blamed the political ambitions of his Indian ministers as causing “lukewarmness, backsliding, etc.” in their Choctaw congregations.39 To be sure, the IMC had practical concerns when it came to Indian ministers engaging in politics. For instance, the commitment required of political office meant less time for preaching and visiting congregations. In 1873, Cow-e-tah Micco, the IMC’s minister on the Creek Agency Circuit, journeyed to Washington, DC, as a delegate of the Muscogee Nation, leaving his circuit unmanned and the IMC scrambling for a replacement.40 But in the eyes of the IMC’s white officials, the bigger sin committed by these Indian ministers was working for an Indian government committed to protecting Indian rule. By being a part of Indian government, whether as judges, delegates, or representatives, these ministers labored on behalf of Indian autonomy even as the IMC expected them to promote Indian assimilation into white society. The continuation of Indian authority, Rebuilding the Mission · 65 which these ministers supported by holding office, only reminded white officials of the IMC’s perceived distance from mainstream Southern Methodist society. Perhaps because Willis Folsom avoided political ambition and focused on Indian missions throughout his life, he served as the public face of Indian ministers for the IMC. A Choctaw from a prominent mixed-blood family, Folsom came to Indian Territory during the removal era and later attended the IMC-operated Bloomfield Academy in the Chickasaw Nation. Folsom entered the ministry in the 1850s and rode a circuit that stretched from Pocola, near the Arkansas border, to Pauls Valley, nearly two hundred miles west. During the Civil War, he preached to members of the Choctaw Regiment and was one of the few ministers who remained in the Choctaw Nation as the war progressed. This came at great personal cost to Folsom, as conference historians noted, because sol- diers burned his home and stole his livestock at the beginning of the war, leaving Folsom to suffer alongside many other Choctaws. Because of his sacrifices, church officials credited Folsom with the survival of Southern Methodism among the Choctaws during the war and its persistence in the postwar decades. After the war, Folsom traveled to white and Indian communities in the Deep South, including Mississippi and Alabama, promoting Indian missions. In December 1884, Folsom attended the national church’s centennial conference in Baltimore as a delegate, making stops in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Washington, DC, along the way.41 Still, Folsom never forgot the differences that existed between white and Choctaw churches or his own unique relationship with Native congregations. When a new white minister to Indian Territory chastised Folsom for preaching at an “Indian Cry,” a mourning or funeral ceremony complete with Native practices considered antithetical to Christianity, Folsom responded “with a faint smile on his face and said ‘You don’t know the Indians.’ ”42 Even with Folsom’s heightened status as an example of Methodism’s positive effect on Indians, IMC officials judged him on their own ethnocentric definitions of a strong ministry, offering faint praise for his preaching skills and only admitting him into full connection near the end of his life. “He is no doctrinal preacher,” Edwin Shapard told the conference in 1884. Shapard, who was Folsom’s presiding elder, criticized the Choc- taw preacher for being “a poor counselor in worldly matters—no politician at all.” Folsom was “easily imposed upon by pretenders and hypocrites,” Shapard told his fellow conference members. The IMC’s 1897 obituary for Folsom was no kinder: “He was, strictly speaking, a man of few talents. His 66 · Chapter Two

Figure 4. Willis Folsom (Mrs. C. M. Coppage Collec- tion, Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society). education was limited; his opportunities were few. He was never what you would call a good preacher.”43 What the IMC could not ignore was Folsom’s gift of prayer. “No one who ever heard him pray at the altar among penitents will forget his prayers,” the conference stated in its memorial for Folsom. “In conversation or preaching he faltered or hesitated, but in prayer his words flowed with a rythm [sic], fluency and an earnestness which brought the power of God upon the penitents.”44 Prayer was a central component of Folsom’s ministry. His wife recalled that he regularly spent hours on his knees in prayer, and in time, a legend grew among Choctaw Methodists that the grass along the old Fort Towson Road did not grow in areas where Folsom had knelt in prayer. While white ministers and congregants wanted sermons grounded in complexities of doctrine as interpreted by Southern Methodist dogma, Folsom’s emphasis on prayer offered his Native audience an avenue to Rebuilding the Mission · 67

Christianity that focused on an individual’s performance and was more closely related to the confessional nature of Native beliefs.45 One verse Folsom frequently used in sermons was 1 Timothy 2:8, which implored “men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger or disputing.”46 Preaching this message for over forty years at churches throughout the Choctaw Nation and to Native students at IMC boarding schools, Folsom stressed the interactivity of Christianity and the power of the individual. Prayer was an obvious sign of a Christian commitment but also a personal exercise largely outside the direct control of white ministers. “I exhorted them to spend the evening in secret prayer alone,” Folsom wrote in his diary after one service in 1859. “More than half of the congregation went to secret prayer meeting. I hear just now in every direction, praying and weeping for mercy.”47 One explanation for Folsom’s success was that he put the power of Christianity into the hands of individuals rather than making them casual recipients of a preacher’s message. Less concerned with the specifics of doctrine, Indians focused more on Christianity’s ability to speak to their particular needs. Connecting biblical principles like baptism or prayer with already-established Native practices, instead of enforcing difficult- to- understand alien doctrine, eased the transition for individuals into a Christian society while respecting the duality of being both Native and Christian. For whites, this approach also condoned certain Native practices and demonstrated that Indian converts did not shed their Native identity once they became Christian.48 Folsom’s preaching style and its reception by his white contemporaries was indicative of the differences between the IMC’s Indian and white members, a divide that grew throughout the postwar decades and became noticeable to most observers. Mary Cole, a former slave who attended a Choctaw Methodist church near Skullyville in her younger days, noted that Choctaws’ “methods of worship were peculiar and different” from whites. Cole described Skullyville’s Choctaw church as a small building and brush arbor that had singing, preaching, and praying “all done in the Choctaw language.” While blacks originally attended services alongside Choctaws, Cole stated that when overcrowding became an issue, Choc- taws closed ranks and made blacks hold separate services later in the day so as not to conflict with their own.49 Indian communities’ growing use of camp meetings, especially as the practice declined among mainstream white Methodist communities by the turn of the century, was another reminder of the different cultures within the IMC. Camp meetings held by Native congregations, whether 68 · Chapter Two

Choctaw, Cherokee, or Creek, became intertribal gatherings or services for extended kinship networks, featuring highly emotional events lasting for days at a time. “The fervor of song and prayer, and the entire atmosphere of the place, impresses you with the fact that you are among a devoutly religious people,” one visitor wrote in Our Brother in Red after visiting a camp meeting of more than four hundred full-blood Chicka- saws. But spectators also pointed out the Native influence in these camp meetings as seen in the language, song, and funeral customs being practiced. Isaac John, secretary of the Board of Missions, visited a Creek camp meeting in the late 1880s and described a mix of Indian culture and elements of a more traditional Southern Methodist past: “Their services, conducted by native preachers, were in their native language, but their tunes were almost as familiar as the negro melodies that in other days we so often heard on Methodist camp-grounds in the South,” John wrote. Not every observer shared John’s benign assessment of Indian camp meetings or considered the Native influence a positive aspect of Indian congregations. Milton Clark saw too much veneration of the dead at Creek and Seminole camp meetings and not enough emphasis on reaching the living. Funeral sermons by Indian ministers, he complained, stressed the Native aspects of the deceased’s life as opposed to spending time trying to reach the living with a Christian message, and he saw no reason why the IMC’s Native preachers should preside over a non-Christian Indian’s funeral.50 More troublesome than the perseverance of Indian culture in the conference was the power Indian communities held over the IMC’s work. Because it operated in Indian Territory, the IMC had to navigate the tricky slope of Indian authority and federal oversight. The 1866 reconstruction treaties between the federal government and the Five Tribes allowed missionaries in the region, but these treaties did not bar the Five Tribes’ various national councils from asserting control over specific aspects of missionary work. In 1882, the IMC’s superintendent of the Harrell Inter- national Institute in Muskogee, Theodore Brewer, acknowledged this fact when he asked the principal chief of the Muscogee Nation for “official permission” to start a church newspaper. Since the newspaper would be associated with the school, and since concerns involving the school’s management required the consent of the Creek Council, Brewer recognized the need for their approval. These restrictions infuriated some white officials, who believed that Indian governments should have no right to impede the IMC’s work. “I was surprised and humiliated,” Edwin Shapard wrote after one such dispute, “when I read an editorial in a paper edited by Rebuilding the Mission · 69 an Indian of intelligence, containing the expression that a Mission Board had been allowed to exercise its office.”51 The conflict between the IMC’s objectives and the authority of Indian governments was evident in debates over land and contract schools, both of which were key elements in the IMC’s twin goals of Indian assimilation and white legitimacy. With church property key to establishing its presence, the IMC needed to resolve questions over land holdings with national councils and the federal government before it could make any legal claims. The IMC’s insistence on building permanent structures to ensure legitimacy made it dependent on Indian governments for approval and on Indian members for help. To acquire land and property, the IMC typically petitioned the federal government and/or one of the Five Tribes’ governments before proceeding. For instance, when the IMC asked the Creek Council for permission to build a church in Muskogee, the council protected its interests by insisting that the church’s board of trustees be Creek citizens. In another case two years later, the council gave the IMC land for a new school one-half mile from the Muskogee depot, where the school would provide the least amount of interference with the Creek town and Creek community.52 The situation was much the same in the Cherokee Nation. Article 14 of the 1866 Reconstruction Treaty gave religious organizations the “right to the use and occupancy of a quantity of land not exceeding one hundred and sixty acres . . . for missionary or educational purposes.” While this article forced Cherokees to accept missionary efforts, it also required the Cherokee Council’s consent if the land was later sold. Furthermore, the treaty stipulated that any profits from the sale be reinvested in the organization’s missionary work in the Cherokee Nation. To simplify the process of navigating these treaty provisions, the IMC specifically drew on its Indian members to petition the council on its behalf, such as in 1874 when the council granted one town lot in Tahlequah for a church to IMC members and Cherokee citizens Joseph Thompson, Levi Keys, and Richard Half Breed.53 Chafing at the need to always placate the Cherokee Council, the IMC avoided its input as much as possible. In November 1886, the council gave the IMC 160 acres for a school near Vinita. According to the bill autho- rizing the project, Principal Chief Dennis Bushyhead appointed a three- person committee to work alongside the IMC’s three representatives and choose a site that would not “interfere with the rights of any Cherokee citizen nor public reservation.”54 When a March 1887 meeting between the Cherokee and IMC representatives failed to produce an agreeable 70 · Chapter Two location, three members, Theodore Brewer, John Bryce, and F. M. Mus- grove, wrote to Bushyhead asking for clarification of the law. The men wanted to know if only Cherokee members could make the decision for a school site, to which Bushyhead replied that it was to be a majority decision of the six-person committee. The next month, when two Cherokee members were unable to attend, the majority selected 160 acres on the north side of Vinita, next to the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad’s right-of- way, land described by the editor of the Indian Chieftain as “one of the most beautiful plats of ground in the Cherokee nation.” John Chambers, one of the absent Cherokee members, later complained to Principal Chief Joel Mayes about the IMC’s actions but conceded that a majority of the men voted in favor of the land and there was little they could do.55 As with land grants, contract schools provided another source of conflict between the IMC and Indian governments. Making this situation more complicated was the role played by the national church organizations, which often bankrolled these operations and participated in contract negotiations. Though mission schools had existed among the Five Tribes prior to the Civil War, the postwar period saw these schools spread throughout Indian Territory. In most agreements between an Indian nation and an individual denomination, church officials managed the day-to-day operation of the school while Indian councils provided students, funds, and other necessary items. The contract between the Chickasaw Nation and the Board of Missions was representative of these types of agreements. Under an arrangement approved in 1888 for the Collins Institute, the Chickasaw Nation provided land, property, desks, books, beds, and farm tools as well as paying the board three thousand dollars a year for thirty students. In return, the board appointed a superintendent to oversee educational matters and the school’s operation, which included hiring teachers and other personnel. The involvement of a national organization, in this case the Board of Mis- sions, was not unusual in school contracts during this era, but it did illustrate the additional layer of bureaucracy that Indian schools maneuvered. The national organization was in charge of selecting a superintendent, which out of practical concerns would most likely be a minister familiar with the local community. Therefore, the agreement between the board and the Chicka- saw Nation was an arrangement in which the superintendent of a contract school reported regularly to both the IMC and the board, while interacting with and depending on an Indian nation for basic operational needs.56 At various times, the IMC operated schools among each of the Five Tribes. Schools such as New Hope Seminary in the Choctaw Nation, the Seminole Academy in the Seminole Nation, and the Asbury Manual Rebuilding the Mission · 71

Labor School in the Muscogee Nation became centerpieces in the IMC’s desire to train a generation of Indian converts and a valuable tool in conference plans for the territory’s future. The IMC Committee on Education’s 1873 report encouraged the conference “to be more interested in, awake to, and identified with the subject of a sanctified education.” Writing in Our Brother in Red in 1884, the newspaper’s editors, Theodore Brewer and Joseph Thompson, criticized IMC members who were reluctant to support these schools and challenged the conference to be more forward-looking than Indians. “When we want a preacher, we draw from the older Con- ferences, instead of raising them, up here,” the pair wrote. “The policy of some of the [Indian] Nations is to raise up and educate their own teachers; is the Church to be behind the Nation?”57 The real concern for the IMC was not that contract schools existed, but why they existed. For the IMC, a “Christian education” based on the foundations of white culture was the key. Like other boarding schools of the era, the IMC’s schools stressed assimilation to white society by ban- ning disruptive elements of Indian culture, teaching an English-based curriculum, and providing manual labor training with farm labor for boys and domestic skills for girls. Still, religious training remained central to the IMC’s educational efforts, even if their students were unfamiliar with Methodist theology. New Hope Seminary’s superintendent stated, “Every child is furnished with a bible, is required to attend prayers, sabbath school and preaching. Morning & night we collect in the school room for prayers.”58 The superintendent of Asbury said, “We are seeking by preaching of the gospel and regular sabbath school instruction, to impress them with religious truth. . . . In our work however we find it requires ‘precept- upon- precept, precept-upon-precept; line-upon-line, line-upon-line.’ ”59 As the conference also learned, some of their students lacked more than just biblical knowledge. Richard Audd, an employee at Asbury Manual Labor School, remembered that “the greater number of the students were from an environment of semi-savagery and the first duty was to teach them the rudiments of civilization.”60 Equally important to religious education, the IMC viewed contract schools as bases for church expansion in both a physical and a spiritual sense. An 1873 Choctaw Council resolution transferred Fort Coffee to the IMC- run New Hope Seminary and allowed its superintendent to use the fort for school purposes. In another case, the conference’s Eufaula church attributed its origins to the re-founding of the Asbury Manual Labor School in 1847. As Eufaula grew in commercial importance after the war, the school and church attracted a larger population of mixed-blood Creek 72 · Chapter Two elites and whites who had intermarried into the tribe. When Theodore Brewer arrived in 1874, he separated the church from the school and moved it into downtown Eufaula. The prosperous congregation quickly established the church as self-supporting.61 Unsurprisingly, Indians had their own ideas about school operations that angered their denominational partners. Indian nations wanted the basic educational value that schools provided rather than the religious training that the IMC desired, and these nations were not shy in expressing this fact to school officials. In 1881, New Hope Seminary’s superintendent believed that Jackson McCurtain, principal chief of the Choctaw Nation, interfered with his management, a problem the superintendent claimed would “embarrass the school in the future.”62 In 1873, Creek trustees of the Asbury Manual Labor School complained that students worked too many hours in the field, while the superintendent, in return, blamed the Creek Council for the problem. “I find it an impossibility to run the school with less labor at the low price of 70 dollars per scholar, which the nation pays,” he responded.63 A year later, the superintendent blamed the school’s continuing struggles on the Creek Council’s insistence that the school be coeducational. Five years later, the IMC complained that Creeks discrim- inated against the conference by sending their best male students to other schools. Instead of more advanced students, Creeks sent their younger children, mostly between the ages of seven and nine, to Asbury for rudi- mentary training. These younger students, the superintendent claimed, did not know basic standards of education like the English alphabet and proved more difficult to educate.64 There was also evidence that someone in the community had bigger problems with Asbury. In September 1881, a suspicious fire destroyed several buildings on campus, and the superintendent’s initial report acknowledged that a student might have started the blaze. Just weeks later, a second fire completely destroyed the school. For several more years, Asbury limped along under IMC control until 1887, when another fire destroyed the rebuilt school, and the superintendent reported, “The trustees and the Chief of the Nation placed a different construction upon the contract from my own construction, and refused to pay to me the full amount appropriated by the Nation.”65 By the 1880s, Indian “interference” ended the contract school system as the Five Tribes established national schools and neighborhood schools. The IMC considered this change an opportunity to focus on its own needs rather than the needs of an Indian nation, which was the explanation given by the Seminole Academy’s superintendent after the Seminoles ended their contract with IMC in 1887. The IMC justified this shift in focus by claiming Rebuilding the Mission · 73 that Indian influence over the boarding schools “would not allow that freedom and firmness of discipline essential to their proper management.”66 IMC officials argued that they could funnel money previously spent on contract schools toward projects that helped the conference more directly, preferably toward new schools operated solely by the IMC that would “have secured greater and better ends.”67 An added bonus to these new schools, they noted, was the fact that white Southern Methodist children, previously banned from contract schools, could attend. Keeping white children from attending contract schools had previously created problems for the IMC, such as in 1873 when the conference’s newly assigned superintendent to Asbury quit once he discovered that he could not admit his own children. “There are almost as many children of Methodist preachers engaged in this work, who are suffering for the want of an education,” one critic wrote, “as there are children of natives educated in these contract schools.”68 While the IMC criticized Indian control over the contract school system and discussed its end as a potential boon to the conference, the conference avoided mentioning other, less-favorable reasons that Indian governments gave for terminating contracts. Mismanagement by church officials was a key reason for the Choctaw Nation’s decision to take full control over New Hope Seminary. The IMC had assumed management of New Hope Seminary in 1871, with the Choctaw Council paying for building costs in addition to yearly appropriations. In October 1884, the IMC asked the Choctaw Council to reimburse the conference $2,757 that it had paid for new buildings, which the council agreed to do. A year later, the council discovered that the superintendent of the school, E. A. Gray, had resubmit- ted $805 from the previous amount for reimbursement, which the council considered a “deliberate intention of perpetuating a fraud upon the Choc- taw Nation.”69 Gray’s theft led the council to negotiate an end to New Hope’s contract with the Board of Missions. Hoping to avoid this, Bishop Robert Hargrove replaced Gray in August 1885 with J. J. Methvin, a Geor- gian minister fresh to Indian Territory, who immediately tried to renegoti- ate the contract with the council.70 The board would support a renewal of the agreement, it told Methvin, only if the contract “continue[d] . . . under the present safe gaurds [sic],” which included church control over superintendent, teacher, and staff appointments. The council rejected this offer (a sensible decision considering the previous church-appointed superintendent had fleeced the council) and passed a resolution calling for the principal chief of the Choctaw Nation to appoint a new superintendent. In October 1886, New Hope Seminary officially passed out of the IMC’s control and back into Choctaw hands.71 74 · Chapter Two

How the IMC and the Choctaw Nation handled the closing of New Hope was symptomatic of the conference’s relationship with its Indian congregations by the late 1880s. For the IMC, Indian interference hampered its efforts at the school and restricted its freedom to engage in missionary work as it saw fit. To achieve the necessary results, whether through an educated ministry or a self-supporting congregation, IMC officials needed to exert more control over the conference. The reluctance of Indian congregations to assimilate as the conference expected only dragged the IMC down as a whole, especially when comparing it to other Southern Method- ist conferences. Indians held the IMC back, conference officials felt, and this belief would determine the IMC’s future direction. What the IMC did not mention were the other reasons for ending New Hope’s contract. Ideas of Indian autonomy, ways to meet Indian needs in accordance with their wishes, and the conference’s own missteps were overlooked by the IMC but not by Indians. Indian officials had asserted their own plans over Southern Methodist–run schools, much to the white man’s chagrin. In the early days, Indian Territory required concessions from organized denominations like the Southern Methodist Church, and, as a result, the IMC accepted Indian influence as a requirement of the work. But once the postwar needs for rebuilding diminished, and the white population grew in the 1870s and 1880s, Indian autonomy became an obstacle to the IMC. White congregations, who were now gaining influence in the conference, defined their own relationship and legitimacy in the larger national church based on the degree to which Indians assimilated to mainstream American society and Southern Methodism. Remaining as a mission focused on Indian communities was no longer tenable for the Indian Mission Conference. Since the conference’s Indian members had accepted Christianity and Southern Methodism, however imperfect or different from the mainstream their practice may be, IMC officials considered them to be on the path to civilization. From the conference’s perspective, these converts symbolized the IMC’s success over the previous decades and stood in stark contrast to those Indians who rejected the white society developing around them. That they practiced Southern Methodism in a way that also provided room for Indian culture would be deemphasized or ignored by the IMC, though it required the conference to rethink its relationship with its Indian brethren. How the conference addressed this problem took on added importance after the land run in 1889. chapter three

Expanding the Mission

The Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Agency after 1887

In the late 1880s, the national church’s missionary impulse pushed the IMC into a new field, even as forces within the conference debated Indian missions altogether. For years, the IMC had focused on the Five Tribes and expended little energy to reach out to new Indian tribes, save for neighboring groups of Delawares or Shawnees who might attend an intertribal camp meeting. But postwar advances meant that the realities of the frontier that had restricted the IMC to eastern Indian Territory in the 1840s no longer existed in the 1880s. As a result, some officials argued that the IMC could no longer be complacent in its missionary efforts. This new urge took hold in Bishop Charles Galloway, who directed the IMC in 1887 to reach out to the surrounding Native tribes, in particular Kiowa and Comanche communities living in southwestern Indian Territory. For some observers, especially those from the national church with only a vague understanding of Indian society, Plains tribes like Kio- was and Comanches were part of the same generic “Indian” construct as Cherokees or Choctaws. But unlike the Five Tribes, who, for the time being, maintained their own government and autonomy, Plains Indians were more recent immigrants to the territory, bristling under reservation life. Called “the terrors of the plains” by their Indian agent in 1888, Kiowas and Comanches lacked the decades of interaction with South- ern Methodism and white society that the Five Tribes had, and they did not have a large and settled population that a church could draw on for support.1 Kiowa and Comanche missionary work presented some of the same challenges as the Five Tribes’ full-blood communities, in addition

75 76 · Chapter Three to introducing a new learning curve of cultures, languages, histories, and government relations. Initially, the IMC’s work in southwestern Indian Territory began in much the same way as its previous work with the Five Tribes. The conference used a mission school as a base of operations, employed white missionaries to visit Indian camps, pressured Indians to assimilate to Southern Methodist ways and white culture, and used Native converts to translate and promote the message. The major difference was the IMC’s changing attitude toward the role of Indian missions. The Indian Territory that existed in the 1840s at the edge of a frontier had become the central United States, where whites demanded their equality as part of an “Ameri- can” nation. Now, conference officials who counted success in the number of converts expected quicker results than what missionaries produced, and they wanted it done with less effort than what the IMC had expended on the Five Tribes. What the IMC had achieved over the previous fifty years, it wanted done in five. Worse still to the IMC’s white members, this new Indian work threatened its push for legitimacy in the national church. Expanding Indian missions to the Plains Indians reinforced its identity as “Indian” and “mission,” further widening the gap between the IMC and mainstream Southern Methodist society. Much of the IMC’s work among Kiowas, Comanches, and other nearby tribes grew in some way from the efforts of J. J. Methvin. With his school, the Methvin Institute, establishing a Southern Methodist presence at the Kiowa- Comanche-Apache (KCA) Agency in Anadarko, Methvin spent more than fifty years ministering to the region’s Indian and white congregations. Though other Southern Methodist missionaries joined him, Methvin was the most active spokesman for Kiowa and Comanche members to the conference, the national church, and the public at large. Yet Methvin represented only a small minority of white missionaries. Simply put, most missionaries did not spend more than fifty years working in a mission field; instead, most left after a short period or shifted their work to nearby white communities who “needed them more.” Taken another way, rather than reinforce the standard narrative of the “self-less missionary,” Methvin’s story reveals why most missionaries failed and how whites eventually dominated what was supposedly an “Indian mission.” Methvin’s personal beliefs were clear. He believed in the superiority of a Southern Methodist lifestyle and saw many, many faults in aspects of Native culture coursing through Kiowa and Comanche communities. Like others who promoted an assimilationist agenda, he concentrated on “uplifting” Indians into white society and scoffed at the idea of a white Expanding the Mission · 77 man “going Indian,” and he was especially critical of practices, Indian or otherwise, that he believed were sinful. But, as he once wrote in his journal, Jesus Christ “becomes all things to all men. He becomes an Indian to save Indians[.] He becomes an African or Chinaman to save Africans and Chinamen.”2 He could be outspoken about and intolerant of customs that he felt contradicted Christianity or Southern Methodism, yet support- ive of Indian members and how they shaped Christianity, even if they incorporated aspects of their own culture in the process. This support for Native members could put him at odds with conference officials. Methvin recognized the importance that Christian Indians played in the missionary process, and he believed that achieving lasting change took time, a position at odds with the conference’s own evolving attitude at the turn of the century. What Methvin learned and, more important, what he accepted was the need for Indians to spread Christianity in their own way. This approach acknowledged that Indians would influence Southern Methodism if it took hold in their communities. Just as with the Five Tribes, Native converts were the most effective translators of the Southern Methodist message, and he recognized that individuals like Andres Martinez and Kicking Bird were integral to his work. Methvin cultivated ties with influential individuals within a tribe, connecting himself to Kiowa families like the Quoetones and Horses, for example, and he was an outspoken critic of mistreatment of Indians by the government and other whites. Ultimately, he used his school to create a generation of Southern Methodist Indians that would affect and lead the mission in the early twentieth century. In another era, Methvin and his fellow ministers might have been received more warmly by IMC members. But in the 1890s, their work represented a step back for the conference’s twin goals of legitimacy and assimilation. Newly immigrated white members scoffed at Indian missions in general as they set about creating their mainstream American communities, while longtime missionaries among the Five Tribes considered their Indian congregations more worthy of assistance than fledgling churches among the Plains Indians. Expansion into western Indian Territory created more diversity in a conference remaking itself into the mold of mainstream society.

The first step in the IMC’s expansion into southwestern Indian Territory was the national church’s election in 1886 of Charles Galloway to the epis- copacy. Within the Southern Methodist Church, the College of Bishops represented the leadership of the church and held great influence over 78 · Chapter Three

Southern Methodism as a whole. Bishops usually came from other high- profile church positions, such as administrators of organizations like the Board of Missions or prominent ministers from large Southern Methodist congregations, and they were almost entirely from the Deep South like Galloway, who hailed from Mississippi. Central to the bishop’s responsibilities was providing leadership to his appointed conferences. Because bishops coveted conferences in the Deep South due to their prestige and ease of travel, and since seniority determined conference appointments, newly elected bishops like Galloway received appointments on the edge of mainstream Southern Methodist society, like the Indian Mission Confer- ence. Galloway, who earned the moniker the Missionary Bishop, embraced his new position and quickly implemented an administrative structure required of a proper Southern Methodist conference. At his first annual meeting with the IMC in October 1886, he enforced a rule restricting ministers to four years in one assignment. This policy change meant that the itinerant underpinnings of the Methodist ministry common in other conferences would be strictly applied to the IMC. The secretary of the annual meeting confirmed that Galloway’s attempts to bring the IMC in line with other southern conferences resulted in “more changes than ever before” and that “[s]ome who had felt they were fixtures were changed.”3 In June 1887, Galloway spent two weeks in Indian Territory and visited the International Indian Council in Eufaula. Here Galloway met Indians from across the region, including his first real encounter with Plains Indians. “It is impossible to look into the faces of you of the Civi- lized Nations,” Galloway spoke as he addressed representatives of the Five Tribes, “and then into those of our brethren of the plains and not realize the blessed results that follow the teaching of the religion of Jesus Christ.”4 For the church’s national newspaper, the Christian Advocate, Galloway recounted his visit for a broader audience. Those Indians, Galloway stated, “ought to stir the missionary fire of the Church everywhere.” The bishop recalled how an elderly Kiowa named Poor Buffalo specifically asked for Christian missionaries to come to their camps. Missionaries “cannot make much of us old Indians,” Poor Buffalo told Galloway, “but much good might be done with the young.”5 Galloway interpreted these comments as a plea from a non-Christian for help and an opportunity for Southern Methodists to carry forth the Pauline mission of evangelism to an eager population. In his address to the council, the bishop stated how affected he was by the plight of the Plains Indians and confessed that “the Indian cause is nearer my heart now than ever before” as he pledged the support of the national church. “As one of the chief pastors of the Methodist Expanding the Mission · 79

Episcopal Church, South, I bring you the greetings of more than a million members, and assure you of their desire for your prosperity and advance- ment, and their wish to help you as far as possible,” Galloway said.6 The editor of the Christian Advocate understood the bishop’s thoughts when he wrote that Galloway’s “missionary heart kindles whenever he gets out among the Indians.”7 While Galloway seized on the request for missionaries, he ignored aspects of Poor Buffalo’s address that hinted at a spiritual view where Christianity existed alongside Native beliefs. For Poor Buffalo, the education that missionaries provided might heal the wounds from white society’s treatment of the Indian. “Don’t know much about the great Father above, but believe in his existence,” Poor Buffalo told the bishop and others at the council. “I think he must be displeased with the treatment the Indian is receiving from his white brother.” According to Poor Buffalo, each Indian tribe along with white society had its own separate god whom it should not dishonor in any way. “But when a tribe does wrong,” he told Gallo- way, “its god becomes displeased at it, especially because the other gods of other nations see his disgrace.” In his opinion, Christian missionaries could help whites atone for their mistreatment of Indians while at the same time honoring their own god. Poor Buffalo hoped that missionaries would bring Kiowas benefits like education, but he did not think Christi- anity would completely replace Kiowa beliefs. Kiowa “gods” were already “pleased,” Poor Buffalo said, “because [Kiowas] are trying to do right and keep peace.”8 Invigorated by his experience at the International Indian Council, Gal- loway assigned missionaries to two new fields that fall at the conference’s annual meeting. C. S. Jones, an experienced missionary formerly working with Cherokees, arrived at his new assignment at the Sac and Fox Agency, near the western border of the Cherokee Nation, in November 1887. At first, Jones appeared optimistic that the Indians would welcome his work, but the agency’s lack of housing placed an additional hardship on his family, and his declining health took a toll on his efforts. After Jones died from tuberculosis in June 1889, the IMC abandoned the field.9 While the IMC’s Sac and Fox mission died with Jones, its Kiowa and Comanche efforts, the second field Galloway opened, eventually became the church’s stronghold in the region. Little about this success, however, seemed apparent in 1887. Though factions within the tribes moved to reservation lands after signing the Medicine Lodge Treaty in 1867, other Kiowas and Comanches resisted the federal government’s policies and continued raiding white settlements for several more years. It was not until 80 · Chapter Three the end of the Red River War in 1875 that these defiant bands capitulated and permanently resettled on the KCA Agency in southwestern Indian Territory. Even so, tensions remained high, and negative perceptions of both tribes permeated agent’s reports. In 1886, the KCA agent, Jesse Lee Hall, accused Kiowa leader Sun Boy of destroying crops and fences to impede assimilation, and he called Comanches “the most cunning, blood- thirsty, and warlike of all the plains Indians.”10 On the KCA Agency, Kiowas and Comanches established their settlements far from each other, with most Comanche communities located near Fort Sill and the majority of Kiowa camps nearly forty miles to the north, close to the agency’s headquarters at Anadarko. This distance not only complicated the work of agency employees, but also explained why missionaries struggled to gain a toehold in the decades after the Medicine Lodge Treaty. Lawrie Tatum, an Iowa Quaker, served as the KCA agent during President Grant’s peace policy of the 1870s, but he spent more of his time negotiating for the release of white captives than ministering to the Indians, and he resigned in 1873. In early 1881, H. S. P. Ashby, a Southern Methodist from the Northwest Texas Conference, arrived near Fort Sill and conducted missionary efforts with the Board of Missions’ approval. Health problems kept Ashby from traveling, and he spent most of his time preaching to the Indians near the fort before leaving the region altogether the following spring. Two years later, J. B. Wicks, an Episcopal minister, arrived in Anadarko and built a small church in town. But instead of reaching out to the Indian camps, Wicks focused on the agency’s personnel and its small white population. Wicks’s time in the field would be short, too, and he quickly moved to eastern Indian Territory.11 Heeding Galloway’s call for missionaries to the Plains Indians, the IMC asked Methvin, who was concluding his business as superintendent of the Seminole Academy in Sasakwa, to make a survey of the field. Traveling with his brother-in-law, W. S. Beall, Methvin journeyed west along the Canadian River, encountering Cheyennes and Arapahos camped along the southern banks before passing through the Wichita Reservation en route to Anadarko. Except for a Mennonite school among the Cheyenne and a Baptist church on the Wichita Reservation, Methvin “found a field of need where we could expend our resources of men and means without conflicting with other churches or overlapping the work of other organizations.”12 In his report to Galloway and the Board of Missions, Methvin stated that missionary work could thrive among the Plains Indians, but only with a young preacher dedicated to the ministry. Western Indian Ter- ritory was a large and sparsely populated mission field, without a railroad Expanding the Mission · 81 or telegraph line, alienating it from eastern communities as well as from the national church. The field required extensive travel to reach Indian camps, Methvin argued, and demanded someone younger, unencumbered by familial responsibilities, unlike him, a married man with a preg- nant wife and four children. At the Muskogee District Conference in July 1887, Methvin anticipated that Indian ministers would open the field, especially after David Berryhill, a Creek minister, indicated his willing- ness. “Brother Berryhill, a full-blood Indian, says he is ready to go to these Western tribes,” Methvin wrote. “How it moved our hearts when he said this, and I prayed God to give us many fully consecrated and competent Indian preachers for this Western work.”13 For unclear reasons, the IMC did not send Berryhill or any other Indian preacher, and instead appointed Methvin as “Missionary to the Western Tribes” at its annual conference in October 1887. Little in Methvin’s background indicated that he could be successful as a missionary, much less one to Indians in the remote outpost of Anadarko. Born in Georgia in 1846, Methvin was a Confederate veteran and trained lawyer before entering the ministry in 1871, after which he spent much time teaching at various church- run schools. Growing tired of local politics and denominational issues affecting church schools in Georgia, Methvin requested a transfer to Indian Territory, where he was originally assigned to superintend New Hope Seminary in the Choctaw Nation. That school closed within a year, and his second assignment, the Seminole Academy, also closed soon after his arrival. When he left for Anadarko in November 1887 to assume his new position, Methvin was a 115-pound, forty-year-old missionary with more experience closing mission fields than opening new ones. Still, he remained optimistic that his efforts would produce needed fruits for the conference. “We will raise the banner of the cross,” Methvin wrote at the start of his missionary work, “and capture these Indians for the Lord.”14 Methvin embraced his new appointment and immediately moved his family to Anadarko in November 1887. From a logistical point of view, Anadarko’s status as KCA agency headquarters seemed the ideal base for Methvin’s operations because the small town provided constant access to government officials as well as to the surrounding Indian communities. But from a practical perspective, Methvin also found a place lacking in needed facilities and appropriate government personnel. The agency had a saw mill, a blacksmith, and a commissary, though the absence of any barns or stables meant that the livestock, grain, and feed were exposed to the weather. Government employees, Methvin complained, worried more about political patronage than Indian affairs, and within his first three 82 · Chapter Three

Figure 5. J. J. Methvin (Virgil Robbins Collection, Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society). years in town, the agency had three different Indian agents. “There were some exceptionally excellent characters among them,” Methvin wrote of agency personnel during this time, “but as a rule it was a crude and crusty crowd.”15 Perhaps the biggest problem looming over the agency was the abun- dance of alcohol. Since the early days of Indian Territory, the illegal liquor trade had plagued much of the region, and it only worsened in the post– Civil War decades, with the lure of large profits and too few U.S. marshals to stop it. Following the creation of a separate territory in 1890, officials in Oklahoma Territory legalized liquor, even though temperance remained in effect in Indian Territory. As a result, sandbar saloons on the Canadian River, which served as the boundary between the two territories, along Expanding the Mission · 83 with outposts in nearby Texas provided ample alcohol to those in the western half of the region. At the KCA Agency, liquor problems and fraud led the federal government to send a special agent in 1887 to investigate. Look- ing into charges of “dishonesty, drunkenness, and various other acts of mis- conduct” by the previous agent, Jesse Lee Hall, Eugene White discovered a nest of drunks colluding with beef distributors and cattlemen to defraud both the federal government and Indian tribes. In his 1888 report to the Indian Office, White stated that liquor infested the entire reservation and “even more so at the agency than elsewhere. The white man who did not drink was the exception.” Methvin’s own observations echoed White’s. The agency clerks were frequent drinkers, he noted, and the superintendent of one of the government schools was suspended for drunkenness, while another employee suffered from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a night of carousing.16 Methvin’s initial impressions of the Indians around Anadarko were equally critical as his thoughts about the agency’s personnel. “Here we began our work with as crude a people as ever roamed over their native soil,” he recalled.17 The KCA Agency served both the Wichita Reservation to the north and the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation to the south, where Methvin found Indians from “ten or twelve tribes in all” who “hung around the Agency most of the time waiting for the next issue of beef and other supplies from the commissary.”18 The local agent, already soured on the prospect of missionary work, told Methvin that he “would have to knock them in the head before [he] could preach to them and teach them.”19 Methvin’s optimism notwithstanding, the culture he encountered was very different from his own. Prior to the reservation era, Kiowas and Comanches had been horse-dependent peoples who dominated the southern plains and relied on the bison for sustenance, cultural traditions, and economic needs. The bison’s decline on the plains, coupled with growing pressures from an expanding United States, turned the 1870s and 1880s into a tumultuous period that disrupted religious and cultural practices for both tribes. Whites who encountered these Indians in the late nineteenth century discovered communities transitioning from the nomadic lifestyle to the forced assimilation agenda of missionaries and government officials. Socially, Kiowas and Comanches organized themselves around small kinship units, with political power resting with individual bands. Men typically joined various societies within the tribe, with the growth of military societies during this era one example of Kiowas and Comanches preserving older customs of prereservation life. Practices seen as anti-Christian in the eyes of whites, such as ritual dances, peyote use, and polygyny, only 84 · Chapter Three distanced Kiowas and Comanches further from the mainstream of white society.20 When he visited neighboring Kiowas and Comanches, Methvin found cosmologies drastically different from his own. At the beginning of his camp work in 1888, Methvin did not understand Native traditions and customs, especially those related to social structures, and he viewed Indian religious practices as nothing but superstitions and paganism. Both Kiowa and Comanche spiritual beliefs centered on an individual’s connection to power, which involved adhering to proper rituals and practices to maintain this power. For Comanches, individuals received their power, or puha, through supernatural methods, like a vision quest or by transferring power from another person, perhaps through inheritance. For Kiowas, the dwdw was the larger spiritual power that embodied all elements of the universe, including the sun, earth, environment, and animals. Attaining this power, largely as a curing or war power, brought prestige and importance to an individual Kiowa. Methvin, however, saw more ominous characteristics in the dwdw and puha. These “perversions of the religious instinct” led to prostitution, suicide, and murder and “contributed to the perverted emo- tion of their savage natures.”21 In the 1880s and 1890s, Christian missionaries found Kiowa society already undergoing a period of great religious change and turmoil. Like other Plains Indians, Kiowas held a kado, or sun dance, which featured the bison as a central component. These dances, which were held in the summer and included public display of the sacred taime bundle as a symbol for the sun, unified the tribe by offering individuals a chance to pray for the future health and well-being of its members. But the decline of the bison on the southern plains led to a similar decline in the sun dance because, as several Kiowa pictorial calendars documented, the taime priest could not find a suitable animal. Kiowas held their last sun dance in 1887, and the federal government banned the practice after 1890, weakening a fundamental aspect of Kiowa culture.22 In this atmosphere of spiritual disruption, Methvin interpreted Kiowa actions as proof of their lack of morality, an observation that was indicative of his own ethnocentrism and his belief in the superiority of Christian- ity. What latter-day observers might note were methods of social control concerning issues of marriage or property, or the struggles of a culture in crisis, Methvin could only interpret through a narrow prism defined by white society and his own personal Christian beliefs. “Successful theft was so much gain,” he wrote. “Murder constituted a hero, adultery but a grati- fication with no thought of wrong, and women little more than a brute for Expanding the Mission · 85 man’s lustful use.” Even James Mooney, the noted ethnologist who later earned Methvin’s enmity, considered Kiowas “deficient” in moral character. “They have the savage virtue of bravery . . . but as a people they have less of honor, gratitude, and general reliability than perhaps any other tribe of the plains,” he wrote in an 1893 report. Methvin understood these Kiowa traits strictly in Christian terms, which enforced the “fallenness” of mankind. “There was no sense of sin,” he wrote, “and therefore no crimes nor criminals among them, for the moral sense had not been sufficiently developed to distinguish between right and wrong, or count any thing as a crime.”23 By focusing on an individual’s sin, Methvin and other missionaries wanted to reorient Kiowa society along an axis of Christian morality. Methvin’s cultural arrogance toward Indians was rooted in his belief in the absence of “grace” in a non-Christian’s life. Though he clearly derided Indian customs he viewed as anti-Christian, so too did he attack similar elements in white society, like gambling and alcohol. During one of his first services in the area in early 1888, he preached before a Cheyenne congregation on “the sinfullness [sic] of the heart and the actual sins of the people.” In the middle of the sermon, Wolf Face, a Cheyenne chief, pointed at another chief, White Antelope, and laughed. Methvin believed that Wolf Face was applying the minister’s message and ridiculing White Antelope for sins he had committed the day before. “This made me think that human nature is the same the world over and in all races,” he wrote of the event. For all the sins he saw in Indian culture, Methvin felt that it was a similar situation experienced by non-Christians throughout society. The Indian may be the “wild savage of the plains,” he thought, but this made him no different from non-believing whites, because “human nature is the same in all.” “[W]ithout grace,” Methvin believed, “the white man is no better than the Indian.”24 From the Kiowa perspective, similarities existed between Christianity and their own Native practices, though missionaries were loath to make any comparisons themselves. Kiowa terms for God (Daw-k’ ee) and Jesus (Daw- k’ yah-ee), for instance, could be connected to their concept of dwdw, thereby introducing perceptions of Jesus as a positive power, which appealed directly to the Kiowas. In other instances, Kiowas were puzzled when they found missionaries trying to introduce concepts already fundamental in their society. As Alice Apekum Zenella, a relative of the Kiowa chief Stumbling Bear, related, missionaries tried to teach Indians how to pray, even though “we already knew how.” Robert Pinezaddleby, Stum- bling Bear’s great-grandson and later a prominent Methodist minister in the twentieth century, credited the “Old Ones” and their focus on dwdw, 86 · Chapter Three and not Christian missionaries, with passing along the importance of daily prayer to younger generations. For individuals like Zenella and Pine zaddleby, preexisting Kiowa beliefs could work in harmony with Christi- anity and ease an individual’s acceptance of the new faith.25 For two years, Methvin’s missionary work around Anadarko made little headway. One unnamed bishop told Methvin, “I feel like you are throwing your life away. Those people are impervious to the gospel, and yours is a hopeless task and we need you elsewhere.”26 With few coworkers at first, little resources, and no church facilities, circumstances required that Meth- vin travel on foot or bicycle to reach Indian camps, where he preached in tepees and brush arbors. Moreover, Methvin’s initial ethnocentric attitude, typical of many white missionaries, meant that he forced Natives to adapt to his beliefs rather than find common ground between white and Indian society. Methvin’s sermons, many Indian audiences believed, focused too much on the religious faults of the white community, with little bearing in their own lives. Why should we feel sorrow and regret, a Native congregation asked Methvin after one of his sermons on the Crucifixion, when it was the whites who killed Christ? Why must Indians pay for sins that they did not commit?27 As long as Methvin and others like him preached Christianity from a strict perspective of white culture, they struggled to gain a foothold. The IMC’s success with the Plains Indians occurred only after missionaries adapted to Indian needs, which involved using methods that appealed directly to Indian culture as well as increasing the use of Native helpers in missionary work. These were lessons that the IMC should have learned after nearly fifty years among the Five Tribes. However, this approach also gave Indians a strong influence over the IMC’s work in the region, a sentiment no longer in vogue with church officials. If the IMC’s ultimate goal was assimilation and creating a community of Christians that mirrored the rest of the conference, changing the work to give Indians more input and then appealing to elements of their own culture was certainly counterproductive. For Methvin, adaptation was a trying process filled with missteps. Ini- tially, he used any Indian gathering as an opportunity to preach, though he could be stymied by the perseverance of Indian customs at these events and forced to compete for attention. When Stumbling Bear’s son died, the chief wanted a Christian burial and an Indian burial because he wanted to “be sure that his son got the benefit of which ever was right,” Meth- vin wrote, denying the duality of Indian and Christianity spirituality that might exist among Native converts. Methvin rejected Stumbling Bear’s Expanding the Mission · 87 request and insisted on a single Christian service. But once the missionary left the funeral, the assembled Indians proceeded with their own burial customs, which included slaughtering the boy’s favorite pony for his use in the afterlife.28 One adaptation that afforded Methvin more success came when he introduced Southern Methodist camp meetings as a replacement for traditional Indian gatherings. Partly to enforce assimilation by reducing Native customs, and partly because of fears that an Indian gathering would lead to a violent uprising, the commissioner of Indian affairs banned the sun dance at the KCA Agency in 1889. Undeterred, Kiowas threatened to hold a dance regardless of the government’s actions, and tensions ran so high that the Indian Office asked for military troops from nearby Fort Sill to protect the KCA Agency. One prominent Kiowa war leader from the prereservation days, Big Tree, blamed Methvin for alerting the government to their plans (though Methvin denied doing so), and he threatened both the minister and his Indian congregation. As a result, the turmoil reduced membership at Methvin’s church to a handful.29 Taking advantage of the government’s ban, Methvin arranged for a camp meeting the next summer near Mt. Scott in an attempt to introduce Christianity and Southern Methodist customs. “[T]his was a wild crowd to preach to,” he remembered of his first Indian camp meeting in the summer of 1890. Methvin’s ignorance of Indian customs and expectations quickly became obvious. First, he needed to convince the assembled Indians that his intentions were not profit related like those of the traders and cattlemen, and that it was necessary for the Indians to attend the multiple three-hour services held each day. Second, as the one organizing the meeting, Methvin needed to feed the crowd, as dictated by Indian tradition. With only ten dollars to spare, he enlisted the help of a local trader, BattleCreek Williams, to secure some beef. With these problems solved, Methvin then experienced a week of unenthusiastic services. It was not until the final day that his breakthrough came, when a Comanche woman “gave full vent to her joy.” This single action aroused a Christian sentiment among the assembled tribes, Methvin believed, making the camp meeting the “beginning of a new era.” Afterwards, camp meetings were held regularly at Mt. Scott and became a bridge between Indian and Southern Methodist societies.30 Just as with its previous experiences in eastern Indian Territory, the IMC learned that when individual Plains Indians embraced Christianity, they did not abandon their traditional culture. Native customs, beliefs, and dress still persisted among Indians “traveling the ‘white man’s road,’ ” 88 · Chapter Three

Methvin told IMC members, because Indians selectively incorporated elements of white society. As Stumbling Bear told Methvin in September 1888, “Not all of the ways of the white man better than all of the Indian ways. Some Indian ways best.” Additionally, Methvin’s work among Kio- was and Comanches exposed the IMC to more diversity at a time when its goal was assimilation, and it reinforced the conference’s Indian appearance, even as the IMC struggled for legitimacy in the eyes of the national church. To those eastern officials who incorrectly believed that the days of the “blanket Indian” had passed, Methvin caustically reminded them to “just come this way [and] he can find all to suit his wildest fancy.”31 With events like camp meetings taking hold with Native communities near Anadarko, individual Indians became associated with the IMC and Methvin’s work. Stumbling Bear, an advocate of accommodation since the days of Quaker control of the KCA Agency in the 1870s, was receptive to the missionary’s work and became a friend. Stumbling Bear’s sister, Ankima, and her husband, Tohausen, were some of Methvin’s first converts and even traveled with him to the IMC’s annual conference on one occasion. Lillian Methvin, the missionary’s youngest daughter, born just months after the family arrived in Anadarko, became especially close to the childless couple, so much so that she referred to them as her “Indian parents.”32 Tohausen and Ankima’s experiences showed how some Kiowas embraced Christianity and Southern Methodism, regardless of Methvin’s skepticism, while also maintaining their connections to Native customs, which most missionaries opposed. Tohausen was the son of a mid- nineteenth-century Kiowa chief also named Tohausen, heralded for his skills in diplomacy and warfare during a time of increasing white migration onto the southern plains. Though the younger Tohausen did not inherit his father’s standing as a principal chief, he earned a reputation for his achievements in battle, and it became his sacred duty to locate and kill the ceremonial bison used in the sun dance. Tohausen remained involved in Kiowa attempts to resume the dance in the 1890s, after the government forbid the practice.33 Methvin initially underestimated the couple’s acceptance of Christianity, even though they were early supporters of his work. Tohausen allowed the missionary to preach at his camp, and the pair regularly attended Methvin’s services for many years. When Tohausen died from tuberculosis in 1894, he spent his final days camped in Meth- vin’s front yard before passing away in Methvin’s own bed. Yet even with these intimate ties between his family and the couple, Methvin did not believe that Tohausen and Ankima understood Christianity enough to be Expanding the Mission · 89 converted, particularly since they avoided the other elements of white culture that missionaries sought. Methvin wanted to see “a deep conviction” and “an agonizing sense of sin” from the couple. It was only after Tohausen and Ankima pressed the matter with the missionary that he accepted them into the church.34 While some missionaries considered any sign of Indian autonomy as evidence of their overall obstinacy as a people, others like Methvin eventually found ways to adapt. By opposing or supporting missionary work among the tribe, influential Kiowa leaders like Lone Wolf and Big Tree maintained a degree of authority over the changes affecting their community. In other instances, leaders retained their autonomy through political maneuvering and rejecting certain denominations in favor of other churches or religious practices. Quanah Parker, the preeminent Comanche leader of the late nineteenth century and one of the last holdouts to remove to the reservation in 1875, served as an interpreter for Methvin on certain occasions when the missionary preached to Comanche audiences. But Parker was also a leading proponent of peyotism in the region and sent his children to a Catholic school, actions that angered Methvin and impeded Southern Methodist influence among Comanches for many years.35 Methvin’s greater success with Kiowas near Anadarko came from the efforts of two early converts, Kicking Bird and Andres Martinez. After adopting Christianity, both men labored as licensed ministers in the IMC until their deaths in the 1930s, during which time they organized several Southern Methodist churches and established Indian congregations throughout southwest Oklahoma. With their ability to understand Kiowa customs and the Kiowa language, they distilled the Southern Method- ist message into a form that many Kiowas could understand and accept. Kicking Bird and Martinez also demonstrated, however, that becoming Christian did not mean that they left their Indian life entirely behind, as conference officials hoped. These men continued participating in Native practices that were seen as being at odds with Christianity, which only distanced Kiowa congregations from the mainline church. Kicking Bird, named after his uncle, a signer of the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty, which created a Kiowa reservation, converted to Christi- anity as an adult, following a camp visit by Methvin. During this visit, Methvin’s sermon discussed the characteristics of a sinner, which Kicking Bird took personally as the missionary’s attempt to mock him in front of the crowd. Kicking Bird responded with anger, threatening both Methvin and his interpreter before telling the missionary “to shut his mouth and get away from here mighty quick. The white man’s way don’t suit us Indians.”36 90 · Chapter Three

Methvin, as he did in other tense situations, appealed to Kicking Bird to “take the way of Jesus Christ” and assume a Christian life rather than one based solely on Indian or white ways. On subsequent visits, Methvin continued to talk with Kicking Bird, and in time, his perseverance paid off when Kicking Bird adopted Christianity and eventually became the first Southern Methodist Indian minister in western Oklahoma.37 In appearance, Kicking Bird adopted many of the tropes of mainstream society, wearing suits like his fellow white ministers and cutting his long hair to sever “himself from any of the old customs that would hinder him in his Christian work.” But as the IMC’s white members realized, these outward signs did not mean that Kicking Bird was equal to a white minister or that he rejected his Native culture. Kicking Bird’s lack of education, for instance, required that other Kiowas read and explain the Bible to him before he preached, a fact that stood in stark contrast to men like Methvin, a trained lawyer and educated minister, whom the IMC expected to lead the conference’s work. At the same time, Kicking Bird remained active in the peyote subculture in Kiowa society and allowed its usage in his home for many years, even as he preached in local churches.38 Kicking Bird, like other Southern Methodist Indian preachers, maintained elements of his Native culture and lacked some of the skills mainstream society demanded from its ministers. Because of this, Kicking Bird’s usefulness to the broader IMC and Southern Methodist Church was largely symbolic, demonstrating the power of Christianity while they limited his actual influence to just Indian churches. Much like Kicking Bird, Andres Martinez was another important figure in the spread of Southern Methodism among Kiowas, though his background revealed the malleability of ethnic identity in nineteenth-century southern plains culture. Andele, as Kiowas called him, was born to a Mexi- can family near Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1855. Captured in an 1866 raid by Mescalero Apaches, Martinez spent several difficult months with the tribe before being traded to a visiting contingent of Kiowas led by Heap-of- Bears. The elder Kiowa leader wanted Martinez as a surrogate son for his daughter, who had recently lost her own child. Once with Kiowas, Marti- nez embraced Kiowa culture, actively partaking in Kiowa raids and warfare in the region and eventually taking three Kiowa wives. After 1875, when Kiowas resettled permanently on the reservation, Martinez briefly returned to his biological family’s home in New Mexico before rejoining the Kiowas and spending the rest of his life with his adopted people near Anadarko.39 Once Martinez converted to Christianity, he became indispensable to Methvin and, in some ways, more instrumental to the IMC’s growth. Expanding the Mission · 91

The relationship between the men was extremely close for the rest of their lives, with one observer noting, “A more beautiful and constant friendship I never witnessed than that of these two.” Martinez served as Methvin’s translator during Kiowa camp visits, and when Methvin opened a mission school in Anadarko in 1889, he hired Martinez as the industrial arts teacher. Afterward, Martinez became a licensed preacher and received an appointment from the IMC as district missionary for the Kiowas. Yet, like Kicking Bird, Martinez never entirely abandoned Kiowa society and culture. At Martinez’s funeral in 1935, Methvin and another Southern Methodist minister conducted his official church service in the Christian tradition, but later, as the minister observed, “the Indians conducted a funeral of their own, in their own way, for their own beloved Andele, and laid his body to rest as one of their own dead.”40 The separate funerals conducted in different traditions revealed the duality of Martinez’s Christian and Kiowa identities. Many IMC officials, especially Methvin, considered Martinez to be an example of C hristianity’s redeeming qualities, and in several ways he showed the outward signs of assimilation that the conference wanted. After his conversion, Martinez married Emma McWhorter in 1893, a white woman who was a daughter of a Southern Methodist minister and a fellow employee of Methvin’s mission school in Anadarko. When Martinez’s Kiowa sister separated from her husband, Martinez and his wife raised the couple’s young daughter, Hattie. Martinez did such a thorough job of introducing Hattie to white civilization that a special Indian agent considered it a “crime” to remove her from Martinez’s home after Hattie’s father attempted to reclaim her. Special Agent G. B. Pray ordered that Hattie remain with the Martinez family so that she would not be “returned to an Indian camp where she would be as helpless as any white child as she knows nothing of the Indian language or of the ways of an Indian camp.” Pray hoped that his order would “forever settle this matter and prevent Mr. Martiniz [sic] from being harassed by the Indians trying to get possession of this girl.”41 But for all his status in the conference, the national church, and the government as a symbol of Christianity and assimilation, Martinez maintained elements of his Kiowa culture that the church could not ignore. When Kiowas and Comanches entered into difficult negotiations with the government over land concessions near the turn of the century, which pitted expansionist-minded whites against Indians struggling to protect their dwindling land base, Martinez served as an interpreter and Kiowa delegate. Later, Martinez worked as an informant for anthropologists Rob- ert Lowie and James Mooney, whom IMC officials like Methvin viewed 92 · Chapter Three with contempt since these men seemingly encouraged Native customs with their ethnographic studies. In terms of his own household, Martinez petitioned the government to recognize his wife as a member of the Kiowa tribe after Kiowas themselves did so during a tribal council. Martinez’s actions revealed a man trying to bridge two very different worlds. His role as intermediary with anthropologists and the government showed his pride in his Kiowa heritage, while his attendance at peyote ceremonies represented Martinez’s attempt to find his place in a religious practice that, like him, was the combination of Native and Christian society.42 Much like the IMC’s work with the Five Tribes, its efforts among the Plains Indians in southwest Indian Territory depended on Indian interpreters, because white ministers could not speak Native languages. Methvin, for instance, once elicited laughter from a Kiowa congregation when his Palm Sunday sermon of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey featured an unfortunate mistranslation of the word “ass.” Throughout his early years with the Plains Indians, Methvin, similar to other IMC missionaries serving full-blood congregations in the Five Tribes, complained that language issues and the lack of translated materials were the primary problems in his work. Unlike the Five Tribes, however, where the constant reassignment of ministers from one circuit to the next meant that few white preachers learned an Indian language, Methvin identified other reasons that made it “a useless waste of time and means.” According to Methvin, Plains Indians had ten unwritten dialects, none of which had a “syntactical system” that could be taught.43 English, he believed, was the only suitable language for white missionaries, but it would take years, if not decades, before all Indians were fluent. In the meantime, Methvin and other missionaries in the field used two types of interpreters. For larger gatherings like camp meetings or services, individuals such as Kicking Bird and Martinez worked alongside the missionary and considered translating as a formal part of their job. In fact, when Kicking Bird threatened Methvin, Martinez was the interpreter who interceded and explained Methvin’s message to Kicking Bird. According to one account from another Kiowa minister, Martinez’s actions were more responsible for Kicking Bird’s conversion than Methvin’s, an allusion perhaps to how Kiowas framed the missionization process to emphasize Indian action.44 Using official or reliable interpreters, however, assumed that the schedules for both the missionary and the interpreter were the same. Camp meetings planned weeks in advance or regular Sunday services were one thing; impromptu visits with a gathering of Indians were something else entirely. To compensate, Methvin used several techniques Expanding the Mission · 93 to find interpreters during his visits. In these cases, the interpreters’ understanding or belief in Christianity and Southern Methodism became secondary to their ability to translate English. The varying commitments to Christianity by the interpreters could determine the shape that the South- ern Methodist Church took among the Plains Indians and force white missionaries to make some concessions in order to reach a Native population. One of Methvin’s tactics involved using young Indians who learned English at a boarding school. Etalye Dunmoe, one of Methvin’s first interpreters, was a former Carlisle student specifically trained by Presbyterians for mission work. Together with the Southern Methodist Methvin, Dun- moe preached to Kiowas when they arrived for their monthly rations at the agency headquarters in Anadarko. Dunmoe’s work at the agency was brief, and he died within six months after Kiowas allegedly threatened to “make medicine” against him for his preaching. At his funeral, Methvin preached a Christian service, which he said was Dunmoe’s wish, and he called on the Indian police to stop Indians from burning Dunmoe’s possessions, as was a customary Kiowa funeral rite. When he noticed the Indian police taking part in the procession to the grave site and a fire in the distance, Methvin realized the power of Indian spirituality. “It was better to disobey order,” Methvin said in reference to the Indian police’s actions, “than to break the Indian ‘Medicine.’ ”45 Another interpreter in Methvin’s early ministry, Tsaitcopte, required even more of a concession on the missionary’s part than had the Presbyte- rian Dunmoe. Though Tsaitcopte underwent training in New York with the hopes of becoming a missionary, he returned to his people only to face their ridicule, much as Dunmoe had. “The Indians are making fun of me and I can not stand up in front of them and tell them the things you say,” he told Methvin as he quit the ministry. Tsaitcopte rejected white culture and resumed Native customs such as dancing, peyotism, and polygyny, but not before blaming his situation on whites for not supporting him enough in the work. “[L]oosing [sic] faith in man, I lost faith in God and Chris- tianity,” he told Methvin. Still, the necessity for a translator meant that Methvin continued to use Tsaitcopte, a man who angrily rejected Christi- anity and white society.46 Sometimes situations forced Methvin to be more creative in finding translators to conduct mission work. In some cases, he asked nearby whites to identify any English-speaking Indians before visiting a camp. Once there, Methvin called the individual out by name, asking him to translate, which the surprised individual usually did out of shock. In other situations, Methvin entered a tepee and joined the circle of assembled Indians 94 · Chapter Three before talking “in a very quiet way.” Invariably, he said, the group would then turn and eye an English-speaking Indian for translation, which the individual would do as long as Methvin talked. By being subtle, the missionary avoided awakening “the spirit of antagonism” from the Indians. “Had I gone to them in a professional and perfunctory way and asked for a hearing, and for an interpreter, they would have assumed a stolid look and—silence,” he wrote. When no interpreter could be found, he used sign language to preach, which created a situation where individuals understood the significance of the occasion but not necessarily the specifics of the Christian message. “While praying, all bowed their heads reverently, and seemed to understand the significance of it,” Methvin reported after using sign language at Lone Wolf’s camp in 1889, “whether they understood the language or not.”47 His own indifference to learning Native languages forced Methvin’s dependency on Native interpreters, even though these interpreters may not have been committed Southern Methodists. By relying on Indians in these ways, Methvin gave them a voice in the missionization process at a point when conference officials advocated total assimilation. Ultimately, these concessions proved attractive to Indians in the region, who, whether whites understood this or not, influenced the IMC’s future. Because of these changes, Methvin gained the trust of some Indian leaders, though not without relinquishing some of his own control over the endeavor. His work among Kiowas, in particular, gave Methvin a firm foundation to expand the IMC’s presence in the region. Over the next few years, several Kiowa churches spread through familial ties, as individual congregations became associated with the Ware, Quoetone, Sahmaunt, and Horse families. One aspect of his work that differentiated Methvin from other IMC missionaries was the degree to which he became involved in the social and legal affairs of the tribe. IMC officials typically involved themselves in the political affairs of its Indian members, but usually in ways that favored the conference’s work toward Indian assimilation or that benefited the IMC more than Indian communities. In contrast, Methvin constantly engaged conference officials and government agents on behalf of Indian needs in a much more ambiguous way, which could make him persona non grata to many whites in the region. In one instance, KCA agent Frank Baldwin grew angry at Methvin because, Baldwin explained, the missionary usurped his authority when selecting Kiowa children for Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. “I cannot conceive why he has assumed this responsibility without my knowledge,” Baldwin complained to the Expanding the Mission · 95 commissioner of Indian affairs in 1897. “[I]t is in ill-keeping on the part of any one else to interfere with my efforts.”48 Although Methvin was an advocate of assimilation in the sense that Indians should adopt “the Jesus Road,” he believed that Indians could still retain some autonomy over their communities. Nor did he see the encroachment of Indian customs into Kiowa church services, which other IMC officials scoffed at, as a negative occurrence. Though assimilation was often at the core of Methvin’s actions, Kio- was also recognized his commitment to honesty and fairness during their dealings with the missionary. By the 1890s, Kiowas leased their lands to cattle ranchers with the profits, dubbed “grass money,” dispersed among the tribe through semiannual allotments. With no banks in town to serve Kiowas, Methvin became a de facto banker, routinely taking in deposits ranging from fifty to five hundred dollars. Sensing an opportunity to promote assimilation, Methvin convinced several members of the tribe to use their money to build permanent houses on the agency. Methvin stated that initially older Kiowa chiefs opposed the small, two-room houses until they gained in popularity, at which time these leaders embraced the project to maintain their status in the tribe.49 On one occasion, Methvin acted as a mediator in the government’s attempts to allot the KCA Agency. In 1892, the Jerome Commission, a government commission charged with negotiating the allotment process with several tribes in Indian Territory, reached an agreement with Kiowas and Comanches. Almost immediately, Indian leaders claimed that the government and its interpreters had received Native support through fraudulent means, and subsequently, they gathered at Methvin’s church to draft their protest. With over four hundred Kiowas and Comanches present, including Quanah Parker and Lone Wolf, whose lawsuit over the matter would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court and lead to the infamous 1903 decision Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, which allowed the federal government to abrogate Indian treaties, Methvin assisted the Indians in drafting their protest, much to the dismay of Jerome Commission members. The commission pleaded with him not to pass the Indians’ memorial on to Washington, DC, but Methvin refused their request because it was not “honest dealing.”50 In reply, the commission reminded Methvin that he was one of the few whites included in the agreement and would receive his own allotment if it were to pass. Methvin’s actions in helping the protest, the commission implied, could ruin his own chances at receiving an allotment. When he learned of this, Methvin expressed his surprise in his inclusion and offered to remove his name. Hoping to maintain whatever 96 · Chapter Three influence it could with the missionary and the allotment process, the commission eventually relented to Methvin and his memorial of protest.51 As Methvin’s standing with the tribes improved, and as his involvement in their worldly affairs increased, the IMC moved to strengthen their presence in Anadarko. This took the form of a boarding school operating under the auspices of the IMC and superintended by Methvin, who had more experience in church-run boarding schools than as an actual missionary. The school, eventually christened the Methvin Institute, lasted less than twenty years, and over that time, it experienced its share of conflicts with Indian tribes, the government, and church officials. Its long-term effects, however, would be much greater. By the early twentieth century, many of the leaders of Southern Methodism among Indians in southwestern Okla- homa traced their roots to the Methvin Institute. Methvin’s approach to Indian boarding schools mirrored the assimilationist-minded approach of the government’s schools at the agency. He differed, though, in the overall importance of religion in an individual’s life, a point to be expected from a minister at a church- run educational institution. Government-run schools operating on the KCA Agency, such as the Fort Sill School and the Kiowa Agency School, faced overcrowding, disrepair, and inadequate staffing and were frequently targets of agent complaints and Indian disdain. Methvin was also contemptuous of those schools, as he believed that the government’s focus precluded teachers from focusing on religious studies. Instead, he wanted a school “where unhindered the Bible could be taught and its truths emphasized” so that Christianity could empower the mind and form character in an individual. At the time, Methvin’s plans were in step with the IMC’s attitude toward a sanctified education unencumbered by tribal oversight, which it promoted among the Five Tribes. As with those schools, the Methvin Institute stressed the values of a Christian education while it limited Indian input in its administration.52 Whatever thoughts the IMC entertained of controlling the new school vanished once Methvin engaged in raising funds for construction. True to form, when he sought support for this new work, Methvin focused on what was best for the school and not necessarily what was in the IMC’s best interests. In March 1889, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Oberly gave Methvin permission to build his school on 160 acres near the agency headquarters at Anadarko, though he did not grant the minister or the church outright title to the land (a point that was common for churches but would later cause legal complications). Changes in the government’s Indian policy enacted that year eliminated financial support for mission Expanding the Mission · 97 schools, forcing the churches to take full responsibility. Consequently, Methvin secured $2,500 from the national church’s Board of Missions for the school’s construction. A year later, Methvin convinced the Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions, another Southern Methodist organization, to trade the school it supported in Muskogee, the Harrell Institute, to the Board of Missions in return for assuming patronage for his school in Anadarko. According to Methvin, the Woman’s Board was disappointed that the Harrell Institute had shifted away from Indian students and wanted to get back to “real missionary work.”53 By going outside the IMC for funding, Methvin ignored the conference’s needs, a move that angered IMC officials. In a previous era in Indian Territory, the IMC had craved external support from the Board of Missions or Woman’s Board. The Harrell Institute, for instance, housed over two hundred female students and was routinely supported by the board in the 1890s. School officials credited its location at Muskogee with giving the school “centrality and accessibility” in addition to providing “local patronage . . . superior to that of any other town in the Territory.”54 Methvin’s mission school for the Plains Indians in southwestern Indian Territory, however, came at a time when the IMC aimed its efforts for a “sanctified education” at whites and the more acculturated mixed-blood population prevalent in towns like Muskogee. The Harrell Institute was in line with the IMC’s goals and situated in a prosperous area, and thus, its success was an adequate reflection of the conference’s work. In contrast, Methvin’s school focused on a “wild” population with little means to support mission work or the mission school, yet its location within the conference’s bounds meant that the IMC would be blamed for the school’s failure. Instead of projecting an image of success to the board, reports of Methvin’s work promised only stories of struggles in Indian Territory to be repeated throughout the national church, further hampering the IMC’s quest for legitimacy. Edwin Shapard, a former superintendent of New Hope Seminary like Methvin, harshly criticized Methvin’s actions. Writ- ing in Our Brother in Red, Shapard questioned the board’s involvement with the school, particularly since the Board usurped the conference’s authority. The board made “extra efforts” with Methvin’s school that it did not make with other institutions, Shapard believed, and it was “certainly ignoring the annual conference.”55 The IMC’s anger at its lack of control over the Methvin Institute hinted at a changing attitude toward its work among the Plains Indians and the perception that Indians did not assimilate into the national church as it had hoped. When Methvin entered the mission field in October 1887, the 98 · Chapter Three conference was enthusiastic for the possibilities of growth, and Bishop Gal- loway exclaimed, “The opening of new work among the Western tribes has already awakened fresh enthusiasm at home.”56 But after nearly two years in the field, IMC officials resented Methvin’s failure to convert Indians in large numbers and wipe out elements of Indian society. When Methvin recommended Anadarko as the site for the annual conference in 1889, his fellow ministers scoffed at the suggestion. “One brother, whose head had out grown his hair,” Methvin complained bitterly, “wanted to know if his scalp would be safe.”57 The Indians around Anadarko were still hostile and uncivilized, IMC members believed, and this was due to Methvin’s failure as a missionary. A divide grew not only between Indians and white congregations in the IMC, but also between perceptions of the “civilized” congregations in the east and the “wild” tribes in the west. With the IMC’s changing attitude toward Indian missions and the general perception of failure among the western tribes, Shapard renewed his criticism of Methvin through the pages of Our Brother in Red. Shapard questioned Methvin’s ministerial abilities and his lack of results, especially once the conference reported an increase in donations for the mission school at Anadarko. The IMC had made mistakes in the past with mission schools, Shapard recognized, but he did not understand why it appropriated thousands of dollars for a mission field that held only a dozen converts.58 Shapard, whose interests were clearly with the Five Tribes and white populations in eastern Indian Territory, believed that the IMC should concentrate its funds on successful fields that better resembled mainstream Southern Methodist society. Never one to flee from a fight, Methvin refuted Shapard’s and the conference’s complaints. “Some of the brethren at conference seemed to be surprised that there had been no conversions over here during the past year,” Methvin responded. “It takes time to break soil, sow seed and bring the harvest to ripeness. We are breaking the ground and sowing the seed, the harvest will come bye and bye.” For Methvin, missionary work was a slow and deliberate process, and he wanted to root out what he felt were the anti-Christian elements of Native society and not just eradicate Indian culture entirely. “Some of these tribes,” Methvin reminded the conference, “are on as low a plain of misery as it is possible for humanity to go.”59 Additionally, Methvin laid some of the blame on the IMC. How could he stamp out Indian vices like dancing and horse racing, Methvin asked, when Our Brother in Red, the official voice of the conference, advertised these same activities at county fairs? “It will be like pitching straws against the wind, for me to talk against these things here,” Methvin raged, Expanding the Mission · 99

“and my own people and the civilized Indian in the east . . . together with the Christian newspapers calling them to those scenes of dissipation.”60 As for the conference’s accusations that it had raised thousands of dollars for so little success, Methvin rejected these claims outright. The IMC’s only expenditure in 1888 was his six-hundred-dollar salary, and though its expenditures increased a year later to include funds for a parsonage, even that was insufficient.61 In fact, the IMC’s poor support forced Methvin to find more external sources for help, and by May 1888, Lucinda Helm at the national church’s Woman’s Department of Church Extension had started a nationwide fund for a parsonage. The following February, Helm reported that the department had received all necessary donations for Methvin’s parsonage and that “the mission to the wild tribes at Anadarko is saved.”62 Unlike other critics, Shapard’s comments stung Methvin because they came from a respected missionary with years of experience in Indian Terri- tory. Methvin felt that Shapard portrayed the western tribes as “impervious to the gospel and that the work among them is in vain.” These comments, Methvin feared, “may have that effect on some who are too ready to believe that way anyhow” and create further distance between the western tribes and the rest of the conference.63 By addressing Shapard directly, Methvin really spoke to a larger audience in the IMC who wanted to scale back missionary efforts to focus on its established churches in eastern Indian Territor y. While the IMC criticized his actions and complained of interference from the national church, Methvin continued his plans for the school, which officially opened in April 1890 with an enrollment of ten Indian students. Still struggling for support, Methvin hoped to raise money for books, an organ, and an altar veiling from the local community, but he acknowledged the difficulty since Baptists and Presbyterians had also built schools in Anadarko. Within a short period, more denominations had moved into the field around Anadarko and Fort Sill, which overtaxed the local community’s ability to meet the needs of individual churches.64 Two of Methvin’s early decisions help explain the school’s success in attracting both students and support, though these decisions also showed a greater sympathy on Methvin’s part for his Indian charges than for the IMC’s wishes. For many young Indian children, the removal from their own culture or harsh treatment by teachers led them to run away from the boarding schools. In one tragic example, three Kiowa boys ran away from the government school in the dead of winter in 1891 due to physical punishments doled out by the school’s principal. Unfortunately, the 100 · Chapter Three trio froze to death after becoming lost in a blizzard, and the angry Kiowa community reacted by threatening the school’s superintendent and forcing the principal to flee Anadarko. Before he opened his school, Meth- vin recruited students with little regard for the families’ concerns toward boarding schools or assimilation, and as a result, he struggled to maintain a student body. This experience taught him the importance of finding parents who supported boarding schools, and once he identified these families, the school’s enrollment grew steadily throughout the decade. In time, the students themselves noticed a difference between Methvin’s school and other schools at the agency, particularly in terms of physical punishments. As Eugenia Mausape, a former Kiowa student, later recalled of Methvin’s school, “They don’t whip us. They don’t punish us. That’s a good school.”65 In addition to identifying Indian families that would support his school, Methvin also needed adequate supplies for his students. To solve this problem, Methvin turned to the government instead of the IMC or the national church. The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 guaranteed annuities for Indian children, and Methvin convinced the commissioner of Indian affairs to distribute these goods through the school. From the government’s perspective, this arrangement simplified the process of distrib- uting annuities to Indian children; for Methvin, it provided vital supplies at no cost and gave an incentive for Indian parents to send their students to the Southern Methodist school instead of the Baptist, Presbyterian, or Catholic schools.66 As Methvin’s work around Anadarko intensified, it quickly became obvious that he would need additional help. At the time of his appointment in October 1887, the IMC gave Methvin a field that stretched from Kansas to Texas and was roughly five hundred miles in circumference. Methvin immediately recognized that the field was too big for one person, and within two months of his appointment, he asked for additional help, a request echoed by other ministers who visited him during that period. Soon, the IMC, along with national church organizations like the Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions, responded by sending more missionaries into the region. But not all of these individuals worked effectively in Methvin’s shadow, nor could they balance the needs of Indian converts with the desires of Southern Methodist officials. For many in the conference and national church, Methvin remained the public face of missions to the “wild tribes,” and other missionaries chafed at this perception.67 While Methvin concentrated his work primarily on the Kiowa camps around Anadarko and on those Indians attending his mission school, other Expanding the Mission · 101

Southern Methodist missionaries traveled farther south. Near Fort Sill, these missionaries worked to varying degrees of success among Coman- ches, who presented many of the same problems for the IMC that Kiowas did, such as language issues, camp visits to remote locations, and government interference. As a result, it took years before the Southern Methodists claimed much progress. One explanation for this delay was that the missionary in charge of the Comanche work, William Brewer, was continually at odds with Methvin and the conference. Brewer, who arrived at Fort Sill toward the end of 1892, immediately set out to work in his own way, claiming that the IMC needed “more horse sense” in the mission field.68 The different approaches Methvin and Brewer used showed the difficulties missionaries faced when balancing the needs of their Indian charges with the expectations of the larger Southern Methodist public. Missionaries could adhere to ethnocentric church philosophy that called for total assimilation and complete removal of Indian culture, though this approach often alienated Indian communities. On the other hand, missionaries could embrace Indian culture in ways that shunned the sen- sibilities of the predominantly white national church, which angered conference officials. Whatever faults Methvin had, he understood that the focus of Indian missions should be on the Indians and not on the actions of missionaries. “How many a poor chip of a man is undermined and destroyed by the insidious bug of egotism or self-conceit,” he once wrote to the IMC.69 Methvin knew that attracting broader support from the IMC or from the national church required that he maintain a visible distance from his Indian converts. He must appear as the dedicated white missionary ministering to an uncivilized people from a position of moral and spiritual authority, rather than as the missionary who had “gone Indian” and was contemptuous of the church’s attitude toward Native peoples. In contrast, Brewer seemingly reveled in how he ingratiated himself with Comanche society. When writing in Our Brother in Red, Brewer simply signed some letters “Tabe-e-yet-sy,” which he claimed was his Comanche name. In other circumstances, he referred to himself as the “Caucasian Comanche” and bragged about living with Quanah Parker in his “luxuriously furnished home.”70 Instead of openly promoting assimilation, Brewer became fiercely protective of his Comanche congregations. “I love to act brotherly,” he said to his fellow ministers, “but I do not intend to allow my visiting brethren to preach to my Indians any more. They can preach to the whites and I’ll preach to the reds.” Brewer mocked the efforts of other IMC ministers, believing that the nearly twenty times a month he preached at the Comanche mission was more difficult than preaching in 102 · Chapter Three an established congregation in eastern Indian Territory. “A man is never a hero till he dies or goes to China,” he reminded the conference after hearing ministers among the Five Tribes complain about their work.71 Brewer’s headstrong attitude clashed with Methvin, the de facto leader of the IMC’s work in the region. When the IMC refused to pay for a translator for Brewer, claiming that a “paid interpreter is no good,” he reminded them that Methvin’s Kiowa interpreter Andres Martinez was “paid nevertheless.” In another situation, Brewer fired Helen Brewster, a missionary sponsored by the Woman’s Board and sent by Methvin to work with Comanche women near Fort Sill. When she told Brewer that she was actually a Baptist and had lied about being a Southern Methodist to get the appointment, he removed her from the field without consulting with Methvin.72 But the biggest point of contention between Brewer and Meth- vin, and, in turn, the IMC, was over the efficacy of educating Indians. This argument mirrored the larger national debate over which had to come first for Indians to assimilate: Christianity or civilization. “The effort to evolve the Indian into A MAN simply by educating him is a monumental failure,” Brewer believed. “The process is too slow. It is a very pretty theory.”73 He remained outspoken in his disdain for education and constantly criticized the conference’s efforts in Anadarko, which, by extension, were criticisms of Methvin. He called the conference’s mission schools a “useless expense” and “inadequate” and believed that the IMC “had better attend to its legitimate business—soul saving.”74 Brewer’s acrimonious relationship with the IMC was noticeable by 1894. That year, he accused unnamed IMC members unassociated with his Comanche mission of working to remove him, and he remained defiant to stay.75 But this attitude did not last. By 1897, Brewer transferred to the Northwest Texas Conference, leaving Methvin unchallenged as the most prominent voice in the region.

“There is nothing that transforms life like the gospel of the Son of God,” Methvin wrote toward the end of his life. “Many methods have been tried by the Government and benevolent organizations for the civilization of the Indian . . . but not in a single instance have these efforts ever been made effective and abiding without the stabilizing power of the gospel.”76 Christianity was the center of Methvin’s life and his work and, in his estimation, the only hope for Indians. In theory, this belief was identical to the rest of the Indian Mission Conference. Bishop Galloway sent Methvin to the Plains Indians in 1887 as an extension of the IMC’s stated goals, and Methvin originally engaged in missionary work much like missionaries Expanding the Mission · 103 in eastern Indian Territory had in previous years. He preached in Indian camps, used Native converts as local preachers and interpreters, and established a mission school to educate future generations of Indian members. But the attitudes of the IMC were changing by the late 1880s. In one sense, the Plains Indians represented a step back for the conference in its desire for legitimacy. Older missionaries like Edwin Shapard questioned whether these Indians were capable of understanding and accepting Chris- tianity like the Five Tribes, while newer members fresh to the territory dis- liked the notion of sharing resources with the “wild tribes.” Highlighting the needs and difficulties of the new field only furthered the notion of the IMC as “mission conference,” catering to a different population at a time when IMC officials wanted to emulate established conferences back east. Methvin labored constantly on behalf of his mission work at the KCA Agency, hoping to convince his conference superiors of the field’s needs, though the IMC and his Indian charges pulled him in opposite directions. While Methvin represented the public face of the work to the IMC, national church, and government, and was beholden to their wishes to some degree, he also understood the reliance on Indians to spread the Christian message. Indian men and women served as important translators, a frequent and expected occurrence at the agency; they became ministers and church leaders who took the conference’s work into camps in between the infrequent visits from white missionaries; and yet they were a constant physical reminder that pockets of unassimilated Indians existed within the IMC. As a missionary, Methvin set his own standards, even though both white and Indian society judged his work on different terms. The IMC wanted a quick transformation of Indians into something similar to white society: regular church services in permanent structures, paid assessments for the conference’s yearly budgets, and an English-speaking membership. Indians, on the other hand, did not embrace white society completely, and they continued to support Native customs, which complicated the assimilation process that whites envisioned. Indians demanded concessions on Methvin’s part and were more receptive to his message when it included a Native perspective, and his success came from his ability to make these concessions. Missionaries who dismissed Indian culture completely risked alienating their audience, while those who assumed Indian culture themselves angered their church superiors. Somehow, Methvin found a balance between these two pitfalls. Writing years later, Methvin described what traits made an individual successful in the mission field. Missionaries could not hold a superiority 104 · Chapter Three complex over the Indians but instead must show a “sympathetic interest in the people.”77 The desire to assimilate Indians into white society did connote a sense of superiority, but Methvin also demonstrated a direct interest in Indian affairs in southwestern Indian Territory as evident in his intercession on behalf of Kiowas and Comanches before the Jerome Com- mission. Still, more important to Methvin than superiority or sympathy was the message of the Gospel. He felt that Christianity trumped civilization, regardless if it was white or Indian, and that only Jesus could save an individual. His critique of non-Christian whites was as scathing as his complaints about Native religious practices that ignored or, in his opinion, corrupted God’s message. Yet, finding a suitable path that stressed Chris- tianity over civilization was difficult in an era of government-sponsored assimilation and the national church’s impatient attitude. Eugenia Mausape attributed her time at the Methvin Institute as the reason she became a Christian. Mausape, whose son Conrad later became a Methodist minister, attended the school when she was thirteen and remembered her time there fondly. She described caring teachers who treated students with respect and tolerated a degree of Indian culture. When she grew ill, Methvin knew the limits of local doctors and told Mau- sape to return to her home to “[1]et the Indians medicine you and you’ll get well.” Yet their regard for Indian ways had limits. “I don’t dance. I’m Christian,” Mausape recalled years later. “J. J. Methvin told us it’s a bad road to be going. I kept it in my heart. I don’t go . . . I don’t want to go to hell! I don’t want to.”78 Regardless of the IMC’s indifference over its development in southwestern Indian Territory, Southern Methodism among Kiowas and Coman- ches grew by the turn of the century. Many of the students who attended the Methvin Institute became leaders in their communities, in both secular and religious matters. That was a point of pride that Methvin frequently mentioned, and their leadership was needed for Southern Methodism to survive in southwestern Oklahoma. By the early 1900s, the divide between Indian and non-Indian members, and between “Civilized Indian members” and “wild Indian members,” would formally split the conference apart. chapter four

The Mission Changes

From the Land Run to Statehood, 1889–1907

The days before April 22, 1889, were busy for Lieutenant Samuel Adair and his troops from the 5th Cavalry. Thousands of migrants had arrived at Purcell, Indian Territory, a town located in the Chickasaw Nation on the south side of the Canadian River, in anticipation of the land run due to commence at noon that day. But as Adair discovered, the promise of 160 acres in the “Unassigned Lands,” or the land located in the central part of the territory believed by many to contain some of the richest and most fertile land in the nation, had inspired the more avaricious members of society. For the last several days, Adair’s men had patrolled the land north of Purcell looking for any “sooner” seeking to stake a claim illegally before the land opened. In one instance, the men of the 5th Cavalry discovered the body of a young man “dressed in the primitive Texas style,” the sole remnant of a family swept away by the sand and water of the nearby river during their unlawful scramble for land. After stationing his men to protect the border, a hopeless task considering the hundreds of miles it covered, Adair returned to Purcell, where thousands of new settlers, many hailing from Arkansas and Texas, had gathered along the city streets in anticipation. At noon, Adair motioned to his men to fire a volley, the signal that the land run had begun. And with “a mighty shout,” a reporter from the New York Times observed, “the advance guard of the invading army is racing like mad across the sands toward the narrow expanse of water” where they “entered upon a wild struggle for homes in the promised land.”1 For many in the Indian Mission Conference, the land run of 1889 was a harbinger of the devil himself. Surveying the chaos in Purcell, J. H.

105 106 · Chapter Four

Miller reported in Our Brother in Red that these new settlers were a rough- hewn collection of gamblers and drunks. “What can be done to check this onward march of sin?” Miller asked as he pleaded with his fellow IMC members to maintain their Christian vigilance. Even before the land run, the general upheaval in the region had disturbed the IMC’s work. The Pierce Institute, an IMC-operated Indian school in the Chickasaw Nation, closed early for the year after its students and staff abandoned the school to prepare for the land run. J. T Fariss, the IMC’s pastoral charge at the school, complained that “the great Oklahoma excitement has unhinged everything and almost every body, in this part of the country.” “They say this is the first time Oklahoma has ever been opened for settlement,” Fariss continued. “May it be the last.”2 The period between the April 1889 land run and Oklahoma’s statehood in December 1907 represented the greatest era of change for the territory in the postwar decades. Subsequent runs for Cheyenne-Arapaho lands in 1892 and for the Cherokee Strip Outlet in 1893, along with later lotteries of Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Wichita, and Caddo lands in 1901, further diversified the territory and increased its population. Eager to attract prosperity and other residents, settlers quickly established new communities with schools, businesses, and churches and pressed for some sort of government. In time, these migrants cast aside Indian governments, land claims, and communities in their battle to create a state on par with the rest of the nation.3 For the IMC, this period shifted Southern Methodism’s focus away from Indian missions and toward mainstream white society. White membership in the conference, which had grown in the 1870s and 1880s, exploded in the 1890s and forced the IMC and the national church to reassess the nature of its missionary work. Many of the concerns present with its Indian congregations, such as language issues, financial support, and reaching a non- Christian population, were not as problematic with the new settlers; instead, these migrants actively sought out their own pastors, congregations, and buildings, virtually creating their own churches overnight. In fact, the IMC faced an overabundance of Christianity as new migrants brought with them other denominations, which made Southern Meth- odists sensitive to those churches that it felt were reaping “their” spiritual harvest. Whether it was other denominations, such as Baptists or Presby- terians; sectional conflicts with Northern Methodists; or internal theological issues like the holiness movement, the IMC felt threatened by other Christians and changed course to meet these challenges. The Mission Changes · 107

While the conference expanded among the new populations developing across the territory, Indian missions continued to struggle in the eyes of IMC officials. Indian congregations, whether in the east among the Five Tribes or in the west with the Plains Indians, mixed Native customs with Christian practices, which did nothing in officials’ eyes but further the image of the IMC as a “mission” conference. With whites assuming a larger influence, anything that reinforced the image of Indian-dominated work threatened the IMC’s legitimacy and status. Expansion among Native communities not only promised limited results due to population and monetary concerns, it also competed with Native customs that some believed undermined Southern Methodist theology. With the Five Tribes, preachers railed against dancing and the “busk,” a harvest festival also known as the green corn ceremony long practiced by Native communities, as a source of Indian debasement and immorality, while ministers in western Indian Territory blamed the “nomadic lives of the Indians, their superstitions and prejudices, the management of them by the Government, the evil influences of bad whites, the degraded habits of mescal-eating and card- playing, and the influences of the ‘medicine men’ ” as reasons for their struggles. “Were it not for the divine promises,” one missionary wrote to the Board of Missions, the work “would be overwhelmingly discour- aging.”4 After decades of Indian missions, the lingering Native aspect to Indian churches in the IMC highlighted just how far removed the conference was from mainstream Southern Methodist culture. The 1890s and early 1900s saw the IMC segregate white and Indian congregations as it created new circuits and districts that served white congregations and were practically devoid of any Indian members. Newer members from southern states wanted the IMC to rival established conferences, and doing so meant remaking conference institutions in the mold of mainstream Southern Methodist society. Money had to be spent on churches that could be self-supporting, the ministry had to be properly educated, and any outward appearance of Indians in the IMC, such as the very name of the conference, had to be replaced. The move toward legitimacy demanded that white congregations control the conference and compete against other white-controlled denominations rather than address the needs of its own Indian churches. This shift in purpose, however, did not mean that Indian congregations disappeared. Instead, they came to occupy their own space within the IMC, surrounded by newer churches and communities. Because Indian congregations were Southern Methodist in appearance, they signaled the 108 · Chapter Four

IMC’s progress in “civilizing” Indians, and the conference was content in letting them exist with only limited interference. Yet these churches also reinforced Native culture by requiring their own ministers and workers who understood Native customs and languages, and the reality of the mission field meant making compromises with Indian communities. Though the IMC considered some concessions too extreme, such as the growing use of peyote among the Plains Indians, it had to allow a degree of autonomy in its Native congregations to tend to their own spiritual needs. Eventually, the IMC’s new white members dominated conference affairs, and officials shifted resources from Indian missions to meet the demand among white communities. IMC and national church officials reallocated the resources for Indian congregations for other needs, and even money, ministers, and land taken from Indian communities went to whites. Gradually, the “Indian” focus of the IMC gave way to a new reality. The move toward legitimacy culminated after more than a decade of discussion and maneuvering when the Indian Mission Conference formally shed its mission identity in 1906 and became the Oklahoma Annual Conference.

In its 1890 memorial commemorating Edwin Shapard’s death, the IMC paid tribute not only to Shapard’s work but also to a bygone era of Indian missions. “[N]o other men will be called upon to do in this conference the kind of work he did. The times and the work have changed. Hereafter our work and sufferings will be different. Rail Roads, legislation and change of customs and habits have ushered in a new order of things, and we look back upon the old as a thing of the past.” The IMC already recognized the effect that the influx of white immigrants into Indian Territory had on its goals and agendas. Just weeks after the land run on April 22, 1889, conference officials asked the Board of Missions for additional support to reach the new settlements growing in the former Unassigned Lands. It was “imperative that our Church should promptly extend its operations into that region,” the IMC reported, which would “require the transfer of at least a score of our most efficient men from the older Conferences.”5 The land run opened the conference up to a larger audience, but its overall effect was to accelerate the growth that had developed in previous decades. White membership in the IMC steadily increased throughout the 1870s and 1880s, growing from 60 in 1869 to 4,173 in 1889. Refer- ring to this growth in the years before the land run, Shapard pressed the conference in 1886 to “occupy more ground” because there were “uncultivated fields” in their midst. Writing from the Pauls Valley District in The Mission Changes · 109

Figure 6. Indian Territory in 1889 (Tash Smith and Maren Smith). the Chickasaw Nation just a few months later, James Shanks echoed Shapard’s advice when he discussed the “newly settled” communities that were “rapidly increasing” around him. “All available resources are needed in these new communities in establishing the Church,” Shanks told the conference flatly.6 The IMC’s expansion in the 1890s took two different themes, both of which ignored Indian concerns in favor of white demands. The first was an argument to expand preexisting work and embrace “uncultivated fields.” On the surface, this included new Indian communities and enlarging Indian missions, such as when Shapard called for the IMC to engage in work among the Osages in 1886. But after 1889, expansion meant new white settlements. “This newly opened country is destined to be a prosperous country, financially and spiritually,” J. Y. Bryce wrote in 1892 about the area around Chandler, a town about forty miles northeast of Oklahoma City, founded after an 1891 land run. “A great many of our people are moving in every day, by May this country will be full. At Chandler the citizens are very desirous to have preaching every Sunday, [and it] ought to be so if the man can be found.”7 Bryce’s comments revealed how supporters of enlarging the work framed their argument in the context of white needs and connected the future of 110 · Chapter Four the conference to the future of white settlers. “With the influx of 5,000 into our membership, the only hope for their growth in grace is in their attendance upon . . . class and prayer meetings, and the preaching of the word,” the conference stated at its 1894 annual meeting.8 These new communities needed the IMC to move into the area, and it ignored its Chris- tian duty by rejecting them. Some IMC members even argued that these whites “are in a worse financial condition than the Indians are,” implying that their destitution made them the true mission field.9 Once the government lifted its barriers restricting white migration, officials believed, the IMC could firmly establish its presence. By enlarging its work in the Pauls Valley area, where whites rented land from the Chickasaw Nation, the IMC stated in 1890, “our missionaries are laying the foundation of the Church.”10 Furthermore, the conference told the Board of Missions that the expansion of the railroad throughout Indian Territory, which connected these new communities, demanded “our eternal vigilance which in this instance shall prove the price of our ecclesiastical growth and life.”11 Yet sending missionaries to these new settlements was not enough, because the communities wanted more tangible signs of the IMC’s presence. “[I]n order to render proper service to the town and people and surrounding community,” the IMC’s ministerial appointment “must concentrate his efforts right here,” wrote the Minco Minstrel, a publication from the west-central Indian Territory town of Minco. “It may cost a little more to have things right, but the satisfaction of knowing that it is right more than compensates for the very small additional cost.” The Miami Weekly Herald made similar comments when discussing a presiding elder’s recent visit to the town, located in northeast Indian Territory. “He told the congregation here that they ought to and could build a comfortable church,” the Herald reported. “A consummation devoutly to be wished.”12 What Minco and Miami demonstrated was the increasing town development occurring in the territory and how that changed the nature of South- ern Methodist work. Church buildings, schools, and businesses connoted permanence for a new town and attracted further prosperity. The IMC’s itinerant circuit rider system, long used by the conference to spread into isolated areas, was out of place in a new community bent on creating permanent institutions. As town development increased, along with demands for permanence in a city’s institutions, circuit riders found the rigors of traveling replaced by the wants of a settled population. Church officials repeated the rhetoric of enlarging the work to meet white needs whenever white settlers moved into the region. The opening of the KCA Agency near Anadarko in 1901 through a more sedate land The Mission Changes · 111 lottery caused a similar sense of anxiety and hope for the IMC equal to the 1889 land run. The IMC estimated the number of migrants near Anadarko at ten thousand, with another ten thousand expected after the opening, which led the conference to draw up boundaries for two potential districts out of the new settlements. “We must enter promptly,” conference officials wrote to the secretary of the Board of Missions. “[W]e must do all we can to hold them for God and Southern Methodism.”13 The IMC’s comments to the board underscored the second major theme that expansion took for the conference. Denominational competition motivated the IMC in the 1890s because it posed an imminent threat to the conference’s place in the region. As other denominations and churches moved into the territory, their efforts threatened to undermine the IMC’s work or, worse still, to perpetuate an “eclesiastical theft [sic]” by stealing Southern Methodists for their own churches. “We very much need for a forward move in our own Conference, among the Wild tribes, and in Oklahoma and new lands that may soon be open to Settlement,” J. M. Gross wrote to his fellow conference members to encourage expansion. “We must occupy this territory at once, or we will lose our Crown.”14 The threat presented by other churches trumped most of the IMC’s decisions during this era because denominational competition was a problem that the conference understood. Indian communities, as many believed, required a reorientation of culture and customs, which was an expensive and time-consuming process. Missionaries needed to literally and figuratively translate their message for a people with often a limited knowledge of Christianity. Denominational competition, on the other hand, required a superior understanding of the Bible, not a superior understanding of Indians. Indian churches and white churches required two different kinds of workers, and not all individuals navigated between the two successfully. Once Indian Territory opened to whites, struggling missionaries frustrated with language and cultural difficulties in Indian communities quickly found white settlements easier to confront and convert. In the decades prior to the 1889 land run, when the IMC and other churches concentrated on Indian communities, the conference maintained an uneasy relationship with encroaching denominations. For much of that time, Presbyterians and Baptists, both bankrolled by northern interests, were openly contemptuous of Southern Methodist missions. In 1877, a Presbyterian official at Fort Gibson, Samuel Stoddard, engaged in a “guerrilla war” to combat the local Southern Methodist missionary, whom Stoddard described as a “Church Militant.” A year later, Presbyterians complained that the IMC’s Eufaula minister had pressured the Creek 112 · Chapter Four government to remove them from the area after Presbyterians planned to open a boarding school. Similarly, Baptist leaders among the Seminoles claimed that “God has given the Indians to us,” while John Jumper, a Sem- inole chief and Baptist missionary, supposedly said that Seminoles were predominantly Baptists “because the Baptists are right.” Already, competition aroused the spirit of some IMC members. As Theodore Brewer reminded the IMC in 1884, “The sin of proselyting members from one Christian denomination into another deserves the condemnation of all good people.”15 By the 1890s, the growth of the white population made the issue of competition more pointed as the number of denominations working in the region now included groups like the Church of Christ, Quakers, Men- nonites, Reformed Church, and Catholics, among others. The conference described the threat from these denominations in stark terms while also emphasizing the superiority of Southern Methodism. “The fact that this will be an ecclesiastical battleground makes it imperative that we have plenty of good men,” the presiding elder of the Duncan District told the Board of Missions in 1901. “That it will be such a field is known by others than prophets.” When the IMC’s A. S. Cook took part in a public debate with a Church of Christ minister in Savanna, Indian Territory, Our Brother in Red gleefully reported that the conference’s minister “cooked Rev. Bar- ber’s potatoes in short order.”16 In other cases, the competition came from internal sources or from other Methodist organizations. The IMC’s appointment to the Comanche mission near Fort Sill, William Brewer, was an outspoken supporter of “Second Blessing,” or the belief that sanctification was an entirely separate and secondary step after salvation, which many Methodist officials openly refuted. Brewer even claimed that his Comanche congregation embraced his preaching and that the Comanche mission was “gaining in spiritual momentum” as a result. But, as he also noted, “[e]very lick I’ve received [about preaching the Second Blessing] came from my brethren in the ministry.” Eventually, the holiness movement’s popularity impinged on both Native and white communities. One member in Tahlequah observed, “The whole town has been moved from top to bottom, from center to circumference” by local holiness supporters known as the “Crusaders.” As these groups gained in number, the IMC came out firmly against the holiness doctrine and described the movement as “fanatical . . . by which many of our people, are in places being deceived and led away.” Holiness movements did “great damage to the church,” and the IMC admonished its members to avoid them.17 The Mission Changes · 113

In the IMC’s eyes, more egregious than internal problems from its own ministers were the attacks from the Northern Methodist Church. This denomination shared much of the same theological heritage as the Southern Methodist Church but held very different social views, which had grown during the sectional strife of the pre–Civil War years. In the postwar decades, the national church faced competition from northern missionaries intent on restructuring the South’s Methodism, which only added to the growing bitterness of Reconstruction. In Indian Territory, Northern Methodists referred to the southern branch as “the old rebel church” or “look[ed] down on the southern Methodist people as slave holders and secessationists [sic].”18 The IMC found itself confronting a similar denomination in terms of theology but with a higher sense of status and respectability in a nation still reeling from the Civil War. The Northern Methodist threat was most prominent in northeast Indian Territory near the Cherokee Nation, though the conflict cropped up whenever new land opened to white settlement. Charles Coppedge, a presiding elder in the Cherokee Nation, referred to the Nowata charge as “the picket line between us and Kansas. The M. E. Church [Northern Methodist Church] has tried to capture this field and has manifested a zeal worthy of a better cause [by the IMC].” In the eastern town of Hart shorne, observers noted in 1891 that the growing Northern Methodist congregation was “about to swallow the South Methodist church.”19 As the KCA Agency prepared for its opening in 1901, IMC leaders appealed to the Board of Missions for help. “Other denominations, especially the Northern Methodists, will put forth mighty efforts to take this land that so justly belongs to us,” the presiding elder complained to the board. When Northern Methodists made overtures to divide Indian Territory with the IMC, the board refused to withdraw from any part of a field it had worked exclusively since 1844.20 In some circumstances, the IMC’s motivation for focusing on other denominations was nothing more than thinly veiled prejudice. Confer- ence leaders believed that the Catholic Church practiced “ ‘First come first served’ in church matters,” implying they ignored previous Protestant missions with their own work. The animosity toward Catholics was most noticeable on the KCA Agency, where a Benedictine monk, Father Isidore Ricklin, arrived in 1891 and opened St. Patrick’s boarding school soon thereafter. St. Patrick’s had double the capacity of the Methvin Institute and was, in the words of one Catholic observer, “the most flourishing of the Oklahoma and Indian Territory Missions.” Even though Father Rick- lin concentrated most of his efforts in the Anadarko area, leaving Indians 114 · Chapter Four living in the outer reaches of the reservation open for missionary work, the Catholics’ success alarmed Southern Methodist officials. Sallie Davis, a missionary sent to Anadarko by the Woman’s Board of Missions, abandoned her Indian camp work to focus on the agency’s white community out of fear that white children would soon attend the Catholic school.21 As lead IMC missionary in the area, J. J. Methvin envied the connections Catholics established with both Indian leaders and government personnel. In 1895, he lambasted Major Frank Baldwin, the KCA Agency’s Indian agent, about his “leaning to Catholicism” when it came to school affairs.22 The superintendents of the Protestant schools in Anadarko, which included Southern Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian, cooperated with one another in returning runaway students, but they did not extend this courtesy to Ricklin and St. Patrick’s. To Methvin’s chagrin, Baldwin took students from the Methvin Institute and returned them to St. Patrick’s without consulting with him beforehand, a move which Methvin felt was “antagonizing” on the agent’s part and would lead Indian parents to avoid the Southern Methodist school altogether.23 More problematic was the Catholics’ direct influence with some of the agency’s Indians. They convinced Geronimo to support their school instead of any Protestant school, Methvin complained, which led twenty-five Apache children to attend St. Patrick’s as a result. With Comanches, Methvin believed that Catholics encouraged their peyote use to attract the tribe’s members, in particular Quanah Parker, to their church. Methvin believed that James Mooney, the noted ethnologist who studied the Plains Indians’ peyote issue during his visit in the 1890s, likewise promoted peyotism because he, too, was a Cath- olic. Additionally, Methvin accused Ricklin of baptizing Indians under the auspices that they could continue using peyote while being Catholic, “but while he fails in getting them to take on his superstition, he helps to keep them in their own.”24 Once the idea of expansion took hold, whether through enlarging preexisting work or through denominational competition, the IMC concentrated its efforts on building proper facilities, like churches and parsonages. Church buildings connoted an established and active presence in a community and became the focal point of the IMC’s goals for the territory. Just one year after the 1889 land run, the IMC made its position known when it asked its preachers to “give particular emphasis to . . . the necessity of building Methodist Church houses and parsonages in every pastoral charge.” Even outsiders noticed the church’s new attitude. Leo Bennett, the government’s agent at Union Agency, noted in his 1890 annual report that the Southern Methodists “largely increased the number of their The Mission Changes · 115 churches and added to their membership during the year.” The following year, he claimed “a healthy progress in the matter of religion” among the Five Tribes. “Many new church houses have been built, churches and Sunday Schools established, and altogether a large increase in church membership is noticeable,” Bennett indicated. In Vinita, the local newspaper noted, “The Methodist church in this city is taking advantage of the flush times to follow the payment to build a new church.” As the IMC built facilities, it created a sense of permanence that moved the conference further from its history as a mission field and closer to the legitimacy that other conferences enjoyed in the national church. “This conference makes a creditable showing for the intelligence, religious zeal and progress in Indian Territory, and which will compare favorably with the States,” the editor of the Muskogee Democrat wrote in 1904.25 This demand for permanent facilities represented a significant shift for the IMC. In previous decades, the necessities of the mission field forced the IMC to make concessions when it came to its church buildings. Several Southern Methodist congregations in remote areas shared facilities with other denominations on a rotating basis. In some communities, as many as four different churches used the same facility, which limited how often the IMC’s congregation met. At other times, congregations held services in public places like Masonic lodges or schoolhouses, even though these might not have been the most conducive for a church service. Worse still for IMC officials seeking a proper church setting, Indian meetings might take place in tepees or under brush arbors. J. J. Lovett from the Cherokee District summed up much of the IMC’s feelings on these antiquated meeting places in 1895 when he wrote, “We can’t win and hold this country for Christ, Southern Methodism, without building churches. School houses and brush arbors have served their day and should be abandoned as places of worship.”26 Without proper buildings, some in the church believed, “a whole train of evils frequently follows.” Ministers and church officials made frequent public appeals for funds in local, regional, or national newspapers and often described the situation as dire without the necessary facilities. In the mid- 1890s, Bishop Robert Hargrove made a fundraising pitch in other conferences that allowed individuals to name a church in Indian Territory in exchange for a $100 donation. In 1893, A. C. Briggs in Canadian County asked the IMC for $750 for three church buildings and one parsonage. Otherwise, he promised, the two Presbyterian churches would overtake the IMC’s work. “[T]hey had scooped in some of our members,” Briggs wrote, “and several more that ought to be with us.” Lucinda Helm at the 116 · Chapter Four national church’s Woman’s Department of Church Extension was even more critical of the IMC’s failure to build proper facilities. Discussing the IMC’s abandoned effort near Pawhuska in the Osage Nation, where the absence of a parsonage scared off potential ministers, Helm stated, “It all turns upon that one point. For the lack of a parsonage the mission to the Osages must be abandoned, and a heathen people be left to perish in the midst of a Christian nation.”27 For many within the national church and the IMC, a mission field was successful only after it exhibited tangible signs of permanence, like church buildings and parsonages, which implied the spread of white civilization. Understanding the need for proper church buildings to legitimize their presence in the region, white congregations became proactive. The Eufaula church, which was one of Theodore Brewer’s first IMC assignments back in the 1870s, burned down in 1896 after a fire destroyed much of the town. But, as the church history reported, reconstruction was “fairly easy in the prosperous new town,” and the rebuilt church remained debt-free. Six days after the 1889 land run, fifty Southern Methodists organized a church in Oklahoma City, which by June claimed over five hundred members. In 1904, the Oklahoma City church, now renamed St. Luke’s, built its first brick building, and two years later, it raised $90,000 for additional facilities. In Holdenville, eight members formed a church in 1897, which grew to more than two hundred members by 1906, the same year it built a new $5,000 church and parsonage. A June 1904 tornado destroyed the IMC’s Clinton church, established just a year earlier, but the congregation rebuilt it in less than two months and added a $1,500 parsonage the following year. As these examples demonstrated, funding for white churches outpaced that of Indian congregations, and whites willingly spent large amounts of their money to support the IMC’s move toward legitimacy. “The Methodists are hustlers when they get a move on, and that is most all the time,” the Muskogee County Republican declared in 1910.28 The need for church facilities exposed the subordinate position of Indian congregations in the 1890s. Public appeals for financial assistance were common in church newspapers, such as H. H. Goode’s 1893 request for $37.50 for his Adair church. But many Indian ministers, especially those working with full-blood congregations, had limited knowledge of English, which severely restricted their ability to appeal for funds from a largely white audience. By the mid-1890s, the IMC had a clear picture of the financial issues affecting its Indian congregations, particularly their lack of self-supporting churches and their continued reliance on external funding. Officials at the Cherokee District Conference in March 1895 The Mission Changes · 117 grew frustrated by their churches’ poor economic condition even after a half- century of mission appropriations. “Our stewards and preachers and members will have to wake up along here or somebody is going to be left,” the district conference stated in a report, which also claimed that fifty-six of its congregations lacked proper facilities.29 For all the problems the IMC’s white members faced establishing their permanent presence, Indian members still held their usefulness for the conference. For years, Indian governments and federal oversight had handi capped the IMC, particularly when it came to purchasing land outright. Now, when Indian members owned resources that the IMC could use, it exploited the situation. The IMC might ask its Indian members who held land titles to donate it to an individual church, such as it did in Marlow in the 1890s, when a Chickasaw woman gave the church a quit-claim deed for a lot two blocks south of Main and Broadway. At times, the IMC appealed directly to Indian councils, as with its Sallisaw church, whose origins came from a land patent it received from the Cherokee Nation in 1890. Ever cautious of the demands coming from outsiders, the Cherokee Council required that an individual church’s trustees be Cherokee citizens, which kept the land or property in the legal control of the Cherokees and not the IMC. This provision, for instance, was enforced when James Taylor, a Cherokee citizen, sold a lot in the town of Claremore to the Methodists in 1893. Yet, IMC demands could prove too much for the Cherokee Council, such as its appeals to open a school in Fort Gibson’s abandoned buildings once the fort reverted back into Cherokee hands. Despite the IMC’s claim that it was “a great opportunity for our church to establish an institution which will meet the demands of this country with its grand possibilities,” Cherokees ignored the conference’s repeated requests.30 The IMC’s call for expansion and desire for proper church facilities showed its new goals by the 1890s. Denominational competition forced the conference to confront an “enemy” it could understand or else lose its preeminence in the territory, while funds for new church buildings came from whites seeking permanent institutions for their new communities rather than for poor full-bloods. But the growing separation between Indian and non-Indian churches did not come solely from the IMC’s new white immigrants. The conference’s Indian congregations, both the older ones among the Five Tribes and the developing ones among the Plains Indians, incorporated elements of their Native cultures into their religious practices that confused some in the IMC. Additionally, some Indian preachers concerned themselves more with Indian autonomy than with the church’s work, much to the frustration of IMC officials. The conference’s Indian 118 · Chapter Four members were certainly more “civilized” than non-Christian Indians, church officials felt, yet the perseverance of their own customs, especially within church settings, differentiated them from the majority of whites in the IMC. Both white and Indian communities created new social institutions that incorporated Christianity and Methodism, but only one bore a close resemblance to those in the American South. The IMC’s attitude toward its full-blood congregations reached a cross- road in the mid-1890s. After more than a half-century of work with the Five Tribes, the conference sensed that its churches were moving away from Indian congregations, particularly among full-bloods, work that “required greater diligence and greater faith to accomplish anything at all,” Milton Clark reminded the IMC. He saw the language barrier as the strongest reason for the IMC’s struggles and suggested a renewed effort by preachers to learn Indian languages, a step back in the national church’s assimilationist agenda. “There are some preachers now who think that it is useless to try to do anything with them. The cost is too great,” Clark continued. “It is not to be wondered at that the interest and work drifted away from the full blood.”31 IMC officials responded to Clark’s comments by blaming the Method- ist circuit rider system. Using Native-speaking preachers years ago would have been effective, but “at that time our itinerant system could hardly have been bent to fit such a contingency,” the IMC noted while ignoring attitudes fifty years earlier that had demanded white control over mission work. As for the present time, it claimed that “all the Indian languages are growing steadily into disuse, and soon will be unknown by any considerable number of the Indians,” a comment that spoke more to the IMC’s focus on acculturated mixed-bloods and its desires for the assimilation of Indian congregations than to the reality of the situation. Several years later, the Board of Missions also reflected on the IMC’s use of the circuit rider system for its Indian missions and declared it a failure. “To call this mission work,” the Board reported, “is hardly fair. The defect is in the system.”32 By the 1890s, the IMC questioned whether Indian missions could even accept Southern Methodist traditions like the circuit rider system. Clark embodied the views of a previous generation of missionaries who advocated new ways to achieve old goals, yet this view was out of step with the IMC’s current agenda and the growing demands of white communities. The changing tide spreading in the IMC forced it away from its Native congregations. One issue that Clark’s comments revealed was the underlying idea of a properly educated and trained ministry. Writing elsewhere in Our Brother The Mission Changes · 119 in Red, Clark reminded the IMC that even after more than fifty years of work, “[i]t takes a WE to preach to full bloods when a white preacher is in it.” With white communities demanding more ministers, the IMC’s Indian congregations, especially its full-blood churches, depended on Native ministers who, conference officials noted, lacked basic knowledge in English, the Bible, and Southern Methodism. To correct these problems, the IMC sent several resolutions to the national church’s general conference asking it to provide materials and to allow licensing examinations in Native languages.33 Arguing that Indian preachers “cannot go to Vanderbilt, nor possibly to any good school, nor read many books,” H. M. Grande called “for something like an informal Preachers’ Institute, where the gospel, the Church, a call to preach, how to preach, how to be saved, and other vital matters can be taught under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.” Even though officials recognized that “[r]equiring full-blood Indians to conform to a literature requirement that they have never had in their language as a pre- quisite [sic] to the ministry will be attended with disaster to our church work among them,” the IMC and the national church made few attempts to translate the Bible and The Discipline. When J. S. Lamar asked the Board of Missions for help in translating portions of The Discipline into Creek, the board hesitated. Months later, it gave Lamar ten dollars from the IMC’s Sunday school budget to buy Bibles for the Creeks.34 William Jimboy, a Creek minister and chaplain for the Creek Coun- cil’s House of Warriors, bemoaned the IMC’s educational problems surrounding its Indian preachers, though he did not dismiss their abilities. Recognizing the clear “difference between the white man and the Indian” in terms of biblical training, Jimboy noted that Indian ministers still “talk about Jesus and tell boldly of salvation.” Indian preachers could promote a Christian and Southern Methodist message in their own way, he believed, even if they lacked some of the training whites enjoyed. Jim- boy blamed the different educational levels between white and Indian preachers on the dearth of materials in Native languages, which he felt was the fault of conference and church officials. “[Since] the book by which we are ruled, which the white people have, is not in our possession, I think we stand as though knowing nothing,” Jimboy complained. “And even of the Discipline, we Methodist ministers are entirely ignorant; every Muskogee and every Seminole. But I think we are not to blame for that.” As whites insisted on conducting the IMC’s annual meeting in English, thereby alienating its Indian members who spoke only their Native language, Jimboy became more fatalistic. “When death has come to us,” he wrote to a friend, “in heaven we will not need an interpreter.”35 120 · Chapter Four

While the IMC’s white officials debated the course of its Indian missions, Native communities followed their own beliefs toward Southern Methodism and Christianity. At times, tribal concerns and Indian customs dictated these decisions. Because some missionaries understood that Christianity did not immediately replace Native society, and that concessions were necessary to attract Indian converts, they were careful in how they condemned Native societies. In other cases, Indian converts governed and operated their own congregations irrespective of the national church’s or IMC’s wishes, which only lowered their status and legitimacy in the eyes of church officials. In 1894, A. B. L. Hunkapiller visited William Brewer’s Comanche mission near Fort Sill. During Hunkapiller’s visit, a Comanche man approached Brewer and asked to convert even though the man had two wives. This seeming contradiction, of a man willing to embrace Christianity while still adhering to older ways, left the visiting minister perplexed as to what the IMC should do. “While it is our duty to guard the door of our great church against polygamy at the same time here is a lost sinner with what light he has, wanting to accept Christ, become a Christian and join the church,” Hunkapiller said. “He is at the door knocking for admittance. What shall be done?”36 Hunkapiller’s question addressed the divisive cultural issue affecting the IMC, which centered on the theological gap between white interpretations of Christianity and long-practiced Native traditions. For much of its history, the IMC maintained a tenuous relationship with certain elements of Indian culture, and the recent addition of Plains Indians communities to the conference roll exacerbated this problem. What later scholars identified as the duality of Indian spirituality and Christianity “existing side by side within the same spiritual experience,” contemporary white Meth- odists saw only as the perseverance of paganism.37 In eastern Indian Terri- tory, preachers railed against the busk and other similar ceremonies, which they interpreted as the veneration of non-Christian spirits and ideals, and labeled these customs as evil.38 Among the Plains Indians, missionaries encountered polygamy, peyote, and the ghost dance movement as major obstacles in their work. How Southern Methodist missionaries approached these issues exposed the uneasy balancing act they performed between the expectations of a white audience and their own honest desire to convert a Native population to their view of Christianity. It also showed that while Native communities accepted Christianity and promoted it in their homes, they accommodated their own culture and did not abandon it to the degree that whites desired. The Mission Changes · 121

To be sure, the IMC’s public rhetoric came down firmly against Native practices like polygamy and dancing. M. B. Avant, a missionary from the Woman’s Board who worked with Choctaw and Kiowa congregations, told the Woman’s Missionary Advocate that the sun dance was “the most debasing and degrading of all [Indian] idolatrous worship.” Methvin spoke for many within the conference when he colorfully painted the ghost dance as a scam where “[a] dozen maniac asylums turned loose together would hardly be equal to the scenes enacted by these tribes . . . in their crazy, superstitious worship of the supposed Messiah.”39 But for all their bluster and public condemnation, missionaries could not stop Indian members from attending these events. Creeks and Seminoles, for example, practiced the green corn dance well into the twentieth century, with Christian Indians (including Southern Methodists) and non- Christian Indians participating at least until the 1930s. In the case of polygamy, missionaries attempted to end the practice, which became easier once the government passed laws forbidding it and missionaries could appeal to Indian agents to enforce the law. Yet as IMC missionaries discovered, actually enacting these measures was difficult, especially with older Indians.40 Angered by former students who engaged in polygamy, Methvin demanded that the KCA agent make them “conform to the law.” Another IMC missionary, Benjamin Gassaway, recognized the legal wife based on age or how long she lived with the husband. When no determination could be made, Gassaway simply threw up his hands and ignored the transgression.41 A more telling example of how IMC missionaries faced the reality of Native practices and its influence over their Indian converts was the widespread use of peyote. Peyotism, or “mescal eating,” as missionaries sometimes called it, had originated centuries earlier with the indigenous population of Mexico before spreading north and taking hold among the Plains Indians during the reservation period of the late nineteenth century. Peyotism typically infused the use of the peyote bud with religious meaning and, in some cases, overtly Christian symbolism. For Plains Indi- ans who found themselves reservation bound and under the government’s thumb, peyotism gave new meaning to older religious symbols like the sun, Earth, and moon while also allowing individuals to seek out their own spirit power through the bud’s hallucinogenic properties. Peyotism grew in prominence on the KCA Agency in the 1880s, gaining the support of important tribal leaders like Quanah Parker (Comanche) and Apiatan (Kiowa), even as the sun dance declined and federal officials waged a campaign to eradicate the practice.42 122 · Chapter Four

In the IMC, J. J. Methvin became the conference’s most outspoken critic of peyotism due to his work around the KCA Agency. Describing his visit to an Apache peyote meeting, Methvin evoked images of a den of sin virtually impenetrable by any feelings of hope and happiness. The feast, he described, “was densely dark, the clouds shut out the stars above, and mists hung heavy about, settled down around like the blackness of despair.” Pey- ote use, Methvin thought, was the “most debasing of all false worships that cursed the Indians” and a “drug habit under the cover of religion.”43 For all his anger at “mescal eating” and the Indians who took part in the ceremonies, Methvin saved the brunt of his criticism for James Mooney, an educated, federally employed ethnologist and, as Methvin was quick to note, a Catholic. The missionary felt that Mooney’s promotion of peyotism as a legitimate Indian practice masked his underlying motive of trying to sup- plant Protestantism among Indians with his own Catholic “superstition.”44 He conflated his own disregard of Catholicism with Mooney’s study of peyotism and attacked both relentlessly. Methvin wrote the KCA agent on several occasions in the mid-1890s complaining of Mooney’s undue influence, in addition to his complaints sent to church members, government officials, and even the secretary of the interior in 1894. The fact that many practicing peyotists were associated with the Catholic Church to some degree, regardless of how close these associations actually were, only aggravated the problem for Methvin.45 Despite all his animosity toward peyotism in general, Methvin never publically mentioned his own Kiowa converts and Indian ministers, like Kicking Bird, Andres Martinez, and Hunting Horse, who participated in peyote meetings for years after their conversions. Unsurprisingly, Indians who justified peyote use in their pursuit of Christianity reacted differently than Methvin and his ilk. “I believe Andele’s Bible,” Sankadota told Martinez during a peyote meeting. “It is right, but the Great Creator made peyote, so we who could not read could understand. The Great Creator made everything that grows, and he made peyote.” Peyotism’s popularity among Kiowas made any individual recrimination difficult for fear of alienating potential members. At the same time, peyote adherents did not see the strict divide between church membership and peyotism and continued to become members of Baptist, Southern Methodist, or other congregations in the region. As long as peyotists balanced peyote meetings with attending church services, Southern Methodist ministers tolerated its use to a degree.46 This delicate balance was evident in the life of Hunting Horse, an older Kiowa leader and one of the symbols of Southern Methodism’s success, even though he continued to participate in peyote ceremonies for decades. The Mission Changes · 123

A former scout for the United States army, Hunting Horse converted to Christianity around 1900 and began attending the Southern Method- ist Church soon thereafter. He was a charter member of the Mt. Scott Kiowa Church and served as the camp announcer at camp meetings. After Hunting Horse’s conversion, Methvin convinced him to send his two sons, Cecil and Albert, to the Methvin Institute, and the two boys eventually became Southern Methodist ministers. Yet even though the church raised him up as representative of Christianity’s redeeming effect on Indians, and as Methvin relied on his influence to attract students to the Methvin Institute, Hunting Horse practiced peyotism for years. According to his son Cecil, Hunting Horse began using peyote in 1891 and learned many of the rituals of running a peyote meeting from Quanah Parker. After more than four decades, Hunting Horse finally quit using peyote as he approached his ninetieth birthday.47 Even when Native converts avoided dancing or peyotism, they infused Christianity with Native customs in ways that further differentiated them from mainstream Southern Methodism. John Tsatoke, Hunting Horse’s grandson, who later became a Methodist minister, credited God with the creation of Kiowa hymns, which flourished even as missionaries worked to eradicate Native languages. From the Native perspective, these hymns embodied a communal experience shared by a tribe that grounded Chris- tianity in a Native spiritual context. According to Tsatoke, Kiowa hymns served as “the inspiration of those that are sick, some that are in bereaved [sic], some that are in sorrow.” God “inspired some of our elder Indian people,” Tsatoke said, while Kiowa Christians “handed down [hymns] to us from year in and year out.”48 One reason for the popularity of these hymns was the ease with which Kiowa Christians could substitute their words for God (Daw-k’ ee) and Jesus (Daw-k’ yah-ee) into songs originally used in the feather dance (the Kiowa name for the ghost dance).49 By incorporating their traditions, these Kiowa members made their own connection to Christianity while also reinforcing white-held views of how distinctly “Indian” those congregations remained. An example of how Natives approached Christianity in ways unfamiliar to whites occurred in September 1894 when Our Brother in Red published a letter titled “An Indian Vision” from the Creek minister David Berryhill. In his letter, Berryhill detailed a recent spiritual vision for a conference audience, though the intent was primarily for his Creek readers. As the vision began, an angel led him first to a bottomless pit, where Berryhill heard voices calling out, including one he recognized. The angel told Berry hill that the pit was actually hell and that the man he heard call 124 · Chapter Four out “claimed to be a child of God, but at the same time was working and serving the devil more than God.” After a stop at a basin that represented “the great gulf of which Abraham told the rich man was between heaven and the place of torment no man might, or could pass,” the angel took Berryhill through the gates of heaven. In heaven, the two encountered Samuel Checote, the deceased principal chief of the Creek and presiding elder in the IMC. Checote asked about his children on Earth, who Berry- hill said “were all on the right road to heaven.” Checote then told Berryhill that Berryhill’s father, mother, brothers, and sisters “were all safe in the heavenly land.” Checote, Berryhill described, “took me into an adjoining room and there I saw my dear old mother arrayed in shining garments, she ran to me and embraced me and kissed me, for there is no weeping here, it is a place of joy and happiness. And I went into another room, and there I saw my old father brothers and sisters shouting and praising God who liveth forever.” Finally, the angel took Berryhill to see God and Jesus, who told him “to return to yonder world and admonish the people to cease to do evil and to learn to do well, and also that the work that I had already done was pleasing in his sight.”50 Berryhill’s “Indian vision” reinforced not only the Creek minister’s commitment to Christianity, but also his own interpretation of Christi- anity, which appealed directly to Creek converts. Visions were certainly nothing new in Christianity, yet the title of the letter made a point of defining it as “Indian.” Furthermore, white officials and ministers largely ignored the letter. A year later, unnamed IMC officials removed Berryhill from the ministry after criticizing him for not wanting the “full ministry of the gospel” by passing his examinations to become an elder in the conference. “All the preachers we have ever seen except Brother Berryhill have been anxious to be ordained so that they might baptize their converts, administer the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and marry their friends,” they said as they chastised him for not living up to white standards of the ministry. Berryhill, in turn, felt that only one person was to blame: a “white man that opposed God’s work, and that person knows it himself, and we Indians know it.”51 Irrespective of the IMC’s support, some individual Indian congregations took the initiative in founding and building their own churches. In the mid-1890s, Kiowa chief Stumbling Bear, with Methvin’s help, founded the Mt. Scott Kiowa Church. With the church located on the KCA Agency and far removed from larger towns, Kiowa members took responsibility for the building’s construction. Charles Apekum, Stumbling Bear’s grandson, who was fifteen years old at the time, recalled cutting limestone The Mission Changes · 125 and hauling it to the site to build the stone church. Boasting of the area’s growth, Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches collectively asked for a new school in 1896 for Mt. Scott and set aside twenty-five thousand dollars of their own money for its operation.52 In other situations, the IMC’s Indian ministers kept their churches free from white involvement by purposely segregating their work from the rest of the conference. Bear Timpson was a full-blood Cherokee who blamed whites for the Cherokees’ struggles in the years after the Civil War. As a result, Timpson’s church in Craig County in northeast Indian Terri- tory focused on Cherokee converts and included many members of his own extended family. Thomas Little, a Seminole preacher, told the IMC, “Although we are Methodists, and are strong in Methodist belief, we think it is better for us that the white people should not be joined with us.” Little wanted the IMC to create an Indian-only district for its Creek and Seminole charges. “It does not please us to be joined with whites who are not citizens. We feel that it is better for the Indians to keep themselves separate.” Little argued that because his community accepted Christian- ity, they had earned the right to operate without white interference, and that Christianity would sustain them without oversight by white officials. “Having learned God’s law, and believing it,” Little wrote, “wherever we Indians are, having believed in it, we will believe it still.”53 With Indian work demanding more financial assistance from outside sources, the IMC debated the economics of its Indian missions. As the nation dipped into a severe depression in 1893, the IMC and the national church put greater emphasis on self-support for individual churches and circuits, which pressured congregations to become financially autonomous from the IMC and Board of Missions. This pressure, however, worked in the conference because the IMC’s membership soared during the 1890s, and its property value skyrocketed due to the growth of white communities. Writing in the 1910s, Theodore Brewer found the changes in the IMC quite remarkable compared with nearly four decades earlier and joked that if ministers outside the region received word of the “fine houses” and “big salaries” in Oklahoma, the bishop would be inundated with transfer requests. “Now we are living in fine parsonages and worshiping in splendid churches,” Brewer wrote. “Who would have thought it thirty years ago?”54 The financial success that developed in white communities did not extend to many of the IMC’s Indian congregations, whose increasing economic marginalization during the 1890s made them unable to support their churches. The IMC floated several plans to reorganize its work, including measures to make Indian work the sole responsibility of the 126 · Chapter Four

Board of Missions and to divide appropriations evenly between whites and Indians. When the board cut its appropriations in the mid-1890s, it forced the IMC to concentrate on self-support. “The pastors should nerve themselves up to the duty of instructing their charges in the duty of self- support,” the editor of Our Brother in Red told the IMC. “Much, too, will depend upon the attitude which the stewards take upon the question.”55 More troubling for missionaries working in Native communities was the perception that IMC officials reallocated money promised for Indian missions to white churches. In 1891, Methvin accused the IMC of using $19,000 of its $20,000 annual appropriations on whites and wealthy mixed- blood churches instead of on needy full-blood work. A decade later, the presiding elder of the Duncan District, which included Methvin’s Kiowa work, asked the board to specifically earmark money for the KCA Agency instead of just giving the IMC a lump sum. Without the board’s specific instructions, he feared, the IMC would spend the money however it saw fit. The board responded by specifying $948 for the KCA Agency, leaving the remaining $10,000 to be used at the conference’s discretion. Meth- vin’s own request to the board was met with recrimination, because of the board’s new policy of “self-maintenance” and “self-propagation,” which it deemed necessary to avoid a “fall to the low level of decadence and early death.”56 The board admonished Methvin in 1896: “[T]he question of self- support, as essential to the establishment of a self-respecting, self-reliant and self-propagating church, is one of paramount importance . . . You can do much to co-operate with our brethren in this direction. . . . [N]o further argument . . . is necessary.”57 With white communities in a position to direct the IMC’s actions, conference officials turned their attention to two important symbols of its status within the national church. Its newspaper, Our Brother in Red, was the official conference organ, detailing the regular activities of the IMC, while the conference’s very name stated its purpose. Yet both of those institutions’ outward appearances designated the conference as “Indian” even though the IMC’s membership and attitude had evolved. As a result, the conference moved to rename itself and its newspaper to better reflect its new direction. As many white congregations advocated for these changes, however, the IMC’s Indian churches fought against it. They were successful at first, but eventually white demands won out. Originally founded as a monthly paper in 1882, Our Brother in Red became a weekly newspaper in 1887 and served as the IMC’s official organ for more than fifteen years. As with most individual conference newspapers throughout the Southern Methodist Church, Our Brother in Red The Mission Changes · 127

Figure 7. A reunion of white and Indian ministers in eastern Indian Territory, circa 1900 (Mrs. C. M. Coppage Collection, Research Division of the Okla- homa Historical Society).

offered pastors and congregations an opportunity to communicate with other members and was considered a vital piece of church literature that each Southern Methodist home should own. Ministers and congregants wrote to the newspaper to discuss camp meetings, conversions, revival services, local political issues, theological questions, and conference policies. It was, in the opinion of IMC officials, the “easiest and swiftest means by which the preachers and the people of this conference can communicate the news of our church to one another.” This newspaper also initially provided a voice to Native preachers and congregations, as apparent by the letters frequently published in Native languages by Creek ministers William Jimboy and David Berryhill, among others.58 As for the newspaper’s title of Our Brother in Red, officials explained their reasoning in an 1884 editorial after critics argued that the name was “condescending” and “patronizing” toward the IMC’s Indian members. “Some have, from the phraseology of the name, been led into thoughts of painted cheeks, brilliant feathers, and red blankets,” the editors responded, 128 · Chapter Four

“but such thoughts do great violence to the legitimate meaning of the name.” The editorial argued that other popular terms for Indians, such as “the nation’s ward” or “the red man of the forest,” reinforced the perception of Indian inferiority while their terminology did not. The editors felt that the newspaper’s name indicated the conference’s belief that “the Indian be received as a brother beloved, with rights and privileges equal to those enjoyed by his brother in white.”59 After the 1889 land run, the IMC returned to the issue of the newspaper’s name. An 1891 attempt to rename the paper the Indian Advocate failed, but a similar move a year later to change the name to the Indian Method- ist succeeded. The IMC stated at the time that the newspaper “failed to meet the demands of the Church,” an indication of the influence that its new white members exhibited. Looking to rebrand the IMC’s newspaper, suggested names included the Oklahoma Christian Advocate along with the Indian Methodist. On the surface, both these titles, along with the previous suggestion of the Indian Advocate, reflected the newspaper’s status as an official Methodist organ. The national church newspaper, after all, was known as the Christian Advocate, and several conferences used that term in their newspaper title, such as the New Orleans Christian Advocate and the Texas Christian Advocate. In other cases, conferences directly used the word “Methodist” in the title as a sign of identity, such as the neighboring Arkansas Conference and its newspaper the Arkansas Methodist. To IMC officials, the change fromOur Brother in Red to the Indian Methodist, therefore, represented the IMC’s development within the larger national church and its own growing white constituency. As future presiding elder W. S. Derrick told the conference, “the name Our Brother in Red, had a kind of uncivilized ‘jingle,’ about it.”60 Several pastors of Indian congregations saw more ominous undertones in the name change. “The paper is all right,” D. C. Murphy wrote, “but that new name looks like Oklahoma had its hand in it.”61 Murphy’s comment pointed straight to the influence that white congregations exerted over the IMC. By renaming the newspaper, the IMC took a small, but important, step away from its Indian past in an effort to increase its legitimacy in the national church’s eyes. Newspaper sales declined by the early 1890s because the IMC’s white members were more comfortable patronizing other conferences’ newspapers, like the St. Louis Christian Advocate. To remain relevant among the new white settlers, the newspaper had to change its name to attract their support. Indian members saw the name change as more evidence of white congregations’ growing disinterest toward their communities. Choctaw preacher Willis Folsom expressed his The Mission Changes · 129 feelings on the IMC’s new attitude when he wrote, “This change indicates that the white people have ceased to call us their brother.”62 After more than six months as the Indian Methodist, public pressure forced the newspaper to return to its old name of Our Brother in Red in November 1893. Several white ministers remained indifferent to the change, but the loudest complaints came from Indian congregations. For the next few years, the newspaper continued until disgruntlement over its management and declining sales forced it to shutter its operations in 1898. In 1900, the IMC briefly supported the Western Christian Advocate, a newspaper started by W. S. Derrick and edited by J. M. Gross, and the conference warned that any minister working for a rival newspaper would suffer “the penalty of the charge of a breach of faith.” Afterwards, the IMC supported a series of newspapers representing various nearby conferences for the next few decades.63 At the same time that its membership argued over its newspaper’s name, forces in the IMC debated whether or not to divide into two separate conferences. This move mirrored the division of Indian Territory in May 1890 into the Twin Territories. Under the Oklahoma Organic Act of 1890, Con- gress joined the panhandle region known as No Man’s Land to the western half of Indian Territory to create Oklahoma Territory. This new territory had its own government, its own territorial courts, and rights to local self- rule separate from Indian Territory, which now consisted primarily of the Five Tribes and Quapaw Agency in the eastern half.64 A newspaper editorial published in February 1893 outlined the differences between the Twin Territories, at least from the IMC’s perspective, which was now heavily influenced by its white members. According to the editor, Oklahoma Territory was populated by people “brought up under the influences of a civilized government, well nigh perfect in its character.” In contrast, “the citizens of Indian Territory . . . are but just emerging from a state of semi barbarianism, and as yet their knowledge of the usages and laws of civilized government too necessarily imperfect.”65 This perceived divide between the two territories left the IMC in a precarious position. As a “mission conference,” the national church expected the IMC to spend funds on both full-blooded and mixed-blooded churches mainly in Indian Territory. The growth in Oklahoma Territory and the fear that other denominations would envelop these people of “near perfect” character, however, left many conference members wanting to focus the IMC’s limited resources on white communities and “remove the badge of missions.”66 By dividing the IMC into two conferences, Oklahoma Territory’s white churches were no longer obligated to support Indian congregations. But 130 · Chapter Four separation promised benefits for churches among the Five Tribes as well. The Board of Missions classified the IMC as a “foreign mission field,” appropriating money accordingly, and Indian communities did not receive a fair share. One minister, for example, complained that he received only $100 for Indian work as opposed to the $1,500 given to missionaries in Japan and China. By removing Oklahoma Territory from the IMC, Indian Territory could keep more money for itself. Another potential benefit was increasing autonomy for Indian churches. Indian congregations could retain independent control over the direction of their churches and shape religious services to their needs while still drawing on the national church’s assistance as need be. Furthermore, division freed Indian congregations from association with white churches unconcerned about Indians. As the Choctaw District stated about the proposed split, “This people has no objection to any preachers who have no interest in the welfare of the Indian and does not want to remain in the Indian Mission Conference. There is nothing to keep any one that wants to go with Oklahoma from going. The Territory land belongs to the Indians.”67 At its May 1894 general conference, the national church granted the IMC the right to divide. During summer district conferences, the Cher- okee District, the McAlester District, and the Choctaw District, all with large Indian populations from the Five Tribes, voted for division. At its annual meeting that October, the IMC voted “by a good majority” to split the Oklahoma and El Reno districts into their own conference on the condition that missions to the Plains Indians remain with the IMC. How- ever, the bishop presiding, Robert Hargrove, rejected the conference’s vote “for reasons deemed by him satisfactorily [sic],” and the IMC remained undivided. Thwarted by the bishop, debate over separation continued for more than a decade. At both the 1898 and 1902 general conferences, the IMC asked for the right to divide, and it was granted at least once more.68 Meanwhile, both the IMC and the national church reevaluated their stance toward Indian missions in general. “We are no longer an Indian Mission Conference, and we ought to change our name and not sail under this nom de plume any longer,” I. B. Hickman wrote in 1896. “I say this because the Indians have left us or we have left them.”69 At its May 1904 annual meeting, the Board of Missions looked “narrowly into the evangeli- zation of the Indians of the territory known as the wild tribes” and decided that “[e]xperience has shown that mixed work, that is, congregations made up of full-blood Indians and of our white population, is not best for either whites or Indians.” The board grew disenchanted from its perceived failure with the Plains Indians and felt that separating whites from Indians was The Mission Changes · 131 the best option for the work. And while the board wanted more missionaries specifically for the IMC’s Indian work around Anadarko, it also took away money from the conference’s appropriations later that same day and earmarked it for a pastor in Berkeley, California.70 It was not until 1906 that the IMC formally made any changes to its boundaries. In the year before Oklahoma’s statehood, the IMC officially changed its name to the Oklahoma Annual Conference and shed its “mission” status within the national church. The Oklahoma Conference separated its Indian missions into three Indian-only districts, the Creek- Seminole Indian District, the Choctaw-Chickasaw Indian District, and the Kiowa Indian District, with a white minister overseeing each district as the presiding elder. No mention was given for the disappearance of the conference’s Cherokee congregations from the membership rolls.71

Soon after the IMC officially became the Oklahoma Annual Conference in 1906, the region’s Southern Methodist Indian congregations declined in membership to pre–Civil War levels.72 The conference formally separated Indian districts from white districts, and then combined the administration of these new Indian-only districts into smaller units. Indian missions, previously the defining characteristic of the region’s Southern Methodism, became isolated outposts surrounded by a larger white-dominated conference. Indian schools, previously a valuable base for missions and a source of pride for the IMC, were increasingly passé for a conference focused on educational efforts for white communities. Whatever attention the IMC paid to Indian schools was usually concerned with an institution’s potential costs, not its Christian education. The segregation of the IMC’s Indian churches from its white churches developed from both sides and was not just a matter of white officials leaving their Indian brethren behind. Following the 1889 land run, the region’s demographics changed completely and made Indians the minority population. An increase in whites created an increase in the IMC’s responsibilities, whether to enlarge its preexisting work or to combat the “Johnny- come-lately” denominations that threatened Southern Methodist congregations. Once the IMC adopted the appearance of a “white” conference, church officials wanted to assume their place as a legitimate conference in the national church. The influence of Indian Territory’s new migrants, who were more concerned with their own needs than those of Indian communities, forced this change in the IMC’s attitude. For their part, Indian congregations continued their own cultural traits much like they had for many decades, much to the consternation of white 132 · Chapter Four missionaries and conference officials. They included elements of their own culture, such as language and song, out of necessity or a desire to worship in a way that was comfortable to them, and ascribed the introduction of these elements into their congregations as the work of the same Chris- tian God worshipped by whites. Individuals asserted their Indian identity in church services, which ran counter to the explicit assimilationist agenda of many missionaries.73 Indian acceptance of white ways varied, with some avoiding white interference at all costs and others more measured in their response. But neither alternative meant that they stopped being Christian or Southern Methodist regardless of how the conference chose to see them. chapter five

Marginalizing the Mission

Indian Work after Statehood, 1907–1918

When the Indian Mission Conference formally became the Oklahoma Annual Conference in 1906, the organization underwent more than just a name change. White churches in what would soon become the state of Oklahoma officially laid claim to legitimacy, placing themselves alongside other conferences in the rest of the national church and pushing aside work in one of the oldest mission fields for Southern Methodism. No longer burdened with the “badge of missions,” the Oklahoma Conference directed its attention toward the typical issues of buildings, money, and membership faced by other mainstream Southern Methodist conferences. This direction evolved again in 1910 when the Oklahoma Conference split into two smaller organizations, the West Oklahoma Conference and the East Oklahoma Conference. Overall, the emphasis on white communities was part of a larger trend in Oklahoma that saw the state’s Indian population pushed to the periphery. The region’s move toward modernization in the early twentieth century demanded an end to tribal sovereignty, the abrogation of decades-old treaties, and the reduction of Indian-controlled land. With the government eager to enact assimilationist-minded policies, unscrupulous whites exploited Indians for their own needs and conspired in some of the largest examples of widespread fraud and theft on a Native population.1 At best, Oklahoma’s Southern Methodist communities could be accused of ignoring their Indian commitments and overlooking white actions as Indian churches moved toward marginalization; at worst, the church was complicit with the overall theft of Indian lands and the declining status

133 134 · Chapter Five of the state’s Native population. Recognizing that its Indian churches had not assimilated into the mainstream culture as desired, conference officials formally segregated Indian work from the rest of its congregations, where Indians assumed a secondary and almost forgotten position in the conference. The 1910 split of the Oklahoma Conference into two smaller conferences further alienated Indian congregations as these new organizations assumed control over the Indian churches within their own geographic boundaries, leaving the Five Tribes as a minority within the East Oklahoma Conference and the Plains Indians as an isolated station in the West Oklahoma Conference. Whether the segregation of Indian work was done for the betterment of Native churches or white churches depended on one’s perspective. What resulted from this new approach to Indian missions was a waning attention span on the part of mainstream Southern Methodist society. National organizations passed over Indian congregations as they shifted their focus to “regular” churches. Southern Methodism in Oklahoma mirrored the rest of the state’s white population in forgetting their Indian roots and ignoring Indian rights in favor of “progress” and “civilization.” As the IMC formally disappeared into the past, the new Oklahoma Conference claimed select elements of its predecessor’s history. Official records and stories transferred to the new conference, which now proudly proclaimed its heritage as extending back decades in order to cement its preeminence in the state. At the same time, churches founded as Indian congregations became increasingly white in their appearance and focused on their overall future rather than on their Native beginnings. Indian membership dwindled, which the conference erroneously attributed to the claim that Indians joined white churches in large numbers and assimilated to the point that preachers no longer made the distinction between Indian and white members or cared for those differences at all. More telling about the conference’s new direction was how church leadership resolved owner ship questions concerning church property. As the government moved to extinguish tribal authority in the early 1900s, questions arose over land ownership and church rights. Conference officials addressed these issues related to church houses, parsonages, building lots, cemeteries, and school facilities by promoting their own interests and potential profit at the expense of Indian rights. With white congregations focusing on their particular needs to increase their own wealth and prestige, Indian congregations faced a different set of problems. Issues of federal interference and paternal oversight still plagued Native communities throughout the state. White ministers, who found the Marginalizing the Mission · 135

Figure 8. A Creek congregation at Springfield Indian Methodist Church, circa 1900 (Fred Long Collection, Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society). new Oklahoma conferences more appealing for various reasons, looked at Southern Methodist Indian churches as remnants of an era best con- signed to the past. Even when whites accepted Indian congregations, they viewed Native religious expressions and services as out of step with modern Oklahoman society. Whites perceived their own churches, which concentrated on outward signs of permanence and legitimacy, as fitting for a mainstream Protestant church in the twentieth century, and they thought that Native churches were unsightly relics of the past. While mainstream communities focused on massive church construction projects, Indian congregations still met in brush arbors, dugouts, tepees, or single-room rural church houses located miles from any urban area. The survival of Southern Methodist Indian congregations in Okla- homa during this tumultuous period depended on several factors. Con- gregations that turned inward over the previous decades, especially as the old IMC increasingly neglected its Indian churches, continued in the new conferences. These congregations were battered, certainly, but they were not destroyed. Indian ministers remained committed to their charges regardless of the indifference displayed by conference officials. As in 136 · Chapter Five previous difficult times, such as the removal era or the Civil War period, traveling preachers and local preachers continued their ministry to the remote Indian congregations in the state. In other cases, a limited number of white missionaries working with Indian communities refused to let their work die. Men and women from local churches and national organizations endured even though their future and their financial support was often in doubt. Still, their results during this period were small, as Indian membership in the Southern Methodist Church continued the gradual decline that had begun in the 1890s, eventually falling to just 2,700 members in 1916.2 The period from 1907 to 1918 represented the lowest ebb of South- ern Methodist Indian congregations in Oklahoma.

The IMC’s final annual meeting in November 1906 began on an ominous note. Bishop John Tigert, newly elected to the position at the national church’s quadrennial meeting the previous May, took ill while conducting a premeeting tour of the region’s Southern Methodist churches. During his stop in Atoka, Indian Territory, a chicken bone lodged below Tigert’s tonsils, leading to inflammation in his throat and blood poisoning. Ignor- ing the advice of his physicians, he continued on to Tulsa, intent on opening the IMC’s annual meeting on November 14. Once there, the illness deepened, and Tigert convalesced in a local residence as Bishop Joseph Key raced to take his place.3 What Key found when he arrived was an organization undergoing a rebirth. The national church finally gave the IMC permission to change its name, which allowed it to shed its history as a mission conference and assume a place in the Southern Methodist community as a “regular” conference. During the debate over the name change, which one newspaper dubbed “[t]he most important feature” of the Tulsa meeting, members divided over the frontrunners of “Indiahoma” and “Oklahoma.” “Indiahoma” was the more inclusive name that reflected the history of the white and Indian communities in the Twin Territories, while “Oklahoma” was more closely aligned with the region’s white communities in the western half of the territory, who dominated affairs. Following a vote, members adopted the latter option and officially transformed the Indian Mission Conference into the new Oklahoma Conference. A day after the close of the Tulsa meeting, Tigert died from his illness.4 Quickly thereafter, the Oklahoma Conference took official steps to segregate its Indian congregations from its white churches, at least in terms of administrative oversight. The conference reported over 42,000 members in November 1907, just one month before Oklahoma’s statehood became official, but its Indian membership totaled less than 7,400. Under Marginalizing the Mission · 137 the system previously in place, Indian congregations existed alongside white churches on the conference’s circuits and districts, with the assigned ministers expected to service both white and Indian congregations. Con- ference officials ended this arrangement by placing Native churches into three Indian-only districts that operated separately from its white districts, even though they occupied the same physical territory. The Choctaw- Chickasaw Indian District (located in southeast Oklahoma), the Creek- Seminole Indian District (located in east-central Oklahoma and renamed a year later as the Creek-Cherokee District), and the Kiowa Indian District (located in southwestern Oklahoma on the KCA Agency) oversaw what remained of the region’s Indian missions. From an organizational perspective, these Indian-only districts mirrored their mainstream counterparts, with a bishop and presiding elder determining appointments for individual congregations, and with the conference leveling financial assessments for every church. In each case, however, the presiding elder also held an appointment in a white congregation and divided his time between the two positions. This was a significant step backward from previous years, when Indians like Samuel Checote had served as presiding elders. Even though Indians had their own districts ostensibly to manage their work, officials still denied them important administrative positions and authority.5 Hindering Indian missions further was the conflicting agenda set by national organizations like the Board of Missions. In 1904, the board asked for plans to conduct “special and exclusive work” for the Plains Indians in the western half of the region for expansion into Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Osage communities. To carry these plans out, the board advocated a return to older methods of missionary work like the mission school system. “To Christianize the Indians,” the board reported in 1909, “the Church school is second in importance only to the evangelistic agency,” an idea borne from the belief that government and public schools could not “develop religious character” as effectively as church-run schools. These plans ignored the board’s own troubled history of operating Indian boarding schools, when complaints of “Indian interference” routinely rang out, but most likely assumed that the government’s efforts to end tribal authority would eliminate many of those problems. While the board addressed rejuvenating its Indian missions, it was also excited by the potential to increase the church’s presence among Oklahoma’s white communities. One presiding elder told the board in 1909 that the conference had established more than forty new preaching places in the six months since the last annual meeting. “The time has arrived for attempting ‘great things’ for God in this destined-to-be-great State,” the board claimed enthusiastically 138 · Chapter Five after hearing the news.6 Seemingly oblivious to its own desire to increase Indian missions, the board soon “insisted upon . . . a policy of concentra- tion upon centers of population and influence,” which left little room for its predominantly rural and scattered Indian congregations.7 The board’s mixed signals exemplified the vast difference between the rhetoric of Indian missions and the reality of Oklahoma at this time. The board had the authority to make important decisions and direct policy on a national level, but local officials carried out these plans. In earlier years, the old IMC was led by a mixture of white missionaries committed to Indian congregations in addition to Indians themselves, like Samuel Checote, Joseph Thompson, and James McHenry. Now, under the new conference, Indian representation was largely absent as a new generation of church leaders without these same ties assumed control. The emphasis on white communities affected the money appropriated for the Oklahoma Conference. Since Indian work was a small part of the larger Oklahoma Conference, the money that the board appropriated went through official conference channels first. As a result, white officials made the actual distribution of funds earmarked for Indians, and sometimes this money found its way into white coffers. At a meeting on May 12, 1908, the board’s Committee on Estimates asked that all its Indian appropriations be marked for specific needs and not just given over to the Oklahoma Confer- ence to dole out. Two months later, the board tried to protect Indian missions further by asking that the money from the sale of some of its property go to “educational work that will most benefit the real Indians of the State of Oklahoma.” What constituted a “real Indian” the board never defined, leaving the conference to interpret it however they saw fit.8 As the board waffled over its plans for the region, the Oklahoma Confer- ence and its Indian operations underwent more administrative shuffling, which continued to marginalize Indian congregations. After merging its Kiowa Indian District with the Choctaw-Chickasaw Indian District in 1908, the Oklahoma Conference split into two smaller conferences in 1910. The division placed the two Indian-only districts in the new East Oklahoma Conference, and the Kiowa work became a solitary charge in the Lawton District in the new West Oklahoma Conference. Within four years, the administration of Indian churches passed twice from one authority to another with little regard for Native concerns and little input from Native leaders.9 One reason the two conferences pushed aside their Indian congregations was the clear disparity between the facilities of Native and white churches. While white communities drove Oklahoma into the twentieth Marginalizing the Mission · 139 century with their vision of grand church halls as the center of urban life, Indian congregations reflected the antiquated nineteenth-century appearance of frontier mission work. Two Cherokee women, Dora Early Tucker and Lucinda Crittenden King, described congregations that to outsiders seemed disorganized and ill-equipped. “I remember when there wasn’t an organized group,” Tucker recalled of the work of her uncle, Methodist preacher Bill Sullivan. “The people were scarce, and far between. And they wasn’t [sic] organized church.” King’s stories echoed Tucker’s. “Well, they just had churches in people’s houses,” she remembered. “[T]hey just go, you know, just certain preacher come by this house . . . maybe next house next Sunday.”10 In stark contrast, white communities demanded buildings that were physical monuments to their beliefs and secured their prominence in the region. From their perspective, church houses were ecclesiastical flags planted firmly in new communities, or, as the East Oklahoma Confer- ence reported at its 1912 annual meeting, “an anchor no storm can drive.” In 1906, St. Luke’s, a Southern Methodist church in Oklahoma City, raised $90,000 for its new building, while in 1921, the Southern Method- ist congregation in Norman received $200,000 from Tulsa oilman Rob- ert McFarlin for its new building. When their local church burned down in 1912, a Depew, Oklahoma, “social and embroidery club known as the Fortnightly Club” raised funds “by serving dinners, teas, bazaars, and sewing bees to carry on the work” of building a new church. Construction began the next year, and by 1915, the congregation added a parsonage.11 As these outward signs of a denomination’s presence grew in importance, officials turned their collective attention to the issues of church property and Indian rights. The IMC as well as national organizations like the Board of Missions and the Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions had acquired land and property from the various tribal authorities and Native congregations during the preceding decades. But once the government’s allotment policy took hold after the turn of the century, securing legal title to the land became a paramount concern. Initiated as Indian policy with the 1887 Dawes Act, and subsequently broadened to include Indian Territory through the Dawes Commission and the 1898 Curtis Act, allotment redistributed Indian land held by the entire tribe into individual allotments ranging from 20 to 160 acres for its citizens. The government purchased the excess Indian land for pennies on the dollar and promptly sold it to whites. In Oklahoma, tribes fought a losing battle to retain their land before succumbing to the allotment process in the early twentieth century. Overall, the policy proved disastrous for Indian populations across 140 · Chapter Five the nation as Native communities had lost more than 80 million acres by the 1930s.12 To ensure that religious groups were not forgotten during the subsequent rush for Indian land, Congress passed several legislative acts that guaranteed acreage for churches, schools, and cemeteries among the Five Tribes and Plains Indians. Once tribal authority was no longer a factor by the early 1900s, and once the increase in white immigrants made property values skyrocket, the Southern Methodist Church stood to profit from its Indian landholdings. These actions were but one part of a larger scheme of graft and fraud that struck the state’s Indians in the early twentieth century. During this era, a cadre of local residents, government officials, and select business interests worked to improve their new communities at the expense of Indian rights. Some individuals were outright thieves looking to exploit Indian property such as land, oil, or mining riches for their own financial benefit, while others interpreted Indians’ asserting their own rights as actually interfering with the greater process of assimilation and ultimately delaying the inevitable.13 At times, the plundering of Indian land caught church officials off guard. In 1900, the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad offered ten dollars per acre for the right-of-way it claimed from the Methvin Insti- tute’s alfalfa fields in Anadarko, well below the twenty-five dollars per acre that J. J. Methvin and James Randlett, the KCA agent, felt the land was worth. Similar problems erupted with the Little Washita Church, a Kiowa congregation that saw its church building divided from its cemetery. According to Methvin, George Bundy, a local homesteader, had received the wrong allotment of land in 1896, and meanwhile the Little Washita Church built its church and cemetery on Bundy’s land. When debate over the property’s rightful owner emerged six years later, Methvin pleaded with the KCA agent to let the land stay in Kiowa hands. Otherwise, he claimed, the lack of a nearby church would force the Kiowa congregation to leave the denomination. As the Little Washita Church’s land problems lingered, the Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions, the Southern Method- ist organization that sponsored the church, reached a compromise with Bundy to swap allotments. The church’s building and its cemetery were on separate sections of land, however, and Bundy would exchange only the cemetery, presumably the least valuable land. Subsequent attempts by Charles Mitchell, the area’s presiding elder, to acquire both sections failed when the government rejected his appeal. In the meantime, other settlers claimed allotments surrounding the cemetery before Kiowas could, forcing the congregation to abandon its building and relocate.14 Marginalizing the Mission · 141

Although those examples put the Southern Methodist Church on the defensive, conference authorities were not above taking part in this larger land grab. “We honor the motive which has inspired the Government, believing that the purpose was to defend the incompetent Indian,” an inter- denominational group of ministers wrote to Congress in 1904, pro- testing the government’s protection of individual allotments for members of the Five Tribes. “The idea that the Indian citizen is an innocent victim of the rapacity and craft of the white race in Indian Territory is ludicrous,” the petition continued. The group, which included two IMC ministers, believed that restricting Indians from selling their allotments to willing whites “resulted most injuriously to every interest, including the building of churches and the maintenance of church schools.”15 Of particular importance to the Southern Methodist Church were the potential profits its various school properties could command. Unlike individual congregations, which at best received twenty to forty acres and usually much less, school property often required at least a quarter section of land, usually on the outskirts of a prosperous town. When communities like Vinita, Muskogee, and Anadarko grew in the early 1900s, these schools occupied valuable land in a booming real estate market. Church leaders lobbied government officials to get the best deal for this land, as when the government included a provision in an agreement between the United States and Creek Nation that allowed the Harrell Institute to buy its land in Muskogee for half of the appraised value.16 What the national church and conference did with the Willie Halsell College in Vinita and the Methvin Institute in Anadarko revealed their larger attitudes toward the Indians in terms of Oklahoma’s economic development. Willie Halsell College’s origins dated back to 1886, when the IMC had invoked Article 14 of the 1866 treaty between the Chero- kee Nation and the United States. Bound by the punishing reconstruction treaty to provide missionary societies with land for educational purposes, the Cherokee Council had given the IMC 160 acres near Vinita after the IMC’s representatives made the selection of land under suspicious circumstances. The IMC’s presiding bishop at the time, Charles Galloway, prodded the conference into action and secured $7,000 from the Board of Missions, with private money contributing the rest of the school’s needs. Originally named Galloway College when it opened in 1888, subsequent financial difficulties led officials to ask William Halsell, a local cattleman who had previously interceded with the Cherokee Council on behalf of the conference, for help. Halsell donated the needed funds, and in return the school changed its name to honor his recently deceased daughter.17 142 · Chapter Five

Located on the north side of Vinita next to the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, Willie Halsell College occupied a “commanding situation about half a mile above the town and attracts the attention of all visitors.”18 Over the next two decades, the college’s land increased in value, though what church officials could do with it was unclear because of the ongo- ing process of allotment in the Cherokee Nation. Congress’s original bill provided the IMC with only four acres, and school officials believed that they deserved much more. Writing on behalf of the school in 1902, trustee B.. F Fortner argued that Cherokees intended for the church to have all 160 acres. Besides, he continued, the school earned that right because it “sent intelligence enough into the current of public affairs.” “[I]t is mani- festly unjust, if not a breach of good faith,” Fortner wrote, “to deprive the school of one single acre or square foot of that land.”19 Congress later adjusted the Quay Bill, named for its sponsor Repub- lican senator Matthew Quay, and gave the Southern Methodist Church the right to purchase all 160 acres and receive title to the land. After the Board of Missions bought the 160 acres for $1,600 in April 1903, which included setting aside a plat for the Cherokee Nation’s principal chief, William R ogers, they sold off portions of the land. In 1905 and 1907, the board sold small sections to the Vinita and Western Railway Company, first for a railroad right-of-way (for $399) and later for a county fairground (for $3,000).20 Also in 1907, the board sold fifty acres to the Vinita College Heights Addition Company for $7,500 on the condition that a small portion be reserved for a parsonage for Vinita’s Southern Methodist congregation. A year later, the board sold the college’s remaining property to a local businessman, R. V. McSpadden, for $25,000. Though the board stated that some of the money from the sale should be put toward “educational work among the Indians,” it also invested parts of it in “the home field,” which included the board’s mission work conducted within the United States, such as efforts in the Rocky Mountain West, in urban areas, and among foreign immigrant populations.21 The Southern Methodist Church’s purchase and sale of the Willie Halsell College’s land in Vinita occurred only after Cherokee ownership claims were pushed aside. On the same day that the secretary of the interior approved the college’s land patent to Chief Rogers, he denied a Cherokee woman’s claim to the college’s land. A few years later, the board once again took up the issue of compensating Cherokees for selling their former land. A special committee investigating the matter for the board, led by Bishop Collins Denny, determined that the Quay Bill in 1902 let the school pay the government the assessed value of the land (listed at ten dollars per Marginalizing the Mission · 143 acre) and made the government responsible for paying Cherokees a lump sum for all church property. The committee denied any obligation to pay a portion of the proceeds to Cherokees and considered the matter closed.22 With the Willie Halsell College, a national church organization parlayed a $1,600 investment in 1903 into a nearly $36,000 windfall in just five years yet denied any need to share their profits with the Cherokee Nation. The situation was even more egregious with the sale of the Meth- vin Institute in 1908. In that case, individuals connected with the conference colluded with businessmen to buy cheap land under what can only be labeled as suspicious circumstances. For his remaining days, J. J. Meth- vin struggled to contain his bitterness toward the “syndicate” he blamed for the school’s demise.23 In the years prior to closing, both the Methvin Institute and the Anadarko area underwent a series of drastic changes. Methvin, who had founded the Methvin Institute, almost single-handedly secured its finances and supplies, and served as its superintendent since its inception in 1889, stepped down following the death of his wife, Emma, in 1904. The Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions, which funded the school and kept oversight over its operations, hired one of the teachers, Ida Mae Swanson, as the new superintendent. Swanson resigned after two years as superintendent, and the Woman’s Board replaced her in 1907 with Charles Mitchell, an IMC minister who worked among the Five Tribes.24 As for the area around Anadarko, the Jerome Agreement between the government and Kiowas and Comanches in 1892 established the terms for allotment, but a collection of Indian leaders and business interests delayed its approval in Congress for several years.25 This ended in 1901 when land lotteries opened much of the KCA Agency to white settlement. Though slightly more restrained than a land run, the land lottery resulted in much of the same demographic change, as white migrants overwhelmed the area in search of cheap land and a promising future. The KCA Agency’s opening promised that land values in the area, such as that of the Methvin Institute, would skyrocket. In its 1901 report to the Board of Missions, the Woman’s Board anticipated that “in the present readjustments[,] the property . . . may become much more valuable.” Once the KCA Agency opened, Methvin moved to secure permanent title to the school’s land. He hired a lawyer with $300 of his own money to petition federal officials in Washington, DC, on behalf of the institute, and he gained the support of other missionaries in Anadarko to defray the costs. Due to Methvin’s efforts, Congress passed a bill giving the denominations in Anadarko title to the church and school land they occupied.26 144 · Chapter Five

While Methvin negotiated with the government on behalf of the school, church officials became increasingly disenchanted with its work. Methvin already had a troubled relationship with others in his conference who disagreed with his methods, a problem that dated back to the earliest days of the school and his public feud with Edwin Shapard. But now he found his work hindered by “different and often unexpected sources.” Individuals whose support Methvin “craved” and “needed,” instead “held aloof, discounted the work and spoke against it,” he remembered. “Not knowing how to defend the work, I could only suffer in silent agony.” Even national organizations that had previously provided much needed support criticized his efforts. S. C. Trueheart from the Woman’s Board expressed her disappointment to Methvin when she told him that her organization contributed so much money “with so little results” that they were “discouraged.” Methvin bemoaned these troubles and lashed out at the “spasmodic and irregular effort upon the part of the Church.” Not afraid to castigate those he felt were to blame, Methvin used a 1901 national church convention in New Orleans as a platform to air his grievances. He blamed the IMC’s dismal results at the KCA Agency on “weak men” and “meager means” and criticized the church for abandoning missions due to a diminished faith and waning interest. “I dare not elaborate,” Methvin cautioned the general church convention. “It would be humiliating.”27 With discontent over the school’s work growing almost in step with its land values, changes were imminent. In 1904, the IMC placed the value of the Methvin Institute’s land at $100,000, though it recognized that the school’s buildings needed repairs. Hoping to keep his school going, Meth- vin suggested that the Woman’s Board sell off forty acres to finance repairs for its existing buildings, but the Woman’s Board vetoed the idea. When Mitchell became superintendent, his conservative estimates placed the overall cost of repairs at $25,000. At first, the Woman’s Board discussed refocusing the school from a coeducational institution to a girls-only school before scrapping that plan altogether. In 1907, it stated publically that it planned to sell portions of the land to fund repairs and keep the school in session. Soon thereafter, however, Belle Bennett from the Woman’s Missionary Council met with Mitchell, his staff, and the KCA agent and decided on two options for the school. The Woman’s Board rejected the first option, which included more money for operations and repairs, and instead opted for the second choice, to close the boarding school in favor of day schools among Indians near Mt. Scott.28 Following the school’s closure, the Woman’s Board concentrated on selling the land, at which point, Methvin believed, “the eye of cupidity and Marginalizing the Mission · 145 greed was fastened upon our property.”29 Though certainly biased because of the personal investment he made in the school, Methvin’s statement held some truth. With the sale conducted by sealed bid, Mitchell advertised the property in newspapers as far away as St. Louis and Atlanta, though the winning bid of $45,000 came from local investors led by Nathaniel Line- baugh, H. C. Bradford, H. C. Garrett, and J. B. McDonald. Ultimately, this “syndicate” of investors, as Methvin called the men, paid the Woman’s Board only $20,000 of the promised amount.30 “[I]t was an evil day for the church and the community,” he lamented years later, “for here was an opportunity to build a great school that would have been a blessing for future generations.”31 Of the syndicate’s members, Linebaugh had the biggest conflict of interest. Described in the press as “one of the leading Meth- odists of the state,” he served as the presiding elder of the Duncan District from 1903 to 1907, an appointment that included oversight of Methvin’s Kiowa work and the Anadarko area.32 Linebaugh’s participation could be classified as another sign of the conference’s declining interests toward its Indian membership. To critics like Methvin, it was evidence of individuals within the conference using their influence to defraud, however indirectly, Indian missions. Though the Woman’s Board used most of its profit from the Methvin Institute for a girls’ school in Rio de Janeiro, it did not abandon its Indian missions completely. In fact, women’s work was one of the most consistent forces in an otherwise tumultuous period for Southern Methodist Indian missions in Oklahoma, as women’s groups founded in Indian congregations, such as local chapters of national missionary societies, stayed active.33 In 1911, Bennett visited the Oklahoma Conference’s Home Missionary Society meeting in Chickasha and left excited by the gathering’s Indian presence. She reported in the society’s official publication, the Missionary Voice, that eight Choctaw full-blood delegates, including one who was a district secretary, attended every session, “and the members in this [Indian] district had paid the largest amount in dues per capita in the Methodist Connection.”34 Bennett was, once again, displaying the national church’s belief that equated success in the Indian mission field with the adoption of mainstream practices, in this case Choctaw women organizing their own church- approved societies and paying dues in line with their means. Women’s work was especially important with the Plains Indians in southwestern Oklahoma. Because of the Woman’s Board’s close association with the Methvin Institute, it appointed teachers and missionaries whom Methvin used for camp work during summer months, when the school was not in session. For instance, Methvin credited Helen Brewster 146 · Chapter Five with cultivating Native support to build the Little Washita Church. Afterward, Brewster, whose “sturdy” frame “presented striking appearance in the bloomer garb she wore on her cross-country travels among the Indians, on a bicycle,” spent many years living near the Comanche camps by Fort Sill.35 In another case, the Woman’s Board responded to Kiowa requests for a school near Mt. Scott by sending Maude Welch and Mattie Hudgins into the field. During the summer, both women conducted camp work, but once the day schools were in session in the fall, Welch split her duties between the classroom in the morning and camp work in the afternoon.36 Initially, Welch conducted her work in much the same fashion as earlier Southern Methodist missionaries in southwest Oklahoma. Like other female missionaries and women’s groups who advocated a middle-class sensibility for marginalized populations, she spent much of her time focusing on Indian women.37 Welch taught these “burden-bearers of the race,” as she called them, domestic chores such as sewing and cooking, which would supposedly ease their transition into mainstream society and engrain in them gender-based activities modeled on Anglo-American culture. To reach the larger Native community, she turned to interpreters, though the absence of children at government boarding schools frustrated her efforts. To compensate, Welch and others left bright scripture cards behind in the camps in the hopes of attracting support, at least for those who could read English.38 When enrollment in the day schools lagged behind expectations, Welch and others grasped for a new strategy. The Woman’s Missionary Council, a new Southern Methodist agency created in the national church’s 1910 reorganization of mission work, blamed the government for not encouraging Indian parents to send their children to mission schools as they had in previous years. The council’s educational secretary, Mabel Head, suggested that the school compensate by providing noon lunches and wagons for transportation, though she overlooked the cost this plan incurred. Also complicating Welch’s efforts was the lack of roads and vehicles in the region. Much of the Indian population around the Anadarko and Fort Sill area lived in rural communities, which required extensive travel on the part of missionaries. In 1912 alone, Welch reported 312 camp visits totaling 1,040 miles traveled. Yet, as she also noted, one excursion alone necessitated a 52-mile trip and resulted in only three camp visits because Indians were away from camp. In light of these disappointing results, the national church cut its financial support for the field by 1914, leaving only one worker for camp visits.39 Marginalizing the Mission · 147

As a result of the church’s weak mission school system, white missionaries no longer had direct oversight of their Kiowa members. Welch said that with their children away at government boarding schools, Indian parents typically camped near the schools on the weekends to visit, which in turn disrupted the missionaries’ camp visits and kept members away from church services and Sunday schools. Following the closure of the Methvin Institute, the Woman’s Missionary Council emphasized Sunday schools as a means of providing religious instruction.40 But as Robert Templeton, the white preacher in charge of the Lawton District’s Kiowa work for the West Oklahoma Conference, reported in 1915, most of the children attended government schools, which took them away from their home churches and left missionaries “few opportunities for speaking to them.”41 Disappointed in how her own work progressed, Welch told the Woman’s Missionary Council that the Indians were “growing more and more indifferent to Christianity and less regular in attendance on church services.” Temple- ton and Welch exposed one of the faults of the current approach to Indian missions in an era when government schools “gave larger opportunity and better equipment than” their own church-run schools.42 Church officials wanted the results and influence that a mission school provided, but without the responsibility for operating it. For much of the 1910s, reports from preachers in the Kiowa field highlighted the Sunday schools’ poor results along with the schools’ lack of basic necessities. Templeton and his predecessor, Benjamin Gassaway, held quarterly conferences for the Lawton District’s Kiowa churches, and the recurring themes were the struggles of their Sunday schools and the declining spiritual life of their members. Gassaway stated in March 1915 that the Cedar Creek Church lacked appropriate Sunday school literature and that its preacher, Delos Lonewolf, only taught “from time to time.” Lonewolf’s infrequent attempts at Cedar Creek were better than at Hog Creek, Gassaway noted, where the congregation’s lack of a building meant no Sunday school was held.43 “Our heart is pained to see so few children and young men and young women in our Sunday services,” Templeton wrote after his first quarterly conference.44 He blamed the region’s woes on various sources. Government boarding schools, he stated several times, kept Indian children away from home.45 When their Sunday schools and churches did meet, Indian members displayed a wandering level of commitment.46 “Many of our people are striving to be spiritual in their daily lives,” he wrote in November 1917, two years after he had arrived in the area. “Some however are forgetting the church to [sic] much and following after other things.”47 148 · Chapter Five

Even as Oklahoma’s Indian churches and white churches developed along two different tracks in the early twentieth century, questions regard- ing authority remained. Complicating matters was the fact that the national church had reorganized its administrative structure, and since it had some oversight in Oklahoma, these changes stood to affect the region’s congregations as well. The Board of Missions had always provided funding for Indian missions, and this remained unchanged during the era, even as most other facets of Indian missions evolved. With its Indian congregations receiving money from national sources, the Oklahoma Conference (and subsequent conferences in the state) justified appropriating funds raised internally for the white churches inside its boundaries. The conference could focus on white communities and not feel that Indians were ignored completely.48 Since the 1870s, the board had concentrated more and more on overseas missions and left the majority of mission work in the “home field” throughout the United States to women’s organizations and individual conferences. Perhaps for this reason, and to recognize that Indians had different needs than the urban immigrant populations or the isolated rural communities that made up most of the home field, the board classified Indian missions as a “foreign field” for decades and assumed primary responsibility for funding it. The board changed this administrative distinction in 1910 when it spun off the home field into a separate department from its foreign mission work and moved Indian missions into the newly created Home Department. With home missions traditionally administered by other church organizations, the Home Department secretary trod carefully to not upset the status quo in the conferences. John Moore, secretary of the Home Department and later a bishop, realized the secondary position that the home field took for the board. “My eight years as Secretary of the Department of Home Missions were not crowned with any particular success,” Moore recalled in his autobiography. “I might go further and say that in my opinion the Department of Home Missions of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, achieved no very creditable success from the organization in 1906 to the union of the three Methodisms in 1939.” Moore identified the national church’s fixation on foreign missions like China and Japan as dominating the mission agenda and creating an “inferior complex” for home missions. Indian missions became secondary to sectional concerns, like combating the efforts of the Northern Methodist church, Moore said, and any financial support that did reach Indian congregations went toward “sustentation” of the existing work and not expansion.49 Marginalizing the Mission · 149

In his reports criticizing the national church’s efforts with Oklahoma’s Indian communities, Moore cited conference interference, insufficient administration by presiding elders, and constant pastoral turnover for the decline of Indian missions. But Moore attacked the system in terms of what whites expected from an assimilationist-minded mission system rather than judging the field based on what Indian communities actually wanted or needed. According to Moore, many of the appointed missionaries lacked proper training and any interest in mission work as a chosen profession. In addition, the appointments often changed from year to year, leaving the mission field without the consistency needed for a growing area. Too often, Moore believed, ministers conducted their work much like a circuit by traveling from congregation to congregation. No individual had completed a quadrennium engaged in Indian missions under this system, and as a result, mission appropriations became “necessary philan- thropy to ward off starvation.” “To call this mission work, from which large results are to be expected, is hardly fair,” Moore wrote. “The defect is in the system.”50 Moore focused most of his criticism on the East Oklahoma Confer- ence, which contained the region’s largest number of Indian members, and in particular on its presiding elders’ poor management of Indian districts. As proof, he cited both the decreasing membership numbers among Indian congregations and the conference’s use of the board’s appropriations, which favored whites over Indians. Moore said that in 1914, the board appropriated $2,525 to the Creek and Choctaw Districts. Of this amount, $1,800 went to the two white presiding elders while the remaining $725 went to thirteen Indian preachers. Two years earlier, $1,150 out of a $2,500 appropriation went to the two presiding elders, leaving nineteen Indian preachers to divide the remaining $1,350. Moore questioned the rationale for conducting mission work in this manner, especially when the conference appointed the presiding elders without regard to their missionary and evangelistic qualifications.51 Oscar Goddard, a former IMC minister who became secretary of the Board of Missions, repeated many of Moore’s sentiments. “We need not try to disguise the fact that the results of our work among the Indians have been the least satisfactory of all our mission enterprises,” Goddard wrote in 1911 in the Missionary Voice, the board’s monthly magazine. Goddard’s critique fell into two main categories, which stressed traits that mainstream Southern Methodist society deemed as signs of success. First, God- dard cited the poor development of Native preachers in terms of education and training. Local preachers served nearly all the church’s twenty-two 150 · Chapter Five full- blood congregations, and many of them were “quite immature both intellectually and religiously.” Because of their lack of education, Goddard believed that the East Oklahoma Conference had to “exercise great lati- tude to get him through” when a Native preacher took his examinations for the ministry. Second, Goddard blamed Indian congregations for not supporting their own churches as a result of the government’s and the national church’s paternalistic policies. Overseas missions like Korea and China, where the board and local officials expected new congregations to support their own work, were just as poor as Indian congregations, God- dard argued, yet only one Indian church was self-supporting. But the bigger problem was the indifference of Indians themselves to sustaining their own work. To solve this problem, Goddard suggested that the Southern Methodist Church press its wealthy Indian members for help. “[T]here are enough well-to-do Indians to provide a fund,” Goddard wrote, “the interest of which would serve as the missionary money for the weaker charges till they reached self-support.”52 The critique of Indian work from Moore and Goddard showed how national organizations like the Board of Missions judged the field in terms of mainstream Southern Methodist society. Indian churches did not embrace the traits of regular conferences as they wanted; however, that did not mean that Indian congregations pushed the church’s work aside or rolled back Christianity. Instead, while white missionaries struggled, Indian members kept their churches alive in ways that reflected the church’s importance to the larger community. In earlier years, local preachers filled the gap when commissioned white ministers were not available, and this continued in the 1910s as individuals with little to no training worked alongside other ministers among Indian congregations. By the time Guy Quoetone received his formal license to preach in 1922, he had already spent more than a decade ministering to his fellow Kiowas, including his time as a young man traveling with Kicking Bird. George Keys, a Cherokee, remembered that during his youth, Indian churches served as community centers, where families and neighbors gathered regularly. “You don’t see that now,” he said, “them old women get to shouting all over place. We had good times then.” When it came to paying ministers, Indian congregations found other ways if they did not have the financial means that their white neighbors did. Communities did their part by supplying food, clothing, or other materials through such activities as pie suppers and quilting bees.53 Though whites might see the church as dying in Indian communities, Native congregations did not. Marginalizing the Mission · 151

There was also evidence that individual Indians operated within the system to fund Native missions on their own (as Goddard called for) but were thwarted by higher powers in the church. In February 1916, “a prominent Cherokee Woman,” Lydia Clark, donated two thousand dollars to the East Oklahoma Conference for Indian missions. Instead of using the money as Clark intended, the conference forwarded one thousand dollars to the Board of Missions and kept the remainder for its own mission work in the state. This move angered Clark, who corresponded with several national church officials hoping to take the money away from the conference. Clark informed the General Board of Church Extension in Louisville, Kentucky, a national church organization that assisted congregations with building church facilities, that she gave her money to the East Oklahoma Con- ference “to be used in the interest of the Indian work of our church in Oklahoma.” It was the conference that single-handedly made the decision to pass along half the money to the national church for foreign missions without consulting with her, Clark charged. The remaining one thousand dollars was still in conference hands, and it was “not accomplishing the end I had in view,” which, she stated, was to reinvigorate Cherokee efforts. To salvage what remained of her money, she wanted the balance transferred to the General Board of Church Extension, who would then fund buildings in Indian communities, especially among her own Cherokee people. Clark was clear in how she wanted her money spent when she communicated with the Extension Board: “It is my purpose,” she wrote, “to use the interest during my life in support of the work among the Cherokees.” The Exten- sion Board responded by putting pressure on the East Oklahoma Confer- ence to hand over the money, though all parties understood that the church had already spent one thousand dollars on foreign missions.54 By now, the administration of Indian missions as a smaller part of white- dominated conferences, along with the divided interests of the Home Department of the Board of Missions, exposed some of the problems that Southern Methodist Indian congregations faced in the 1910s. Membership numbers diminished, as did funding, and previous Southern Methodist strongholds among Cherokees all but disappeared. To combat these problems, Indian and non-Indian individuals operating from local and national stages worked toward creating a separate Indian Mission to oversee the efforts. This move promised immediate benefits for Southern Methodist Indian communities such as more autonomy for their churches and more input from Indian leaders, Indian ministers, and sympathetic whites focused on Indian needs. 152 · Chapter Five

One of the initial steps in establishing a new Indian Mission occurred when Moore visited Oklahoma in 1913 to investigate mission work in the state. Moore had a clear concept of how home missions should function compared to foreign work, as he wrote later. “Foreign Missions operate from radiating centers,” he declared, while home missions “should operate by permeating forces in the life of the communities.”55 For Moore, home missions concentrated on the existing work and amplified nearby needs, unlike foreign missions, which were beachheads established in fields where Christianity did not exist. By raising money for new efforts, he believed, home missions overly exploited the work in the public’s mind. Therefore, in Moore’s opinion, Indian missions needed to refocus on their previously established congregations in older communities and not on campaigns to move into new fields. Creating this separate Indian Mission proved problematic, because established organizations within the national church refused to concede control over Indian missions to Indians themselves. Both Moore and the East Oklahoma Conference submitted plans for a new Indian Mission to the national church, though Moore’s included a provision that allowed the mission to appoint its own superintendent in charge of the work. Moore’s plan included all the Indians in the state, while leaving certain administrative tasks, such as the licensing of ministers, to the East Oklahoma Conference. When the national church considered the plans at its general conference in Oklahoma City in 1914, the Committee on Missions rejected the idea of a separate mission. Moore indicated in his next annual report to the board that his plan failed because of conflict with the East Oklahoma Conference over authority and oversight. He wanted the new mission’s superintendent to have power to direct activity, especially in terms of spending appropriations, while the East Oklahoma Conference opposed this plan, presumably because it was losing authority and money in the deal.56 By 1917, Moore’s anger with the East Oklahoma Conference reached a crescendo, as he once again criticized the church’s poor response “to the 160,000 Indians within our Southern and Southwestern territory.” The sticking point remained the conference’s control over Indian missions, even though the appropriations came from the board.57 Finally, at the general conference in 1918, the national church recommended a reorganization of the Indian work in Oklahoma. This new administrative agency included a separate superintendent to direct the organization, the employment of “such tribal presiding elders as the condition and progress Marginalizing the Mission · 153 of the work may require and justify,” and the appointment of missionaries directly by the board.58

In the years immediately after the end of the original Indian Mission Con- ference in 1906, Indian congregations experienced a steady decline that nearly pushed them into oblivion. Just as whites had with other institutions in the newly created state, they assumed control over the Southern Methodist Church and reshaped it to fit their needs. Indian congregations became an afterthought in a larger process of growth that benefited an emerging state focused on its new white-centric future. Money meant for their communities went through the channels controlled by white officials with little concern for Indian congregations. With the government doing its part to end tribal authority and ease the path for white ownership of former Indian land, church officials found various ways to lay claim to Indian property and take advantage of new opportunities, all while holding little regard for the effects on Native communities. Yet this period did not signal an end to all Southern Methodist Indian congregations. In some communities, the church declined tremendously, such as the unexplained disappearance of their Cherokee congregations. But in other cases, the apathy shown by white officials allowed Indian churches to continue along their own course rather than in ways pre determined by mainstream Southern Methodist society. Indian congregations did not assimilate as church officials, the government, and the larger American culture wanted. Instead, they were in the process of creating a Christian and Southern Methodist experience more in line with their own desires. The creation of a separate Indian Mission allowed this autonomy to develop even more, though not without additional problems. chapter six

The Mission Reborn

The New Indian Mission, 1918–1940

In the period between the new Indian Mission’s creation in 1918 and the merger of the northern and southern branches of Methodism in 1939, Indian members reversed the erosion of autonomy they had experienced in previous years. They became presiding elders overseeing circuits dominated by Indian ministers, who, in turn, preached to Indian congregations that incorporated Native elements. Characteristics that whites considered outdated or even backward, such as the persistence of Indian languages in church services or the lack of proper church facilities, identified the uniqueness of Southern Methodist Indian congregations in Oklahoma. Yet this newfound autonomy was not the intention of the national church. Without necessary white oversight, Indians might corrupt Christianity in intolerable ways, as they had with the peyote movement. Already, a collection of peyotists led by Quanah Parker had successfully repealed antipeyote legislation in Oklahoma, and later leaders pressed their First Amendment rights and formally incorporated the movement into the Native American Church in 1918. Though the Five Tribes steadfastly rejected it in their communities, government officials estimated that peyote affected as much as 75 percent of the Kiowa and Comanche populations. For Southern Methodists, who believed that peyotism was a perversion of their Chris- tian creed, the Native American Church was further proof of the need for whites to control the missionization process.1 To ensure their control, church leaders implemented educational requirements as well as licensing restrictions that promoted an overall agenda of assimilation. By appointing experienced white ministers as the

154 The Mission Reborn · 155 mission’s superintendent, or by founding a new boarding school in the mold of church-run schools of the nineteenth century, the national church adhered to an older philosophy that favored white ideals. Assimilation as an underlying motive never disappeared from the agenda, and the national church expected Indian congregations to mimic their white brethren by supporting the church in proportion to their means. Much of the tension in the Indian Mission occurred because church officials had one set of expectations for Indian members, while Indians wanted an organization that enabled their own religious independence. Unfortunately for church officials, these safeguards did not overcome Indian autonomy and their own indifference toward Indian work. Whites may have held important positions, but Indians assumed more say over their congregations by using church-approved avenues to their advantage, much to the chagrin of church officials. As explicitly “Christian” institutions, Native congregations gathered to worship as legitimate South- ern Methodist churches in the eyes of officials, even as they promoted a Native culture assimilationists wanted eradicated. Church publications, for instance, praised Indian camp meetings because they “remind one of the camp meetings of our boyhood days in the South,” tying these meetings to the larger tradition of Southern Methodism while overlooking the distinctly Native aspects grounded in Indian culture.2 Acting alone or in groups, Indians worked for the needs of their communities and not based on some grand plan from the national church or Indian Mission. At times, these actions placed the Southern Methodist Church in direct conflict with other denominations and created tension in larger, inter- denominational organizations, who then chided Southern Methodists for their inability to control their Indians. After declining for decades, the founding of a separate Indian Mission in 1918 was a step forward for Native congregations in Oklahoma. Even so, church officials continued some of the mistakes of earlier generations and ignored Indian input in the decision-making process. Important issues like money or education remained under the control of white officials removed from the needs of Native communities, which frustrated Indian congregations. And yet, somehow in this difficult mix, Indians assumed more command over missionary work.

With the new Indian Mission formally established, Bishop Edwin Mou- zon was charged with setting the mission into motion. From an administrative perspective, Mouzon was a logical choice. Because the mission assumed operations formerly under the jurisdiction of the East Oklahoma 156 · Chapter Six

Conference and the West Oklahoma Conference, the bishop in charge of the entire region was best suited to make the necessary changes to budgets, organization, and personnel as well as instituting the legal framework that would govern the mission. In doing so, Mouzon walked a fine line between the expectations for a proper church institution and the needs of its Indian congregations. Unfortunately, Mouzon had little prior experience with Indian missions and personally found Indians a perplexing population. “As you know Indians are very peculiar people,” Mouzon wrote to the secretary of the Board of Missions in 1920. “It takes one a long time to find out what an Indian is thinking about.”3 The uncertainty surrounding Mouzon’s reorganization was obvious in his correspondence with Andrew Pickens, a white man who was presiding elder of the Choctaw District. Worried about losing his position due to declining Choctaw membership, Pickens begged Mouzon to keep him in his post. Choctaws wanted him to stay, Pickens argued, and the district’s problems were caused by outside factors, like the Choctaws’ high mortality rate. “My Indians are devoted to me,” Pickens told the bishop, “and I do not deny that it will be very painful to them and me if you in your godly judgment should decide to separate us.” Mouzon responded by indicating that the mission would be “reorganized in a manner which will be pleasing to the Indians and which I trust will develop initiative on their part.”4 Mouzon’s goal, as well as the stipulations given by the national church and Board of Missions, was to return some of the Indian Mission’s authority to its Native membership. Recognizing the ineffectiveness of its work over the previous decade, the national church knew that the Indian Mission’s success would be borne by the Indians themselves. But while this approach sounded like a positive change for Oklahoma’s Indian congregations, in reality the end goal of Indian assimilation remained the same, with the new mission pushing Indian members into a white-dominated church culture. The need to re-create proper Southern Methodist churches in the mission’s Native congregations remained paramount. With the new mission promising Indians a larger role, appointing the mission’s superintendent assumed added importance. Previously, the East Oklahoma Conference had sought power over the appointment, while the Board of Missions had insisted on a superintendent outside the conference’s authority, presumably to avoid any conflict of interest between a white conference and an Indian mission. For the mission’s leadership positions, Mouzon sought individuals with plenty of experience working with Indian communities, though he was less concerned with whether they were Indian. Writing to Orlando Shay before the mission’s 1918 annual The Mission Reborn · 157 meeting, Mouzon said “that we shall do all in our power to use the men to best advantage who know most about the work.”5 When Mouzon’s first appointment, R. T. Blackburn, stepped down after a year, the bishop replaced him with Shay, whose résumé at that point was dubious, largely because the Cherokee work had disappeared while he was presiding elder for the East Oklahoma Conference’s Creek-Cherokee District.6 Mouzon himself questioned Shay’s abilities, writing in September 1918, “Shay is a good man and we must find some way to use him although of course he is not the man for Superintendent of the Indian Mission.” Other ministers questioned whether “brother Shay will ever set as high standards for those people.” 7 Damned by faint praise, Shay’s tenure as superintendent from 1919 to 1924 encountered several problems from the surrounding white communities as well as from his fellow missionaries. To deal with the theft and corruption affecting Native communities, Shay took a paternalistic approach toward his Indian members. “I find it necessary in my work to take some oversight of our Methodist Indians with reference to their temporal affairs,” he told Mouzon soon after his appointment. In one case, a young Choctaw orphan rented out 115 acres of her land to a white man for $100, who then rented it out to a second man for $400. That man, in turn, leased it to a farmer for $1,000. Angry at the men for taking advantage of the orphan girl, Shay appealed to the principal chief of the Choctaw Nation on her behalf. In another instance, Shay threatened to report the Kiowa Indian agent to the commissioner of Indian affairs after the agent rented 160 acres from a Kiowa widow for $180, even though the actual rental value was over $1,000. Aware that his sympathy for Indians’ “temporal affairs” might leave the bishop with the wrong impression, Shay made it clear that he held only the highest expectations for their spiritual leanings. “I wish to assure you that in my ministerial work for the passed [sic] twenty five years that I have been as firm and exacting in the inforcement [sic] of righteousness and disciplinary requirements as any preacher in the East Oklahoma Conference,” Shay wrote.8 Shay’s protection of Indian rights extended only so far when Christianity was involved. As far as the mission was concerned, Shay wanted an assimilated population adhering to the same standards as mainstream church society. Exactly how to administer this work became another problem for Shay, because his vision for the Indian Mission differed from the views shared by some of his fellow ministers. Shay wanted only Indians who were trained according to the church’s ecclesiastical standards in leadership positions, which meant developing a younger generation of Native Christians into 158 · Chapter Six capable ministers. In the meantime, white ministers would provide the necessary oversight of Indian missions to protect church interests. This stance, after all, undergirded generations of assimilationist-minded white officials who envisioned a Native population conforming to the rules of the church. Shay’s rigid, top-down approach, however, threatened the work of several older missionaries who had built their own success with Native communities on a more flexible strategy, and who understood the desire by Indians to direct the work themselves even if it might conflict with the mission’s agenda. Immediately, Shay’s approach conflicted with the presiding elder of the Kiowa District, J. J. Methvin, who held his own entrenched views on Indian missions developed from four decades of missionary work. When Kicking Bird received a one-year suspension in 1920, Methvin wanted to replace him with two younger Kiowa men, Delos Lonewolf and Guy Quoetone, the latter of whom, Methvin proudly told Mouzon, was a former Methvin Institute student. “I believe I have fallen upon a plan which under the Divine guidance will result in new life for this work, and a plan that will multiply itslf [sic] in a short while, for there are a number of young men whom I feel sure could be trained into good teachers, and later on some of them into preachers,” Methvin told Mouzon before insisting that he “be allowed freedom of action . . . to develope [sic] any thing permanent for good in this field.”9 Responding to Methvin’s plan, Shay labeled his presiding elder, who by this time was nearly seventy-five years old, as out of touch with the present-day Indian missions. A primary sticking point between the two men was the proposed salary for the replacement ministers. Methvin wanted to divide Kicking Bird’s monthly pay of thirty-five dollars along with five dollars of his own money between Lonewolf and Quoetone. Shay felt that paying an unqualified Indian preacher with no formal training twenty dollars a month was too generous, “but since Bro. Methvin has promised this ammount [sic] I see no way out of it.” Further- more, Shay thought that the field was too overcrowded to justify adding more Native ministers, and instead he wanted Methvin to do more preaching, with unpaid Indians picking up the remaining slack.10 At the center of Methvin and Shay’s argument was the role that Natives played in the Kiowa field. Both men thought that Kiowa members needed to expand the work themselves, but Methvin gave authority and lati- tude to individuals whom Shay considered unqualified, at least when it came to Southern Methodist standards. Methvin believed that missionary work was a slow and steady process, and he wanted to strengthen the mission with his old friends Benjamin Gassaway and Andres Martinez, The Mission Reborn · 159 while Native ministers with various degrees of training spread it among Kiowa communities. Shay, on the other hand, viewed Methvin’s approach as outdated. “But here is the true situation, Bro. Methvin is an old man living in the past largely,” Shay told Mouzon before criticizing the inclusion of the elderly Martinez and Gassaway as “a waste of time and money.” For Shay, the work’s future was with the “younger life,” which meant that the mission needed “to get ahold of the boys and girls when they return from school.”11 Many white ministers like Shay (and Methvin in his earlier days) believed that attracting youth into the church before they were inculcated by their Native heritage would lead to a stronger foundation for the mission. But Methvin’s own success with Kiowas came after he converted the tribe’s older and respected members, like Hunting Horse, Jimmie Quoetone, Stumbling Bear, and Tohausen. Gaining acceptance from the community’s elders was just as important, if not more, than converting a younger generation. While Shay adjusted as superintendent, Mouzon’s appointments for presiding elders created their own share of controversy for the Indian Mis- sion. Mouzon chose Methvin as the presiding elder for the Kiowa District before it was eventually downgraded to a circuit and folded into the Creek District in 1921. He also replaced Andrew Pickens as presiding elder of the Choctaw District with Lewis Cobb, a Choctaw mixed-blood who had joined the IMC in 1885. Pickens, though, was embittered over Mouzon’s decision. “I have succeeded as Pastor wherever I have been sent as the Records show,” Pickens wrote to a church official in Texas shortly after the mission’s first annual meeting. “But as Presiding Elder whether of Indians or Whites I have excelled—‘But there arose a Pharoah [sic] who knew not Joseph,” he said alluding to Mouzon’s decision to remove him and the new bishop’s perceived unfamiliarity with Oklahoma’s Indians.12 As for the Indian Mission’s Creek District, Mouzon appointed John- son Tiger, a respected Creek leader and member of the Alligator Clan of Eufaula Deep Fork Town. Tiger’s father, Moty Tiger, was also a Southern Methodist minister, whom President Theodore Roosevelt appointed chief of the Muscogee Nation in 1907, and like his father, the younger Tiger carved out a reputation within Creek and Southern Methodist circles. An 1895 graduate of Bacone College, a Baptist school in Muskogee, Tiger’s linguistic skills made him a sought-after interpreter by the Southern Meth- odist Church, Creek officials, and business interests wanting to negotiate with the Creek government. In 1905, he served as a delegate to the Sequoyah statehood convention in Muskogee, which advocated separate statehood for Indian Territory. Tiger had worked with his wife at the Creek 160 · Chapter Six

Orphan Asylum before moving into the ministry of the Southern Meth- odist Church, where he was ordained a deacon in 1905 and appointed presiding elder of Creek District in the East Oklahoma Conference in 1916.13 Tiger’s appointment afforded the Indian Mission a certain degree of prestige, which they reciprocated by giving Tiger important administrative positions. Besides serving as a presiding elder, Tiger was also mission treasurer and later represented the Indian Mission as its sole delegate to the national church’s general conferences in 1926 and 1930.14 But for all his status within the mission, white Southern Methodist communities shied away from allowing him any input in their affairs, as demonstrated by events surrounding the Oklahoma Educational Commission. Created by Oklahoma’s two white-dominated conferences to fund a new Southern Methodist university for the state, the organization declined seating Tiger as a representative from the Indian Mission. What the organization would accept, Mouzon told Tiger, was the Indian Mission’s money so it could “do its part in the [commission’s] Educational Campaign.”15 This incident with Tiger and the Educational Commission was indicative of how officials in Oklahoma’s white conferences expected to use Indian resources when necessary, though they were less concerned with giving Indians any say in the decision-making process. When church officials realized the potential wealth of some of its members, especially among the Five Tribes’ oil-rich citizens, they pressed any advantage they had. In 1921, Mouzon recruited Shay and Theodore Brewer to raise money from their Indian connections for the national church’s Christian Educa- tion Movement. Recognizing that Brewer was “loved and respected by the Indians as no other man in Oklahoma” from his days in the old Indian Mission Conference, Mouzon asked the aged minister to collect “large contributions to Christian Education” during a six-week swing through Indian congregations. Mouzon then instructed Shay “to drop almost everything else and attend to this with Dr. Brewer. We have not a day to loose [sic] . . . This great thing must be done.”16 A more egregious example of whites exploiting Indian wealth for their own benefit occurred in the case of the “world’s richest Indian,” Jackson Barnett. In this situation, the Southern Methodist Church was but one of several parties using whatever means necessary to gain access to Barnett’s fortune. A poor and illiterate full-blood Creek Indian, Barnett’s allotment was in the lucrative, oil-producing Cushing field in northeastern Okla- homa. Due to his illiteracy, Okmulgee County courts declared the nearly sixty- year-old Barnett an “incompetent” in 1912 and appointed a guardian to oversee his wealth. For the next two decades, various interests fought The Mission Reborn · 161 over access to Barnett’s estate, including the government, which used his money to purchase Liberty Bonds during World War I, as well as local church organizations, which pressed for donations for their own needs. In the 1920s, Anna Laura Lowe, a white woman, married Barnett under dubious circumstances and eventually moved the old man to California, intent to live off his wealth. After Barnett’s death in 1934, nearly one thousand “heirs” from across the country tried to claim a piece of his estate.17 The Southern Methodist Church involved itself in the Barnett affair in 1919 largely due to denominational competition and fears of being left out of a potential windfall. In December, J. C. Curry, a white Southern Methodist preacher from Henryetta, Oklahoma, asked Mouzon to use his influence with commissioner of Indian affairs Cato Sells on behalf of the Henryetta congregation. After relating stories of Barnett’s personal fortune from the reported $50,000 a month pouring in from his oil-rich allotment, Curry complained that the local Baptist preacher had already pressed Sells for $25,000 of Barnett’s money for his own congregation’s building project. Curry explained that his frustration in the matter was in being left out of any redistribution of Barnett’s riches, not that churches took advantage of an “incompetent” Indian under the care of white guardians. Curry and other Christian leaders in town, including representatives from the Church of Christ and Catholic congregations, wanted their share of Barnett’s money, but the Baptist preacher convinced them to wait for fear that Sells would bar any future gifts if too many churches asked at once. While they waited, the Baptists increased their request to $200,000, and Curry was angry at their perceived underhandedness. He wanted Mouzon to pressure Sells on the behalf of the local white Southern Methodist congregations and get $25,000 from Barnett’s estate.18 To ensure white oversight, the national church did not lift the new Indian Mission to the same conference-level status held by the old Indian Mission Conference. If it was a regular conference, then the new mission’s secondary institutions, like quarterly and district conferences, would have authority over certain clerical issues. In a regular conference, for instance, district conferences licensed ministers, elders, and deacons. This was not the case in the new Indian Mission. White officials maintained oversight of licensing and similar issues, presumably to make sure that the Indian Mission’s personnel fit the approved mold of mainstream Southern Methodist society. Almost immediately after the Indian Mission’s founding, Indian members complained to Mouzon over their lack of authority to license their own ministers. In January 1919, Johnson Tiger asked the bishop about the powers of the Indian Mission’s district conferences, to 162 · Chapter Six which Mouzon replied bluntly that “your District Conference will not have the full authority of a regular District Conference.”19 The Indian Mission’s district conferences could recommend individuals as ministers, elders, or deacons, Mouzon decided, but the authority to license them rested solely with the East Oklahoma Conference. Frustrated, the Indian Mission asked the national church to elevate it to a regular conference because of the “real need of District Conference.”20 In addition to licensing problems, a second major issue affecting the Indian Mission involved educational requirements for the ministry. The national church’s educational standards were a longstanding source of contention, as various Southern Methodist officials questioned the knowledge of ecclesiastical and theological instruction held by Indian preachers. This complaint, after all, was one of the reasons whites had shunted Indian congregations to the side in the 1890s. Arguing that the current course of study was too rigorous, J. J. Methvin told Mouzon that the material was “too difficult for our Indian brethren. Their knowledge of English is too limited to make a successful study of the course.” As their presiding elder, Methvin believed that the ministers in the Kiowa District were “doing excellent work—up to the measure of their ability,” though Methvin’s comment implied that different standards applied to Indians and whites. “If we can develop among them a couple of well instructed, consecrated workers, the future of the work will be secure,” he wrote.21 With the sole authority to craft a course of study, Mouzon created a standard that openly recognized the differences between the Indian members in the Indian Mission and Southern Methodist congregations in the rest of the United States. In regular conferences, ministers took yearly examinations that required an extensive knowledge of various theological articles relevant to Methodism and Wesleyan studies, in addition to an in- depth understanding of the Bible and The Discipline, Southern Meth- odism’s official manual of rules and beliefs. In stark contrast, Mouzon’s plan for the Indian Mission was significantly less exhausting. According to the 1922 edition of The Discipline, the first published with the new standards, a license to preach in the Indian Mission required only a vague understanding of the New Testament’s “Christian doctrine,” while simply having access to The Discipline replaced any need for a significant knowledge of Southern Methodist principles. Further licensing renewals, which occurred annually for the next four years, added more expectations in small increments but never asked Indian ministers to submit written sermons or to have the same understanding of biblical and Wesleyan scholars required of white ministers.22 The Mission Reborn · 163

Mouzon’s course of study reflected the differences that existed between the Indian Mission and regular conferences. The Southern Methodist Church designed its criteria to create a homogenized pastoral class who could transfer from circuit to circuit, district to district, or conference to conference and still preach the same basic tenets. The Indian Mission, conversely, operated from a different set of standards that did not expect its ministers to ground their sermons in minute theological points or Meth- odist principles. As long as the national church failed to provide materials like the Bible and The Discipline in translated form for its Kiowa, Creek, Choctaw, or other Native ministers, it could not expect them to follow Southern Methodist doctrine to the letter. Instead, the national church believed Indian preachers would attract converts by distinguishing Chris- tianity from Native practices, like dancing and peyote use, that the church condemned as heathen. This gap in expectations gave Indians significant room to influence the mission in ways acceptable to them and to connect it to Indian culture, while also continuing the pattern of segregation that differentiated their congregations from Oklahoma’s white churches. Con- verts could connect older traditions that existed long before the introduction of Christianity, such as the Kiowa practice of facing the tepee door to the east when setting up camp, to the machinations of the Christian God and still be seen as promoting Christianity.23 Holding Indian ministers to a different standard also assumed that they were limited to only Indian congregations and would have little effect on white churches. The reasons Mouzon gave for creating a course of study significantly different from the rest of Southern Methodist society, especially considering the national church’s assimilationist agenda, depended on who asked. To a national official, Mouzon was blunt in his assessment of Indian ministers and his own low expectations for their work. “This simplified Course of Study was necessary as the Indian preachers were entirely unable to do the work that the members of our white conferences were called upon to do,” he replied. That same day, Mouzon wrote Shay with a more encouraging outlook on Indian ministers. “This simplified Course of Study is given not to relieve our Indian brethren from doing the proper work,” Mouzon told the Indian Mission’s superintendent, “but to enable them to do the kind of work they are prepared to do.”24 Just as Mouzon wanted to guide the mission’s progress through his administrative decisions, so too did Indian members shape it in their own particular ways. In some cases, Native congregations introduced elements into their worship that distinguished them from their white counterparts in the rest of Oklahoma. At other times, they fostered extended communal 164 · Chapter Six gatherings that many white congregations had abandoned by the early twentieth century. Finally, Native practices considered at odds with Chris- tianity still permeated parts of the mission’s work. Whatever the reason might be, the new Indian Mission took on a decidedly more Native appearance than it had in previous years because of its members’ activities. An unintended consequence of the national church’s segregation of its white and Indian congregations was creating an atmosphere where Native customs could persevere. In many ways, the Indian Mission’s Kiowa congregations took root in culturally significant ways that baffled white observers, who defined success by the rigid standards of mainstream Southern Methodist society. Their churches lacked facilities and equipment, their preachers had limited theological training and labored to understand English, and their members exercised elements of their Native culture that conflicted with the government’s assimilationist policies. When discussing how Kiowas negotiated the Christian experience, John Tsatoke, a third-generation Kiowa member, said, “when we accept Christ and change the way of life, there’s a new life.” This “new life” was not a rejection of Native society as whites expected, Tsatoke continued, because it included socializing with non-Christian Kio- was at powwows to show that they “respect those things.”25 A prominent example of how the new life incorporated older ways was the proliferation of Kiowa hymns. Cecil Horse, Tsatoke’s father, character- ized Kiowa hymns by emphasizing the Christian experience rather than religious doctrine. Kiowas learned their hymns, he said, “by becoming so religious and these songs just appeared to them, what we call spiritually. . . . They are not learned by books. They are learned by the mind . . . maybe the mind would think about the Lord and it turns into song.”26 William Witt, Shay’s replacement as Indian Mission superintendent, later described the importance of Indian singing in practical terms that revealed the poorer economic status of Native congregations. “[I]n altar calls and altar services, they do not have to bother about a pianist or hymnbook,” Witt wrote, gently overlooking the fact that pianos were expensive and that hymnbooks were printed in English. “[T]hey just sing the old songs they all seem to know and which were born in their hearts.”27 Tsatoke saw deeper connotations to Kiowa hymns. The songs were “inspired by our Great Father, God,” he said, “who inspired some of our elder Indian people.”28 For Tsatoke, these hymns allowed entire Kiowa communities to connect to the traditions of an older generation while also infusing these traditions with Christianity for a younger generation, all of which occurred beyond the scope of mainstream Southern Methodist society. The Mission Reborn · 165

In the 1930s, Kiowa ministers led quarterly singing conventions that brought congregations together within yet another church-sponsored gathering promoting elements of their culture. Linn Pauahty, a young Kiowa Southern Methodist minister and later holder of two Kiowa medicine bun- dles, organized these intergenerational, intercongregational events held after regular Sunday services. “Each church is represented and they sing in groups, and solos, and trios, and quartets, and often the whole congregation join together in a great volume of music,” Andres Martinez reported to the Indian Mission. “One of the gracious blessings of these conventions is the conserving of the interest of the young people as well as the more mature.”29 Methvin, by now nearly ninety years old, was impressed by the role Indians took in the services. “It was wonderful to hear them sing,” he wrote after one service. “Belo Cozad represented the old times by some music on an old time Indian flute.” Methvin was particularly excited by the potential to reach younger Kiowas through singing conventions, which were soon held outside of churches and in places like the government’s Riverside School. “It was a real religious service in song,” he wrote approv- ingly after the Cedar Creek youth put on their own convention.30 With much of the Indian Mission’s population scattered across rural areas, camp meetings became an important communal event for Native congregations. These events combined elements of tribal or intertribal gatherings with the religious-infused meetings long associated with Meth- odism’s spread along the American frontier. By the early twentieth century, camp meetings often occurred in conjunction with church-sponsored activities, such as quarterly and district conferences, or around holidays like Christmas. Congregations frequently built facilities to accommodate campers that made “the church resemble a little village.”31 The Indian Mission’s superintendent discussed a 1926 camp meeting that featured preaching from Creek and Choctaw ministers before a crowd representing six different tribes. Bishop A. Frank Smith, who presided over the Indian Mission from 1930 to 1944, described Indian camp meetings as a “world within a world” where thousands of Indians gathered “in some historical camping place for a week each year.”32 From the Southern Methodist perspective, these camp meetings har- kened back to an earlier generation, but they came at a time when white congregations focused on modern issues like church buildings and construction projects in urban areas. This perception promoted dual assump- tions about Indian members. First, they were “backward” and out-of-date with modern sentiments of the church, different enough that they required special rules to operate. Second, they were still on the path (albeit delayed 166 · Chapter Six considerably) to Christianity shared by mainstream society, which only confirmed the effectiveness of the current assimilationist agenda. More significant, by occurring within a church-approved context, these gatherings could exhibit elements of Native society without too much recrimination from church officials. Oscar Goddard, secretary of the Board of Missions’ Home Department, recognized that “Indian customs” and not white expectations dictated the flow and length of church-sanctioned events like quarterly conferences. The popularity of using church functions as Indian camp meetings was apparent when church officials estimated that nearly two- thirds of the mission’s membership attended district conferences, and more than one-third attended its annual meeting, a sizable accomplish- ment considering the rural distribution of the congregations, their overall poverty, and the expense of traveling across Oklahoma.33 The proliferation of these camp meetings came at a time when Indian communities struggled to survive, much less maintain culturally significant gatherings free from white scrutiny. After allotment, for instance, many members of the Five Tribes found their land in isolated places with limited means of income and survival.34 One Southern Methodist Choc- taw preacher testified before a Congressional subcommittee in 1931 that camp meetings allowed Choctaws to pool their resources, especially their food, for the larger church community. In some of these cases, Christian- ity and Christian practices insulated Native members from some of the pressures of an encroaching white society and gave direct relief to communities increasingly at risk. On the KCA Agency, the government’s attempts to stamp out the sun dance and ghost dance led officials to blacklist par- ticipants and withhold their rations and money. Atwater Onco, a Kiowa elder, remembered that in the 1920s and 1930s, the absence of dancing as a communal outlet had resulted in Kiowa members of Baptist and Southern Methodist churches reorienting their social gatherings around Christian camp meetings instead. Within the Indian Mission, Kiowa members routinely gathered during the Christmas season, such as in 1928, when Ted Ware reported 175 camped near his Cedar Creek church.35 The importance of camp meetings as communal events extended throughout many of Oklahoma’s Indian communities. Simon Atohka, a full- blood Choctaw and deacon in the Indian Mission’s Salem church, stated that his church originally had a one-room building, but as the crowds grew, the congregation built more facilities, such as corrals for horses as well as bathrooms and kitchens for families. In terms of social interaction, young men sent to keep an eye on the horses in the corrals, Atohka described, courted women free from adult interference. Others, The Mission Reborn · 167 like full-blood Choctaw preacher Ben Benjiman, said food was a prime attraction, and no one was turned away from the gathering regardless if they were white or Indian. Yet whites visiting these meetings often found Indian preachers conducting the services in Native languages for a distinctly Native audience.36 In at least one instance, the government disrupted these meetings by breaking up Indian campgrounds. For several years after the Methvin Insti- tute’s closure in Anadarko, some Kiowas camped near the old school buildings on weekends in anticipation of Sunday services at their church. With the buildings now located near white settlements, the KCA agent, Ernest Stecker, ordered the buildings torn down to stop Kiowas from camping. Benjamin Gassaway, the preacher in charge of the Kiowa work, successfully appealed to Commissioner Cato Sells and saved the buildings. Gas- saway and Methvin claimed that Stecker’s motivation was not to disperse Indians gathering outside the watchful eye of the Indian agent, but, as a Catholic supporter, to squash Southern Methodist influence. Thwarted in his efforts to tear the buildings down, Stecker plowed up the land to stop Kiowas from camping there in the future.37 As they exerted more autonomy in the Indian Mission, Native congregations clashed with local and national officials over the mission’s work. First, church officials once again promoted educational methods to train a generation of Indian ministers. What made this particular example different from previous attempts, however, was the plan to educate Indian students alongside poor white students. Furthermore, church officials discovered Indian ministers making plans for the Indian Mission that conflicted with their own. In expressing their autonomy in little ways, such as joining individual churches or starting new congregations in areas typically controlled by other denominations, Indians refused to act exactly how whites wanted. Even though it had created the mission to rescue its Indian work, the national church’s ultimate goal of assimilation remained intact. The old Indian Mission Conference, its subsequent conferences, and the Board of Missions had officially eliminated church-run Indian schools from Okla- homa more than a decade earlier after a steady decline in results, and the remaining schools those organizations did operate were aimed fully at white communities. But with the Indian Mission emphasizing the importance of Indian ministers, church officials wanted a school to educate future workers and to instill a legitimate church culture in its Native members. Previously, mission leaders had offered training institutes at quarterly conferences to bring some semblance of religious education to the mission.38 168 · Chapter Six

The timing for the Indian Mission’s new school coincided with a boom in the national church’s fundraising and an increased awareness of the place of Indians in American society following World War I. In 1918, the Southern Methodist Church embarked on its Centenary Campaign, a large- scale fundraising venture inspired by the government’s war bond drives and intended to commemorate the centennial of Methodist missions in the United States. For the Indian Mission, the Missionary Cen- tenary Commission specifically wanted to “[p]rovide a school to train religious teachers, leaders, and preachers for the Indians of all tribes” and “[p]ut our Indian Work on a basis commensurate with the claim upon our Church and our capability to meet that claim.” In a statement in the Mis- sionary Voice, the Board of Missions asked church members to “remember how the Indian did his part for us on the fields of France and cheerfully, gladly do our part for him.”39 This campaign resulted in the Folsom Training School, located deep in the old Choctaw Nation in Smithville, Oklahoma.40 Named after the nineteenth-century Choctaw minister Willis Folsom, officials claimed that the school was “a light on the mountain top which sweeps the valleys below and radiates through every point of the compass far out over this neglected country.”41 “No greater or more heroic piece of work is being done any where than at Fulsom,” school officials bragged. “Where is this great work equaled in our Southern Methodism?”42 To be sure, official rhetoric focused on the school’s ability to help Indians. Responding to criticism of their Indian work from Baptists in western Oklahoma, Oscar Goddard made it clear, “We have this year built Willis Fulsom Institute for their education.”43 William Hubbell, the school’s superintendent for most of its existence, told the board, “It has been evident for some time that a Native leadership must be developed and trained if we were to render the largest service. The Fulsom School will help in a large way to meet this need.”44 A few years later, he said that the school used a very selective process “to seek out promising Indian boys and girls and train them for leadership among their people.”45 The board employed similar rhetoric to justify why the national church involved itself in Indian education, including giving $150,000 for buildings, saying that “we regard Fulsom Training School as a very valuable and necessary means for the training of adequate leadership among our Indian people.”46 Regardless of their talk of promoting Indian education, church officials immediately divided the school’s attention between Indian congregations and the white population in southeastern Oklahoma. “It belongs to no conference but to the whole church,” the Fulsom Training School The Mission Reborn · 169 newsletter announced. “It is nonsectarian. It is serving the whole territory in which it works regardless of political or religious affiliations. It is built for Indians and Whites on equal basis.” The inclusion of poor whites from the mountainous region of McCurtain County seemingly contradicted the board’s focus on Indian communities. School officials argued that the integrated approach served the best interests of its Indian students by promoting assimilation, such as Hubbell’s claim that the “ideal of the institution is to have an equal number of whites and Indians, each one having every privilege that the other enjoys.”47 Bishop Mouzon also explained the integrated student body: “[T]he future of the Indian is bound up with the future of the white man.”48 Much like earlier boarding schools, Folsom’s curriculum stressed basic tenets of mainstream society, such as English and the fundamentals of Christianity, and including whites was one more way of further distancing Indian students from their Native communities. It was unclear, however, what Indian “privileges” white students enjoyed in the tradeoff. School officials like Hubbell eagerly promoted the benefits of the dual educational format for whites and Indians, stating that the two groups were “close competitors in scholarship and in Christian culture.” Folsom’s white students “have a broader experience with the ability and merits of another race which tends to broaden their sympathies, increase their tolerance, reduce their prejudice, and give them a better preparation for life.” Simi- larly, Indians “learn that whites are their friends and have many interests in them that are much deeper and broader than those practiced by many of whites who dealt with them in the earlier days.” And, as the school made pains to show, Indian students themselves allegedly saw the benefits, too, of an educational environment that placed Indians side by side with whites. One Indian student, Alice James, wrote in a piece titled “Why Fulsom is a Good Place for Indian Students” that “Fulsom does not show a distinction between the two races, there is perfect harmony between students, and they enjoy their work together.” Johnson Bobb, a Choctaw student “of rare gifts,” declared that Indians at government-run boarding schools too often “go back to the blanket” and that “[t]here is only one way to educate them to be loyal citizens and that is with the Whites.”49 By operating Folsom as a mixed school, Southern Methodist leaders appealed to whites for the school’s support by framing Folsom’s impact as equally beneficial to the surrounding white communities as to its intended Indian targets. The school’s newsletter quoted the attorney for McCurtain County, L. E. Mifflin, as saying that since the school opened, “the moon- shiners and bootleggers have practically left the territory and Smithville is 170 · Chapter Six one of the quietest and best governed little towns in our country today.” Hubbell reinforced Mifflin’s comments when he told the board, “Local Folsom enthusiasts enumerate with pride that nineteen stills have moved away since the coming of Folsom.” Furthermore, other prominent Okla- homans noticed Folsom’s success. As school officials noted with glee, an unnamed dean of education from a local state university wished that his own children could attend Folsom.50 The pride that Hubbell and other officials took in Folsom’s effect on white communities undercut the school’s stated purpose as a place for Indian education, a point not missed by Native members of the Indian Mission. Even as the school promoted its success, officials acknowledged that it struggled with attracting Indians to Folsom (though “failed” was a more apt description). By 1926, Hubbell admitted that white students outnumbered Indian students by a ratio of three to one. Some Indian reticence toward the school was evident from the very beginning, which underscored how church officials ignored Indian input during Folsom’s planning stages. “I am quite sure that if we are to succeed with this school,” Mouzon wrote to the board’s secretary at the school’s outset, “we must do something to interest the Indians.” The problem was that Mouzon and others did little to cultivate Indian support. In fact, officials excluded two representatives elected by the Indian Mission from the school’s advisory committee, one of whom was Johnson Tiger.51 More significant, church officials exploited Indian resources to promote a school that increasingly catered to whites, especially after national funding declined in the mid-1920s. Because full-blood Indians owned the school’s land, which made it “inalienable” and nontaxable, the board used the peculiar legal standing of Oklahoma’s Indians for its own economic advantage. Moreover, when donations to the national church’s Cente- nary Campaign leveled off mid-decade, the board authorized a $500,000 endowment “to be made among the Indians” in 1924 to compensate.52 As financial troubles mounted, Indian congregations became the scapegoat for Folsom’s funding problems. Writing to the Indian Mission superintendent in 1926, Hubbell chastised Indian members for not “helping to take care of themselves” at the school. “If the Indians were unable to take care of themselves somewhat,” he believed, “I would feel a little differently about it.” Hubbell repeated these remarks in the Indian Methodist, the mission’s official newspaper. Whites did their part and funded Folsom, he claimed, while Indian churches were “doing little along these lines. . . . [T]he time has come when the Indians in Oklahoma if they love the Methodist church should begin to do what they can themselves.” Hubbell The Mission Reborn · 171 ranted against Indian apathy toward the school to national church officials as well. To the board, Hubbell grumbled that Folsom had been “thwarted many times in its efforts . . . [The school] certainly is not satisfied with the response which the Indian gives to the efforts of the institution.”53 Other Indian Mission officials understood the problem in expecting Indian communities to fund a school that they could not or would not attend. In a report to the board, Superintendent William Witt complained that the school reached only a small number of Indians. In later reports, Witt blamed the cost as the primary reason more Native students could not attend, a point lost on those officials who continued to press Indian congregations for financial support. J. J. Methvin was equally as critical as Witt when he discussed the large number of white students at an Indian school. Because he believed that Folsom was in the best position of all Oklahoma’s Methodist schools to help the Indian Mission, Methvin admonished church officials to do more to attract Indian students.54 Financial difficulties caused by the Great Depression in addition to administrative problems put an end to the Folsom Training School. Hub- bell resigned in 1932 because of conflicts with the board, which hoped to replace him with someone “who will give more attention to the Indians and make the School more serviceable to them.”55 Meanwhile, officials debated two plans to keep the school afloat. One suggestion involved con- vincing federal authorities to transfer Indian students from government schools to Folsom, thus underwriting their budget with federal funds. This plan, some argued, had the support of Choctaw chief Ben Dwight, who promised to send Choctaw students (at $125 a head) to a school closer to home. The second option was to ask the Oklahoma Conference, a new organization resulting from the 1930 merger of the East Oklahoma Con- ference and the West Oklahoma Conference, for financial support, particularly since Folsom had become an all-white institution in 1932.56 The board and the Oklahoma Conference initially agreed to a deal for the school’s management to “be wholly in the hands of the Board of Managers of the Oklahoma Annual Conference.” Under this arrangement, Folsom would move officially from a mission project for Indians to a conference- controlled school focused on whites. When the board refused the conference’s request for more money, the school closed for good in 1933.57 Even so, Indian Mission members pressed the board to reopen Folsom as an Indian-only school. Citing the fact that public schools in southeast Oklahoma barred Indian students, the mission’s 1933 annual meeting lamented that the national church “has withdrawn from this field of effort and left us with nothing but our Christian Education program in the local 172 · Chapter Six church, to meet this our greatest problem.” Officials asked again in 1938 to reopen Folsom as an Indian boarding school, and once more, the board rejected the mission’s request. “While deeply sympathetic with the need for making provision for a better trained leadership for the Indians,” the board responded, “the lack of finances and inaccessibility of location, make it impossible to reopen the school.” With the board eliminating any future hope of reopening Folsom, members of the Indian Mission could only reflect on another missed opportunity. “Folsom,” Witt bluntly told the board in 1937, “was never operated to meet our needs.”58 Although it attempted to train a generation of Native ministers for the Indian Mission, the Folsom Training School’s inclusion of white students immediately weakened its stated intentions. Indian congregations recognized their lack of autonomy with the school even though officials expected them to support it financially. As a result, Indians reacted largely with indifference toward the national church’s efforts. But in other cases when the national church ignored Indian needs, Native members actively asserted their demands by using the church’s administrative structure to organize groups and congregations on an Indian-only basis or to push the mission into territory typically controlled by other denominations. These actions showed that Indians understood how the Southern Methodist Church operated and would use this knowledge to promote Christianity in ways that appealed to Indian communities, regardless of the consider- ations of Oklahoma’s mainstream Southern Methodist society. One smaller example of creating Indian-only organizations within the Southern Methodist Church occurred in the late 1920s. For many years, the women’s missionary societies in the East Oklahoma Conference and the West Oklahoma Conference had barred Indian women because “they speak little English, rendering attendance upon the annual Missionary Conference of no practical value, rather an embarrasment [sic].” Because the white-dominated missionary societies excluded Indians, Native women wanted for their own missionary society “an autonomous organization with proper relation to the Council in order easily to develop Women’s Work among the Indian Women.”59 In this case, Indian women went through the proper channels to found an organization that resembled mainstream Southern Methodist society in form, though the focus was clearly on a minority Southern Methodist community. Eventually, the larger Indian Mission agreed with these organizers and recommended to the national church that the mission needed its own Women’s Missionary Society. More prominent examples of Indian ministers and congregations asserting their own autonomy in Oklahoma, especially in ways that combined The Mission Reborn · 173

Native needs with mainstream church organization, occurred in the western half of the state among the mission’s Kiowa and Comanche churches. Efforts by Indians themselves to expand the mission frustrated Southern Methodist Church leaders who, over the years, experienced increasing tensions with other Protestant denominations. Individual Indians cared little for these “restrictions” and instead followed whatever path promised the best for themselves and their communities. This put the national church on the defensive with other Christian groups, who condemned the South- ern Methodist Church for both its religious poaching and its perceived poor performance in the state. Since the arrival of J. J. Methvin in 1887, Southern Methodist missionaries competed with various other denominations on the KCA Agency. Methvin’s school, the Methvin Institute, stood alongside similar schools managed by Northern Baptists, Presbyterians, and Catholics, with each school’s superintendent wanting to lure Indian students to his institution. Additionally, missionaries from Episcopal, Reformed, and Mennonite churches, along with ministers from the burgeoning holiness movements, operated in the region to some degree. Overall, thirteen national organizations from various denominations contributed workers, supplies, and funds specifically for Indian missions on the KCA Agency, and in 1900 nineteen churches existed on the reservation.60 After the area opened to white settlement in 1901, Indian congregations from all denominations struggled, which led missionaries to blame one another along with government officials for their problems. Father Isidore Ricklin, a Benedictine monk at St. Patrick’s School in Anadarko, became an easy target for Protestant missionaries once he received a government boarding school contract in 1911. In April 1913, Harry Treat, an American Baptist (or Northern Baptist) missionary who worked at the Red Stone Mission, claimed that Ricklin confirmed Baptist girls at the school without parental permission, and that KCA agent Ernest Stecker ignored Treat’s protests. Particularly sensitive to the importance of baptismal acts, Treat blamed Catholics and Southern Methodists for making it impossible for Northern Baptists to hold services at the school. “The parents seem to have had the idea that they could make the children safe if every chance were given them to get a little water,” Treat wrote to his superiors. “The old heathen idea that it is necessary to do something to be saved is very hard to remove. And especially when the Methodists want to sprinkle the children, too, it is hard for them to distinguish the difference.”61 While denominational rivalries brewed at the school, a bigger problem for Treat emerged that same spring when Benjamin Gassaway’s Southern 174 · Chapter Six

Figure 9. Communities within the former Kiowa- Comanche-Apache Reservation’s boundaries (Tash Smith and Maren Smith).

Methodist Kiowa congregation near Anadarko made plans to move to Hog Creek, a location just four miles away from Treat’s Red Stone Mission. Treat met with Gassaway, who, rumor had it, “could show considerable temper,” to discuss the potential conflict between the two denominations. Acknowledging previous Southern Methodist work, Treat argued that the Northern Baptists held a stronger claim because many Southern Method- ist Kiowas had worshipped at his church for the past two years. Gassaway countered that many of Treat’s Red Stone members were Southern Meth- odist originally, which, he believed, established the preeminence of his work over Treat’s.62 Treat admitted to the American Baptist Home Mission Society secretary that a “large portion of our Red Stone church were first members of the Methodist church at Anadarko, and I find that they have in some cases merely joined the church that is nearer to home.”63 After meeting with Gassaway several more times, Treat realized that the pressure to move came from Kiowas and not their white minister. “I know some of them seem to be in earnest for their own chapel and services,” Treat told his superiors, “so that [Gassaway] is under pressure of their desires.”64 A meeting with Gassaway and his presiding elder a few weeks later only confirmed Treat’s fears. “The two Methodist brothers took the ground that as the present location of the chapel was so disadvantageous, it was their duty The Mission Reborn · 175 to listen to the Indians and move the chapel so that it might accommodate the people,” Treat reported, “And they were duty bound to provide some place for the Anadarko church organization to worship.” Concluding that the Southern Methodists would build a new chapel no matter how much he opposed it, Treat resigned himself to the effect it would have on Red Stone. “I do not care if some who are new members of the Baptist church should go to the Methodists,” he wrote. Instead, he would focus his efforts on keeping those at Red Stone who “were really converted.”65 The conflict between Treat and Gassaway in 1913 exposed a nascent movement by the Indian Mission’s Kiowa members to drive the denomination into new areas strictly for their benefit. Even though rival denominations opposed their efforts and their own ministers seemed reluctant to work on their behalf, Kiowas established Hog Creek Chapel (later rechristened Ware’s Chapel) by 1914.66 This incident was only the beginning of Indians pushing their own agenda in southwestern Oklahoma. Events nearly two decades later once again placed the Northern Baptists and Southern Methodists in open conflict as the two sides fought over everything from overlapping and encroachment to the proper role of Indian leadership. This time, though, individual Kiowa and Comanche members living near the KCA Agency played a greater role in the process and forced white superiors to react to their actions. The first major flashpoint in this denominational rivalry involved Albert Horse, son of Kiowa elder and Southern Methodist convert Hunting Horse. As a boy, Albert and his brother, Cecil, had attended the Methvin Insti- tute, which prepared them for later jobs interpreting for Southern Method- ist and Northern Baptist preachers, even as they participated in the peyote subculture alongside their father.67 Albert’s decision to leave the North- ern Baptists’ Saddle Mountain congregation for the Indian Mission’s Mt. Scott Kiowa church in 1931 led to a series of accusations involving church officials from across the country. In a letter to Bruce Kinney, director of Indian Missions for the American Baptist Home Mission Society, Saddle Mountain minister Perry Jackson railed against Albert and the Southern Methodist officials he blamed for improperly recruiting Albert and other Kiowas to their church. “We all knew he was going after the money in it,” Jackson wrote bitterly. “Albert always wanted to be paid for interpreting and was never satisfied to work for his Lord without pay.” Jackson believed that Indian Mission representatives tried to bribe Saddle Mountain members John Aunko and Sherman Chaddlesone as well, but only Albert accepted their offer. “Johnny [Aunko] told me that he [Albert] often tried to get him to join in with him and stick or strike for pay refusing to interpret without 176 · Chapter Six pay,” Jackson told Kinney. As for the rumors that Indian Mission officials were after Cecil, too, Jackson dismissed Cecil by claiming, “He would wreck any church he had charge of and Albert knows it. But he wants Cecil to get the money too.”68 Kinney pushed the issue with Northern Baptist superiors and his counterparts in the Southern Methodist Church. Believing it was the “deliberate formulated policy of your Church there to hire ten Baptist members to work for them in the hope of building up the Methodist membership at the expense of the Baptist cause,” Kinney promised J. W. Perry at the Southern Methodists’ Board of Missions that they would “adopt some vig- orous defense measures.” After Perry demanded an apology for what he considered an unfounded accusation, Kinney reiterated the claim more forcefully. “I am surer now than ever before that I was right,” he wrote. Even though they had suspected bribery for several years, “[w]e gave no serious attention to this until Albert Horse did actually go to work for you. Albert has talked and written too much for his own good concerning this.” To prove that Albert left Saddle Mountain purely for economic reasons, Kinney gave Perry a nine-point explanation, which included claims that the Indian Mission paid Albert for several months before he left Saddle Mountain and that Albert actively recruited others. Kinney then expressed his anger to his superiors in the Northern Baptist Church. Albert had once been a Southern Methodist, Kinney admitted to Frank Smith, the Ameri- can Baptist Home Mission Society’s secretary of missions, but he had joined the Northern Baptists more than twenty years earlier because “he thought the Baptists were right in their teachings—as he has often stated since.”69 As expected, Indian Mission officials refuted charges of bribery levied at them by Northern Baptists. They gathered letters from several Kiowas mentioned as targets of the scheme, including Aunko, Chaddlesone, Ste- phen Kotay, and Cecil Horse, who each denied any undue Southern Meth- odist overtures toward them.70 “This is to certify that no representative or member of the Methodist Church has attempted to bribe me, or use any unbrotherly, [or] other methods to secure my membership in the Meth- odist Church,” Cecil wrote. “Our relations with the Methodist members have been only brotherly and friendly.” Andres Martinez thought that the rumor of “ ‘ten Baptist members who have been hired’ by the Methodists” was “imagination” on the Baptists’ part. J. W. Perry’s own opinion of the situation was straightforward and revealing of the national church’s growing indifference toward the field. “[W]e had neither the money nor the disposition to do anything of the kind,” Perry wrote to William Witt, who was accused of being at the center of the bribery scandal. “Some of those The Mission Reborn · 177

Yankees just like to make trouble for Southern people. They are ready to believe any kind of story they hear about us, even though it is absolutely foolish.” 71 For all the anger emanating from Northern Baptist officials, there was little evidence that they confronted Albert directly to hear his side of the story. “[T]here was some surprise to me,” Albert wrote Witt about the situation, “about my own free will and accord to join back to my own home church.” According to Albert, he based his decision to leave the Saddle Mountain Baptist Church and join the Mt. Scott Kiowa Church on spiritual grounds and not monetary gain. “I depended on God and Jesus for my leader,” he said, “[1]ed by the spirit when I came back to my mother church last August.” As Albert explained, he had learned about Christianity from his time at the Methvin Institute, which had given him his religious foundation, and he later attended Saddle Mountain only “because I was near that church. . . . I don’t see why I should change in my convictions when I was brought up by the Methodist church.”72 Albert’s statement to Witt demonstrated the permeability of denominational lines in Kiowa society that white officials would not accept. White officials from both churches couched their comments concerning Albert’s actions in accusations of bribery but ignored the fact that Kiowas did not share the same sense of denominational rivalry. Whereas Northern Baptist and Southern Methodist leaders focused on church loyalty as a sign of their denomination’s preeminence in the region, Kiowas found denominational bounds more flexible. “[Whites] don’t get together like the Pentacostal [sic] peoples would go into the Baptist church and get up and testify and what they want to do . . . seems like they have no right to do that,” Jenny Horse, Cecil’s wife, said as she explained some of the differences between white and Indian congregations. “But us Indians, we fellowship. We all get together. Like a prayer service, we all take part in singing, testimony meeting. We all, whoever wants to get up and testify, why, they do.” Ioleta McElhaney, a Baptist Kiowa, recalled that as a young child her family had attended the Mt. Scott Methodist Church because it was, most important in her opinion, “an Indian church.” “In those days there wasn’t much difference between—we didn’t make much of denomination,” McElhaney stated. “If our people belonged there, well we would go there too.”73 While officials argued over Albert Horse’s actions, similar problems occurred with another Kiowa minister, Delos Lonewolf. Raised by his paternal uncle, Chief Lone Wolf, the younger Lonewolf aligned himself with his uncle’s fight against the allotment of the KCA Agency and was a member of several delegations to Washington, DC, that protested the 178 · Chapter Six government’s actions. Lonewolf received his license to preach from the Indian Mission in 1923, after previously working for the organization as an interpreter. His first appointment was to a church in Stecker, Oklahoma, but it was his efforts at the “new and progressive” Sugar Creek church that drew the ire of Northern Baptists. Lonewolf’s work was “only four or five miles from our Rainy Mountain location where we have been for more [than] thirty five years,” Kinney wrote to J. W. Perry in April 1931. Indeed, Northern Baptists had operated the Rainy Mountain Mission since 1892 without much competition from other denominations, and it remained one of their strongest Kiowa churches. Regardless, Lonewolf believed that several Southern Methodists living in the area needed their own church, a claim Kinney swiftly dismissed. There were only six Southern Methodists nearby, Kinney wrote, and plenty of roads and automobiles to take them to other Southern Methodist churches if they so desired. But, as he told Perry in another letter, geographic necessity was not Lonewolf’s real reason for “doing everything in his power to get the Baptists in that section to attend his services.”74 Northern Baptist officials believed that Lonewolf harbored great animosity toward their church because they rejected him on charges of immorality. “Lonewolf seemed to nurse a grievance—that when he left the Baptist church years ago and joined the Methodist, Mr. Clouse [former Rainy Mountain minister Howard Clouse] told him never to come back,” a Northern Baptist official investigating the issue told Frank Smith. The underlying cause of Lonewolf’s grievance, and the reason that North- ern Baptists rejected Lonewolf, appeared to be his embrace of peyotism. He “was for some time the National President of the Peyote Church and one of those who secured a state charter,” Kinney told Smith. “Delos has been living such a life as we could not sanction and I think that [North- ern Baptist missionary E. A. King] was wise in not letting him into the church without some signs of a change of life.” “Peyote, polygamy and immorality come in here. We will not take in known cases of the first two and where all three are know[n] persons must deny, and promise to abandon all three,” Kinney reiterated a month later in another letter to Smith. Lonewolf knew that Northern Baptist missionaries disciplined members for breaking these rules, Kinney alleged, while the Southern Methodists “would take him without question.”75 Northern Baptist officials believed that Southern Methodists ignored peyote, which, along with polygamy, they considered incompatible with true Christianity. Furthermore, Kiowas understood that fact, these officials contended, which is why they left for Southern Methodist churches. The Mission Reborn · 179

Figure 10. Delos Lonewolf (Rev. George W. Hicks Collection, Research Division of the Oklahoma Histor- ical Society).

According to Kinney, Southern Methodists “make no requirements about giving up Peyote, Polgamy and some other things,” which explained Albert Horse’s and Delos Lonewolf’s actions. To this point, Smith agreed that they “would need a better type of man” for their Indian missions to succeed. Northern Baptists reacted to the controversy by stressing their need to be the gatekeepers of Christianity, especially if Southern Methodists seemed incapable of doing so. As for Lonewolf’s own stance on the issue, he at least made public comments disavowing peyotism. “I used to follow idol worship, Peyote, Native church,” he testified to Witt. “I used to says its [sic] all right. I never realize any good out of it for twenty five years[.] I find I was trying to follow Christ but I was a stumbling block to others.”76 Lonewolf’s comments aside, the Indian Mission had a long history of publically condemning peyote use while privately ignoring it, as the cases of Kicking Bird and Andres Martinez had demonstrated a generation earlier. 180 · Chapter Six

Even as Northern Baptist and Southern Methodist leaders clashed over the Kiowa field, more problems developed with nearby Comanche communities. Ever since Methvin’s initial decision to focus on Indians near Anadarko in 1887, Comanches, who had settled forty miles to the south, near Fort Sill, received scant attention from Southern Methodist missionaries. In the meantime, other denominations entered the field, with Northern Baptists operating the Deyo Mission near the town of Walters under the supervision of Elton Deyo, and the Reformed Church establishing their own Comanche congregations in Fletcher, Walters, and Lawton. Still, Southern Methodists never gave up what they considered to be their historical claim to certain areas. Complicating matters for the three denominations was the prevalence of peyotism among Comanches and the influence of leaders like Quanah Parker, who were skeptical of missionaries in general. It was not until after the allotment period in the early twentieth century that Christianity took hold among Comanches, though tribal divisions between Christians and peyotists deepened for several more decades. By the 1930s, the main peyotists represented an older generation of Comanches, while younger Comanches increasingly turned to Christianity and the various denominations working in the area.77 This new generation of Comanches included Norton Tahquechi and White Parker. Born in 1894, Tahquechi attended Carlisle Indian School and later served in World War I. In the 1930s, he was a translator for eth- nographers like E. Adamson Hoebel, who studied Comanches, as well as a member of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Business Committee. White Parker, Quanah’s son, was originally a member of the Reformed Church and went to the church’s Cook Bible School in Arizona even though his wife, Laura, was the daughter of Southern Methodist missionary Milton Clark. Faced with limited options in the Reformed Church, Parker left the denomination in September 1930 and joined the Indian Mission. South- ern Methodist leaders immediately recognized the boon that Parker’s membership gave to their mission. “He has always impressed me as a very sensible and good man,” J. W. Perry wrote to Witt, “and evidently he knows the Comanches better than any of us can.”78 After becoming ministers in the Indian Mission, Tahquechi and Parker forced Southern Methodism into previously abandoned fields without much regard for denominational conflicts. Tahquechi, who received a license to preach but no formal appointment, “had the Pauline passion for souls and was not long in making an appointment for himself,” Witt recalled. Of particular interest to Tahquechi was the Comanche community near Mt. Scott, where the Indian Mission’s sole church was composed The Mission Reborn · 181 of mostly Kiowa congregants. Tahquechi led twenty-two Comanches from other denominations into the Mt. Scott church, which resulted in Witt making him an assistant pastor of the culturally mixed congregation. R. C. Adams, who witnessed some of his Comanche members from the Reformed Presbyterian’s Cache Creek Mission follow Tahquechi to Mt. Scott, believed that the Southern Methodists had a hidden motive for accepting Comanches into the Mt. Scott church. “It is only a subtle way to start a Methodist work among the Comanches in the territory which is already worked,” Adams grumbled to Northern Baptist officials.79 Writ- ing Witt directly, Adams said that Tahquechi’s “work has caused a rather tense situation in a field which has been considered as belonging to the Reformed Church and the Reformed Presbyterian Church.” Responding to these complaints as well as the demands of the Comanches who wanted more done on their behalf, Witt deferred to a “gentlemans agreement [sic]” that existed between the Indian Mission and other denominations around Mt. Scott when he rejected Comanche requests for their own church.80 Undeterred by Witt’s refusal, Tahquechi and his Comanche followers built a “temporary tabernacle” near Mt. Scott out of discarded material from Fort Sill.81 Writing to William King of the Home Missions Coun- cil of the inter-denominational Federal Council of Churches, J. W. Perry explained that Tahquechi organized the church “[w]ithout anybody knowing it” and pleaded, “I assure you that we are doing our very best to keep our Comity agreement, but when people come to you and beg you and entreat you and keep it up for a long time, you know how hard it is to resist.”82 Next, Tahquechi’s group drafted a petition, signed by forty-two individuals, asking for the Indian Mission’s formal recognition. “We believe the Church should be at the center of the life and activity of a community,” the petition began before declaring that Comanches were “not wards of any Church [but] free moral agents before God and definitely responsible for their own salvation also for their children and their people.” The group preferred the Indian Mission’s administration over other denominations, but since even it was unwilling to act on their behalf, “we found our only hope was to act independently and for ourselves.”83 These actions stunned even seasoned Southern Methodist missionaries like Andres Mar- tinez, who was “surprised” at “how much interest those Indians are taking to have a Methodist Minister to preach for them especially of their own tribe.” For Witt, the Mt. Scott Comanche Church became the “miracle church” he promoted to Southern Methodists throughout the nation.84 While Tahquechi expanded Comanche missions into the Mt. Scott area, White Parker faced his own problems with the Little Washita 182 · Chapter Six

Church near Fletcher. Decades earlier, Methvin had established a church on eighty acres just outside town with help from the government and the Woman’s Home Mission Society. Soon, pressure from white settlers forced the Woman’s Home Mission Society to give up its claim, and once funds for further mission work dried up in 1904, Southern Methodists left. With the field seemingly abandoned, the Reformed Church opened its own mission in Fletcher in 1915.85 Parker’s efforts in 1931 reinvigorated the spirits of older Southern Methodist missionaries, who saw a chance at reclaiming a forgotten field. “Since the work has been renewed and seems to be in a promising condition,” Methvin wrote to Witt about a field he had pio- neered forty years earlier, “we would commit a grievous sin to abandon that work now.” “We have been on the ground perhaps longer than anybody else and have had work there,” J. W. Perry reminded Witt, ignoring the fact that it had been at least twenty years since Southern Methodists had actively worked the area. “We, of course, do not want to intrude on anybody’s territory,” he continued, “but we have been working that field for a good while and don’t want to be run out because some body else would like to get our place.”86 To those outside Southern Methodist circles, Tahquechi and Parker’s efforts were an unwarranted attack on other denominations. Southern Methodist expansion into the Comanche field was the “worst case of denominational highway robbery that I have ever seen,” H. F. Gilbert, a Northern Baptist missionary, informed his superiors. “If something is not done soon they can just about wreck our work,” Bruce Kinney admitted to Frank Smith. “They have never consulted us in the matter,” G. A. Water- mulder of the Reformed Church’s Women’s Board of Domestic Missions reported. “There has been no cooperation, no spirit of Comity.” Even G. E. E. Lindquist, a nationally recognized reformer from the Home Mis- sions Council, witnessed the turmoil in the Comanche field after visiting the region on a fact-finding trip. Southern Methodists “invaded territory already allocated,” he told Smith, before urging that this problem “be dealt with very soon, and that the serious nature of the encroachment on the part of the Southern Methodist people should be frankly dealt with.”87 Responding to the problems created by the two Comanche ministers, the various denominations conducted a series of meetings devoid of any Indian input. The Home Missions Council held one in Washington, DC, in the fall of 1930 in which, according to J. W. Perry, the council gave Southern Methodists certain Kiowa communities in exchange for leaving the disputed Comanche field. The council then called for another meeting in Lawton, Oklahoma, to work “out some agreement by which The Mission Reborn · 183 we might avoid any over-lapping or conflict among the churches working among the Indians.” Writing on behalf of the council to Witt about the Lawton meeting, Gilbert said, “I am asked to invite local white missionaries . . . No Indians are invited whatever their official standing. This must be strictly white missionaries, directors and secretaries . . . The presence of others besides those specified above would embarrass the discussions.” Unimpressed with what he heard at the Lawton meeting, which organizers decided should be held in a local funeral home, Methvin called the meeting a “fissle [sic].” “To follow the plan of some of the missionaries of the different churches in this Indian work will lead you to a funeral home indeed.”88 What emerged from these meetings and ensuing discussions were two distinct complaints about Southern Methodist work in southwestern Oklahoma. The first revolved around issues of overlapping and encroachment. “Previous to their entering the field there were no Methodists in the district,” wrote Robert Chaat, the Reformed Church’s missionary to the Comanche field. “There is absolutely no ground or reason for their establishing a work there. The field is occupied. The spiritual needs of the people have not been neglected.” “If the [Southern Methodists] continue their encroachment we are doomed to a small constituency which will render ineffective our large expenditure of money,” Gilbert wrote Kinney before encouraging that “all possible measures should be taken to stop them now.” Kinney, in particular, was enraged by Southern Methodist actions, which he placed solely on the shoulders of the Indian Mission’s superintendent. “Our people are trying to win men for Christ,” Kinney told Frank Smith. “Dr. Witt and his men seem to be trying to make Meth- odists and they do not care how they get them. It has been the Boast of some of his preachers that Dr. Witt has said that he would wipe up all of our other work and that he would do it with our men.” After Smith admonished Kinney for his anger at Witt, Kinney responded, “We cannot afford to cooperate, combine or federate with organizations known to be ecclesiastical pirates and brigands.” Lindquist was especially harsh toward Southern Methodist ministers, whom he blamed for most of the denominational fighting in Oklahoma by “introducing the competitive element in the western church work, resulting in overlapping and duplication of effort. A glance at the church map of today compared to the one 1918 would seem to bear out this criticism.”89 These criticisms were common in an era when denominational rivalries still resonated, but they also demonstrated the religious imperialism and sense of entitlement white officials had toward an Indian field that was 184 · Chapter Six slowly moving out of their control. This larger attitude revealed the second and more important complaint about Southern Methodist missions. It was not simply that the Indian Mission threatened their own work with encroachment; it was the fact that it was Indians, and not white ministers, doing so. In their minds, Southern Methodists acted irresponsibly by giving these unproven Native ministers any official authority. “It is so easy to flatter an untrained Indian and make promises to him and disrupt the friendly relations in any field,” remarked Watermulder. “The thing that appeals to the Indians is not Methodism in itself but letting them run their own churches,” Gilbert wrote Kinney. Referring to Tahquechi’s efforts at Mt. Scott, Gilbert groused, “Norton is armed with a license as a local preacher which makes him in his own estimation a more able preacher than I am and what is more, in the estimation of the Indians.” Perry Jack- son at the Saddle Mountain Baptist Church said that his work suffered because the Southern Methodists “expand their work by using many young Indian men as local ministers.” Jackson promised to “give them some of their own medicine” by using young men “who are not capable enough to be ordained.”90 Even those officials who suggested creating a larger, Protestant-dominated mission to coordinate mission work assumed it would be a white-controlled organization.91 Officials denigrated Indians who sought out the Southern Methodists as greedy or insufficiently Christian, as apparent in Kinney’s animosity toward Albert Horse and Gilbert’s toward Norton Tahquechi. “The whole plan [of the Southern Methodists] finds its strength in certain Indians who want to be supported and who are either too indolent or too unskilled to accomplish much by hard work,” Frank Smith wrote when explaining why the Indian Mission accepted members that Northern Baptists expelled. “The dissati- scation [sic] of the Indians with the established agencies is partly a hope of financial support and partly a desire for a more lax standard of church membership.” Harry Treat at the Red Stone Baptist Church commented, “It is not uncommon still to hear someone say, you Baptists are too strict, we will join the Methodists for they are easier (whatever they mean by that). Apparently our standards are higher, or the Indians think they are.”92 While there may have been some truth in Treat’s comments, taken another way, Southern Methodist “lax” standards revealed an avenue for autonomy that was not lost on Indians themselves. “[Y]ou Baptist have Bars against Indian’s be License to Preach no matter how faithful[,] he can’t be License to Preach,” wrote one Kiowa named Lowensoh. “Meth- odists don’t do that way[,] gives a man chance and therefore if others want Preach and heart alright, will be License. . . . You Baptist have bar our The Mission Reborn · 185

Indians,” Lowensoh stated bluntly as he sized up the differences between the denominations, “and we can’t Blame Methodists for helping them.”93 Over the years, the indifference shown by the Southern Methodist Church on a national and regional level had removed some of the assimilationist pressure from its Native congregations in southwestern Oklahoma, which members like Albert Horse, Delos Lonewolf, Norton Tahquechi, and White Parker used to benefit their own communities, even when it put the larger church in direct conflict with other denominations. Cultivat- ing Indian ministers was long the hope of Southern Methodists, and they were now achieving that goal, though not in the way the church originally intended. Changing circumstances in the field dictated that they develop a “license first, train second” policy toward Native ministers that left whites reacting rather than directing. Other denominations like the Northern Baptists recognized how this would lead to a power shift in Indian congregations and wanted to avoid the Southern Methodist plan. Indeed, Cecil Horse, more so than his brother, Albert, joined the Indian Mission based on the immediate opportunities it provided. “I began to think different on how I used to live in life and I began to work in the church work,” Cecil recalled of his decision to enter the ministry in 1934 following the death of his son, “and then I asked to become ordained minister in the Methodist church or in the Baptist church.” While the Northern Baptists promised him a preacher’s license after he completed two years of training, Witt offered Cecil the chance to get licensed immediately. Unwilling to wait, Cecil accepted Witt’s offer and was soon appointed to the Cache Creek Church. In time, Cecil received some pastoral training from the University of Oklahoma while he preached multiple times a week at Cache Creek.94

In 1938, Mary Beth Littlejohn finally received her appointment to the Indian field near Anadarko as part of the Southern Methodist Church’s Deaconess program, an early twentieth century outlet for the church’s women workers. Sent “without too much idea of what was expected,” Little john found herself assigned to the Indian Mission’s Christian education program, where she taught Southern Methodist principles to Indian members. This experience gave her a unique perspective on the differences between white and Indian congregations. “In our culture we stress the importance of working with children and youth,” Littlejohn wrote. “But Indians lay great stress on the value of age. . . . We used to laugh at comments concerning certain ‘young preachers’—when we found these ‘mere infants’ were 45 and above.”95 186 · Chapter Six

Littlejohn’s comments on the “young preachers” in the Indian Mission showed the different expectations that national church officials and Indian congregations had toward ministers. In the 1930s, the national church clung to ideas of creating a generation of Native members in the Indian Mission through educational programs like the Folsom Training School in southeastern Oklahoma. Doing so ensured that white officials maintained some control over Indian congregations while the church also reiterated its larger assimilationist message. This approach had been the national church’s overall policy toward Indian work for decades, and the current strategy of the new Indian Mission was yet another attempt at an old ideal. Other aspects of the Indian Mission during this time, such as its ministers being licensed by an outside conference and not by the mission itself, reinforced the importance of white oversight. But no matter what their objective had been, the organization of the Indian Mission was an important step in giving Indian congregations more autonomy. The demand for and Bishop Mouzon’s creation of a separate course of study for Indian ministers proved that white authority would be limited in the new mission. By reluctantly embracing a separate standard for Indian ministers, the national church ensured that Indian congregations developed in a pattern different from mainstream Southern Meth- odism. The longstanding Southern Methodist position of using Native ministers coupled with a growing white indifference toward the work gave Indians the room to construct their own space within a larger church society in the 1920s and 1930s. With more autonomy, Indian congregations created their own institutions and practices within a Christian and South- ern Methodist context. As long as Christianity remained at the center of their activities, such as camp meetings held during revivals or quarterly singing conventions where entire congregations celebrated God in their Native tongues, then church officials could condone the actions of Indian members and keep their interference to a minimum. These officials may not have anticipated the trouble Indian autonomy produced in terms of denominational competition, but they could not deny the expansion of Southern Methodism in Indian communities. Conclusion

J. J. Methvin did not spend his final years basking in accolades or riches from a lifetime spent in the mission field. Never one with great means or opportunities, the economic turmoil of the Great Depression left him dependent on others and, at times, living hand to mouth. One observer noted that Methvin’s house “looked pinched from poverty within, everything being of the plainest and cheapest and much worn.”1 His oldest sur- viving son, Glover, lived nearby and regularly sent money to support his father, while in other situations, friends bought him meals. “I felt like it was an imposition but I had only one penny in my possession,” Methvin wrote in his journal after one such meal with Andres Martinez. Methvin became increasingly melancholy and contemplative about his life’s work as the years passed. “Could I but leave some worthy record to be read by those to come after me, that would be an inspiration to them to an onward and outward and upward reach, I should die content,” he wrote in 1933. “No higher honor could I, or do I, desire than just to be identified along with Jesus Christ as a friend and lover of my fellowman.”2 After being in failing health for some time, Methvin died on January 17, 1941. His second wife, the former Ida Mae Swanson, wrote to their sons Paul and Lee, living in Washington, DC, that the end had not been unusual, only that the ninety-four-year-old retired missionary had “collapsed” shortly before his passing. The presiding bishop for the West Oklahoma Conference, Charles Selecman, sent a telegram of condolence to the family, Ida Mae told her boys, while Methvin’s older sons, Glover and Marvin, made the funeral arrangements.3

187 188 · Conclusion

Methvin’s death signaled the end of an era for Oklahoma’s Southern Methodist Indian missions, as the aged preacher had outlived most of his generation of ministers. Gone were old friends like Milton Clark, missionary to the Creek Indians, who had secured Methvin a pension five years after the national church forced him into retirement, along with Martinez, Methvin’s constant companion until suffering a fatal stroke in December 1935 after a Kiowa prayer meeting.4 These individuals had witnessed the changes that Oklahoma’s Indians had experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They saw the Five Tribes fight for their tribal sovereignty even as the government and white population pressed on them. They watched as the Plains Indians transitioned from a life on the southern plains to the enclosures of a reservation and the cultural assault of reformers and missionaries. Now, the Indian Mission’s members were men and women who had come of age after Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907. These people were in a position to build on the work of earlier generations and fashion the church to fit the needs of Indian communities, all while battling domineering white officials who refused to relinquish real power over missionary efforts. As Methvin was one of the last members of a bygone era of frontier missions, his funeral in Anadarko brought together various church officials and members, though “Indian men and women constituted a considerable part of the congregation that filled the church.” His pallbearers were Native ministers from the old KCA Agency, including Cecil Horse, Ted Ware, Henry Ware, Matthew Botone, Oliver Woodard, and Charley Aphkone. “After the benediction, an aged Apache rose in the balcony,” a local newspaper reported. “ ‘I want to say something,’ he said. ‘I owe everything to that good man. This isn’t a time to grieve. He has gone home to God. He was like a father to me and my people.’ ”5 Nevertheless, events in the wake of Methvin’s death illustrated some of the limitations that mainstream, white-dominated Methodist churches in Oklahoma placed on its secondary, yet autonomous, Indian congregations. Much like they had for over a century with other missionaries and prominent members, church officials used Methvin’s life as a way to stress the one-way process of uplifting Indians to Christianity as well as the altruistic struggle of the church’s missionaries with their Native brethren. His obituary in the West Oklahoma Conference’s 1941 annual journal said that Methvin “heeded the call of the church to work in the old Indian Territory” and that “[t]his call became the challenge which sent him to his God for help in a way he had never gone before.” Writing in the Oklahoma Historical Society’s Chronicles of Oklahoma, Sidney Babcock, Conclusion · 189 a fellow white Methodist minister, further developed Methvin’s status as a humble ambassador of Christ. “Slowly but surely,” Babcock wrote “the kindly heart, the quiet demeanor, the simple earnestness, the patient constant toil of this man of God in the interest of the Indians won his way into their hearts.” In time, Methvin’s myth grew as church leaders elevated him from the “simple” and “kindly” man of Babcock’s writing to “the prophet of the blanket Indians” in church literature distributed across the country.6 Whites discussed Methvin’s life in ways that emphasized the goals and ethnocentrism of their denomination while placing Indians in a marginalized context as a group of nonbelievers to be acted on. They romanticized a former era while continually overlooking Indians still among them. The fact that Anadarko, the old KCA Agency’s headquarters where Methvin had lived and labored for more than fifty years, no longer had a Methodist Indian church only underscored this attitude. Indian members of the Indian Mission, on the other hand, saw Methvin as an individual that had empowered their own Christian experience. The Indian Mission’s obituary eulogized Methvin for his lifelong Christian service in the area while also showing the importance of Indian communities to Christianity in general. “Christ’s kingdom may come increasingly throughout the length and breadth of our ever growing Indian mission,” the obituary stated, clearly showing the independence of the Indian Mis- sion that its members desired and the belief that Christianity and Indian culture were not irreconcilable. In Anadarko in 1941, Ted Ware, who credited Methvin with starting “me on the right way,” organized a Kiowa congregation even as his district superintendent was sure he would fail and offered to “eat his hat” if Ware succeeded. After meeting for several years in private homes, in another Methodist Church before being kicked out, and even in an old creamery in town, the J. J. Methvin Memorial Church opened its own doors for Kiowa members in 1945. Today, its current building, constructed twenty years later, sits across the street from the entrance to the county fairgrounds, where each August, Indians from all over the region meet for the week-long celebration of Native culture at the American Indian Exposition. It is worth noting that one of the original organizers for the American Indian Exposition was Guy Quoetone, the Kiowa minister and former pupil and employee of the Methvin Institute.7 Methvin’s death and Ware’s organization of a new Indian congregation in Anadarko came during an era of great change for American Method- ism in general and, more specifically, for Methodist Indian communities in Oklahoma. After nearly a century of separation, northern and southern branches of Methodism formally reunited in 1939 during a ceremony 190 · Conclusion in Kansas City, creating a new denomination called, simply enough, the Methodist Church. Congregations that had been rivals for generations now joined in a new organization that shared much of the same Wesleyan theology and Christian outlook. Unification came only after decades of debate, as leaders from both groups worked to reconcile lingering animos- ities and sectional strife. From an administrative perspective, it took years for church-run organizations, like boards of missions and various overlapping conferences, to coordinate and combine their efforts effectively as their new church moved into its next phase. The merger of the two largest branches of Methodism in 1939 brought dynamic changes to Oklahoma’s Methodist Indian communities. South- ern efforts had dominated the region ever since the creation of the Indian Mission Conference in 1844 and the IMC’s subsequent inclusion in the Southern Methodist Church the following year. Northern efforts, though present in the years after the Civil War, did not develop significantly until after the 1889 land run, during which time the two groups vied for prominence among the region’s growing white population. For a brief period, Northern Methodists even operated their own Indian-centric conference in the territory, also named the Indian Mission Conference, though its membership numbers never matched those of the Southern Methodists. Indians from several northern tribes removed to Oklahoma brought with them their northern-leaning Methodist congregations, much as the Five Tribes did in the 1830s and 1840s with their southern counterparts. After reunification, these Native churches, primarily Pawnees and Poncas, joined with the Indian Mission and created even more diversity within an already eclectic organization. In 1941, the Indian Mission’s Creek Dis- trict reported that the Native communities within its boundaries now included Creeks, Shawnees, Sac and Foxes, Osages, Kaws, Seminoles, Euchees, Poncas, and Pawnees.8 The early 1940s serves as the conclusion for this study largely because of the changing organizational structure of Oklahoma’s Methodism. With the idea of Indians asserting their own autonomy through church-created structures being a central component of this overall argument, the change in these structures, and the introduction of new groups into the dynamic, signals a natural end point. Nevertheless, Methodist work among Okla homa’s Native communities continued in the years after reunification, with Native congregations facing many of the same problems. G. E. E. Lind- quist and other reformers pressed on with their attacks against Methodists as being divisive to the overall missionization process and for giving too much authority to Native ministers.9 Racial tensions remained, as evident Conclusion · 191 when a group of Euchee boys asked the presiding bishop to investigate allegations of discrimination at the white Sunday school they attended. Financial concerns were still paramount, as Indian ministers received significantly less pay than their white counterparts in the Oklahoma conferences. After the Board of Missions protested to Superintendent William Witt that too many Indian preachers held second jobs, Witt complained that five Creek ministers were paid less than sixty dollars a year. “Of course they have to work and draw on their own resources to live,” Witt wrote. “It is evident that they cannot render efficient service with the scant support they receive.”10 “Our people for the most part are making great sacrifices to carry on,” Witt reminded national church officials just months after reunification, “and under present conditions there is no great hope of material financial increases.”11 The economically flush years after World War II brought Oklahoma’s Methodist Indian congregations significant improvement in their financial situation but also increased paternalism from white officials that left its members yearning for more control. In 1941, Dewey Etchison took over as superintendent of the Indian Mission after William Witt retired, and three years later the national church replaced A. Frank Smith as presiding bishop with his brother, newly elected Bishop W. Angie Smith, who would preside over the Indian Mission as well as the Oklahoma Conference until his retirement in 1968. Smith, whose forceful personality made him the “last of the imperial bishops,” was a demanding bishop for Indians and whites alike and took great interest in the churches under his watch. During his tenure, Smith pushed for increased economic support for Indian missions from the region’s white churches, including the Oklahoma Confer- ence and the South Central Jurisdiction, a new organizational body that encompassed several Methodist conferences on the southern plains. The increased financial assistance correlated to an increased membership, and by 1963 the Indian Mission’s rolls included members from more than two dozen tribes, including Cherokee work, which had disappeared nearly a half- century earlier. Property values, building expenditures, and ministerial salaries increased during the era, all leading to an improved standard of living for the Indian Mission’s congregations.12 Yet Smith’s paternalistic management conflicted with Indians who pur- sued opportunities best calculated to help their communities at the expense of the national church’s agenda. Robert Pinezaddleby, a descendent of Kiowa chief Stumbling Bear, joined the ministry after World War II, even though Conoco Oil had promised him a lucrative job. With only a basic understanding of Christianity, Pinezaddleby ministered for several years to 192 · Conclusion

Poncas, Osages, and Cheyennes before deciding to enroll in the seminary at Southern Methodist University for further education. Church officials tried to dissuade Pinezaddleby, telling him that “ ‘you preachers don’t need any trained person. Just get up there and use your Bible and preach.’ ” “[B]ut that wasn’t enough for me,” he recalled, “so I told them ‘I want to take that training.’ ” Smith saw Pinezaddleby’s push for seminary training as nothing but a ploy to get a higher salary. “ ‘I’ll be watching you,’ ” he told Pinezaddleby when the young minister entered SMU’s Perkins School of Theology in 1950.13 By the 1960s, Native members held several important administrative positions within the Indian Mission, such as district superintendent, which replaced the position of presiding elder after 1939. What they did not have was a separate conference to guide their churches. Emboldened by the social activism of the 1960s and the increased calls for Native self- determination, Indians in the mission protested the paternalism of white officials and their secondary status in the Methodist Church. In 1968, the same year that the Methodist Church unified with the Evangelical United Brethren Church and several smaller branches to form the United Meth- odist Church, it created an advisory committee composed of whites and Natives aimed at increasing Indian authority over Indian churches. Paul Milhouse, who replaced Smith as presiding bishop that year, briefly did away with the position of general superintendent of the mission, which had been dominated by white ministers, in favor of several district superintendents made up of Indian preachers. This move allowed a leadership class to develop further as individuals like Pinezaddleby, Lindy Waters, and Thomas Roughface took on more responsibilities in the mission. Four years later, the national church established the Oklahoma Indian Mis- sionary Conference to oversee its Indian churches in the region and with power to license and ordain ministers, though it was not until 1988 that the new organization received voting rights at the national church’s general conference. In the meantime, Bishop John Wesley Hardt, reflecting the national church’s awakening to the reality of its multiethnic membership, appointed Roughface to the reestablished position of general superintendent of the Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference, the first Native minister to serve in that role.14

The experience of Oklahoma Indians in the Southern Methodist Church from the 1840s to the 1940s reveals the ways in which Native communities created their own religious space, even as ethnocentric pressures of assimilation marginalized Indians in American society. This was not a one-sided Conclusion · 193 process; it evolved from action and, in some cases, inaction by both sides. Whites envisioned missionary efforts as noble and their cause as good, but individuals in the field encountered daily struggles that left them doubt- ful of themselves and of Indian communities. They longed to re-create a church society similar to what they had experienced back home and stop being the “lonely picket in the field,” facing down the menacing hordes of heathenism. The longer that took, the less enthralled they became with Indian missions. When the tipping point in population occurred in the 1890s, and whites made up the majority in the Indian Mission Conference, local and national officials formally pushed Native communities to the side. The fact that Indians embraced Christianity to some degree made this segregation easier for church officials to accept. They succeeded to some limited degree in their original intention of “uplifting” Indians through Christ, which meant that they could justify their shift in focus (and funds) away from Indians to the larger community “that needed them more.” It was, after all, for the good of the church, they believed. As Indians receded from the public eye in the early twentieth century, white congregations and church officials remained indifferent to Indian needs or, in certain situations, took advantage of them, just as others did in Oklahoma. It was in this growing indifference that Indians found ways to claim Christianity for their own purposes. By taking advantage of church- sponsored structures, individuals harnessed the prestige and authority of a denomination for their personal use or for the benefit of the tribe. This was as true in the 1870s, when white officials complained of Indians among the Five Tribes using their ministerial training for political gain, as it was in the 1930s, when Plains Indians pushed the denomination into new regions and built their own churches despite objections of “overlapping” from high-minded white reformers. In embracing elements of Christian- ity, Native congregations created a distance from white-dominated society for their own autonomy, which whites tolerated. Indian converts resembled whites in general appearance, and that was the point of the white missionaries’ decades of work; that these congregations actually reinforced Native culture through language and communal gatherings was downplayed or overlooked. Indian converts had found a third alternative between complete acceptance and outright rejection of white society. As is often the case, reality is murky and difficult to confine to ready- made categories. There were, no doubt, individuals within the Southern Methodist Church who promoted the assimilationist agenda of the nineteenth century with great zeal and saw Indian culture as an outright evil. They were intolerant toward Native communities as they moved from 194 · Conclusion simple ethnocentrism to full-blown racism, and these people were all too willing to ignore Indians to focus on whites. But there were also individuals who were committed to the concept of Christianity and believed that they were doing “the Lord’s work.” For them, Indians could not only control Christianity among their communities, they were necessary for Christianity to take hold at all. Understanding how religious beliefs moti- vate groups, rather than judging these beliefs on more modern terms that stress their ethnocentric or adversarial overtones, reveals a broader picture of the missionization process and the ways in which individuals exploited religion and church structures for their own needs. Notes

Introduction

1. “Letter to the Editor of the Christian Advocate 1907,” History of Missions Proj- ect, United Methodist Church Archives, General Commission on Archives and His- tory, Madison, New Jersey [hereafter GCAH]. 2. Ibid. 3. Rosemary McCombs Maxey, “Who Can Sit at the Lord’s Table?: The Experience of Indigenous Peoples,” in Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada, ed. James Treat (New York: Routledge, 1996), 43. 4. Herbert Eugene Bolton, Rim of Christendom: A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer (New York: Macmillan, 1936); Francis Paul Prucha, Amer- ican Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); James A. Sandos, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), xiii. 5. George Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cul- tural Genocide (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993); James Treat, ed., Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1996); Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas, eds., Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 6. Homer Noley, “The Interpreters,” in Native American Religious Identity: Unfor- gotten Gods, ed. Jace Weaver (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 52. 7. Frederick A. Norwood, The Story of American Methodism: A History of the United Methodists and Their Relations (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1974), 31–41, 70–76, 95–102. 8. Ibid., 175–89, 185–209. 9. Jack Schultz, The Seminole Baptist Churches of Oklahoma (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 3, 4.

195 196 · Notes to Pages 13–23

10. Angie Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934); Angie Debo, The Road to Disappearance (Norman: Uni- versity of Oklahoma Press, 1941); Grant Foreman, The Five Civilized Tribes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934); Andrew Denson, Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture, 1830–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Clara Sue Kidwell, The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855–1970 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); David La Vere, Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory (Nor- man: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 7. 11. David W. Daily, Battle for the BIA: G. E. E. Lindquist and the Missionary Cru- sade against John Collier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 15.

Chapter 1. The Mission Begins

1. Thomas A. Morris, Miscellany: Consisting of Essays, Biographical Sketches, and Notes of Travel (Cincinnati, OH: Swormstedt and Poe, 1854), 357; E. J. Stanley, Life of Rev. L. B. Stateler: A Story of Life on the Old Frontier, Containing Incidents, Anecdotes, and Sketches of Methodist History in the West and Northwest (Nashville, TN: Publish- ing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1916), 114–15. 2. Joseph Mitchell, The Missionary Pioneer: Or, A Brief Memoir of the Life, Labours, and Death of John Stewart (Man of Colour), Founder, Under God, of the Mis- sion Among the Wyandotts, at Upper Sandusky, Ohio (New York: J. C. Totten, 1827), 17–18; Robert W. Sledge, “Five Dollars and Myself”: The History of Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1845–1939 (New York: General Board of Global Missions, United Methodist Church, 2005), 13–14, 21. 3. Walter N. Vernon, ed., One in the Lord: A History of Ethnic Minorities in the South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church (Oklahoma City: Commis- sion on Archives and History, South Central Jurisdiction, United Methodist Church, 1977), 1–3; Sidney H. Babcock and John Y. Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma: Story of the Indian Mission Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Oklahoma City: n.p., 1935), 11–14, 23; Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic, 45. 4. Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic, 52, 63; William G. McLough- lin, The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794–1870: Essays on Acculturation and Cultural Persistence, ed. Walter H. Conser, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 29, 40, 313n56; Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 97, 116–18, 120. 5. Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George E. Tinker, A Native American Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 12, 19, 100–101, 107; Pamela Innes, “Creek in the West,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 14, Southeast, ed. William C. Sturtevant (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2004), 400–3; John James Collins, Native American Religions: A Geographical Study (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 329–31, 334–35; Paul Schultz and George Tinker, “Rivers of Life: Native Spirituality for Native Churches,” in Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada, ed. James Treat (New York: Routledge, 1996), 58–59. Notes to Pages 24–30 · 197

6. Arrell M. Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 206, 227–28; Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 120; McLoughlin, The Cher- okees and Christianity, 19, 190; Rennard Strickland, The Indians in Oklahoma (Nor- man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 15. 7. Devon A. Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851–1909 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), xi; Strickland, The Indians in Oklahoma, 14; Denson, Demanding the Cherokee Nation, 18–19, 108–9. 8. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Transmitted with the Mes- sage of the President at the Opening of the Second Session of the Twenty-Ninth Con- gress, 1846–1847 (Washington, DC: Ritchie and Heiss, 1846), 152. 9. Henry C. Benson, Life Among the Choctaw Indians, and Sketches of the South- West (Cincinnati, OH: Swormstedt and Poe, 1860), 95–96. 10. William H. Goode, Outposts of Zion, with Limnings of Mission Life (Cincin- nati, OH: Poe and Hitchcock, 1863), 130. 11. Luther Lee and E. Smith, The Debates of the General Conference, of the M. E. Church, May, 1844 (New York: O. Scott, 1845), 59; Robert Athow West, Report of Debates in the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Held in the City of New-York, 1844 (New York: Lane and Tippett, 1844), 57, 58. 12. West, Report of Debates, 57–58, 59. 13. Lee and Smith, The Debates of the General Conference, 59; West, Report of Debates, 58. 14. West, Report of Debates, 58–59. 15. Ibid., 59; Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, vol. 2, 1840, 1844 (New York: Carlton and Phillips, 1856), 46; Lee and Smith, The Debates of the General Conference, 85. 16. Wade C. Barclay, Early American Methodism, 1769–1844, Missionary Moti- vation and Expansion, vol. 1 (New York: Board of Missions and Church Extension of the Methodist Church, 1949), xxxiv; Wade C. Barclay, Early American Methodism, 1769–1844, To Reform the Nation, vol. 2 (New York: Board of Missions and Church Extension of the Methodist Church, 1950), 359–65. 17. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1846–1847, 147–48; Benson, Life Among the Choctaw Indians, 122; George Foster Pierce, Incidents of Western Travel: In a Series of Letters (Nashville, TN: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1859), 55–56. 18. First Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 23, 1844, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, Oklahoma City University [hereafter OCU], Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Barclay, Early American Methodism, 2:365–66; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Years 1839–1845, vol. 3 (New York: Mason and Lane, 1840), 537. 19. Barclay, Early American Methodism, 2:359–60; P. A. Peterson, History of the Revisions of the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1889), 43–48; First Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 23, 1844, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU. 20. Fifth Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, November 1, 1848, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU. 198 · Notes to Pages 31–37

21. Stanley, Life of Rev. L. B. Stateler, 118–19. 22. First Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 23, 1844, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU. 23. Ibid. 24. Twelfth Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 10, 1855, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU. 25. Fifth Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, November 1, 1848, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU; Eleventh Annual Ses- sion of the Indian Mission Conference, October 25, 1854, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU. 26. Twenty-seventh Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 2, 1872, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU. 27. Ninth Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 29, 1852, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU. 28. West, Report of Debates, 57. 29. Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2:108–9. 30. Goode, Outposts of Zion, 148; Fourth Annual Session of the Indian Mission Con- ference, November 4, 1847, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU. 31. Peterson, History of the Revisions of the Discipline, 58–60. 32. Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, for the Year 1857 (Washington, DC: William A. Harris, 1858), 253. 33. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1846–1847, 142–43. 34. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Transmitted with the Mes- sage of the President at the Opening of the First Session of the Thirty-Second Congress, 1851 (Washington, DC: Gideon, 1851), 109, 134. 35. First Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 23, 1844, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1846–1847, 147–48; Annual Report of the Commis- sioner of Indian Affairs, Transmitted with the Message of the President at the Opening of the Second Session of the Thirtieth Congress, 1847–1848 (Washington, DC: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, 1848), 524. 36. Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 116–17, 119–20; Annual Report of the Com- missioner of Indian Affairs, For the Years 1840–1845 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1845), 601–2. 37. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1840–1845, 590. 38. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1846–1847, 152. 39. Goode, Outposts of Zion, 77–78. 40. Pierce, Incidents of Western Travel, 48, 50. 41. Ibid., 45. 42. Goode, Outposts of Zion, 64. 43. Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, for the Year 1859 (Washington, DC: George W. Bow- man, 1860), 175. 44. Peterson, History of the Revisions of the Discipline, 63–66; Matthew Simp- son, ed., Cyclopedia of Methodism: Embracing Sketches of its Rise, Progress, and Notes to Pages 37–42 · 199

Present Condition, with Biographical Notices and Numerous Illustrations (Philadel- phia: Louis H. Everts, 1880), 542. 45. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1840–1845, 511, 597–98. 46. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Transmitted with the Mes- sage of the President at the Opening of the First Session of the Thirty-Third Congress, 1853 (Washington, DC: Robert Armstrong, 1853), 150–51. 47. Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1839– 1845, 3:603; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for the Year 1858 (Nashville, TN: Southern Methodist Publishing, 1859), 92; Seventeenth Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, November 1, 1860, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU. 48. Homer Noley, First White Frost: Native Americans and United Methodism (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991), 37; Schultz and Tinker, “Rivers of Life,” 58–64. 49. Douglas L. Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion in New England’s Old Colony, 1670–1770,” in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, ed. Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 97–98; William G. McLoughlin, Champions of the Cherokees: Evan and John B. Jones (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1990), 84; McLoughlin, The Cherokees and Christianity, 198. 50. Benson, Life Among the Choctaw Indians, 123–24. 51. Pierce, Incidents of Western Travel, 50. 52. Goode, Outposts of Zion, 157–58. 53. Joanna Brooks, “Hard Feelings: Samson Occom Contemplates His Christian Mentors,” in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Reli- gious Landscape, ed. Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 31–34; James Treat, “Introduction: Native Christian Narrative Discourse,” in Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada, ed. James Treat, (New York: Routledge, 1996), 13. 54. Goode, Outposts of Zion, 124; Benson, Life Among the Choctaw Indians, 162– 65; First Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 23, 1844, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU; Annual Report of the Commis- sioner of Indian Affairs, Transmitted with the Message of the President at the Opening of the Second Session of the Thirty-Third Congress, 1854 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1855), 155. 55. Charles F. Deems, ed., Annals of Southern Methodism for 1856 (Nashville, TN: Stevenson and Owen, 1856), 103, 106. 56. Sledge, “Five Dollars and Myself,” 15; Morris, Miscellany, 357–58. 57. Fourth Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, November 4, 1847, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU; Stanley, Life of Rev. L. B. Stateler, 129–30; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1854, 146; Goode, Outposts of Zion, 215–16; Benson, Life Among the Choctaw Indians, 279. 58. Pierce, Incidents of Western Travel, 54–55. 59. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1846–1847, 58. 60. W. B. Morrison, “The Choctaw Mission of the American Board of Commis- sioners for Foreign Missions,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 4 (June 1926): 182; Kidwell, The Choctaws in Oklahoma, 30–40. 200 · Notes to Pages 42–48

61. McLoughlin, The Cherokees and Christianity, 198; William G. McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees’ Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 38, 136–37. 62. Murray R. Wickett, Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in Oklahoma 1865–1907 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 5–6. 63. First Annual Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 23, 1844, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU; Goode, Outposts of Zion, 149, 177; William Graham, “Frontier Sketches,” Ladies’ Repository 24 (1864): 494. 64. Deems, Annals of Southern Methodism for 1856, 107. 65. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Transmitted with the Mes- sage of the President at the Opening of the First Session of the Thirty-Fourth Congress, 1855 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856), 124. 66. Quoted in McLoughlin, Champions of the Cherokees, 353. 67. James Anderson Slover, Minister to the Cherokee: A Civil War Autobiography, ed. Barbara Cloud (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 57; Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, for the Year 1860 (Washington, DC: George W. Bowman, 1860), 115–16. 68. Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 138–39; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for the Year 1861 (Nashville, TN: Southern Methodist Publishing, 1870), 360; Eighteenth Annual Ses- sion of the Indian Mission Conference, October 10, 1861, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU; Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 142. 69. Minutes, Nineteenth Session of the Indian Mission Conference, Indian Mis- sion Conference, 1844–1877, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Col- lection, Oklahoma Historical Society [hereafter OHS], Oklahoma City. 70. Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1871), 32; minutes, Choctaw Circuit Quarterly Conference, 1836–1888, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collection, OHS. 71. Report on Indian Affairs by the Acting Commissioner for the Year 1867 (Washing- ton, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), 329–30; minutes, Nineteenth Session of the Indian Mission Conference, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collection, OHS; Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 138–39. 72. Minutes, Nineteenth Session of the Indian Mission Conference, Indian Mis- sion of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collection, OHS; Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 1871, 32.

Chapter 2. Rebuilding the Mission

1. Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1873), 42; Minutes of the Indian Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Forty- Fifth Session, Muskogee, Indian Territory, October 22–27, 1890, Farley Collection, Notes to Pages 48–56 · 201

Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma [hereafter WHC], Norman; Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Southern Methodist Publishing, 1872), 32. 2. Charles Robert Goins and Danney Goble, Historical Atlas of Oklahoma, 4th ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 98–99; H. Craig Miner, The Corpora- tion and the Indian: Tribal Sovereignty and Industrial Civilization in Indian Territory, 1865–1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 115; Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed in the United States (Except Alaska) at the Eleventh Cen- sus: 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894), 242. 3. Forty- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1889 (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1889), 25. 4. Indian Chieftain (Vinita, Indian Territory), June 5, 1884. 5. T. L. Ballenger, “Joseph Franklin Thompson: An Early Cherokee Leader,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 30 (1952): 286–88; Tahlequah Leader (Tahlequah, Okla- homa), November 16, 1922; Indian Chieftain, June 5, 1884. 6. Missionary Voice, April 1911; Our Brother in Red, September 1883. 7. Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 1871, 32. 8. Ibid., 32. 9. Ibid., 31. 10. May 9, 1872; May 23, 1874; May 7, 1875; May 4, 1877; and May 15, 1878, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 2, March 31, 1870–May 12, 1879, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. 11. Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 1871, 33. 12. Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 1872, 4. 13. July 20, 1870, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 1, April 1866–October 1, 1870, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. 14. Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 1871, 32; December 27, 1870, and January 25, 1871, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 2, March 31, 1870-May 12, 1879, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; October 13, 1885, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 3, May 12, 1879–August 31, 1886, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; interview with Mrs. A. N. Averyt, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC. 15. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1880 (Wash- ington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 95. 16. Cherokee Advocate (Tahlequah, Indian Territory), October 12, 1883; historical tablet, folder 18, UMC Okmulgee First, box 46, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS; Our Brother in Red, November 29, 1887, and November 5, 1887. 17. Our Brother in Red, September 1883. 18. Our Brother in Red, March 1884. 19. Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 23–24; McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears, 136–37; Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 121; Cherokee Advocate (Tahlequah, Indian Territory), October 10, 1884. 202 · Notes to Pages 56–62

20. Our Brother in Red, April 1886. 21. Our Brother in Red, June 1887. 22. Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 1873, 3. 23. McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears, 74; Noley, “The Interpreters,” 52; Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 297; Treat, “Native Christian Narrative Discourse,” 13; James L. West, “Indian Spirituality: Another Vision,” in Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada, ed. James Treat (New York: Rout- ledge, 1996), 34–35; Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion,” 95. 24. Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 197; First Annual Ses- sion of the Indian Mission Conference, October 23, 1844, Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877, OCU; Our Brother in Red, October 29, 1887. 25. Holland N. McTyeire, A Manual of the Discipline of the Methodist Episco- pal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1870). 26. Forty-second Session, October 12, 1887, Methodist Indian Mission Confer- ence Records, 1836–1906, OCU; February 11, 1880, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 3, May 12, 1879–August 31, 1886, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; Milton A. Clark to Ann Eliza Worcester Robertson, June 22, 1887, folder 7, box 11, Alice M. Robertson Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 27. “Ann Eliza Worcester Robertson,” Methodist Review of Missions 19 (June 1899): 705–9; “The Creek Discipline,” Methodist Review of Missions 19 (June 1899): 754–55. For examples of Robertson’s translations, see Our Brother in Red, December 20, 1894; January 17, 1895; February 15, 1895; March 7, 1895; April 11, 1895; and May 9, 1895; W. R. Lambuth to Ann Eliza Worcester Robertson, May 9, 1899, folder 1, box 13, Alice M. Robertson Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 28. Minutes, Twenty-eighth Annual Session, October 23, 1873, Indian Mission Conference, 1844–1877, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collec- tion, OHS. 29. Ibid.; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1855, l, 139. 30. McLoughlin, Champions of the Cherokees, 243. 31. Minutes, Twenty-second Annual Session, October 3, 1873, Indian Mission Conference, 1844–1877, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collec- tion, OHS; Thirty-ninth Session of the Indian Mission Conference, September 14, 1889, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU. 32. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1868 (Wash- ington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), 283; Our Brother in Red, January 1886; Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 1873; minutes, Choctaw Circuit Quar- terly Conference, 1836–1888, OHS. 33. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1881 (Wash- ington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 104; Annual Report of the Commis- sioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1882 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 90. 34. Minutes, Fifteenth Annual Session, October 7, 1858, Indian Mission Confer- ence, 1844–1877, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collection, OHS; Emmet Starr, History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore (Oklahoma City: Warden Company, 1921), 285; Lester Hargrett, A Bibliography of Notes to Pages 62–69 · 203 the Constitutions and Laws of the American Indians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 65–66; Our Brother in Red, May 1883; Noley, First White Frost, 132–33; George Washington Grayson, A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiogra- phy of Chief G. W. Grayson, ed. W. David Baird (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 108–9n2. 35. Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 211; Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 121; Pierce, Incidents of Western Travel, 46. 36. Our Brother in Red, June 1883. 37. O. A. Lambert, “Historical Sketch of Col. Samuel Checote, Once Chief of the Creek Nation,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 4 (September 1926): 275–79; interview with Agnes Kelley, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC. 38. Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 183. 39. Our Brother in Red, September 10, 1887, and September 1883. 40. Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 1873, 40. 41. July 28, 1861, and September 5, 1861, folder 6, box 1, Rev. Willis F. Folsom Col- lection, OHS; Noley, First White Frost, 167–68; Babcock and Bryce, History of Meth- odism in Oklahoma, 145–46; Ada Evening News (Ada, Oklahoma), October 01, 1967; interview with Mary Elizabeth Folsom, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; April 1889, folder 4, box 1, Rev. Willis F. Folsom Collection, OHS; diary, vol. 1–2, 1873–1884, Rev. Willis F. Folsom Collection, OHS. 42. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 43. Noley, First White Frost, 199; Our Brother in Red, July 1884; Fifty-second session, November 10, 1897, Minutes of the Indian Mission Conference, 1894–1900, OHS. 44. Fifty-second session, November 10, 1897, Minutes of the Indian Mission Con- ference, 1894–1900, OHS. 45. Interview with Mary Elizabeth Folsom, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; Ada Evening News (Ada, Oklahoma), October 1, 1967; Treat, “Native Christian Narrative Discourse,” 13. 46. For a sample of Folsom’s use of this verse over the years, see December 28, 1873; February 3, 1877; and September 16, 1884, folder 3, box 1, diary, vol. 1–2, 1873– 1884, Rev. Willis F. Folsom Collection, OHS. 47. January 29, 1859, folder 2, box 1, Rev. Willis F. Folsom Collection, OHS. 48. Noley, “The Interpreters,” 52. 49. Interview with Mary Cole, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC. 50. Our Brother in Red, September 1886; I. G. John, Hand Book of Methodist Mis- sions (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M.E. Church, South, 1893) 108–9; Our Brother in Red, April 1886. 51. T. F. Brewer to Samuel Checote, July 20, 1882, Creek, Schools, Bacone Uni- versity, Muskogee High School, Muskogee Institute, and Harrell Institute, CRN 43, Creek National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; Our Brother in Red, May 4, 1889. 52. Letter from Chief, March 14, 1878, Creek, Schools, Miscellaneous, CRN 49, Creek National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; Grant Foreman, Musk- ogee: The Biography of an Oklahoma Town (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943), 53. 53. Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, (Washing- ton, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 942–50; “Act granting one town lot 204 · Notes to Pages 69–73 to the Methodist Episcopal Church South,” n.d., Cherokee (Tahlequah), Churches, CHN 69, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; J. F. Thomp- son to William P. Ross, Principal Chief, November 13, 1874, Cherokee (Tahlequah), Churches, CHN 69, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS. 54. Council Bill No. 4, November 25, 1886, vol. 275, National Council, CHN 12, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS. 55. John Chambers to Henry Chambers, March 30, 1887, Cherokee (Tahlequah), Schools: Private and Religious, CHN 100, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; Indian Chieftain, May 12, 1887; letter to D. W. Bushyhead, May 8, 1887, Cherokee (Tahlequah), Schools: Private and Religious, CHN 100, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; Indian Chieftain, May 12, 1887; John Chambers to J. B. Mayes, December 3, 1888, Cherokee (Tahlequah), Churches, CHN 69, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS. 56. “Contract between the Chickasaw Nation and the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Approved Sept. 15, 1888,” Indian Territory, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. 57. Minutes, Twenty-eighth Annual Session, October 23, 1873, Indian Mission Conference, 1844–1877, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collec- tion, OHS; Our Brother in Red, January 1884. 58. Minutes, Twenty-ninth Annual Session, October 22, 1874, Indian Mission Conference, 1844–1877, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collec- tion, OHS. 59. Minutes, Twenty-seventh Annual Session, October 2, 1872, Indian Mission Conference, 1844–1877, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collec- tion, OHS. 60. Interview with Richard Young Audd, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC. 61. L. J. Bond to E. R. Shapard, December 8, 1873, Letters Sent and Letters Received and Other Departments, Choctaw, Schools, New Hope Seminary, July 5, 1871–June 2, 1899, roll CTN 75, Choctaw National Records, Indian Archives Col- lection, OHS; “1847–1947: A Century of Service,” folder 27, UMC Eufaula, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS. 62. Thirty-sixth Annual Session, October 5, 1881, Methodist Indian Mission Con- ference Records, 1836–1906, OCU. 63. Minutes, Twenty-eighth Annual Session, October 23, 1873, Indian Mission Conference, 1844–1877, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collec- tion, OHS. 64. Young Ewing to National Council, Muscogee Nation, n.d., Creek, Schools, Asbury Mission, roll CRN 43, Creek National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; Thirty-fourth Annual Session, September 10, 1879, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU. 65. J. F. Thompson to Samuel Checote, September 30, 1881, Creek, Schools, Asbury Mission, roll CRN 43, Creek National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; T. F. Brewer and J. F. Thompson to Samuel Checote, October 19, 1881, Creek, Schools, Asbury Mission, roll CRN 43, Creek National Records, Indian Archives Col- lection, OHS; Indian Journal (Eufaula, Indian Territory), October 13, 1887. 66. Interview with J. J. Methvin, August 10, 1937, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; Forty- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 26. Notes to Pages 73–81 · 205

67. Our Brother in Red, January 1887. 68. Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 1873, 40; Our Brother in Red, January 1887. 69. “A proposed act for the erection of two boarding schools,” folder 51, box 2, Choctaw Nation Papers, WHC; “Articles of Agreement,” Letters Sent and Letters Received and Other Departments, Choctaw, Schools, New Hope Seminary, July 5, 1871–June 2, 1899, roll CTN 75, Choctaw National Records, Indian Archives Collec- tion, OHS; “Report of E. A. Gray,” folder 22, box 16, Choctaw Nation Papers, WHC; “Bill No. 26—Report of E. A. Gray,” folder 24, box 17, Choctaw Nation Papers, WHC. 70. Forty-first Annual Session, October 20, 1886, Methodist Indian Mission Con- ference Records, 1836–1906, OCU. 71. June 8, 1886, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 3, May 12, 1879–August 31, 1886, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH; “Bill No. 66,” folder 62, box 17, Choctaw Nation Papers, WHC.

Chapter 3. Expanding the Mission

1. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1888 (Washing- ton, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888), 96. 2. February 1, 1927, Methvin journal, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 3. Christian Advocate, November 6, 1886. 4. Our Brother in Red, July 1887. 5. Christian Advocate, August 13, 1887. 6. Indian Journal (Eufaula, Indian Territory), June 16, 1887; Warren A. Candler, Bishop Charles Betts Galloway: A Prince of Preachers and Christian Statesman (Nash- ville, TN: Cokesbury Press, 1927), 94. 7. Christian Advocate, August 13, 1887. 8. Ibid. 9. Forty-second Session, October 12, 1887, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Our Brother in Red, December 17, 1887; Christian Advo- cate, January 7, 1888; Christian Advocate, July 7, 1888; Forty-third Session of the Indian Mission Conference, October 10, 1889, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 252. 10. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1886 (Wash- ington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), 127–28. 11. May 5, 1881, and February 6, 1882, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 3, May 12, 1879–August 31, 1886, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; Walter N. Vernon, “Methodist Beginnings Among Southwest Oklahoma Indians,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 58 (Win- ter 1980–1981): 394–95; J. J. Methvin, In the Limelight, or History of Anadarko and Vicinity from the Earliest Day (Anadarko, OK: Plummer, 1929), 83–84. 12. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 13. Christian Advocate, July 30, 1887. 14. Forty-second Session, October 12, 1887, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, OCU; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, 206 · Notes to Pages 82–86

OCU; A. E. Butterfield, Comanche, Kiawa, and Apache Missions: Forty-two Years Ago and Now (n.p., 1934), 4; Our Brother in Red, January 14, 1888. 15. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1888, 95; Methvin, “Rem- iniscences of Life Among the Indians,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 5 (June 1927): 170. 16. Wickett, Contested Territory, 147–49; Donald J. Berthrong, The Cheyenne and Arapaho Ordeal: Reservation and Agency Life in the Indian Territory, 1875–1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 225, 302–5; Eugene Elliot White, Experiences of a Special Indian Agent (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 238–39; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1888, 98; Methvin, “Reminiscences of Life Among the Indians,” 170. 17. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 18. Methvin, “Reminiscences of Life Among the Indians,” 170. 19. Rev. J. J. Methvin, February 19, 1934, box 9, Lida White Collection, WHC. 20. Thomas W. Kavanagh, “Comanche,” in Handbook of North American Indi- ans, vol. 13, part 2, Plains, ed. William C. Sturtevant (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 892–99; Jerrold E. Levy, “Kiowa,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 13, part 2, Plains, ed. William C. Sturtevant (Washington, DC: Smithso- nian Institution, 2001), 910–15; William C. Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies: Enduring Veterans, 1800 to the Present (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), xi–xii. 21. Vernon, “Methodist Beginnings Among Southwest Oklahoma Indians,” 395; Our Brother in Red, January 14, 1888; Kavanagh, “Comanche,” 892; Benjamin R. Kracht, “Kiowa Religion in Historical Perspective,” American Indian Quarterly 21 (Winter 1997): 16–17; Methvin, “Reminiscences of Life Among the Indians,” 177, 179. 22. Kracht, “Kiowa Religion in Historical Perspective,” 18–19; Alice Marriott, The Ten Grandmothers: Epic of the Kiowas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 302–3; Candace S. Greene, One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record (Lin- coln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 127; Maurice Boyd, Kiowa Voices, vol. 1, Ceremonial Dance, Ritual and Songs (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1981), 24. 23. James Mooney, “Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians,” in Seventeenth Annual Report, part 2, Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, DC: Govern- ment Printing Office, 1893), 234; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 24. Christian Advocate, February 25, 1888; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 25. Boyd, Kiowa Voices: Ceremonial Dance, Ritual and Songs, 100; Kracht, “Kiowa Religion in Historical Perspective,” 20; Lucille Gilstrap, Sayt- aym-k’ee-ah, Kiowa Chief and His People, WHC. 26. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 27. J. J. Methvin to J. Morris Nichols, January 2, 1919, J. J. Methvin Manuscript Collection, OHS; Bruce David Forbes, “John Jasper Methvin: Methodist ‘Missionary to the Western Tribes’ (Oklahoma),” in Churchmen and the Western Indians, 1820– 1920, ed. Clyde A. Milner and Floyd A. O’Neil (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 50, 52; Methvin, “Reminiscences of Life Among the Indians,” 171; interview with W. W. Bray, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC. Notes to Pages 87–92 · 207

28. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 29. Luke Eric Lassiter, Clyde Ellis, and Ralph Kotay, The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 36; Indian Office to the War Department, June 5, 1889, roll 60, May 6–July 25, 1889, Letters Sent by the Indian Division of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, 1849–1903, University of Oklahoma; Indian Office to the War Department, Septem- ber 3, 1889, roll 61—July 22–October 10, 1889, Letters Sent by the Indian Division of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, 1849–1903, University of Oklahoma; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 30. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 31. Our Brother in Red, September 15, 1888, and May 12, 1888. 32. Interview with J. J. Methvin, October 26, 1937, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; interview with Lillian Gassaway, May 27, 1937, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC. 33. Candace S. Greene, “Exploring the Three ‘Little Bluffs’ of the Kiowa,” Plains Anthropologist 41 (August 1996): 233. There were three Kiowa men named Tohausen (translated as Little Bluff in English) in the nineteenth century, as Greene details in her essay. According to her, Tohausen II was a nephew of the original Tohausen and used the name only temporarily, while Tohausen III was the son. 34. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 35. Methvin, whose relationship with Parker was acrimonious at best, called his interpretation skills “faulty.” See September 8, 1889, Methvin, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU; Lassiter, Ellis, and Kotay, The Jesus Road, 54–57; William T. Hagan, Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 89–91. 36. Eighteenth Annual Session of the Indian Mission of Oklahoma, Septem- ber 20–22, 1935, OCU; interview with Guy Quoetone, T-306, Doris Duke Oral His- tory Collection, WHC; E. H. Rawlings, “Kicking Bird’s Experience,” World Outlook 25 (November 1935): 396. 37. Rawlings, “Kicking Bird’s Experience,” 396; interview with Karl Kickingbird, T- 302, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. 38. Eighteenth Annual Session of the Indian Mission of Oklahoma, OCU; interview with Guy Quoetone, T-306, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. 39. J. J. Methvin, Andele, The Mexican-Kiowa Captive: A Story of Real Life Among the Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). 40. Robert S. Satterfield, “Andele, Mexican Indian Christian Minister,”World Outlook 26 (June 1936): 236. 41. G. B. Pray to W. A. Jones, October 12, 1898, Kiowa, Comanche and Wichita Agency letterpress book, Letters Sent, vol. 63, September 12, 1898–April 1, 1899, roll KA 31, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS. Pray believed that Hattie’s father wanted his daughter back so that he could receive her semiannual grass money from the tribe’s leasing revenue. As it stood, KCA agents recognized Martinez as her guardian and gave Hattie’s share to him. See G. B. Pray to Kiowa Agency, May 13, 1898, Kiowa, Comanche and Wichita Agency letterpress book, Letters Sent, volume 61, April 5, 1898–July 13, 1898, roll KA 30, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS. 42. Andres Martinez to James F. Randlett, March 1, 1901, Kiowa Agency, letterpress books, vol. 85, December 22, 1900–April 1, 1901, roll KA 59, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; from the introduction by James Brooks 208 · Notes to Pages 92–97 in Methvin, Andele, The Mexican-Kiowa Captive, 13, 15. For an account of Martinez attending a peyote ceremony, see Maurice Boyd, Kiowa Voices, vol. 2, Myths, Legends and Folktales (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1983), 278–83. 43. Lassiter, Ellis, and Kotay, The Jesus Road, 36–37; J. J. Methvin, “Work Among the Wild Tribes,” Methodist Review of Missions 14 (October 1893): 204. 44. Interview with Guy Quoetone, T-306, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. 45. Interview with J. J. Methvin, September 21, 1937, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; J. J. Methvin to Capt. R. H. Pratt, April 22, 1888, Kiowa Agency—Births, Mar- riages, Divorces, Deaths, Wills and Related Records, 1869–1925, roll KA 52, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. Methvin was particularly angry in this instance because it left Dunmoe’s widow and young daughter without any property. 46. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU; interview with J. J. Methvin, October 26, 1937, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC. 47. Sidney H. Babcock, “John Jasper Methvin, 1846–1941,” Chronicles of Okla- homa 19 (June 1941): 116; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU; Our Brother in Red, April 6, 1889. 48. Frank D. Baldwin to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 12, 1897, Kiowa, Comanche and Wichita Agency, letterpress book, Letters Sent, vol. 58, September 10, 1897–June 10, 1898, KA28, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Records, OHS. 49. Interview with Lillian Gassaway, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; interview with J. J. Methvin, May 31, 1937, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 50. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 51. William T. Hagan, Taking Indian Lands: The Cherokee (Jerome) Commission, 1889–1893 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 204; John Jasper Meth- vin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU; Methvin, In the Limelight, 99–100. In the end, KCA agent George Day, who received the protest, failed to pass the letter on to Washington, DC, unbeknownst to Methvin. When a new agent discovered the letter in 1900, he blamed Day’s potential financial gain as motive. See James F. Randlett to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, January 5, 1900, Kiowa, Comanche and Wichita Agency, letterpress book, vol. 74, October 31, 1899–January 23, 1900, KA53, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Records, OHS. 52. Methvin, In the Limelight, 88; Clyde Ellis, To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 38–46; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 53. Commissioner of Indian Affairs to W. D. Myers, March 18, 1889, Kiowa Agency, Indian History, Culture and Acculturation, Churches 1870–1925, KA50, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Records, OHS; Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 237–38; J. J. Methvin to J. Morris Nichols, January 2, 1919, J. J. Methvin Manuscript Collection, OHS; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 54. Minutes of the Indian Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Forty-Fifth Session, October 22–27, 1890; “Harrell International Institute Catalogue, 1890–1891,” Harrell International Institute Catalogue and the Harrell Monthly, Alice Robertson Collection, OHS. 55. Our Brother in Red, October 5, 1889. Notes to Pages 98–106 · 209

56. Our Brother in Red, November 5, 1887. 57. Our Brother in Red, July 20, 1889. 58. Our Brother in Red, September 7, 1889, and October 5, 1889. 59. Our Brother in Red, May 25, 1889. 60. Our Brother in Red, September 22, 1888. 61. Our Brother in Red, September 21, 1889. 62. Christian Advocate, February 16, 1889, and May 5, 1888. 63. Our Brother in Red, September 21, 1889. 64. “Supply Request, April 6, 1890,” Miscellaneous Schools, Methodist Episco- pal Mission or Methvin Institute, April 6, 1890–June 30, 1895, KA97, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Records, OHS; Our Brother in Red, November 30, 1889. 65. Marriott, The Ten Grandmothers, 188–95; Methvin, In the Limelight, 77–78. Silver Horn’s pictorial calendar records this event as the “Boys frozen winter.” See Greene, One Hundred Summers, 128; Forbes, “John Jasper Methvin,” 59; “Quarterly Report of the Indian Schools, December 31, 1890,” Miscellaneous Schools, Method- ist Episcopal Mission or Methvin Institute, April 6, 1890–June 30, 1895, KA97, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Records, OHS; interview with Guy Quoetone, T- 149, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC; interview with Eugenia Mausape, T- 37, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. 66. Interview with J. J. Methvin, July 23, 1937, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Charles Adams, April 25, 1890, Miscellaneous Schools, Methodist Episcopal Mission or Methvin Institute, April 6, 1890–June 30, 1895, KA97, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Records, OHS. 67. Our Brother in Red, January 14, 1888; January 7, 1888; January 28, 1888; and November 23, 1893. 68. Our Brother in Red, October 12, 1893. 69. Our Brother in Red, August 23, 1894. 70. For examples of these letters, see Our Brother in Red, February 2, 1893; August 30, 1894; April 25, 1895; June 13, 1895; February 23, 1893; and May 4, 1893. 71. Our Brother in Red, January 10, 1895, and March 14, 1895. 72. Our Brother in Red, May 17, 1894; Woman’s Missionary Advocate, May 1895; “Old Indian Methodist Mission at Fort Sill,” Early Churches, Missions, and Schools, F, box 13, Works Project Administration Historic Sites and Federal Writers’ Project Collection, WHC. Regardless of Brewer’s actions, Brewster returned to the Fort Sill area and spent many more years as an active missionary among the Comanches. 73. Our Brother in Red, July 19, 1894. 74. Our Brother in Red, October 12, 1893. 75. Our Brother in Red, August 9, 1894. 76. Methvin, “Reminiscences of Life Among the Indians,” 178. 77. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 78. Interview with Eugenia Mausape, T-37, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC.

Chapter 4. The Mission Changes

1. New York Times, April 23, 1889. 2. Our Brother in Red, April 27, 1889, and May 11, 1889. 210 · Notes to Pages 106–113

3. Goins and Goble, Historical Atlas of Oklahoma, 4th ed., 122–24, 128–30, 144; Mary Jane Warde, “Fight for Survival: The Indian Response to the Boomer Move- ment,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 67 (Spring 1989): 31. 4. Forty- Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episco- pal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1890), 44. 5. Forty-fifth Session, October 22, 1890, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Forty- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 31. 6. Twenty-fourth Session, September 30, 1869, Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collection, OHS; Forty-fourth Session, October 2, 1889, Meth- odist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Our Brother in Red, January 1886, and March 1886. 7. Our Brother in Red, January 1886, and January 7, 1892. 8. Forty-ninth Session of the Indian Mission Conference, Minutes of the Indian Mission Conference, 1894–1900, box 34, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS. 9. Our Brother in Red, November 1, 1894. 10. Forty- Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 11. 11. May 11, 1900, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 2, July 26, 1894–January 5, 1904, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH. 12. Our Brother in Red, January 26, 1893; Miami Weekly Herald, January 6, 1900. 13. June 13, 1901, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 2, July 26, 1894–January 5, 1904, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH. 14. Our Brother in Red, April 1886, and May 18, 1893. 15. Timothy Hill from Samuel Stoddard, August 3, 1877, folder 9, box 4, Alice M. Robertson Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; Timothy Hill from R.. C McGee, December 5, 1878, folder 7, box 4, Alice M. Robertson Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; Our Brother in Red, January 1885, and May 1884. 16. June 13, 1901, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 2, July 26, 1894–January 5, 1904, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH; Our Brother in Red, July 27, 1893. 17. Our Brother in Red, August 3, 1893; Indian Sentinel (Tahlequah, Indian Terri- tory), April 15, 1898; Our Brother in Red, November 15, 1894. 18. Our Brother in Red, April 1886, and March 5, 1896. 19. June 13, 1901, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 2, July 26, 1894–January 5, 1904, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH; Our Brother in Red, February 13, 1896; Muskogee Phoenix (Muskogee, Indian Territory), April 22, 1891. 20. June 13, 1901, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 2, July 26, 1894–January 5, 1904, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH; May 3, 1905, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 4: May 3, 1904–May 20, 1909, Methodist Epis- copal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. This was not an unprece- dented suggestion, because Northern and Southern Methodists had agreed to divide their work in several foreign fields so as not to duplicate or waste their limited efforts. For instance, in South America, the M. E. Church conducted work in the smaller Notes to Pages 114–119 · 211

Spanish- speaking nations, while the Southern Methodists worked in Portuguese- speaking Brazil. Similar arrangements existed in Mexico and Japan. 21. May 11, 1900, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 2, July 26, 1894–January 5, 1904, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH; Indian Advocate (Sacred Heart, Indian Territory), July 1, 1896; Lassiter, Ellis, and Kotay, The Jesus Road, 31–33; Woman’s Missionary Advocate, February 1893. 22. Woman’s Missionary Advocate, December 1895; J. J. Methvin to Major Frank D. Baldwin, September 7, 1895, Miscellaneous Schools, Methvin Institute, September 7, 1895–July 20, 1898, KA roll 98, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS. 23. J. J. Methvin to Major Frank D. Baldwin, September 13, 1895, Miscellaneous Schools, Methvin Institute, September 7, 1895–July 20, 1898, KA roll 98, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS. 24. Woman’s Missionary Advocate, March 1895 and January 1894. 25. Forty-fifth Session, October 22, 1890, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), 95; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1891 (Washington, DC: Gov- ernment Printing Office, 1891), 250; Indian Chieftain, June 21, 1894; Muskogee Dem- ocrat (Muskogee, Indian Territory), October 27, 1904. 26. Our Brother in Red, April 14, 1892, and January 19, 1893; First Methodist Church, Ada (1895–1949), box 43, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS; UMC Davis, box 44, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS; Our Brother in Red, July 4, 1895. 27. Our Brother in Red, January 9, 1896; Atlanta Constitution, March 26, 1896; Our Brother in Red, July 6, 1893; Christian Advocate, February 16, 1889. 28. “1847–1947 A Century of Service, The Methodist Church, Eufaula,” Okla- homa, Religious Bodies of Oklahoma Collection, WHC; “A Tribute to Your Vision: St. Luke’s Methodist Church,” WHC; “History of the Methodist Church in Holden ville, 1897–1957,” WHC; “Seventy-Fifth Anniversary, United Methodist Church, Clinton, Oklahoma,” WHC; Muskogee County Republican (Muskogee, Oklahoma), July 21, 1910. 29. Our Brother in Red, April 20, 1893, and April 4, 1895. 30. UMC Marlow, box 45, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS; UMC Sallisaw, box 46, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS; “Deed to Town Lots, April 5, 1893,” Coowee- scoowee District Records: Land Records and Estray Property Records, Cherokee Volume 218, roll CHN 28, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; Forty-seventh Session, November 16, 1892, Methodist Indian Mission Confer- ence Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Forty-eighth Session, November 1, 1893, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU. 31. Our Brother in Red, October 11, 1894. 32. Our Brother in Red, November 1, 1894; Seventieth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1916), 47. 33. Our Brother in Red, May 31, 1894; Forty- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 25; Fiftieth Annual Session, October 31, 1895, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Fifty-second Annual Session, November 10, 212 · Notes to Pages 119–123

1897, Minutes of the Indian Mission Conference, 1894–1900, box 34, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS. 34. Our Brother in Red, January 1887. Vanderbilt was originally a Southern Meth- odist school before breaking ties with the church in the early twentieth century; Our Brother in Red, May 2, 1895; letter to J. S. Lamar, March 4, 1897, letter book 4, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Board of Missions Correspondence; letter to J. S. Lamar, December 17, 1897, letter book 6, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Board of Missions Correspondence. 35. Our Brother in Red, April 25, 1895; Ann Eliza Worcester Robertson to the editor of Our Brother in Red, November 15, 1897, folder 2, box 13, Alice M. Robertson Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 36. Our Brother in Red, February 22, 1894. 37. West, “Indian Spirituality,” 33, 36. 38. Our Brother in Red, August 24, 1893, and November 28, 1895. 39. Woman’s Missionary Advocate, September 1890 and March 1891. 40. Interview with Alex Alexander, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; Schultz, The Seminole Baptist Churches of Oklahoma, 56; Gilstrap, Sayt- aym-k’ee-ah, Kiowa Chief and His People, WHC. 41. J. J. Methvin to Major Frank D. Baldwin, July 9, 1897, Miscellaneous Schools, Methvin Institute, September 7, 1895–July 20, 1898, KA roll 98, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; interview with John Gassaway, Indian- Pioneer Papers, WHC. 42. Morris W. Foster, Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 94; Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 34–39, 70–81; Thomas C. Maroukis, The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 14–33; Boyd, Kiowa Voices: Ceremonial Dance, Ritual and Songs, 27. 43. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 44. J. J. Methvin, In the Limelight, 69–70; Woman’s Missionary Advocate, January 1894. 45. Woman’s Missionary Advocate, May 1895; J. J. Methvin to Major Frank D. Baldwin, September 7, 1895, Miscellaneous Schools, Methvin Institute, September 7, 1895–July 20, 1898, KA roll 98, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; Methvin to Major Baldwin, September 13, 1895, Miscellaneous Schools, Meth- vin Institute, September 7, 1895–July 20, 1898, KA roll 98, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS. 46. Boyd, Kiowa Voices: Myths, Legends and Folktales, 281; interview with Alfred Chalepah, T-77-2, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC; interview with James Silverhorn, T-19, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. 47. Robert M. Templeton, “Hunting Horse,” World Outlook 30 (November 1940): 423, 447–48; interview with Cecil Horse, T-27, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. Another son of Hunting Horse, Monroe Tsatoke, was a peyote adherent and a member of the famed Kiowa Five, where he gained national and international fame as an artist. 48. Kim Mammedaty, “Remember the Sabbath Day,” in Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada, ed. James Notes to Pages 123–129 · 213

Treat (New York: Routledge, 1996), 158; Luke Eric Lassiter, “ ‘From Here on, I Will Be Praying to You’: Indian Churches, Kiowa Hymns, and Native American Christi- anity in Southwestern Oklahoma,” Ethnomusicology 45 (Spring/Summer 2001): 343; interview with Rev. Cecil Horse, Oral History Program, OHS. 49. Boyd, Kiowa Voices: Ceremonial Dance, Ritual and Songs, 100. 50. Our Brother in Red, September 6, 1894. 51. Our Brother in Red, August 1, 1895. 52. Gilstrap, Sayt- aym-k’ee-ah, Kiowa Chief and His People, WHC; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1896 (Washington, DC: Govern- ment Printing Office, 1896), 254. 53. Interview with John Armstrong, T-192-1, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC; Our Brother in Red, July 4, 1895. 54. “A Historical Sketch of Our Work in Oklahoma by Theodore Brewer,” Ruth Brewer Stith Collection, WHC. 55. Our Brother in Red, May 2, 1895; August 15, 1895; January 26, 1893; August 23, 1894; and May 23, 1895. 56. June 13, 1901, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 2, July 26, 1894–January 5, 1904, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH; Fifty- first Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1897), 3. 57. Letter to J. J. Methvin, April 16, 1896, letter book 1, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Board of Missions Correspondence. 58. Minutes of the Indian Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Forty-Fifth Session, October 22–27, 1890, Farley Collection, WHC; For examples of letters published in Indian languages, see Our Brother in Red, April 14, 1892; September 29, 1892; May 25, 1893; and September 6, 1894. 59. Our Brother in Red, August 1884. 60. Forty-sixth Session, November 4, 1891, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Forty-seventh Session, November 16, 1892, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Our Brother in Red, Janu- ary 19, 1893; March 23, 1893; and May 18, 1893. 61. Our Brother in Red, April 13, 1893. 62. Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 304–6; Our Brother in Red, April 13, 1893. 63. Our Brother in Red, November 9, 1893; Forty-eighth Session, November 1, 1893, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Journal of the Indian Mission Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Fifty-Sixth Ses- sion, Methodist Library, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey; Babcock and Bryce, History of Methodism in Oklahoma, 307–8. 64. Previously, Indian Territory had not been a federal territory with the same status as other federal territories in the West. The creation of the Twin Territories was one more step in the slow assault on the sovereignty of the Five Tribes that culminated with Oklahoma statehood in 1907. See Jeffrey Burton, Indian Territory and the United States, 1866–1906: Courts, Government, and the Movement for Oklahoma Statehood (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 142–43; Edward Everett Dale and Morris L. Wardell, History of Oklahoma (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948), 254–55. 214 · Notes to Pages 129–137

65. Our Brother in Red, February 16, 1893. 66. Our Brother in Red, April 19, 1894. 67. Our Brother in Red, January 18, 1894, and August 9, 1894. 68. Our Brother in Red, July 26, 1894, and August 9, 1894; Forty-ninth Session, October 31, 1894, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; Our Brother in Red, November 8, 1894; Jno. J. Tigert, ed., Journal of the Thirteenth General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publish- ing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1898), 102; Jno. J. Tigert, ed., Journal of the Fourteenth General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nash- ville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1902), 237. 69. Our Brother in Red, March 5, 1896. 70. May 6, 1904, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 4, May 3, 1904–May 20, 1909, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. 71. Official Minutes and Annual Report of the Sixty-Second Session of the Okla- homa Conference of the MECS, November 13–18, 1907. 72. Sixty- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1909), 19. In 1909, the Board of Missions reported 2,928 members from the Five Tribes and 382 from the western tribes. 73. William C. Meadows, Kiowa Ethnogeography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 151–52.

Chapter 5. Marginalizing the Mission, 1907–1918

1. Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940), x; Blue Clark, Lone Wolf v. Hitch- cock: Indian Treaty Rights at the end of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); William T. Hagan, United States-Comanche Relations: The Reservation Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); W. David Baird and Danney Goble, The Story of Oklahoma (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 315–18. 2. Seventy- First Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1917), 52–53. 3. Oklahoman, November 15, 1906; November 21, 1906; and November 22, 1906. 4. Sledge, “Five Dollars and Myself,” 192. Sledge uses the term “regular annual conference” to distinguish the Oklahoma Conference from its predecessor; Okla- homan, November 15, 1906; Official Minutes and Annual Report of the Oklahoma Conference of the MECS, 61st Annual Session of the Indian Mission and the 1st Ses- sion of the Oklahoma Conference, November 14–19, 1906, 23, 25; Leland Clegg and William B. Oden, Oklahoma Methodism in the Twentieth Century (Nashville, TN: Parthenon Press, 1968), 16, 66; Oklahoman, November 22, 1906. 5. Official Minutes and Annual Report of the 62nd Session of the Oklahoma Con- ference of the MECS, November 13–18, 1907; Clegg and Oden, Oklahoma Meth- odism in the Twentieth Century, 67–68; Official Minutes and Annual Report of the Notes to Pages 138–140 · 215

63rd Session of the Oklahoma Conference of the MECS, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, November 6–11, 1908, 26. 6. Fifty- Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House, M. E. Church, South, 1904), 153; Sixty- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1909), 19, 20. 7. Sixty- Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episco- pal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1910), 34. 8. May 12, 1908, July 9, 1908, and August 6, 1908, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 4, May 5, 1904–May 20, 1909, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. 9. Clegg and Oden, Oklahoma Methodism in the Twentieth Century, 67–68; Min- utes of the Sixty-Fourth Session of the Oklahoma Conference of the Methodist Epis- copal Church, South, November 3–8, 1909, 60; Gross Alexander, ed., Journal of the Sixteenth General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1910), 198; Minutes of the Sixty-Fifth Session of the Oklahoma Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, November 10–15, 1910, 38–39, 46. 10. Interview with Dora Early Tucker, T-353-3, Doris Duke Oral History Collec- tion, WHC; interview with Lucinda Crittenden King, T-422-4, Doris Duke Oral His- tory Collection, WHC. 11. Minutes of the Sixty-Seventh Session of the East Oklahoma Conference, Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South, November 20–24, 1912; “A Tribute to Your Vision: St. Luke’s Methodist Church,” WHC; UMC Norman-McFarlin, box 45, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS; UMC Depew, box 44, Hobart Ragland Collection, OHS. 12. Though land was the biggest issue, smaller property could cause problems between white and Indian congregations, such as the Anadarko church not returning pews loaned to it by a local Indian congregation or the Chickasaw Charge in the McAlester District demanding a fair payment of its share of the Stonewall congregation’s facilities; First Quarterly Conference of Indian Work Charge, Lawton District, West Oklahoma Conference, 1914–1915, Quarterly Conference Record Book from the Kiowa District, 1914–1918, folder—Kiowas, box 1486, Walter N. Vernon Papers, Bridwell Library, SMU [hereafter BL]; First Quarterly Conference for 1906–1907 of the Chickasaw Charge, Quarterly Conference Record Book, Chickasaw and Washita Charge, box 2, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH; Janet MacDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887–1934 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 13. Reports of the Department of the Interior for 1910, vol. 2, Indian Affairs, Territo- ries (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 180; Debo, And Still the Waters Run, 92. 14. James F. Randlett to A. A. Graham, July 9, 1900, Kiowa, Comanche and Wich- ita Agency letterpress book, vol. 56, June 21, 1900–September 22, 1900, KA roll 56, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; letter from J. J. Methvin, May 19, 1897, Kiowa Agency, Indian History, Culture and Acculturation, Churches 1870–1925, KA roll 50, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; J. J. Methvin to James F. Randlett, February 18, 1902, Kiowa Agency, Indian History, 216 · Notes to Pages 141–143

Culture and Acculturation, Churches 1870–1925, KA roll 50, Kiowa Agency Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; George Bundy vs. Little Washita Methodist Church, Oklahoma 1905–1940, Records of the Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries, GCAH; C. F. Mitchell to Mrs. R. W. MacDonnell, February 2, 1908, Oklahoma 1905–1940, Records of the Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries, GCAH. 15. Senate Documents, 58th Congress, No. 169, February 1904, 49–50. Twenty-two local ministers from among the Five Tribes signed the petition, including the two IMC ministers, N. B. Fizer and J. C. Baird. 16. Annual Report of the United States Indian Inspector for the Indian Territory for 1903 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 147. 17. “An Act allowing the Methodist Episcopal Church South the use and occu- pation of One hundred and sixty acres of land, November 23, 1886,” volume 284, National Council, Senate, CHN 15, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; O. B. Campbell, Vinita, I. T.: The Story of a Frontier Town of the Cherokee Nation, 1871–1907 (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Publishing, 1969), 73–74. Willie Halsell College’s most notable student was a young Cherokee boy named Will Rogers. 18. Letter to D. W. Bushyhead, May 8, 1887, Cherokee (Tahleqauh), Schools: Pri- vate and Religious, CHN 100, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collec- tion, OHS; Indian Chieftain, March 26, 1891. 19. B. F. Fortner to P. L. Soper, June 13, 1902, Cherokee (Tahlequah), Schools: Private and Religious, CHN 100, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Col- lection, OHS. 20. The Statutes at Large of the United States of America from December 1901 to March 1903 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903), 719–20; Let- ter to W. C. Rogers, February 2, 1904, Cherokee (Tahlequah), Schools: Private and Religious, CHN 100, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS; October 3, 1905, and April 5, 1907, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Com- mittee Meetings, file 04, May 4, 1904–May 20, 1909, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. 21. December 27, 1907, May 9, 1908, and July 9, 1908, Minutes of Annual Meet- ings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 4, May 4, 1904–May 20, 1909, Method- ist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; Contract, Indian Work—Oklahoma #3, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. 22. J. George Wright to W. C. Rogers, January 6, 1905, Cherokee (Tahlequah), Schools: Private and Religious, CHN 100, Cherokee National Records, Indian Archives Collection, OHS. The woman’s name was Bobe Griffith. See also Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior for 1903—Indian Affairs, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 153;Sixty- Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publish- ing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1913), 228–29. 23. For examples of Methvin’s use of the word “syndicate,” see interview with J.. J Methvin, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; J. J. Methvin, The Lone Cedar and Else (Anadarko, OK: Plummer, n.d.), 6; and John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. Notes to Pages 143–146 · 217

24. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU; Charles F. Mitchell, The Story of My Life (Weatherford, OK: n.p., 1940), 84. Swan- son was also Methvin’s second wife, with the two marrying in 1908 and remaining together until his death in 1941. 25. Kiowa and Comanche leaders claimed that they were misled when they signed the original agreement. Quanah Parker was one of the leading voices in the protest, and Parker used his connections with the cattle industry (who leased the land from the tribes and stood to lose out by allotment) to delay its passage. See, Hagan, Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief; Clark, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. 26. June 13, 1901, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 2, July 26, 1894–January 5, 1904, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU; Methvin, In the Limelight, 89. 27. John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU; J.. J Methvin, “Work Among the North American Indians,” Missionary Issues of the Twen- tieth Century: Papers and Addresses of the General Missionary Conference of the Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Executive Committee, 1901), 451–52. 28. Fifty-ninth Session, October 26, 1904, Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906, OCU; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J. J. Methvin Per- sonal Papers, OCU; Mitchell, The Story of My Life, 85–86; May 3, 1905, and May 15, 1907, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 04, May 5, 1904-May 20, 1909, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; Mitchell, The Story of My Life, 85–86; Muldrow Press (Muldrow, Okla- homa), June 5, 1908. 29. Methvin, In the Limelight, 89. 30. Mitchell, The Story of My Life, 85–86; John Jasper Methvin autobiography, J.. J Methvin Personal Papers, OCU; Sixty- Third Annual Report of the Board of Mis- sions, 174–75. 31. Methvin, In the Limelight, 90. 32. Ada Evening News (Ada, Oklahoma), October 1, 1908; Official Minutes and Annual Report of the Oklahoma Conference of the MECS, 61st Annual Session of the Indian Mission and the 1st Session of the Oklahoma Conference, Tulsa, I.T., Novem- ber 14–19, 1906, 18. 33. May 8, 1911, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meet- ings, file 5, August 4, 1909–June 19, 1913, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mis- sion Administrative Files, GCAH; Noley, First White Frost, 205–6. 34. Belle Bennett, “Report of Belle Bennett,” Missionary Voice 1 (September 1911): 30–31. 35. Indian Mission, Little Washita Church, Early Churches, Missions, and Schools, L, box 13, Works Project Administration Historic Sites and Federal Writers’ Project Collection, WHC; Old Indian Methodist Mission at Fort Sill, Early Churches, Mis- sions, and Schools, F, box 13, Works Project Administration Historic Sites and Federal Writers’ Project Collection, WHC. 36. Gilstrap, Sayt- aym-k’ee-ah, Kiowa Chief and His People, WHC; Sixty- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 174–75; First Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for 1910–1911 (Nash- ville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1911), 383–85; Second 218 · Notes to Pages 146–148

Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for 1911–1912 (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1912), 328–29. 37. Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1990). 38. Third Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Epis- copal Church, South, for 1912–1913 (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1913), 166–67; Maude Welch, “Notes on Our Own Work Among the Indians,” Missionary Voice 2 (July 1912): 410; First Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Council, 1910–1911, 383–85. 39. First Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Council, 1910–1911, 384–85; Welch, “Notes on Our Own Work Among the Indians,” 409–12; “Mt. Scott Indian Work,” Missionary Voice 4 (July 1914): 413. 40. Welch, “Notes on Our Own Work Among the Indians,” 411; Third Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Council, 1912–1913, 166–67; First Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Council, 1910–1911, 383–85. 41. Second Quarterly Conference of Indian Work Charge, Lawton District, West Oklahoma Conference, 1915–1916, Quarterly Conference Record Book from the Kiowa District, 1914–1918, folder—Kiowas, box 1486, Walter N. Vernon Papers, BL. 42. First Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Council, 1910–1911, 384; Mrs. R. W. MacDonnell, “The Indian Our Nation’s Ward,” Missionary Voice 3 (March 1913): 152. 43. First Quarterly Conference of Indian Work Charge, Lawton District, West Oklahoma Conference, 1914–1915, Quarterly Conference Record Book from the Kiowa District, 1914–1918, folder—Kiowas, box 1486, Walter N. Vernon Papers, BL. 44. Ibid. 45. Second Quarterly Conference of Indian Work Charge, Lawton District, West Oklahoma Conference, 1915–1916, Quarterly Conference Record Book from the Kiowa District, 1914–1918, folder—Kiowas, box 1486, Walter N. Vernon Papers, BL; First Quarterly Conference of Indian Work Charge, Lawton District, West Oklahoma Conference, 1916–1917, Quarterly Conference Record Book from the Kiowa District, 1914–1918, folder—Kiowas, box 1486, Walter N. Vernon Papers, BL; Third Quarterly Conference of Indian Work Charge, Lawton District, West Oklahoma Conference, 1915–1916, Quarterly Conference Record Book from the Kiowa District, 1914–1918, folder—Kiowas, box 1486, Walter N. Vernon Papers, BL. 46. Fourth Quarterly Conference of Indian Work Charge, Lawton District, West Oklahoma Conference, 1915–1916, Quarterly Conference Record Book from the Kiowa District, 1914–1918, folder—Kiowas, box 1486, Walter N. Vernon Papers, BL. 47. First Quarterly Conference of Indian Work Charge, Lawton District, West Oklahoma Conference, 1916–1917, Quarterly Conference Record Book from the Kiowa District, 1914–1918, folder—Kiowas, box 1486, Walter N. Vernon Papers, BL. 48. Minutes of the Sixty-Fourth Session of the Oklahoma Conference of the Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South, November 3–8, 1909, 52–53; Minutes of the East Oklahoma Conference Sixty-Sixth Session, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, November 1–5, 1911, 48–49. 49. Sledge, “Five Dollars and Myself,” 305–8; John M. Moore, Life and I: Sketches and Comments (Nashville, TN: Parthenon Press, 1948), 103, 106–7. Notes to Pages 149–157 · 219

50. Sixty- Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episco- pal Church, South (Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1914), 61–62; Sixty- Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 62–63; Seventieth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1916), 47. 51. Sixty- Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 62–63. 52. O. E. Goddard, “Our Indian Problem,” Missionary Voice 1 (November 1911): 33–38. 53. Interview with Guy Quoetone, T-637, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC; interview with Guy Quoetone, T-306, Doris Duke Oral History Collec- tion, WHC; interview with George Keys, T-334-2, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC; interview with Lulu Hair, T-514, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC; interview with Dora Early Tucker, T-353-3, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. 54. Minutes of the Seventy-First Session of the East Oklahoma Conference, Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South, November 22–26, 1916, 53; Minutes of the Seventy- Second Session of the East Oklahoma Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, November 7–10, 1917. 55. Moore, Life and I, 108. 56. Gross Alexander and John L. Kirby, eds., Journal of the Seventeenth General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1914), 136–37; Sixty- Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 62–63, 257–58. 57. Seventy- First Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1917), 52–53. 58. Frank M. Thomas and Curtis B. Haley, eds., Journal of the Eighteenth Gen- eral Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1918), 28, 170.

Chapter 6. The Mission Reborn, 1918–1940

1. Maroukis, The Peyote Road, 3–5, 32–33, 42; Stewart, Peyote Religion, 98; Rob- ert E. L. Newberne, Peyote: An Abridged Compilation from the Files of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922), 33–34. 2. Grover C. Emmons, “The Indian Mission in Oklahoma,” World Outlook 30 (March 1940): 96. 3. Frank M. Thomas and Curtis B. Haley, eds., Journal of the Eighteenth Gen- eral Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1918), 269; Edwin D. Mouzon to O. E. Goddard, August 27, 1918, box 263, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon, CA1919–CA1934, Correspondence and Clips, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 4. A. C. Pickens to Edwin D. Mouzon, October 11, 1918, box 263, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL; Edwin D. Mouzon to A. C. Pickens, October 15, 1918, box 263, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 5. Sixty- Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 62–63, 257–58; Edwin D. Mouzon to Orlando Shay, September 28, 1920, box 260, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 220 · Notes to Pages 157–160

6. Seventy- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Epis- copal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1919), 44–45; Robert B. Eleazer, ed., Seventy- Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1920), 45–46; Min- utes of the Sixty-Fifth Session of the Oklahoma Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Ardmore, Oklahoma, November 10–15, 1910, 30–31; Minutes of the East Oklahoma Conference Sixty-Sixth Session, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Okmulgee, Oklahoma, November 1–5, 1911, 23–24. 7. Edwin D. Mouzon to O. E. Goddard, September 4, 1918, box 263, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL; W. L. Anderson to Edwin D. Mouzon, September 25, 1920, box 268, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 8. Orlando Shay to Edwin D. Mouzon, December 10, 1919, box 261, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL; Orlando Shay to Edwin D. Mouzon, February 20, 1920, box 261, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 9. J. J. Methvin to Edwin D. Mouzon, November 8, 1920, box 268, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 10. Orlando Shay to Edwin D. Mouzon, December 10, 1920, box 268, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL; Orlando Shay to Edwin D. Mouzon, January 19, 1921, box 268, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 11. Orlando Shay to Edwin D. Mouzon, January 19, 1921, box 268, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 12. Minutes of the Third Session of the Brewer Indian Mission of Oklahoma of the MECS, September 10–12, 1920; Minutes of the Fourth Session of the Brewer Indian Mission of Oklahoma of the MECS, September 16, 1921; Seventy- Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 45–46; Orlando Shay to J. Marvin Nichols, July 27, 1920, John Young Bryce Collection, OHS; A. C. Pickens to J. Marvin Nichols, Janu- ary 9, 1919, John Young Bryce Collection, OHS. 13. Interview with Lena Benson Tiger, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; “Johnson Tiger, A Famous Creek Leader,” Oklahoma Biographies, T–V, box 19, Works Proj- ect Administration Historic Sites and Federal Writers’ Project Collection, WHC; “Biographical Sketch of Moty Tiger,” folder 2, Moty Tiger Collection, WHC; Musk- ogee Democrat (Muskogee, Indian Territory), August 8, 1905; Minutes of the Seventy- First Session of the East Oklahoma Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Muskogee, Oklahoma, November 22–26, 1916, 43. 14. Edwin D. Mouzon to Johnson E. Tiger, December 18, 1918, box 262, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL; A. J. Weeks, ed., Eightieth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1926), 187; Curtis B. Haley, ed., Journal of the Twenty-First General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1930), 9. 15. Edwin D. Mouzon to Johnson E. Tiger, September 28, 1920, box 268, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL; Edwin D. Mouzon to Johnson E. Tiger, Septem- ber 30, 1920, box 268, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 16. Edwin D. Mouzon to Orlando Shay, April 15, 1921, box 268, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. Notes to Pages 161–166 · 221

17. Tanis C. Thorne, The World’s Richest Indian: The Scandal over Jackson Barnett’s Oil Fortune (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008); Debo, And Still the Waters Run, 338–42, 346–50; “Jackson Barnett,” Oklahoma Biographies, A–B, box 19, Works Project Administration Historic Sites and Federal Writers’ Project Collection, WHC. 18. J. C. Curry to Edwin D. Mouzon, December 9, 1919, box 261, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL; Debo, And Still the Waters Run, 338–39. 19. Gilbert Rowe, ed., The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1922 (Nashville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South), 91; Missionary Yearbook: Eighty-Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Mis- sions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1930), 420–21; Edwin D. Mouzon to John- son E. Tiger, January 28, 1919, box 262, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 20. Eightieth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 187; Minutes of the Fourth Session of the Brewer Indian Mission of Oklahoma of the MECS, September 16, 1921. 21. J. J. Methvin to Edwin D. Mouzon, February 5, 1920, box 261, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 22. Collins Denny to Edwin D. Mouzon, January 26, 1920, box 261, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL; Rowe, ed., The Doctrines and Discipline of the Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South, 1922, 399–404, 409–10. 23. Interview with Rev. Cecil Horse, Oral History Program, OHS. 24. Edwin D. Mouzon to Frank E. Thomas, December 29, 1919, box 261, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL; Edwin D. Mouzon to Orlando Shay, December 29, 1919, box 261, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 25. Interview with Rev. Cecil Horse, Oral History Program, OHS. 26. Interview with Cecil Horse, T-30, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. 27. “Evangelism in the Indian Mission,” Printed Matter, Magazines and News papers, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH. 28. Interview with Rev. Cecil Horse, Oral History Program, OHS. 29. Boyd, Kiowa Voices: Myths, Legends and Folktales, xxvii, 102–4; minutes, The Indian Mission of Oklahoma, Seventeenth Annual Session, 1934–1935, October 5–7, 1934. 30. Methvin, “Hotch-Potch by Rev. J. J. Methvin,” J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 31. “The Indian Mission of Oklahoma,” Pamphlets, box 1, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH. 32. W. U. Witt, “Among the Indians” Missionary Voice 16 (October 1926): 300– 301; Travis Park Chapel, San Antonio, Sunday, September 3, 1944, box 598, Bishop A. Frank Smith Papers, BL. 33. Emmons, “The Indian Mission of Oklahoma,” 96–97; Seventy- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 44; Seventy- Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 45–46; “The Indian Mission of Oklahoma,” Pamphlets, box 1, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH. 34. Debo, And Still the Waters Run, 379–80; Kidwell, The Choctaws in Oklahoma, 195. 35. Survey of the Conditions of the Indians of the United States: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee of Indian Affairs, United States Senate, Seventy-First 222 · Notes to Pages 167–170

Congress, Part 14—Oklahoma (Five Civilized Tribes) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931), 5698; Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic, 229; Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies, 121, 382; Indian Meth- odist, March 1929. 36. Interview with Simon Atohka, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; interview with Ben Benjiman, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC; interview with James Felix, Indian- Pioneer Papers, WHC; interview with F. L. Anderson, Indian-Pioneer Papers, WHC. 37. Lassiter, Ellis, and Kotay, The Jesus Road, 38–39. 38. Seventy- Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 45–46. 39. Sledge, “Five Dollars and Myself,” 315–16, 334–35; Missionary Centenary, 1819–1919, World Survey: A Program of Spiritual Strategy and Preparedness (Nashville, TN: Missionary Centenary Commission, 1919), 82; “The American Indian on the Fields of France,” Missionary Voice 9 (May 1919): 134. 40. Seventy- Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 44–45; Quarterly Bulle- tin, Fulsom Training School, June 1924, Fulsom Training School Collection, OHS. 41. August 19, 1919, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 09, August 19, 1919–April 29, 1922, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; William B. Hubbell, “Fulsom Training School,” Missionary Voice 15 (September 1925): 10. 42. “Fulsom Training School,” Fulsom Training School Collection, OHS. 43. O. E. Goddard to L. C. Barnes, December 22, 1921, folder 12, Rainy Moun- tain Kiowa Baptist Church 1900–37, Mountain View, OK, box 73, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, American Baptist Historical Society [hereafter ABHS], Mercer University, Atlanta, Georgia. 44. A. J. Weeks, ed., Seventy- Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South, 1923), 35. 45. William B. Hubbell, “Indians and Fulsom,” Missionary Voice 16 (January 1926): 10. 46. August 19, 1919, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 9, August 19, 1919–April 29, 1922, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; January 14, 1926, Minutes of the Executive Committee Meetings, file 3, October 9, 1924–April 26, 1926, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. 47. “Fulsom Training School,” Fulsom Training School Collection, OHS; Mis- sionary Yearbook: Eighty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1928), 405. 48. Gilbert T. Rowe and Curtis B. Haley, eds., Journal of the Nineteenth General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1922), 487–90. 49. “Fulsom Training School,” Fulsom Training School Collection, OHS; Quar- terly Bulletin, Fulsom Training School, June 1924, Fulsom Training School Collec- tion, OHS. 50. “Fulsom Training School,” Fulsom Training School Collection, OHS; Mis- sionary Yearbook: Eighty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 404–5; “Folsom Training School,” Typescripts by Thelma J. Reynolds, box 62, Works Project Administration Historic Sites and Federal Writers’ Project Collection, WHC. Notes to Pages 170–174 · 223

51. Hubbell, “Indians and Fulsom,” 10–11; Edwin D. Mouzon to O. E. Goddard, September 28, 1920, box 260, Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers, BL. 52. Seventy- Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 46; May 9, 1924, Min- utes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 10: May 20, 1922– April 29, 1926, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; A. J. Weeks, ed., Seventy- Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South, 1924), 31. 53. W. B. Hubbell to W. U. Witt, June 16, 1926, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; Indian Methodist, March 1, 1927; Missionary Yearbook: Eighty-Third Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1929), 405. 54. Missionary Yearbook: Eighty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 401; Missionary Yearbook: Eighty-Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Method- ist Episcopal Church, South, 1931), 392; Missionary Yearbook: Eighty-Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Missions, 427. 55. J. W. Perry to W. U. Witt, May 14, 1932, Correspondence, box 1, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH. 56. J. W. Perry to W. U. Witt, May 20, 1932, Correspondence, box 1, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH; R. S. Satterfield to W. G. Cram, July 25, 1932, Correspondence, box 1, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH; J. W. Perry to W. U. Witt, July 29, 1932, Correspondence, box 1, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH; Missionary Yearbook: Ninetieth Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Meth- odist Episcopal Church, South, 1936), 313. 57. Lease Contract, Fulsome Training School, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; September 8, 1932, and February 3, 1932, Min- utes of the Executive Committee Meetings, file 7, September 8, 1932–February 22, 1934, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH. 58. Minutes, the Indian Mission of Oklahoma, Sixteenth Annual Session, 1933– 1934, September 21–24, 1933; April 22, 1938, Minutes of Annual Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, file 16, May 4, 1937–January 31, 1939, Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files, GCAH; Missionary Year- book: Ninety-First Annual Report of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episco- pal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1937), 326. 59. Minutes, the Indian Mission of Oklahoma, Twelfth Annual Session, 1929– 1930, September 13–15, 1929. 60. Lassiter, Ellis, and Kotay, The Jesus Road, 30. 61. Harry H. Treat to Charles L. Ellis, April 30, 1913, folder 11, Red Stone Mission, 1909–10, 13–16, 29–30, Anadarko, OK, box 73, American Baptist Home Mission Soci- ety Collection, ABHS; Harry H. Treat to Charles L. White, May 10, 1913, folder 11, box 73,American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 62. Harry H. Treat to Bruce Kinney, April 24, 1913, folder 11, box 73, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 63. Harry H. Treat to Charles L. White, May 10, 1913, folder 11, box 73, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 224 · Notes to Pages 174–180

64. Harry H. Treat to Bruce Kinney, April 24, 1913, folder 11, box 73, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 65. Harry H. Treat to Charles L. White, May 10, 1913, folder 11, box 73, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 66. Clegg and Oden, Oklahoma Methodism in the Twentieth Century, 91. 67. Interview with Cecil Horse, T-27, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC; interview with Cecil Horse, T-30, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC; interview with Rev. Cecil Horse, Oral History Program, OHS. 68. Perry Jackson to Bruce Kinney, March 2, 1931, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU. 69. Bruce Kinney to J. W. Perry, March 7, 1931, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH; Bruce Kinney to J. W. Perry, June 9, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; Bruce Kinney to Frank A. Smith, Decem- ber 17, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 70. Stephen Kotay, April 13, 1931, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; John Aunko, April 13, 1931, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W.. U Witt Personal Papers, OCU; letter from John Aunko, April 13, 1931, Corre- spondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; Sherman Chaddlesone, April 13, 1931, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; unaddressed letter, signed by Cecil Horse, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Per- sonal Papers, OCU. 71. Unaddressed letter, signed by Cecil Horse, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W.. U Witt Personal Papers, OCU; Andres Martinez to W. U. Witt, March 23, 1931, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; J. W. Perry to W. U. Witt, March 18, 1931, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH. 72. Albert Horse to W. U. Witt, March 27, 1931, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU. 73. Interview with Cecil Horse, T-30, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC; interview with Ioleta Hunt McElhaney, T-474-1, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. 74. Hugh D. Corwin, “Delos K. Lonewolf, Kiowa,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 39 (1961): 433–36; Indian Methodist, September 1929; Bruce Kinney to J. W. Perry, April 6, 1931, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; Bruce Kinney to J. W. Perry, June 9, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 75. B. D. Weeks to Frank A. Smith, April 12, 1932, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; Bruce Kinney to Frank A. Smith, April 26, 1932, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; Bruce Kinney to Frank A. Smith, May 21, 1932, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 76. Bruce Kinney to Frank A. Smith, January 4, 1932, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; testimony of Delos K. Lonewolf, Sermons and Addresses G, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU. 77. Foster, Being Comanche, 119–23. 78. William C. Meadows, The Comanche Codetalkers of World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 247 f33; Thomas W. Kavanagh, ed., Comanche Eth- nography: Field Notes of E. Adamson Hoebel, Waldo R. Wedel, Gustav G. Carlson, Notes to Pages 181–184 · 225 and Robert H. Lowie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 14–15; Lawton Constitution (Lawton, Oklahoma), November 18, 1956; “A Certificate of Dismission,” Miscellaneous, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; J. W. Perry to W. U. Witt, Novem- ber 23, 1931, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU. 79. “Indian Mission News,” World Outlook 23 (January 1933): 37; R. C. Adams to Frank A. Smith, December 17, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 80. R. C. Adams to W. U. Witt, November 19, 1931, Correspondence, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH; Letter from W. U. Witt, n.d., Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU. 81. Letter to the Supt. of Indian Mission W. U. Witt, November 9, 1931, Correspon- dence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; “Our Specials,” World Outlook 24 (March 1934): 100. 82. J. W. Perry to William R. King, December 23, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 83. J. W. Perry to William R. King, January 2, 1932, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 84. Andres Martinez to W. U. Witt, November 10, 1931, Correspondence, 1930– 1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; “Our Specials,” 100. 85. J. J. Methvin to W. U. Witt, April 25, 1931, Correspondence, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH; “Fletcher Indian Mission,” Early Churches, Missions, and Schools, F, box 13, Works Project Administration Historic Sites and Federal Writers’ Project Collection, WHC. 86. J. J. Methvin to W. U. Witt, April 25, 1931, Correspondence, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH; J. W. Perry to W. U. Witt, April 1, 1931, Correspondence, William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH. 87. H. F. Gilbert to Bruce Kinney, December 15, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; Bruce Kinney to Frank A. Smith, November 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; G. Watermulder to E. A. King, December 15, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; G. E. E. Lindquist to Frank A. Smith, December 16, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS. 88. J. W. Perry to W. U. Witt, December 11, 1930, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; H. F. Gilbert to W. U. Witt, March 26, 1931, Cor- respondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; Methvin’s daily journal, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 89. Robert P. Chaat to Frank A. Smith, December 15, 1931, folder 4, box 62, Amer- ican Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; H. F. Gilbert to Bruce Kin- ney, November 13, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; Bruce Kinney to Frank A. Smith, May 21, 1932, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; Bruce Kinney to Frank A. Smith, May 26, 1932, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; “Mr. Lindquist’s Secret Report to the National Council of Home Missions,” William Umstead Witt Collection, GCAH. 90. G. Watermulder to E. A. King, December 15, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; H. F. Gilbert to Bruce Kinney, 226 · Notes to Pages 184–191

November 13, 1931, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Collec- tion, ABHS; Perry Jackson to Bruce Kinney, March 2, 1931, Correspondence, 1930– 1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU. 91. “The Proposed Indian Mission of Oklahoma and Bible Training School,” Mis- cellaneous, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU; Mark A. Dawber to W. U. Witt, n.d., Indian Mission: 30–44, Oklahoma, BD of Missions: 40–60, box 600, Bishop A. Frank Smith, 1940–1964, Bishop A. Frank Smith Papers, BL. 92. Frank A. Smith to William R. King, January 20, 1932, folder 4, box 62, Amer- ican Baptist Home Mission Society Collection, ABHS; Harry H. Treat to Frank A. Smith, May 23, 1932, folder 4, box 62, American Baptist Home Mission Society Col- lection, ABHS. 93. Letter from Lowensoh, April 13, 1931, Correspondence, 1930–1936, W. U. Witt Personal Papers, OCU. 94. Interview with Cecil Horse, T-30, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, WHC. 95. “Concerning Woman’s Work in the Indian Mission of Okla.,” Historical, Okla- homa Indian Mission 1941–1960, Records of the National Division, Global Board of Ministries, GCAH.

Conclusion

1. Report of Dr. Hume, folder 1, Interviews, box 9, Lida White Collection, WHC. 2. Methvin, “Hotch-Potch by Rev. J. J. Methvin,” J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 3. Ida Mae Swanson Methvin, January 1941, folder—Letter, Paul and Lee Methvin from J. J. Methvin, 1941, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 4. Satterfield, “Andele, Mexican Indian Christian Minister,” 212–13, 236. 5. Printed Materials, Clippings, 1941, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU. 6. Journal of the West Oklahoma Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, 1941, OCU; Babcock, “John Jasper Methvin, 1846–1941,” 116; “The Romance of Indian Missions: Methodism Among American Indians,” Indians, North American, Methodist Work Among, 1956–1969, Mission Geographical Reference Files, GCAH. 7. Indian Mission Conference minutes, 1941, WHC; Printed Materials, Clippings, 1941, J. J. Methvin Personal Papers, OCU; Lassiter, Ellis, and Kotay, The Jesus Road, 40; Boyd, Kiowa Voices: Myths, Legends and Folktales, 290–92. 8. Indian Mission Conference minutes, 1941, WHC. 9. Don Klingensmith to Dr. Kohlstedt, November 29, 1941, folder—Indian Mis- sion: 30–44, Oklahoma, BD of Missions: 40–60, box 600, Bishop A. Frank Smith, 1940–1964, Bishop A. Frank Smith Papers, BL; Don H. LaGrone to W. U. Witt, April 1942, folder—Indian Mission: 30–44, Bishop A. Frank Smith Papers, BL. 10. Minutes, the Indian Mission of Oklahoma, Twenty-first Annual Session, 1938– 1939, OCU; Missionary Yearbook: Ninety-Third Annual Report of the Board of Mis- sions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1939), 321. 11. Minutes, the Indian Mission of Oklahoma, Twenty-Second Annual Session, 1939–1940, OCU. 12. Vernon, One in the Lord, 38. Notes to Page 192 · 227

13. Interview with Rev. Robert Pinezaddleby, Oral History Program, OHS. 14. Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jeanne Miller Schmidt, The Meth- odist Experience in America, vol. 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2010); author’s interview with Bishop John Wesley Hardt, March 13, 2008, Bridwell Library, South- ern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.

Bibliography

Archival Collections

American Baptist Historical Society, Mercer University, Atlanta, Georgia American Baptist Home Missions Society Collection Bizzell Library, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma Letters Sent by the Indian Division of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, 1849–1903 Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas Bishop A. Frank Smith Papers Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon Papers Walter N. Vernon Papers McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma Alice M. Robertson Collection Oklahoma City University, Oklahoma City Indian Mission Annual Conference Journal, 1844–1877 J. J. Methvin Personal Papers Methodist Indian Mission Conference Records, 1836–1906 W. U. Witt Personal Papers Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City Alice Robertson Collection Fulsom Training School Collection Hobart Ragland Collection Indian Archives Collection Indian Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church Collection J. J. Methvin Manuscript Collection John Young Bryce Collection Oral History Program

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Rev. Willis F. Folsom Collection Samuel Checote Collection United Methodist Church Archives, General Commission on Archives and History, Madison, New Jersey History of Missions Project Methodist Episcopal Church, South Mission Administrative Files Mission Geographical Reference Files Records of the National Division, Global Board of Ministries Records of the Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries William Umstead Witt Collection Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman Choctaw Nation Papers Doris Duke Oral History Collection Farley Collection “History of the Methodist Church in Holdenville, 1897–1957” Indian- Pioneer Papers Lida White Collection Lucille Gilstrap, Sayt- aym-k’ee-ah, Kiowa Chief and His People Moty Tiger Collection Religious Bodies of Oklahoma Collection Ruth Brewer Stith Collection “Seventy- Fifth Anniversary, United Methodist Church, Clinton, Oklahoma” “A Tribute to Your Vision: St. Luke’s Methodist Church” Works Project Administration Historic Sites and Federal Writers’ Project Collection

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Ada Evening News, Ada, Oklahoma Atlanta Constitution Cherokee Advocate, Tahlequah, Indian Territory Christian Advocate, Nashville, Tennessee Indian Advocate, Sacred Heart, Indian Territory Indian Chieftain, Vinita, Indian Territory Indian Journal, Eufaula, Indian Territory Indian Methodist Indian Sentinel, Tahlequah, Indian Territory Lawton Constitution, Lawton, Oklahoma Miami Weekly Herald, Miami, Indian Territory Missionary Voice Muldrow Press, Muldrow, Oklahoma Muskogee County Republican, Muskogee, Oklahoma Muskogee Democrat, Muskogee, Indian Territory Muskogee Phoenix, Muskogee, Indian Territory New York Times Oklahoman, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Bibliography · 231

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Other Published Sources

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Index

Adams, R. C., 181 Big Tree, 87, 89 allotment, 95, 104, 139, 143 Blackburn, R. T., 157 American Baptist Home Mission Board of Missions, 30, 80, 118, 191; appro- Society, 175 priations, 52, 138, 149; competition with American Board of Commissioners for Baptists, 176; efforts in the Oklahoma Foreign Missions, 41 Conference, 137–38, 156; and Folsom American Indian Exposition, 189 Training School, 168, 171–72; foreign Ankima, 88–89 and home fields, 148; and Willie Halsell Apaches, 13, 90, 114, 122 College, 141–42 Apekum, Charles, 124–25 Bobb, Johnson, 169 Arapahoes, 13, 80, 137 Brewer, Theodore, 68, 70–72, 112, 116, Asbury, Daniel, 30, 31 125, 160 Ashby, H. S. P., 80 Brewer, William, 101–2, 112, 120 Aunko, John, 175–76 Brewster, Helen, 102, 145–46, 209n72 Briggs, A. C., 115 Baldwin, Frank, 94, 114 Bryce, John Y., 70, 109 Baptists, 166; and Jackson Barnett, 161; Bundy, George, 140 and competition with Methodists, 42, Bushyhead, Dennis, 69 111–12, 168, 173–85; and Deyo Mission, Butler, George, 43 180; and John Jumper, 112 Butler, Pierce, 37 Barnett, Jackson, 160–61 Benjiman, Ben, 167 Capers, William, 22 Bennett, Belle, 144, 145 Carey, Walker, 62 Bennett, Leo, 114–15 Carlisle Indian School, 93, 94 Benson, Henry, 24, 28, 38, 39, 41 Catholics, 89, 100, 122; and Jackson Berryhill, David, 81, 123–24, 127 Barnett, 161; and competition with Berryman, Jerome, 26–27, 33, 40–41, 43 Methodists, 173; and Isidore Ricklin, Bertholf, Thomas, 30, 31 113–14, 173

241 242 · Index

Chaat, Robert, 183 Duncan, Erastus, 24, 35 Chaddlesone, Sherman, 175–76 Dunmoe, Etalye, 93, 208n45 Chambers, John, 70 Dwight, Ben, 171 Checote, Samuel, 62–64, 124, 137, 138 Cherokee National Council, 69, 117, East Oklahoma Conference, 133, 138, 141; during the Civil War, 44; decline 149–52, 155–56, 162, 171–72 in efforts, 131, 151, 191; fight between Essex, James, 30, 43, 45 full-blood and mixed-blood factions, 24; Etchison, Dewey, 191 Keetoowah Society, 43–44; and property Euchees, 190–91 disputes with the IMC, 69–70; and removal, 22; and Reconstruction Treaties Federal Council of Churches, 181 of 1866, 69, 141; and slavery, 43–44 Fields, Turtle, 22 Cherokees, 12, 38 Five Tribes, 12, 61, 75, 188; church Cheyennes, 13, 80, 85, 137 buildings, 53, 69; early Methodist efforts Chickasaws, 12, 34, 38; and camp meet- among, 21–23; mission schools, 33–34, ings, 68; and the Civil War, 44 70–73, other denominational efforts Choctaw Council, 71–73; church services, among, 41–42; and peyote, 154; and 67; and the Civil War, 44, 65; full-blood Reconstruction, 47–48; removal, 22–23; members, 145; and removal, 22; restric- and slavery, 42 tions against white settlement, 54 Folsom, Willis, 65–67, 128–29, 168 Choctaws, 12, 38, 156 Fort Gibson, 44–45, 53, 111, 117 church buildings: acquiring land from Fort Sill, 80, 101, 146 Indians, 69, 139–41; as signs of legiti- full-bloods: definition of, 23–24; and Fol- macy, 53–54, 110, 114–17, 139 som Training School, 170; IMC efforts Church of Christ, 112, 161 among, 55–56, 118, 150; and slavery, 42 Clark, Lydia, 151 Fortner, B. F., 142 Clark, Milton, 56, 59, 68, 118–19, 180, 188 Cobb, Lewis, 159 Galloway, Charles, 53, 75, 77–80, 98, 141 Cole, Mary, 67 Gassaway, Benjamin, 121, 147, 158–59, Collins, W. D., 32, 35 167, 173–75 Comanches, 13, 75–76, 83–84; beliefs of, Gilbert, H. F., 182–84 84; Medicine Lodge Treaty, 79; early Goddard, Oscar, 149–50, 166, 168 Methodist efforts among, 101–2, 180; Goode, William, 33, 41, 43 and peyote, 154; Red River War, 80 Graham, William, 43 Coppedge, Charles, 113 Gray, E. A., 73 Creek Council, 68, 69 Gross, J. M., 111, 129 Creeks, 12, 34, 38, 121, 190; and camp meetings, 68; Chitto Harjo’s movement, Hall, Jesse Lee, 80, 83 4; conflict between Upper and Lower Hardt, John Wesley, 192 Creeks, 22–23; laws against Christianity, Hargrove, Robert, 73, 115, 130 22–23, 35, 63; and removal, 22; spiritual Harrell, John, 36, 51, 53, 63 practices, 23 Head, Mabel, 146 Cumming, David, 29, 34, 43 Heap-of-Bears, 90 Curry, J. C., 161 Helm, Lucinda, 99, 115–16 Home Missions Council, 182 Delawares, 21, 75 Horse, Albert, 123, 175–77, 184–85 Derrick, W. S., 53, 128–29 Horse, Cecil, 123, 164, 175–76, 185, 188 Index · 243

Horse, Hunting, 122–23, 159, 175 Kinney, Bruce, 175–76, 178–79, 182–84 Horse, Jenny, 177 Kiowas, 13, 75–76, 83–84; beliefs of, 79, Hubbell, William, 168–71 84–86; and Christianity, 85–86, 123, Hudgins, Mattie, 146 164, 177; hymns, 123, 164–65; Medicine Hunkapiller, A. B. L., 120 Lodge Treaty, 79; and peyote, 122, 154; Red River War, 80 Indian Mission, 186, 189; changes during Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Agency, 76, the 1960s, 192; competition with Bap- 80, 110, 166; and allotment, 143; and tists, 175–85; creation of, 152; difference denominational competition, 173–85; from a regular conference, 161–62; early and Jerome Commission, 95; upon administration, 155–60; and Folsom Methvin’s arrival, 81–83 Training School, 168–72; licensing Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Business Com- Native preachers, 162–63; Oklahoma mittee, 180 Educational Commission, 160 Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation, 83 Indian Mission Conference (IMC), 160, Kotay, Stephen, 176 161; and blacks, 48; change into the Okla- homa Conference, 131, 133, 136; and land runs, 105–6, 108, 109, 116 the Civil War, 44–45, 50–51; creation of, Leflore, Greenwood, 22 25–28; and denominational competition, Lindquist, G. E. E., 182–83, 190 111–14; first districts of, 29; division into Linebaugh, Nathaniel, 145 two conferences, 129–30; expansion after Little, Thomas, 125 1889, 109–14; and the Holiness move- Littlejohn, Mary Beth, 185–86 ment, 112; and language and translation Lone Wolf, 89, 94, 95, 177 issues, 57–60, 119; ministers as govern- Lonewolf, Delos, 147, 158, 177–79, 185 ment officials, 64–65; need for church Lowensoh, 184–85 buildings, 114–17; problems with Meth- vin and the Methvin Institute, 97–98; and Martinez, Andres, 77, 89, 102, 122; as a slavery, 42–44; work among full-blood and minister, 90–91, 158–59, 165, 176, 181; mixed-blood communities, 55–57, 118 and peyote, 92, 179; relationship with Indian Territory, 44–45, 82, 129, 159 Methvin, 90–91, 187–88 International Indian Council, 78–79 Marvin, Enoch, 50–51 interpreters, 35–36, 92–94 Mausape, Eugenia, 100, 104 Mayes, Joel, 70 Jackson, Perry, 175, 184 McAlister, Wilson, 34 Jimboy, William, 119, 127 McCurtain, Jackson, 72 John, Isaac, 68 McElhaney, Ioleta, 177 Jones, C. S., 79 McFerrin, John, 26, 52–53 Jones, Evan, 9, 42, 43–44 McHenry, James, 62, 138 Jones, John, 44, 60 McKissick, James, 41 McLemore, Robert (Tsu-ga-do Da), 54–55 Keener, J. C., 53 Medicine Lodge Treaty, 48, 79, 89, 100 Key, Joseph, 136 Methodist Episcopal Church, South. See Keys, George, 150 Southern Methodist Church Kickapoos, 12, 29 Methodists: African Methodist Episcopal Kicking Bird, 77, 89–90, 179; as an IMC Church, 48; annual conference, 30–32; minister, 90, 92, 150, 158; and peyote, camp meetings, 38–39, 67–68, 87, 155, 122, 179 165–66; circuit rider, 28, 110, 118; 244 · Index

Methodists (continued) Native practices: and Christianity, 23, circuits, 28; Colored Methodist 57–58, 120, 123, 163–64; ghost dance, Episcopal Church, 48; creation of 121, 166; green corn festival, 23, 107, United Methodist Church, 192; district 121; Indian Cry, 65; among Kiowas, 79, conference, 29–30; districts, 29; general 164; polygamy, 121, 178–79; and prayer, conference, 32; local preachers, 35, 66–67; sun dance, 84, 87, 166 36–37, 61, 149–50; Methodist Church, Native preachers, 68; among Kiowas, 190, 192; Methodist Episcopal Church, 158–59; licensing, 162–63; Methodist 9, 25, 113, 190; Methodist Protestant use of, 35–40, 61–62, 149, 184–85, 192; Church, 9; Missionary Society, 21, 22, problems with using, 119, 150 30, 32–33; presiding elders, 29; quarterly Neely, Richard, 22 conference, 29–30; and removal, 22–23; John Wesley, 8–9, 28 Oberly, John, 96 Methvin, Ida Mae Swanson, 143, 187 Oklahoma Conference, 3, 108, 171, 191; Methvin, John Jasper, 76, 140, 165, 167; change from IMC, 131, 133–35, 136; adapting to Indians, 86–88; beliefs of, restructuring Indian work, 137–38 76–77, 85; and closure of the Methvin Oklahoma Indian Missionary Institute, 143–45; and competition in Conference, 192 southwest Oklahoma, 173, 182–83; and Oklahoma Territory, 82, 129 conflict with Catholics, 114; and conflict Onco, Atwater, 166 with Shapard, 97–99; and conflict with Osages, 47, 109, 116, 137, 190, 192 Shay, 158–59; death and memory of, Our Brother in Red, 59, 98, 123, 126–29 187–89; financial issues of, 126; and Folsom Training School, 171; initial Page, John, 39, 62 impressions of Indians, 83–84; and Parker, Quanah, 89, 95, 101, 114, 180; and Jerome Commission, 95–96; opposition peyote, 121, 123, 154 to peyote, 122; problems with the course Parker, White, 180–82, 185 of study, 162; relationship with Martinez, Pawnees, 190 90–91, 187–88; as superintendent of New Perry, J. W., 176, 178, 180–82 Hope Seminary, 73, 81; surveying western peyote, 108; among Native members, 90, Indian Territory, 80–81; using interpreters, 175, 178–79; Methodist attitudes toward, 92–94; views on Anadarko, 81–83 121–23, 154, 163; Native American Methvin Institute, 76, 158, 173, 177, Church, 154 189; closure of, 143–45; foundation of, Pickens, Andrew, 156, 159 96–100 Pierce, George Foster, 28–29, 35–36, 41, 62 Micco, Cow-e-tah, 64 Pinezaddleby, Robert, 85–86, 191–92 Milhouse, Paul, 192 Plains Indians, 78, 80, 92, 137, 188; Meth- Mitchell, Charles, 140, 143–45 odist attitudes toward, 48, 75; women’s Mitchell, Thomas, 60 work, 145–46 mixed-bloods, 23–24, 42, 55–56, 118 Poncas, 29, 190, 192 Mooney, James, 85, 91, 114, 122 Poor Buffalo, 78–79 Moore, John, 148–50, 152 Potawatomis, 12, 29, 53 Morris, Thomas, 19–20, 40 Presbyterians, 93, 99–100; and competi- Mouzon, Edwin, 155–60, 169, 186 tion with Methodists, 111–12, 115, 173; Murphy, D. C., 128 differences from Methodists, 41–42 Musgrove, F. M., 70 Pyle, Oooalah, 3–5 Index · 245

Quoetone, Guy, 150, 158, 189 Smith, A. Frank, 165, 191 Quoetone, Jimmie, 159 Smith, Frank A., 176, 178–79, 183–84 Smith, W. Angie, 191–92 railroads: Chicago, Rock Island, and Southern Methodist Church, 8, 78–79, Pacific Railroad, 140; Missouri, Kansas 159, 160, 163; and 1939 merger, 190; and Texas Railroad, 70, 142; and Recon- break from Methodist Episcopal Church, struction Treaties of 1866, 48 9; and Centenary Campaign, 168, 170; Reconstruction Treaties of 1866, 47–48, Christian Education Movement, 160; 68, 69 and the Civil War, 44; College of Bish- Reformed Church, 180–83 ops, 77–78; and The Discipline, 58–59, Reformed Presbyterian, 181 119, 162–63; General Board of Church Rector, Elias, 44 Extension, 151; Home Department, 148; Robertson, Ann Eliza Worcester, 59–60 Woman’s Board of Foreign Mission, 97, Ross, John, 24, 44 100, 140, 143–46; Woman’s Department Roughface, Thomas, 192 of Church Extension, 99; Woman’s Ruble, Thomas, 28, 34, 43 Home Mission Society, 182; Woman’s Missionary Council, 144, 146–47 Sac and Foxes, 79, 190 Stateler, Learner, 29, 30–31 Saddle Mountain, 175–77, 184 Stecker, Ernest, 167, 173 Sankadota, 122 Stumbling Bear, 85, 86, 88, 124, 159, 191 Scales, Nicholas, 22 schools: Asbury Manual Labor School, 34, Tahquechi, Norton, 180–82, 184–85 70–71; Bacone College, 159; Bloomfield Talbott, Nathaniel, 29, 39, 41 Academy, 50, 65; Chickasaw Manual Talley, Alexander, 22 Labor Academy, 34, 44; Choctaw Tatum, Lawrie, 80 Academy, 39; Collins Institute, 70; Templeton, Robert, 147 among the Five Tribes, 33–34, 70–73; Thompson, Joseph, 50, 69, 71, 138 Folsom Training School, 168–72; Fort Tiger, Johnson, 159–60, 161, 170 Coffee Academy, 24, 31, 34, 36; Harrell Tigert, John, 136 International Institute, 68, 97, 14; Indian Timpson, Bear, 125 Manual Labor School, 29, 31, 33; and Tohausen, 88–89, 159 the Indian Mission, 167–72; New Hope Treat, Harry, 173–75, 184 Seminary, 34, 70, 71–74, 81; Pierce Trott, James, 22 Institute, 106; Seminole Academy, 53, Tsaitcopte, 93 70, 72, 80, 81; St. Patrick’s School, Tsatoke, John, 123, 164 113–14, 173; Willie Halsell College, Tsu-ga-do Da. See McLemore, Robert 141–43 Tufts, John, 53, 61 Sells, Cato, 161, 167 Seminoles, 12, 112, 121, 190 Unassigned Lands, 105, 108 Senecas, 29, 47 Union Agency, 53, 61, 114 Shapard, Edwin, 54, 64, 65, 68, 109; Union churches, 53–54 argument with Methvin, 97–99; death of, 108 Ware, Ted, 166, 188–89 Shawnees, 12, 75, 190 Watermulder, G. A., 182, 184 Shay, Orlando, 156–59, 160, 163 Waters, Lindy, 192 slavery, 25, 38, 42–44 Watie, Stand, 24, 50 246 · Index

Welch, Maude, 146–47 Wicks, J. B., 80 West Oklahoma Conference, 133, 138, Witt, William, 164, 171, 176–77, 179–83, 147, 156, 171–72, 187–88 185, 191 Wichita Reservation, 80, 83 Worcester, Samuel, 9, 41, 59 About the Author

Tash Smith received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, with an emphasis in the American West and American Indian history. His research focuses on the interaction and shared history of the West’s white and Indian communities during the region’s development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has presented portions of his research at the Western History Association’s annual meeting, the Northern Great Plains Conference, and the United Methodist Church’s Historical Convocation. Currently, he is an assistant professor of history at St. Gregory’s University in Shawnee, Oklahoma.