[Illustration: (_Istutsi in Naktsokv. Or The Child's Book._ By Rev.
John Fleming.)]
When the Cherokee Nation migrated from Georgia to the newly formed
Indian Territory, John Fisher Wheeler, who had been head printer of
the Cherokee Press at New Echota, proceeded to the Union Mission
Station on the Grand River, near the present location of Mazie,
Okla. There the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
supplied him with a new press on which in August 1835 he did the
first Oklahoma printing. Wheeler had served his apprenticeship at
Huntsville, Ala.[98]
One of two or three extant copies of the third recorded issue
of Oklahoma's first press is present in the Library of Congress
collections: _Istutsi in naktsokv. Or The Child's Book. By Rev.
John Fleming. Missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions._ Printed before October 31, 1835, in an edition of
500 copies, it is a 24-page primer with text in the Creek language
rendered in the Pickering alphabet and with woodcut illustrations
of animals and other subjects. A Creek Indian named James Perryman
or Pvhos Haco ("Grass Crazy") assisted with the translation.[99]
Fleming's work among the Indians has earned for him a notice in
the _Dictionary of American Biography_, where his "chief claim to
remembrance" is said to be "that he was the first to reduce to writing
the Muskoki or Creek language, which was a task of peculiar difficulty
on account of the numerous and puzzling combinations of consonants
involved."
The Library of Congress obtained the rare copy of its earliest
Oklahoma imprint through the Smithsonian Deposit (see p. 52, above) in
1878.
[Footnote 98: See Lester Hargrett, _Oklahoma Imprints 1835-1890_ (New
York, 1951), p. ix-x, 1-2.]
[Footnote 99: Ibid., no. 3.]