Minister to the Cherokees

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. It was not the last time that he would be a witness to American history. 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 acceded to his son's request and began composing a record of his eventful life. The resulting book, more than a mere memoir for Slover's descendants, is a wonderful gift to any reader curious about the life and culture of nineteenth-century America. Slover writes of his personal adventures, as well as of wedding customs, smart-aleck pupils, and spectacular meteor showers. He 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 - and made and remade - by an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Barbara Cloud is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the author of The Business of Newspapers on the Western Frontier and has been the editor of Journalism History since 1992.