Despite being warned that missionary work can involve hardship, poverty and destitution, Isabel Crawford, a 28-year-old single woman from Canada, found herself on a westbound train from Chicago to Oklahoma Territory in 1893.
Her destination was Elk Creek Mission near Hobart on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation. The reservation had been created by the U.S. government from the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty, which allotted 3.5 million acres in the southwest corner of Oklahoma Territory. It had become home to more than 6,000 Indians from 10 tribes.
Crawford wrote in her many journals and diaries that she was “crestfallen” at the assignment from the Women’s American Baptist Home Mission Society and it was “a complete surprise and a shock.” She had wanted a foreign mission assignment and lamented that the Elk Creek Mission was “87 miles from the railroad!” However, she knew from the age of 20 that she had been called by God to the mission field and had set about preparing herself.
Kiowa Chief Gui-pah-gho, also known as Lone Wolf the Elder, did not favor or sign the Medicine Lodge Treaty and tried, without success, to fight it. Before he died in 1879, Gui-pah-gho passed his name to a younger warrior named Mamay-day-te, who became the Elk Creek Lone Wolf. He welcomed the Baptist missionaries to his camp.
“I have long desired what you propose,” Chief Lone Wolf said to Rev. J.S. Murrow, the veteran Indian Territory missionary working to secure mission sites. His comments were reported in the April 27, 1893, edition of the Baptist Watchman. “My people need missionaries, churches and schools. I am glad you have come. Hasten the buildings, locate the missionary quickly. I am so glad.”
After Crawford and her traveling companions arrived in Chickasha by train on their way to Elk Creek, “we drove the twenty miles to Anadarko, in a hack, put up at the hotel, where we slept three in a bed that sagged in the middle,” she wrote in one of her many journals. Lone Wolf was in town for rations and welcomed the group. He was happy with their arrival and promised they would not be hurt.
In bringing the message of “the Jesus Road,” Crawford required assistance. Ten years before arriving at Elk Creek Mission, she had become ill and lay in bed with pain and fever for six months. Her doctor administered quinine, which caused a hearing impairment from which she never recovered. In addition to a hearing device hung around her neck called a “conversation tube,” she also used an interpreter and learned sign language to communicate with the Kiowa.
She wrote that one of their greatest challenges was getting food out from the stores, because none were close by.
“You just can’t imagine how awkward it is to be without a store. To try and help the meat situation, I fished one day from 11 o’clock till 3 and never got a bite, and how I did learn to sympathize with our poor starving Indians.”
After three years at Elk Creek Mission, Crawford moved to the Saddle Mountain area alone, leaving her missionary companions with Lone Wolf, and made her home in a tent. On April 12, which happened to be Easter Sunday, she gave her first “Jesus Talk.”
“It was a rainy, stormy day and they all crowded into a small two room house for this first service. The Indians were more surprised than anything, that a small, unprotected white woman, who was deaf and carried a hearing horn would come among them alone. They responded warmly, saying, ‘We like you for coming this way. You trust us.’” An article printed in the Nov. 23, 1893, Baptist Watchman noted that women missionaries were sent especially to work among the women and children. However, to Crawford’s surprise the men loved to quilt and sew and “above all liked to get together and talk,” she wrote. “It seems remarkable that Kiowa men who but recently had been warriors, going on bloody raids would take a liking to such work as sewing and quilting.”
Chief Dumot and the Saddle Mountain Kiowas accepted Crawford as one of their own. She worked side-by-side with them in all their daily chores and activities, in addition to preaching and teaching and nurse duties when needed.
To be continued…