Highlights Archives
Diary of a Preacher Among the Indians
Every summer we publish a historic diary from our collections, issued on the dates it was written through an RSS feed. You can also see it each day on our Historic Diaries page or read the entire document online at any time. Each day's entry is annotated and explained, and contains links to pictures, articles, or maps.
This year we've chosen the travel journal of the Rev. Cutting Marsh (1800-1873), a Protestant missionary who crossed Wisconsin to visit the Sauk and Fox Indians in the summer of 1834. Marsh's diary contains a wealth of detail about these tribes, who played such an important part in Wisconsin history from 1650 to 1832. But it also shines a searchlight into the mind of a devout Christian grappling with a frontier society that didn't seem to understand him. In its pages, we can see not only how Wisconsin Indians reacted to the white culture that was dispossessing them, but also how a sincere person of faith reacted to the greed, lawlessness and ambition of a secular world.
The manuscript pocket notebooks that Marsh carried that summer ended up in the Society's archives. Marsh wrote almost every day but did so haphazardly, occasionally skipping pages that he would fill in days or weeks later with information out of context (sometimes even written upside-down). He often interspersed notes for sermons, drafts of letters, and spontaneous prayers amid his routine daily entries, using the volumes as a kind of commonplace book. Between June 12 and October 13, 1834, he covered more than 300 pages with interview notes, observations, and reflections. The excerpts that we've transcribed and annotated at Historic Diaries makes it easy for non-specialists to navigate this maze and appreciate the unique value of this previously unpublished document.
Marsh had an excellent eye and ear for detail, so the diary contains vivid, on-the-spot accounts of frontier traders, soldiers, gamblers, missionaries, drunkards, settlers, politicians and, of course, Indians. He faithfully transcribed his conversations with Sauk and Fox leaders, carefully recording their words. The diary consequently gives rare insight into their view of the white society that forced them out of their Wisconsin homeland at gunpoint, and which attacked their traditional way of life with Christianity and literacy. He wrote down what the Indians told him about their motives for fighting the Black Hawk War and records two conversations with Black Hawk himself, in which the great Sauk chief discusses the war and the circumstances surrounding the creation of his famous autobiography. Marsh also fills dozens of pages with ethnographical observations of Sauk and Fox life and customs, preserving a record of them at the time they'd just been forced from the eastern woodlands onto the open prairie.
Throughout the diary, Marsh tries to fit these new experiences into his worldview, and is never slow to pass judgment on Indians and settlers alike. He's a cantankerous Puritan much of the time, and his spontaneous outbursts in the privacy of his diary vividly portray the lowlife frontier characters, "benighted" Indians, cautious soldiers, and ambitious developers whom he encountered. Like many religious Americans today, he struggled to balance the demands of his faith with a secular society (and an indigenous spirituality) that didn't seem to appreciate it.
In his world, God was always nearby and His will had been revealed in the Bible, which he felt compelled to share with the Stockbridge and, if they would have it, the Sauk and Fox. Each person had the power to align his or her actions with divine intentions; to Marsh, everyone had the free choice to live morally or to yield to temptation. Similar religious views led many early Wisconsin settlers to embrace the anti-slavery movement, temperance and other reforms. They led Marsh to devote his life to missionary work, first among the Stockbridge Indians and later as an itinerant preacher riding thousands of miles to counsel residents of the Wisconsin frontier.
Marsh moved to Wisconsin in 1830 to serve the Stockbridge, and lived with them for 18 years. His annual reports to his sponsors during that time provide a rich source of information on the tribe's life and their treatment by white settlers and government authorities. After nearly two decades advocating for Indian welfare, he concluded, "I am ashamed of my country." His ministry, to his dismay, was largely unsuccessful. Although the Stockbridge took up farming and embraced education, at least half of the community had no interest in becoming Christians or supporting his church, preferring the traditional beliefs of their ancestors.
When his sponsors gave up the Stockbridge mission in 1848, Marsh worked as a wandering minister among white settlers in Wisconsin, traveling extensively through the eastern part of the state. He made Waupaca his headquarters and, from 1848 to 1856, served as pastor-at-large to a number of parishes. He retired from the ministry in 1856 and lived in Waupaca until his death.
Marsh's only long absence from his Stockbridge parishioners was the journey in the summer of 1834, given in this previously unpublished diary. We hope you'll enjoy following him into the wilderness each day by having it delivered to you overnight. For more about using RSS feeds, see our RSS syndication page; you can get other regular updates from us this way, too, as well as following our blog, Odd Wisconsin.
:: Posted June 21, 2006
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