New and Uncommon Means
New and Uncommon Means
This chapter illustrates how Christian missions continued to be the single most important source of print media in Indian Country during the nineteenth century. Unlike John Eliot and Eleazar Wheelock, however, the missionaries who fanned out across an ever-expanding territory to the west of the original thirteen states used what geographer, clergyman, and “friend of the Indian” Jedidiah Morse called “new and uncommon means” to produce and circulate religious books to their Native charges. With modern printing technologies like steam presses and stereotype plates and emerging marketing strategies that guaranteed mass circulation, this new generation of missionary print providers looked forward to a time when “every family” would have access to “a competent supply of common Bibles, and catechisms, a good reference Bible, concordance, and commentary.” Of course, these evangelical dreams focused most often on “the Book,” the Bible.
Keywords: Christian missions, print media, Indian Country, John Eliot, Eleazar Wheelock
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