Minister to the Cherokees

Book excerpt: In 1857 James Anderson Slover rode into Indian Territory as the first Southern Baptist missionary to the Cherokee Nation. As the Civil War began to divide the Cherokees along with the rest of the nation, Slover was caught up in one of the most intense dramas of his century. As a farmer, teacher, preacher and evangelist, observer of the Mexican War and the Civil War, contemporary commentator on slavery, and California pioneer, Slover played a small role in changing the face of the nation. It was in 1907, a year after he helped build shelters for people left homeless by the great San Francisco earthquake, that he began composing a record of his eventful life. The resulting book is a wonderful gift to any reader curious about the life and culture of nineteenth-century America. Slover tells of flatboating down rivers from Tennessee to Arkansas, "skedaddling" from the Union army in Indian Territory, and working his way up the West Coast to Oregon, preaching the gospel as he went and carving a new life for himself and his family time after time. His autobiography, encompassing eighty-three years of his life and spanning most of a century, gives us a vivid picture of a lost world and of how it was experienced by an ordinary man in extraordinary times.