McCoY, ISAAC: 1784-1846.
Isaac McCoy , friend of the Indian, crusader for his rights and gentleman of God, was born in Fayette County, Pa., on June 13, 1784. Six years later the McCoy family moved to Shelby County, Ky.
In Kentucky young McCoy acquired an adequate education. (There were probably more educated men, capable and willing to teach their own and their neighbors' children on the seventy-five miles of the lower Kentucky River in the 1790-1810 period than in all the rest of the Ohio River country combined.) Before his twentieth birthday he married Christina, one of the daughters of Capt. Polls, and the young people began forty-two years of the most gruelling hardships ever suffered by a frontier couple.
Isaac had become interested in the Baptist ministry and he had been preparing himself for the pulpit: unlike his fellows of the day he took no interest in sectarian squabbles. In 1804, shortly after their marriage, Isaac and Christina set out for Vincennes, in the Indiana Territory, where Isaac hoped to be assigned to a church.
Naturally they expected to serve among the whites: at that time they probably despised the Indians, as most frontier couples did, and especially since Christina and her mother had been captives of the Ottawas for some time in her childhood.
In 1805 Isaac was called to Clark County, Ind., where he was licensed to preach in the Silver Creek Baptist Church, and in 1810 he was called to the famous Maria Creek Baptist Church in Vigo County– probably the best pastorate in the state at the time.
He visited St. Louis on a preaching tour and, impressed by the depravity of the remnants of the French and Indians and the dissolute trappers and adventurers who made it their home, decided to take up missionary work. He made this decision known to the Baptist Board of Missions, and the Board agreed, asking him to report as to the places in Indiana and Illinois "most destitute of preaching."
Isaac replied, naming those un-Godly spots as requested but adding what was then a new note for a Baptist–especially a Kentucky or Indiana Baptist. He asked, he says, "… that I might extend my labors to the Indians." On Oct. 17, 1817, he received a commission which permitted him to labor among the Indians for one year: one way or another, with or without page: 199[View Page 199] salary, Isaac McCoy extended his one year to thirty- nine–until his death.
The following June he introduced himself to the Miamis, Weas and Kickapoos at their annual meeting to receive treaty goods. They were mostly drunk–as they always were when white traders came among them at treaty payment–but McCoy thought he saw encouraging signs. He wrote and distributed a circular in Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois and toured these states soliciting funds for his projected mission school and church.
On his return from one of these trips he found that his eldest daughter, thirteen, had died: "We afterwards believed the event was sanctified," says McCoy, "in inducing us to let go the hold … upon … civilized society … We had felt great anxiety on account of this daughter; our other children were small, but she was of an age to make it particularly desirable that she enjoy the benefit of a good school in the midst of good society." The death of this daughter was not to be their last sacrifice: the McCoys were to bury ten of their children during their joint missionary labors.
In November, 1818, they began construction of their first mission on the Wabash, near the mouth of Raccoon Creek on land only recently taken from the Indians by the "New Purchase."
They began cabins, secured a teacher (he was an infidel but McCoy later converted him–and he was an enthusiastic aid, even in his Godless state) and McCoy began making the rounds of the Indian villages in search of pupils. Difficulties were great: the interpreters were mostly French-Canadians and Catholics, some traders were not particularly interested in the preaching of temperance to their customers and the Indian agents were, as a rule, uninterested in either missions or Indians. Finally, however, school was opened on Nov. 6, 1819, with six white pupils and one Indian boy.
Isaac McCoy began to study the Miami language–no small task since most interpreters were French-Canadians, speaking neither good Miami, good English nor good French–and he finally gave it up and learned Delaware from Christmas Dashney (properly Dagnett), a Delaware who had been educated at a Catholic mission.
Pressure from the white squatters very soon became intolerable, and in 1820 the school was removed to Fort Wayne .
Here it prospered moderately, and some conversions were made among the Indians and part-Indians, but now a new trial came to plague the McCoys: members of the Baptist Mission Board, many of whom had been reared on the frontier, began to harass their Indian missionary over money matters–expenditures were too high, it was senseless to operate a school, it was better, in short, to shoot Indians than to minister to them.
In this emergency McCoy turned to Lewis Cass, governor of the Michigan Territory and a friend of the Indians. Cass helped and, better still, he secured federal aid. At his advice the McCoy mission was removed to the St. Joseph River, in Michigan, among the Potawatomis.
It was these people whom McCoy thereafter considered his own. When in 1830 it became obvious that they must move west of the Mississippi, he got himself appointed surveyor and agent to help them locate their new homes; he did what he could to aid them on their death-march to the west. Later, with his sons, Dr. Rice McCoy and John McCoy, he performed similar service for other tribes, surveying or directing the surveys of most of the reservations in Kansas and in the Cherokee Outlet.
He hoped for an Indian state; he was constantly in touch with Washington, trying in every way to ameliorate the condition of the Indians and to protect their interests. Between times he preached, prayed, taught and counseled.
By 1842 the white Christians were twenty-five years further from the bloodshed of the frontier than they had been at the beginning of McCoy's labors, and even the most narrow of them had been forced to acknowledge his zeal, his spirit and his ability: they appointed him first corresponding secretary of the Indian Mission Association at Louisville, Ky.
It must have cheered his last years to head such an organization, but he had but few of these years ahead: constant hardships and killing labor had made him an old man at fifty-eight, and at sixty-two, on June 21, 1846, he died.
- (Circular Requesting Funds for a Mission; Published July,
1818.) No copy located.
- Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform, Embracing
Their Colonization; with an Appendix. Boston,
1827.
- Address to Philanthropists in the United States, Generally
and to Christians in Particular, on the Condition and Prospects of the
American Indians. n.p., 1831.
- Annual Register of Indian Affairs within the Indian
Territory, 1835-1838. (Published serially)
- History of Baptist Indian Missions: Embracing Remarks on the
Former and Present Condition of the Aboriginal Tribes; Their Settlement
within the Indian Territory, and Their Future Prospects.
Washington, D. C., 1840.
