Says Mrs. J. McNair Wright: “If the church can only be plainly shown the
need, amount, prospects, and methods of work in any given field, a vital
interest will at once arise in that field, and money for it will not be
lacking. The missionary columns in our religious papers do not supply
the information needed fully to set our missions before the church. Our
home-mission work needs to be ‘written up.’ The foreign field has found
a large increase of interest in its labors from the numerous books that
have been written,--_interestingly written_,--giving descriptions of the
work, the countries where the missionaries toil, and the lives of the
missionaries themselves. The Pueblo, the Mormon, and the American Indian
work should be similarly brought before the church. A book gives a
compact, united view of a subject; the same view given monthly or weekly
in the columns of periodicals loses much of its force and, moreover, is
much less likely to meet the notice of the young. A hearty missionary
spirit will be had in our church only when we furnish our youth with
more books on missionary themes.”[1]
In accordance with these ideas the following pages have been written.
It is surprising to find how few books can be obtained on missionary
work among the Indians. After ten years of effort the writer has only
been able to secure twenty-six books on such work in the United States,
and five of these are 18mo. volumes of less than forty pages each. Only
five of these have been published within the last fifteen years. Books
on the adventurous, scientific, and political departments of Indian life
are numerous and large; the reverse is true of the missionary
department. Hence it is not strange that such singular ideas predominate
among the American people in regard to the Indian problem.