Our Arklahoma Heritage: A missionary to the Cherokee Nation brought the printed word to early Indian Territory

Rev. Samuel Austin Worcester

On November 23, 1835, on a wooded bend of the Grand River a mile and a half north of present-day Chouteau, a small iron hand-press clanked for the first time west of Arkansas.

The ink was still wet on sixteen pages of Cherokee syllabary when Rev. Samuel Austin Worcester pulled the sheet and held it to the light.

No English. No title page. Just a simple almanac for the year 1836: moon phases, planting tables, and a few Bible verses.

It was the first book ever printed in what would become the state of Oklahoma.

Ten years earlier, in the fall of 1825, Worcester had arrived at the same spot as a newly married 27-year-old missionary. Union Mission (founded 1820) was then the westernmost Protestant mission in the United States and Oklahoma’s first permanent school.

For two malaria-filled years, Worcester and his wife Ann taught Osage and Creek children to read, sang hymns in the Osage language, and buried more than one child who never saw the age of ten.

In 1827 failing health forced them east, but Worcester never forgot the Grand River country.

By 1835 the Cherokee had been forced west on the Trail of Tears. Worcester, now the Cherokee Nation’s official postmaster and printer, hauled an 800-pound press by oxcart from Cincinnati back to Union Mission.

His goal was simple: give the Cherokee their own literature in their own language before the old ways disappeared

.The press stayed only a few months (it moved south to Park Hill in 1836), but those weeks were enough. The 1836 Cherokee Almanac rolled off the bed of the mission press in a log building that no longer stands. Today the site is silent except for birds and the river, the foundations barely visible under oaks and cedars.

A modest Oklahoma Historical Society marker and a reconstructed cabin are all that remain of the place where Oklahoma’s written history began

.Most Oklahomans know Worcester for the Supreme Court case that bears his name. In 1832 he had been sentenced to four years of hard labor in a Georgia prison for refusing to swear allegiance to a state that had no jurisdiction over Cherokee land.

The court ruled in his favor (Worcester v. Georgia), President Jackson ignored the ruling, and the Trail of Tears followed anyway. Less remembered is the fact that the same man who defied a state and a president also set the first type in what is now Mayes County.

The press itself survived. You can still see it at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City, a squat iron relic with a cracked wooden frame. The almanac survives too (one copy in the Gilcrease Museum, another in the American Antiquarian Society).

And every time a Cherokee child learns to read ᏣᎳᎩ in a modern classroom, the chain that began with those sixteen inked pages in a log cabin on the Grand River is still unbroken.

Union Mission is now a National Historic Landmark, tucked off Highway 412 on a gravel road most Pryor teenagers have never noticed. The cemetery holds a handful of fieldstones from the 1820s. The river keeps rolling past the same bend it has rolled past for two centuries.

And somewhere under the leaves lies the exact spot where Samuel Worcester pulled the handle that made Oklahoma, for one quiet moment in 1835, a place that could put its own words on paper.