American Indian Culture and Research Journal

At the close of the eighteenth century, the missionary zeal of the Second Great Awakening had failed to open many roads into Cherokee country. Although our lands had been drastically reduced by treaty and war over the course of interactions with the British, French, and Americans, the Cherokee nevertheless represented a powerful military and political force impervious to unwelcome overtures from evangelistic missionaries, however enthusiastic. By the close of the nineteenth century, though, missionaries’ inroads were well established, and thousands and thousands of Cherokees had converted to Christianity. Among the earliest and most influential of converts was Catharine Brown, the daughter of a relatively affluent family from an Alabama town and an early attendant of the Brainerd mission school, established in eastern Tennessee in 1817 under the direction of the largely Congregationalist American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions. On her arrival the missionaries were doubtful that the proud and beautiful Cherokee woman could acclimate to their strict lifestyle, but she soon became a favored student, whose enthusiasm led many of her family and other Cherokees to the new religion. Less than two years after her conversion, she was sent to take charge of a school at the town of Creek Path, and only three years later, in 1823, she died of tuberculosis at the approximate age of twenty-three. After her death Rufus Anderson, a ranking official with the American board, began a biographical article on her for that body’s publication, the Missionary Herald, but he found the subject matter compelling enough to warrant a separate edition, culled from Brown’s letters and others’ recollections and documents. Her memoirs, though heavily edited and frequently altered by Anderson’s ready hand, offer a rare opportunity to consider the adaptation available to a subject.