The Prospects from Prospect Hill (iv)

 

It's formidable but obscure, prominent but hidden, memorable, but somehow forgettable--much ado about very little maybe. Most of Sioux City has absolutely no idea it's there, even though it sits at a place that once offered reverence. When I dropped by, no one else was around. I was likely the sole visitor all day, despite perfect sunshine. 

The fine monument celebrates three men no one in town remembers, men who embarked on a mission that departed a Sioux City that, back then, thought of itself as the doorstep to a wildly dangerous frontier--"Rev. Sheldon Jackson, Rev. T. H. Cleland, and Rev. J. C. Elliott."

Sadly, Preacher Eliot doesn’t Google well. Cleland went up to Alaska, but is remembered for his commitment to education, higher education here in the lower 48.

This Sheldon Jackson may be forgotten in Sioux City and on Prospect Hill, but the man wrote his own story elsewhere, most specifically in Alaska. No, he didn’t win the west for Christ as promised, but “the flying horseman of the Rockies,” as some called him, gave it a heckuva whirl.

 Sometime before his seminary days at Princeton, Sheldon Jackson, a blue blood if ever there 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 the foreign mission field (he was slight, not much over five feet tall, and a bit pale), he ventured out to a frontier inhabited only by Indians and mountain men with fur hats and huge knives, what the church called “exceptional populations.”

 After his first miserable year among the Choctaw, he kept going west by horseback, railroad, Conestoga, and, when necessary, on foot, planting churches wherever he went—like Johnny Appleseed, sometimes one a day.

 When Jackson arrived to start a church in Grand Island, mosquitoes were so heavy that an hour before the very first meeting a man with a smudge smoked them out of the building. But they returned with a pitiful vengeance and the few who’d gathered, and Jackson himself, threw up their hands and left, but not before electing an elder or two and putting down a foundation for a frontier church.

Jackson traveled to whatever open spaces still existed, eventually to Alaska, meanwhile birthing Christian fellowships and bringing what he considered "development" to the Native people, doing what he promised when he and his two cohorts prayed so dutifully up on our own Prospect Hill. The Reverend Sheldon Jackson went out to "win the west."

To say he traveled extensively throughout Alaska is comic understatement. On one of his trips, he met Capt. Michael A. Healy, the first and only African-American to captain a Coast Guard ship, a man known as “Hell-Roaring Mike.”

 An odd couple if there ever was one, the two of them saw the starving Aleuts and Inuits, men, women, and children who were dying, literally, by way of goods and ills sold to them by colonizing white men.

 I am not making this up. Captain Healy and Reverend Jackson literally saved indigenous people from starvation and death by buying domesticated reindeer from the Siberians, and then--no one thought it possible--bringing dozens, eventually hundreds, across the perilous Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska on a ship named Bear, then introducing them into the land of the Inuit and Aleuts, not simply for food, but for use in a thousand ways, not unlike Great Plains Native people using every square inch of buffalo.

Give folks a reindeer, and they'll eat for a week--how does that old line go?--give them a herd and they'll create an industry.

The Reverend Sheldon Jackson preached the Good News, but also he delivered goods that let people live. 

He’s one of the men whose name is etched on the Prospect Hill memorial, First and Bluff. You can see for yourself any time you feel tugged up the hill. As far as I know, he never preached a sermon in Sioux City, but he left a mark. Just thought you might like to know.

Tromp up there sometime. You’ll love the view.