Rev. Sheldon Jackson

 

It's formidable but obscure, prominent but hidden, memorable, but somehow forgettable--much ado about nothing maybe. Most of Sioux City has absolutely no idea it's there, even though it sits at a place that once made it seem kingly.

When I dropped by there was no one else around. I was likely the sole visitor all day, despite the perfect sunshine. 

The monument celebrates three men no one in town remembers, men who happened to embark on a mission that took off from a Sioux City that once thought of itself the doorstep to a wild and dangerous frontier. Those three are listed plainly--"Rev. Sheldon Jackson, Rev. T. H. Cleland, and Rev. J. C. Elliott."

Preacher Jackson may have been totally forgotten anywhere in Sioux City and on Prospect Hill, but he's a man not to be forgotten elsewhere, most specifically in Alaska. Don't know that he "won the west," but he certainly gave it a whirl.

Sometime before his seminary days at Princeton, Sheldon Jackson, a blue blood if there ever was one, got himself called into Christian missions, which was, mid-19th century, as adventurous an occupation as any. When he was turned down for a place on the foreign mission field (he was slight, really, not an inch over five feet, and just a hair pale and sickly), he stayed home instead and ventured out into regions of the country inhabited only by First Nations and a couple hundred tough-guy trappers and mountain men.

He spent a year among the Choctaw in Indian Territory, then kept going west by whatever means he could travel--horseback, railroad, Conestoga, and, when necessary, on foot. He was the quintessential mover and shaker, planting churches by the dozen. 

Deliberately, he migrated to whatever open spaces still existed, which brought him to Alaska, where Good Book in hand, he kept birthing Christian fellowships and bringing what he considered "development" to the Native people, doing what he likely promised when he and his two cohorts departed so gloriously from Prospect Hill. The Reverend Sheldon Jackson took his calling seriously. Without question, he was out to "win the west."

To say he traveled extensively throughout Alaska is laughably understated. On one of his trips he made the acquaintance of Capt. Michael A. Healy, the very first African-American to run a government-owned ship, a man who loved booze as much as Jackson didn't. An odd couple if there ever was one, the two of them determined to save both the Aleuts and the Inuits from utter starvation by importing domesticated reindeer, by the hundreds, from Siberia. I'm not making this up. Captain Healy and Reverend Jackson literally saved indigenous people from extinction by herding domestic reindeer in their homelands.

I'm not lying. Here's some of his own pictures, from his papers at Princeton.

 

The man in the hat and the vest is the preacher.

That's Captain Healy's Bear out there delivering reindeer. 

Give some folks a reindeer, and they'll eat for a week--how does that old cliche go?--bring them a herd and they'll beget an industry.

All though his life and ministry, it seems, the Reverend Sheldon Jackson preached the Good News, but also delivered the goods that let people live. 

Rev. Sheldon Jackson is the guy the Sioux City prayed for one April day in 1869, when he and couple other men of the cloth left Prospect Hill to "win the west" for Christ. They could'a done worse.

Just thought you might like to know.