Baptist Work Among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest‪.‬

Baptists have attempted to Christianize Native Americans since Roger Williams. Leon McBeth related how a pre-Baptist Williams purposed to learn Indian languages, and by 1632, was conducting missionary work among the tribes of New England. (1) Apparently, the first identifiable Indian convert was Japheth, a Connecticut man immersed into the Seventh Day Baptist Church at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1674. Progress, however, was always slow and fitful at best. By the end of the eighteenth century, Robert G. Gardner estimated only .34 percent of the Indian population east of the Mississippi was Baptist--one in three hundred. Due largely to the efforts of the Triennial Convention and the American Indian Association, Native American Baptists grew to 2.5 percent of the total Baptist population by 1845. (2) Before the Civil War stalled everything, American Baptists had sixty missionaries commissioned to serve among the Indians with reports of two thousand baptisms. (3)