New England missionaries and American Indian art at the Peabody Essex Museum - Salem, Massachusetts

For both missionaries and Indians there were instances of lives changed by mutual appreciation, even friendship. Missionaries' correspondence with their families reveals glimpses of their personal lives less easily seen through the lens of annual reports, sermons, and fund-raising speeches. In a letter to her grandfather written in 1837 Mary Longley Riggs (1813-1869), the first wife of Stephen Riggs, mentions the "very beautiful" situation of the mission station and recalls how, soon after arriving, she and others walked

up to the village & called at the house of one of the chiefs. He was not at home, but his daughters smiled good-naturedly upon us. We seated ourselves upon all the bed, sofa, & chairs they had, which was a frame extending on three sides of the house and covered with skins.(8)

The Indians suffered greatly as their lands were usurped and their way of life forcibly changed. Although the missionaries themselves were sometimes responsible for these upheavals, there were notable instances of missionary self-sacrifice to protect the rights of the American Indians. In 1831, when state and Federal interests sought to force the Cherokee and other tribes to lands west of the Mississippi River, Samuel Worcester and other ABCFM missionaries issued a resolution stating that they viewed

the removal of [the Cherokee]...as an event to be most earnestly deprecated; threatening...to involve them in great distress, and bring upon them...an immense and irreparable injury.(9)

Worcester was arrested in July 1831 for not cooperating with state officials and in September he was sentenced to four years in the Georgia State Penitentiary. Worcester appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court, which, in 1832, upheld the sovereign rights of the Indian tribes. The case of Worcester v. Georgia is still widely cited, but President Andrew Jackson chose to ignore the court's decision and removed thousands of Indians from their homelands in 1838 and 1839 in what came to be known as the Trail of Tears.(10)

The impact of Christian missions on American Indians is susceptible to the retroactive application of twentieth-century sensibilities to nineteenth-century circumstances. Many missions did not long persist, at least in their original form. Lac qui Parle in Minnesota, which had originally been a fur-trading post established by Joseph Renville (1779-1846), the son of a French father and a Dakota mother, was abandoned in 1854, a few years after Renville died. He had been an important link between the missionaries and the Indians. The Brainerd mission and school were obliged to close their doors with the removal of the Indians to the West in 1838 and 1839. Other missions were gradually transformed or reverted to purely secular communities. Some missions shifted their emphasis to more charitable functions as the Indian communities they served were absorbed into characteristically impoverished reservation settlements.(11)

The effect of mission schools like the one at Brainerd often outlasted the school itself, as Indian students and associates, such as Stephen Foreman (Pl. X), became important educators in their own right. In the end, however, New England's Protestant missionaries may have had a less enduring spiritual impact than they had hoped for. In contrast to the French in Canada, where intermarriage and cultural fusion were more common and acceptable to the Catholic Church, the severe mores of the New England Protestants tended to keep them from mingling with the Indians, inevitably resulting in a more rarified legacy.