Restoration out west

The old memorial, pretty much as forgotten as forsaken, blasts out a mission that seems these days as shameful as it once seemed shameless. It memorializes an impromptu prayer meeting of three Presbyterian clergymen, in town for a conference, who way back in 1869, high above Sioux City, Iowa, on Prospect Hill, knelt together before their Maker and pledged to evangelize, well, read it yourself: all of the American West.

Amazingly, they were serious. One of them, the Reverend Sheldon Jackson, worked mightily toward that goal throughout his life. Deliberately, Jackson traveled into those vast open spaces, eventually even north to Alaska, where Good Book in hand, he kept birthing Presbyterian fellowships and bringing what he considered "development" to Native people, doing pretty much what he promised up there on Prospect Hill. He took the calling seriously and went out to "win the west."

To say he traveled extensively throughout Alaska is pitifully 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 into their homelands.

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 line go?--bring them a herd and they'll beget an industry.

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

So in a fine museum touted as the best in Alaska, the Anchorage Museum, I looked around not long ago to see if I could find some mention of this Presbyterian phenomenon who, by my reading, had done a great deal for Alaskans of all stripes--and especially for the indigenous people of that immense and awesome place.

This is what I found. I may have missed a mention here or there, but this is how he's recognized in Alaska's finest museum:

Just in case you can't read it, let me set it out for you. 

Sheldon Jackson, placed in charge of Alaska's first American schools, wrote that their purpose was Native assimilation into the larger society. Native students were segregated, indigenous languages were forbidden, and children were taught that their cultures were "uncivilized." Until a court settlement in 1976--the Molly Hootch case, named after an Inupiaq student--many Native children had to attend distant boarding schools because no high schools were available in their home communities. 

All of that is true, but it's only half of the story. In Alaska and all the rest of the American West of the 19th century, often as not three factions went to war: Native people, white people with the Bible, and white people with liquor. Without a doubt, Jackson's most profound enemy--and he knew it and he fought them--was white people with liquor.

It's likely fair to say that people Rev. Jackson and Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, devoted 19th century mission spirits, haven't missed personally whatever adulation they once attained. They were fine people, not in the least political; they rarely looked out for themselves.

But I think it only fair to do a little restoration. There's much, much more to the Sheldon Jackson story than what appears in Alaska's best museum. And there's much, much more to the story of a 20-year-old Belgian priest who followed a call to minister to Native people in North America, sneaking away to avoid the tears he knew he'd shed when leaving his family. 

Like the Presbyterian Jackson, the Jesuit De Smet could not have known what he'd go through in the 19th century American West.