The Life Of Isabel Crawford

This biography of Isabel Crawford is a lively account of a feisty and fascinating Baptist missionary. Born in Canada in 1865, she had an independent spirit leading her to remarkable accomplishments in a life marked by obstacles. Her conversion at age ten created a lifelong commitment to Christian service. In her teens a near-fatal illness left her deaf, but nevertheless in 1893 she completed studies to become a missionary. Rejected for overseas service, she was assigned to a troubled Indian mission in Oklahoma. She began her work there with great reluctance but developed a lifelong bond with her beloved Kiowa converts. Her success as a woman missionary created friction with the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and she left the mission in 1906. Remaining committed to the Women's Home Mission Society, Crawford became a sought-after inspirational speaker for them and later served again as missionary, this time in western New York. She retired in 1930 and moved back to Canada in 1942. Crawford is buried, as she had arranged, at her Saddle Mountain, Oklahoma, mission. The biography is enriched by extensive use of Crawford's witty and perceptive descriptions of the extraordinary challenges and variety of experiences that marked her life.

This biography of Isabel Crawford is a lively account of a feisty and fascinating Baptist missionary. Born in Canada in 1865, she had an independent spirit leading her to remarkable accomplishments in a life marked by obstacles. Her conversion at age ten created a lifelong commitment to Christian service. In her teens a near-fatal illness left her deaf, but nevertheless in 1893 she completed studies to become a missionary. Rejected for overseas service, she was assigned to a troubled Indian mission in Oklahoma. She began her work there with great reluctance but developed a lifelong bond with her beloved Kiowa converts. Her success as a woman missionary created friction with the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and she left the mission in 1906. Remaining committed to the Women's Home Mission Society, Crawford became a sought-after inspirational speaker for them and later served again as missionary, this time in western New York. She retired in 1930 and moved back to Canada in 1942. Crawford is buried, as she had arranged, at her Saddle Mountain, Oklahoma, mission. The biography is enriched by extensive use of Crawford's witty and perceptive descriptions of the extraordinary challenges and variety of experiences that marked her life.

Near the close of the nineteenth century, Isabel Crawford went to the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation in Oklahoma and founded the Saddle Mountain Baptist Mission. This book, written in journal form, begins with her arrival at the reservation in 1896 and describes her decade-long crusade to convert the Indians to Christianity. She and her assistant were the only white women at the isolated station in the Wichita Mountains. Crawford's experience there tested her resourcefulness, endurance, and sometimes her faith. Humor marks her journal as she recounts her struggles to establish a formal mission. She lived with the Indians, at first putting up in a tipi and adjusting, not without difficulty, to their ways. She was "the Jesus woman" who taught the Ten Commandments. In her wake came camp meetings, baptisms, and "big eats." Through the years Isabel Crawford and her Indian brothers and sisters were bound more closely as they raised money to build a church. Though written with Christian purpose, Kiowa: A Woman Missionary in Indian Territory shows Crawford's sensitivity to Kiowa history and culture during a period of transition. The mission still exists and Isabel Crawford is still remembered kindly, according to Clyde Ellis, who introduces this Bison Books edition. An authority on Oklahoma tribes, Ellis is the author of "To Change Them Forever": Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893-1920. He is an assistant professor of history at Elon College in North Carolina.

The stories of the women have often stayed in the shadows of Canadian Baptist history. The writers of this book have sought out neglected primary source materials to reveal the lives and work of an array of Baptist women in Canada's history. Read here about the Acadian Mary Lore hungrily reading her French Bible and welcoming the message of Baptist missionaries in Lower Canada, Jane Gilmour leaving her home in Britain to minister with her husband in Montreal and the wilds of Upper Canada, a group of remarkable black Baptist women in southern Ontario in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Isabel Crawford from Niagara becoming an advocate for the Kiowa people of Oklahoma, Miriam Ross from Nova Scotia ministering in the Congo, Lois Tupper, pioneer female Baptist theological educator, and, more generally, the work of Baptist women in the Maritimes in the nineteenth century and western Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Empowered by their Baptist faith, these Canadian women did remarkable things, and their stories deserve to be told and read.

During the nineteenth century, white Americans sought the cultural transformation and physical displacement of Native people. Though this process was certainly a clash of rival economic systems and racial ideologies, it was also a profound spiritual struggle. The fight over Indian Country sparked religious crises among both Natives and Americans. In The Gods of Indian Country, Jennifer Graber tells the story of the Kiowa Indians during Anglo-Americans' hundred-year effort to seize their homeland. Like Native people across the American West, Kiowas had known struggle and dislocation before. But the forces bearing down on them-soldiers, missionaries, and government officials-were unrelenting. With pressure mounting, Kiowas adapted their ritual practices in the hope that they could use sacred power to save their lands and community. Against the Kiowas stood Protestant and Catholic leaders, missionaries, and reformers who hoped to remake Indian Country. These activists saw themselves as the Indians' friends, teachers, and protectors. They also asserted the primacy of white Christian civilization and the need to transform the spiritual and material lives of Native people. When Kiowas and other Native people resisted their designs, these Christians supported policies that broke treaties and appropriated Indian lands. They argued that the gifts bestowed by Christianity and civilization outweighed the pains that accompanied the denial of freedoms, the destruction of communities, and the theft of resources. In order to secure Indian Country and control indigenous populations, Christian activists sanctified the economic and racial hierarchies of their day. The Gods of Indian Country tells a complex, fascinating-and ultimately heartbreaking-tale of the struggle for the American West.

From the Founding Fathers through the present, Christianity has exercised powerful influence in the United States—from its role in shaping politics and social institutions to its hand in inspiring art and culture. The Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States outlines the myriad roles Christianity has played and continues to play. This masterful five-volume reference work includes biographies of major figures in the Christian church in the United States, influential religious documents and Supreme Court decisions, and information on theology and theologians, denominations, faith-based organizations, immigration, art—from decorative arts and film to music and literature—evangelism and crusades, the significant role of women, racial issues, civil religion, and more. The first volume opens with introductory essays that provide snapshots of Christianity in the U.S. from pre-colonial times to the present, as well as a statistical profile and a timeline of key dates and events. Entries are organized from A to Z. The final volume closes with essays exploring impressions of Christianity in the United States from other faiths and other parts of the world, as well as a select yet comprehensive bibliography. Appendices help readers locate entries by thematic section and author, and a comprehensive index further aids navigation.

Linda Williams Reese tells of political activist Kate Barnard, who became Oklahoma's Commissioner of Charities and Corrections but fell from political grace, of Alice Robertson, who in 1920 abandoned the acceptable female endeavors of teaching and charity work to become a representative to the U.S Congress, and of Isabel Crawford, missionary to the Kiowas, who confided to her journal, "There are different kinds of hardships and those of the heart and spirit are harder to bear.".