The missionaries were subject to unceasing hindrances from renegade whites, who are always on the borders of civilization, and have usually been the enemies of missionaries.

But among the Cherokees no year passed without conversions.  Those who appeared to the missionaries so wild and forbidding that they were received with fear, came under the gospel power and were clothed and in their right mind.  In six years the Church had largely increased.  Indians traveled a score of miles to attend the services.  As yet, there was no Cherokee written language.  This mission was eight years old when the four gospels were translated into the Cherokee tongue, and in three or four years more, one-half the nation could read.  There were now among the Cherokees and the Choctaws, eighteen missionary stations.

In 1826, the Board began work among eight other tribes in different parts of the country.

It next took charge of the Stockbridge tribe, whose ancestors had enjoyed the ministry of the celebrated Dr. Jonathan Edwards.  They were originally in Massachusetts.  They were pushed back hundreds of miles to Central New York, then pushed further back hundreds of miles to Indiana; then pushed still further back hundreds of miles to Michigan, and finally pushed back once more and allowed to rest in the remote West—­in Minnesota.  During all these cruel removals, they had themselves kept alive a school, and had among them exemplary Christians.  Now, after one hundred years of such history, the American Board put a mission among them.  The church survived, and the whole settlement took in the spirit of civilization and took on its forms.  A year later were added the missions to the Chickasaws, and now, about the close of the year 1830, it seemed as if the fruitage of this Indian missionary consecration were at hand.  Half the Cherokees in Georgia could read.  Civilized life had taken firm hold on them, and they were governing themselves with Christian laws.  Eight churches were in life and power among them.  The Chickasaws had their church in Arkansas, and the Cherokees there, another.  The churches of the Choctaws had received to their communions that year two hundred and fifty members who were hopefully converted, and in all the Indian Missions of the American Board there was a steady increase of hopefulness, while the members in tribes were also increasing.

“Everywhere the fruits of the missions among the Indians were abundant.  No more docile pagans were ever approached with the gospel than some of these peoples.”

Nevertheless, from this period of time, Indian missions cease to be successful for a generation.

The mission to the Chickasaws was abandoned in 1834; to the Osages in 1836; to the Stockbridge tribe, in 1848; to the Choctaws, in 1859; to the Tuscaroras, in 1860; and to the Cherokees, in 1860; until at last but a single mission remained, that among the great Sioux tribes or the Dakotas.  Twelve missions and forty-five churches, which reached about one hundred thousand Indians abandoned in twenty-six years!