New Echota. Cher. Na. Jan. 1, 1830

(2 pages only)

From the Missionary Herald.

CHICKASAWS.

Extract from a letter of Mr. Anson Gleason, dated at Tokshish, September 28th 1839. ( N.B. date probably should be 1829)

This poor people are now expecting to cross the great river, and find a home farther west. They have two years to explore and settle on their new lands. They know not where their home is to be, only it is told them that it is to be across the great river. Our little church say, or some of them, that if our missionaries will go with them, they will quietly submit; but no doubt that greater part, and indeed all, would much rather stay where they are.- The interpreter who went with them to the council to meet the President and Secretary of War, told the Indians there, that if there was any good country over the Mississippi, he had not seen it, though he had once been over into that country; and that if they sold their land and removed, they would leave him to die this side.

It is now an anxious time with the missionaries here, who have just begun to reap the precious harvest which has cost so many painful years of hard labor, ' so many beloved fellow laborers. Oh that we could have been left unmolested in our delightful work till these tribes should have become the happy people of the Lord. Missionaries may follow them; but who would presumptuously take on himself the responsibility of sowing a field of grain to be reaped and gathered in some far distant clime. If these natives are shoved off, what will be done with us who have been standing here a long time between two fires. Those Indians who hate missionaries, or the praying people, charge us with the villainy of selling their country; and the credulous surrounding whites curse us bitterly for having stood in the way of government in their efforts to get the land of the Indians sooner.