In 1891, after more than four years had passed since Andrew left Indian Territory, he returned for a first visit, bringing former missionary Matthew Dalton as a companion. The two men traveled by train and stage to Manard, Cherokee Nation, where Uncle William and Auntie Ann Hendricks received them enthusiastically. Two elders headquartered there also. The visitors spent several days seeing friends and members in the region around Manard and holding some proselytizing meetings.105
Members and friends built a log meetinghouse at Manard.
They then traveled to Briartown, on the Canadian River, the boundary between the Cherokees and the Choctaws. Eight elders, one of them a local member, worked out of the Mabry farm. The elders had a little cabin for themselves. After a two-day conference with these men, Andrew and Elder Dalton returned to Manard, where all the missionaries gathered for the dedication of the building site donated by the Hendrickses for the first Mormon meetinghouse in the territory. After two more days of conferences, the visitors returned to Utah, having spent a month with the missionaries, members, and investigators.106
On their way home, Andrew and Matthew took a train that passed through Kansas City, and they made their first visit to the temple site in Independence, Missouri. During their brief visit they met both some Hedrickites and some Josephites (as members of the Reorganized Church were then nicknamed), including William Smith, the Prophet’s brother,107 and Joseph Smith III, the Prophet’s son. Andrew listened to the taking of a deposition of Joseph III in litigation over ownership of the temple lot property.108
After the month away, Andrew resumed selling general merchandise for Hyde and Griffen.
In late 1893, with business slow, Andrew made a second visit to his mission. Although he generally covered mission expenses himself, this time the First Presidency appropriated $30 for his expenses.
His second tour lasted more than two months, from mid-November 1893 to January 20, 1894.
Felt rather reluctant about leaving my home this time. My wife also felt very badly. I don’t know when I experienced such tender feelings myself. Cold dark night gave gloom to the occasion. Clare was not feeling well also made Ollie feel bad at having me go away. Our trust is in the Lord. all will be well with us.109
Andrew had intended to get off the train at Arkansas City, Kansas, near the Osage Indian Agency, but when he found there was no stage connection, he went on to Orlando, arriving at night. He stayed in a hotel and the next day, when he sat down to write, he felt impressed to go to the train depot and see if his parcels had come. At the depot he met two elders and a member who lived near Orlando. They had come to meet him, even though he had not expected to be there until three or four days later. For the next week he visited members and held meetings either in homes or schoolhouses.110
Around this time a Campbellite minister had challenged the elders to debate. Andrew said he would be glad to have the elders present their views, but not engage in debate.111 A Sunday meeting in a schoolhouse right after a terrific cold windstorm drew only one person, an old Methodist gentleman who attended only because he had custodial responsibility for the schoolhouse.
On December 18, Andrew left for Manard. To get to there (150 miles away on a straight line) he went two days by train, going north clear to Kansas, then east along the Kansas–Oklahoma border, and finally south to Ft. Gibson, where he was met by elders headquartered in Manard, a place so familiar.112
At Manard he held meetings and visited friends, some of whom had become converts. Others, like William Hendricks, were generous friends but still could not take the last step. This time the missionary conference met in the handsome log meetinghouse constructed since Andrew’s last visit.
After a week in Manard113 Andrew went south to the Mabry home, near Briartown, where other elders were headquartered. Along the way Andrew stayed as usual with members and held meetings. Often the most interested listeners were kin of his hosts. The Church grew most smoothly by conversion of members’ close relatives. The Choctaws proved more responsive than the Cherokees. In some areas, though, hostility from Indians and “white trash” drove out the missionaries.114 The elders greatly valued good friends, such as Enoch Flack, a “colored friend of wealth and influence and a Choctaw citizen. He had a fine house, seven acres of orchard, and 950 acres under cultivation by thirty-six renters.”115
Near the Mabrys’ home in a place called Massey Settlement, Andrew organized a Sunday School and the first formal branch in the mission. He also laid a cornerstone for construction of the second Mormon meetinghouse in the mission.116 Andrew organized another Sunday School before he returned to Manard on January 9.
At the end of 1894, twenty-one missionary elders staffed the mission, but that meant an average of only ten arriving during the year. Thirty-nine baptisms brought the total number of baptisms since 1855 (when the first missionaries came) to 158. During 1894, nine members had emigrated West and two had apostatized, leaving 109 Saints in the mission field.
In an article Andrew wrote for The Contributor he made suggestions about service in his mission:117
• Callings should be for twenty-two months rather than twenty-four, avoiding the worst malaria months at the beginning of the first year and at the end of the second year.
• Unmarried men focus better on the work than men concerned about their families.
• Proselytizing without purse or scrip fosters dependence on the Lord and on the generosity of the people.
• Dressing in a dignified manner signals the elders’ quality as gentlemen, serious about their calling.
• Knowledge of the scriptures aids persuasion.
• Good education, musical talent, and conversational skill help in gaining friendship.
He also pointed out that one reason for slow growth in the mission was the emigration of Saints, some gathering to Zion, others simply escaping drought conditions.118
After being gone from Salt Lake City for more than two months, Andrew arrived home on January 29, 1894, and resumed his employment.
In September 1895, eighteen months after his last visit to Indian Territory, Andrew went there for a third time as mission president. This visit was mainly to dedicate an LDS chapel in St. John, Kansas. The dedication fell to him because Kansas had recently been transferred from the Northern States Mission to the Indian Territory Mission.
The Bickertonites established St. John in 1875 as one of two major centers for members of their church to gather. After the death of Joseph Smith, William Bickerton first followed Sydney Rigdon, then Brigham Young, but when the Utah church announced polygamy, Bickerton established his own church.119 By 1885 dissension had grown, and Mormon elders from the Northern States Mission began converting members of the group, so that at the time of the dedication twenty-one Mormons lived in St. John.120 Occasionally, the Mormon and Bickertonite missionaries crossed paths and found they had much in common.121 However, they disagreed primarily over polygamy and authority.
A Mr. Glasscock, a former Bickertonite, donated to the LDS Church a plot of ground in St. John consisting of six city business lots on which to place a chapel. The Church then purchased for half price from an investment company a United Brethren chapel (28 × 44 feet).122 Andrew persuaded the First Presidency to buy the meetinghouse, and the elders moved it onto the vacant lots, replastered it, and painted and furnished it, ready for dedication. A substantial party from Salt Lake led by Andrew and Elder Edward Stevenson of the Quorum of Seventy attended the dedication. This was the third meetinghouse in the Indian Territory Mission, the others at Massey and Manard.
Ollie went along on the trip and also baby Spencer, then just six months old. They took Clare as well to help look after the baby. Andrew and Ollie left the other three children with relatives. Ollie played the organ and helped with an elders’ chorus for the dedication.123 She also sang in a Church-presented concert before an audience of six hundred people. She wrote in her journal, “I was frightened when I got up to sing . . . but I got through alright.”124 The conference and dedication lasted four days, a major event in the little town. Activities included the music concert, lectures by Andrew on irrigation and by Elder Stevenson on migration to Utah, and a baseball game between the elders and a local team.
Before going home, the group from Utah went back halfway across the state to Kansas City and visited the temple lot in Independence, Missouri. “We [seven] all knelt down in a circle on the spot where the corner stone was laid and offered a prayer, each in turn.”125 They also rented a carriage and drove to Far West, where the corner stones of another temple had been set,126 and to Adam-ondi-Ahman. That night in their hotel, the bed collapsed and left Andrew and Ollie to sleep on the floor.127
Ollie had never been outside Utah, so this was a major adventure for her. She had scrimped and saved to feel she could afford the trip. Of the train trip home, Andrew wrote,
[Out of Kansas City on the way home,] we were all tired and worn out, went to sleep. [In the morning] Ollie felt for her purse but could not feel it. She went to the [water] closet and looked in her underskirt but no purse, later in the day we found she had been robbed, her pocket being cut open and her purse gone, it almost used her up. She felt so badly about it. It was a purse containing money given her when a girl, saving for years she had quite a purse, sad but [sic] dear experience.128
Notes
105. Andrew Kimball, “Among the Cherokees,” Deseret News clipping, in Andrew Kimball, Papers, December 31, 1891, to January 11, 1892.
106. Andrew Kimball, Journal, 12–31, 1892. Shortly after this visit, elders were sent to proselyte among the Osages and Chickasaws as well as the Cherokees and Choctaws. Newspaper clipping in Andrew Kimball, Journal, June 30, 1892.
107. Andrew’s journal identifies the Prophet’s brother he met as Samuel, but Samuel died in 1844. Andrew must have been referring to the Prophet’s brother William (1811–93), who was at this time a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS Church).
108. Andrew Kimball, Journal, December 29, 1891, to January 31, 1892. See Bagette, “Temple Lot Case,” 121, on the litigation. The Reorganized LDS Church won the trial, but the appellate court reversed the judgment in 1894.
118. Andrew Kimball to Mrs. A. I. McDonald, August 4, 1895, Church History Library.
119. Entz, “Bickertonites,” 1, 6; Andrew Kimball to First Presidency, October 1894, Church History Library.
120. The Bickertonites had established the colony in Kansas because of its proximity to the Lamanites, to whom they felt a special responsibility.
121. See Entz, “Bickertonites,” 31–33. On one of his first days in the Indian Territory, Andrew had met and disputed with a Bickertonite missionary. Andrew Kimball, Journal, February 2, 1884. They disagreed energetically about polygamy and baptism for the dead but ended with good feelings.
