Isaac McCoy

Isaac McCoy (June 13, 1784 - June 21, 1846) was a Baptist missionary among the Native Americans in present-day Indiana, Michigan and Missouri. He was an advocate of Indian removal from the eastern United States, proposing an Indian state in what is now Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. He also played an instrumental role in the founding of Grand Rapids, Michigan and Kansas City, Missouri.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Family 3 Missions in Indiana and Michigan 4 Indian Removal 5 Surveyor of Indian Territory 6 Missionary Work in the 1830s 7 Assessment 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links

[edit] Early life

McCoy was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. In 1789, the McCoys, father, mother and six children, rafted down the Ohio River to Kentucky, settling first near Louisville and ln 1792 in Shelby County. Isaac McCoy's father was a Baptist Minister and the son followed in his footsteps. He departed Kentucky for Vincennes, Indiana in 1804 shortly after his marriage to Christiana Polke, age 16, a cousin of future President James K. Polk. Although he had no training and little formal education he became a part time preacher. In 1808 the Silver Creek Baptist Church, the first Baptist Church in Indiana, granted McCoy a license "to preach the Gospel wherever God in His providence might cast his lot.” In 1809 McCoy became pastor of Maria Creek Church near Vincennes and in 1810 the Church ordained him. Possessed of a restless spirit, and despite illness and poverty, McCoy traveled widely on the frontier promoting various causes. In 1817, the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions appointed him as a missionary to the settlers and Indians in Indiana and Illinois Territory. His interests and concern for Indians quickly began to dominate his work.^[1]

[edit] Family

McCoy and wife Christiana had 14 children, of whom only four survived their father. McCoy also owned a female slave named Chainy acquired in 1835. McCoy stated that he was opposed to slavery, but had purchased Chainy to avoid her being separated from her husband and children by being sold through a slave market. In his will he made provision for granting freedom to her, provided she pay back her purchase price of $415 plus interest. Chainy's children were to be freed at age 24.^[2] McCoy's son, John Calvin McCoy, became his father's helpmate and prominent in his own right in the early history of the Kansas and Missouri frontiers.^[3] McCoy's wife, Christiana, died in Kansas City in 1851. A stream in Elkhart County, Indiana and a lake in Cass County, Michigan are named for her.^[4]

[edit] Missions in Indiana and Michigan

McCoy founded his first mission and school to the Indians in 1818 in Parke County, Indiana on Raccoon Creek adjacent to the Wea Indian reservation.^[5] Most of his students were the children of White settlers as the Wea showed little interest in the school. In 1820, the McCoy family moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana to set up a mission to the Miami tribe. His school at Fort Wayne attracted 40 Miami, Potawatomi, and mixed-blood children. In 1821, McCoy made the first of his many visits to Washington, DC to ask the government, unsuccessfully on this occasion, to allow him to appoint teachers, blacksmiths, and other “agents of civilization” to be provided the Indians under newly-ratified treaties.^[6]

In December 1822, McCoy left Fort Wayne and moved his family and 18 Indian students to a site on the St. Joseph River near the present-day city of Niles in southeastern Michigan to open a mission to the Potawatomi. The Carey Mission as he named it was 100 miles from the nearest White settlement. Unlike his earlier contacts with the Indians, the Pottawatomi gave him a relatively warm welcome and, in fact, helped feed his large family and Indian students. McCoy enjoyed more success here than in his earlier endeavors, soon managing a school of 76 Indian children, four Indian employees, five missionaries, six children, and a millwright. In 1826, he was on the move again, further into the wilderness, establishing the Thomas Mission to the Odawa people at what was later to become Grand Rapids, Michigan.^[7] McCoy and his missionaries were the first European-American settlers in Niles and Grand Rapids.

[edit] Indian Removal

With good intentions, McCoy began in 1823 to advocate that the Indian nations of the East be moved west “beyond the frontiers of the White settlement.” He believed that getting the tribes to their own, isolated places, away from the reach of those white men that were exploiting them, would give them a better chance of surviving — and becoming good Christians. McCoy’s ideas for removal of the Indians were not new, but he promoted successfully the new idea that the U.S. government should fund “civilization programs” to educate the Indians and make of them farmers and Christians.^[8] McCoy expanded his concept later to propose the creation of an Indian state making up most of the land area of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska.

Although McCoy thought of himself as the future leader of Indian Canaan (as he called it) he had little confidence in his fellow missionaries. They never accomplished more than ‘to soften the pillows of the dying’ and had “too recently been transplanted from the sterile plains of religious bigotry, to expand with liberal views of the character, and of the just rights of man.” Rather he placed his faith in the government to create for the Indians “a country of their own” where they could “feel their importance, where they can hope to enjoy, unmolested, the fruits of their labours, and their national recovery need not be doubted.” His proposed Indian colony, to become subsequently a Territory and then a State within the United States, would be guided by a benign U.S. government and missionaries with whiskey dealers and dishonest merchants banned.

What McCoy failed to foresee was that the frontier of White settlement was expanding so rapidly that his Indian Canaan would be overrun by White settlers before Indians could enjoy “unmolested, the fruits of their labours.”^[9] Moreover, he overestimated the good will and capacity of the government. During the great Indian Removal forced on the Indians by the U.S. govenment in the 1830s and later, thousands of Indians would die of neglect and arrive at their new homes impoverished and starving, such as those on the Trail of Tears.

[edit] Surveyor of Indian Territory

The possibility of removing eastern Indians west of the Mississippi River was enhanced In 1825 when the Osage and the Kaw ceded large portions of their lands in Kansas and Oklahoma to the United States. In 1828, Congress authorized McCoy to lead an expedition to survey lands to which the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek could be relocated. McCoy also invited representatives of the Potawatomi and Odawa to join the expedition. With the unenthusiastic Indians McCoy traveled through Kansas and Oklahoma laying out potential reservations for Indians and devising in his mind the organization of an Indian State.^[10]

In June 1829, McCoy moved his family to Fayette, Missouri. That fall, at his own expense, he carried out a survey on the Kaw lands and in 1830, with Kaw mixed blood Joseph James as his guide he surveyed and established the boundaries of a reservation for the Delaware tribe who were persuaded to move there from their territories in southern Missouri.^[11]

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act which formally authorized the removal of eastern Indians to the West. For the next ten years McCoy was engaged in surveying boundaries of reservations for more than twenty Indian tribes who moved west. Often they comprised often only a pitiful remnant of formerly powerful peoples.^[12] McCoy had hoped to be one of the three commissioners appointed to oversee Indian Territory, but he was passed over and his dreams of becoming the government’s chief representative to the Indian tribes were dashed. ^[13]

McCoy was well aware of the fraud, abuse, and neglect involved in the removal of Indians westward, but rationalized that it was for the greater good of having Indian lands secured for perpetuity. Perpetuity was to last little more than two decades.^[14]

[edit] Missionary Work in the 1830s

McCoy, his son John, his daughter Delilah and her missionary husband Johnston Lykins focused on missionary work among the Shawnee and Delaware and moved to what is now Kansas City, Missouri on the border of Indian Territory and near the reservations of those two tribes. The younger McCoy established a trading post at Westport, Missouri, and was among the first organizers of Kansas City. Lykins became one of the city's first mayors.

McCoy, with his strong views, was often at odds with the Baptist mission board and other missionaries. In 1832, a smallpox epidemic was killing thousands of Indians and McCoy journeyed again to Washington, this time to seek funds from Congress for a vaccination program for Indians. He found little enthusiasm for such a bill. The Missouri Senator, Alexander Buckner, said to him about Indians, “if they were all dead it would be a blessing for our country.” Partially due to his efforts, Congress eventually passed a modest bill to finance Indian vaccinations. In 1833, McCoy intervened to protect a group of Mormons from a mob in Independence, Missouri.^[15] Although he continued to be involved in innumerable projects on behalf of what he perceived as the best interest of Indians, McCoy was nearly destitute during much of the 1830s, taking in boarders and working as bookkeeper in a neighboring store. He still harbored hopes that he would be appointed as the government overseer of Indians and labored in Washington and on the frontier seeking, unsuccessfully, for U.S. government recognition of the Indian lands as an official U.S. Territory. ^[16]

In 1840, McCoy wrote one of the earliest, most personally informed reports on the Midwestern Native American tribes, The History of Baptist Indian Missions. In 1842 he moved to Louisville, Kentucky. There he directed the Baptist American Indian Mission Association and wrote additional works. He died there in 1846 and was buried in Western Cemetery. ^[17]

[edit] Assessment

McCoy was much more of social reformer than a missionary, hardly being concerned in his later years with converting Indians to Christianity. He ‘’attacked the system of law and custom by which Indians had been kept in bondage” and “his object was to free the Indians from those restraints.” His solution was to move the Indians beyond where they could be corrupted and exploited by Whites. But the tide of westward expansion in the U.S. was too strong and his plans failed. Still, the vision of this rude, untutored preacher and pioneer was, in the words of his biographer, ‘somewhat breathtaking.”^[18]

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Shultz, George A. (1972). An Indian Canaan: Isaac McCoy and the Vision of an Indian State. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-8061-1024-4. 

[edit] External links

• The Isaac McCoy Papers at The Kansas Historical Society
• Works by Isaac McCoy at Google Book Search

Persondata
Name	Maccoy, Isaac
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	June 13, 1784
Place of birth
Date of death	June 21, 1846
Place of death