Robert Hamilton, a friend and associate of Mary P. Jayne and Joseph S. Murrow, was one of the first missionaries sent by the American Baptist Home Mission Society to western Oklahoma; Hamilton worked with the Cheyenne and Arapaho people from the 1890s to the 1920s. Hamilton, who had been ordained a Baptist missionary in 1892, was a man of tremendous drive and devotion, energy and patience, curiosity and courage. He, like other missionaries in Oklahoma before and after statehood, cared for the indigenous people, whom he considered to be like children; he was their missionary father, and indeed the Indians themselves adopted the designations of “children” and “father” when addressing him. Hamilton understood that “the Indians are by nature religious, mystical, ritualistic, reverent,” as he wrote in The Gospel Among the Red Man, a partially autobiographical account of Baptist missionary activities in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. “It is one of the evidences of the divine nature of the gospel, and of the efficiency of the Holy Spirit to ‘guide into all truth,’ that the missionary to a primitive people, with an unskilled interpreter, can get the message to them, and the resultant surprising grasp they have of divine truth.” In the manuscript account, Sketch of Work Among Cheyennes and Arapahos, Hamilton narrated in third person the scene when in 1892 he began to meet with the Cheyennes: 

These Indians had only nineteen years before quit the warpath, and were living in the midst of a people, who if they had understood them, might have been a great blessing and help to them, but who viewed them with suspicion, and only visited their camps out of curiosity or to trade with them. For these reasons, they continued to live apart from their white neighbors, practicing, in Hamilton’s view, the most disgusting of heathen customs in the name of religion. Mr. Hamilton attended an Indian burial, at which a woman cut gashes in her arms and legs for the dead, until the blood ran down to the ground. He saw women, who in their grief for their children, had cut off a joint of their fingers one after another until their hands were but stubs. 

More astonishing was the Sun Dance ceremony “at which twenty men stripped of all their clothing, danced continuously for three days and nights without food or water. . . . Others had places cut in their breasts, and a skewer put through under a muscle, and this tied to a rope which was attached to a central pole of the dance lodge. Throwing their weight upon the rope, they would dance until the muscles were torn out.” He also witnessed the Ghost Dance, “where all night long, they formed a large circle, going round and round keeping step to the weird, plaintive music as they sang their Messianic songs. He saw a woman go inside the circle and stand for more than an hour with her hands stretched out toward the north, praying most fervently, while the tears ran down her face, pleading for the coming of the Indian Messiah. Her tone and posture expressed the most intense longing. Finally exhausted, she fell in a swoon.”

Into this environment, Hamilton came preaching the Gospel, comparing himself to the Apostle Paul. Although Hamilton was vain and full of himself, he nevertheless believed wholeheartedly in the Great Commission given by Christ to His disciples. Delivering the Gospel was the sole object to him, and he and his family endured privation and the environmental extremes of western Oklahoma to succeed in this self-appointed goal. Hamilton witnessed the conflict and confusion that the Cheyennes and Arapahoes experienced over the correct path to happiness: the traditional road or the Jesus Road. He heard firsthand accounts from Indian men and women, a few of whom could speak English; for others, Hamilton relied on interpreters, such as the Cheyennes Philip Cook and Moore Vanhorn, the latter of whom was an early convert and enthusiastic Christian, despite having suffered many wrongs in his youth at the hands of white soldiers. In the manuscript pamphlet Christmas with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, Hamilton described the anguish of two women, who had been through much sorrow because of personal loss of family, including their children: “One who had lost her son said that when he died, she had been tempted to throw away the Jesus Road, and take up again her old heathen religion, but that now she could see that it was better to trust in Jesus, and that she could see that His way was right, she asked the church to forgive her for her sinful thoughts, and promised to walk in the ‘Road’ more carefully.” In the manuscript Sketch of Work Among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, Hamilton described the personal experience of “one old man,” who “told the missionary that in the olden times it was thought an honorable thing to steal from those who were not their friends, and the man who could steal the most horses and cattle, and thus make the best feasts and presents to his people, had the greatest respect. . . . How Jesus had changed his heart from that way of doing[!] Now he had learned to love his enemies, and to do good to all men, and his life bears out his testimony.” In the same manuscript, Hamilton described how some Cheyennes, “who started in the way ‘went back and walked no more with Him’,” and began to persecute those who stayed on the Jesus Road. Such antagonists rejected Christians who were to join a delegation of the tribe going to Washington because they considered the Christian Cheyenne to be too close to the white man, and therefore influenced in the wrong way by Christianity. Moreover, “Christians were told by the Ghost Dance prophets that when the Indian Messiah came and restored the Indians and the buffalo, that all the Indians, who were found in the white man’s religion, would be destroyed with the white people.” Even so, some Ghost Dancers, such as the Arapaho, Hail, in time rejected their beliefs to follow the Jesus Road. The Plains Indian “medicine man,” however, graced with the knowledge of the mystical selection of himself to influence the powers of nature, was less inclined to renounce his pagan beliefs, and was the most formidable opponent of Indian converts. Hamilton recorded the case of a Cheyenne “medicine man” who went so far as to hex a Christian Indian couple: “this medicine man had an arrow, called the arrow of jealousy or hate. When dipped in a certain preparation known only to the fraternity, and shot in the direction of his victim, though miles away, the substance would search him out, and his destruction was certain.” Hamilton rode miles to find the couple, then told them that the medicine man’s threats were the work of Satan (Eahwo), and believers in Christ could put off Satan. “After prayer they were able to cast off the delusion, and peace of mind was restored.”

               Hamilton recounted another example of religious change among the Cheyennes of Oklahoma: “[One] old man . . . on being received for baptism, related the following touching incident. ‘The first religious act that impressed itself on my childish mind [the old man recounted], was when a small boy on my mother’s back. At that time my mother made an offering of two buffalo robes to the Great Spirit, and prayed for me, asking that I might live and grow up to be a good man. Later when I was a young man, I met a white man with a kind face and a soft voice, who told me that I ought to love and worship Jesus. He gave me this[–the old man drew] from his breast a crucifix, which he wore next his skin, under his shirt, attached to a string about his neck . . . and told me always to keep it. I have worn it over my heart ever since. I do not pray to it, but have kept it to remind me of the good man and his words. When the missionaries came to our reservation, I was glad to learn that they knew about this same Jesus. I never miss an opportunity to hear them tell about Him, and I was glad when I learned that I could be His friend and follower’.”

The Plains Indians of western Oklahoma discovered, in the words of the missionary, explanations for human behavior, for mistakes and doubts, for unhappiness and suffering. Even the fiercest warriors sought to be embraced in overwhelming love. The closest experiences to such love that tribal beliefs offered were the promises of happiness in the next life, or the benevolence of the Great Spirit, or the means by which nature nourished, clothed, and sheltered them. The Kiowa Sanco adapted the natural theology inherent in Christianity to his own experiences of delight and satisfaction when finding a pure stream of bright, crystal water, or when coming from out of the darkness of a spring thunderstorm into the broad horizon of the plains covered by the ubiquitous rays of the sun. Not only did Christianity emphasize the importance of natural history in the scheme of redemption, but one’s personal physical and spiritual experiences were known to God, who watched to see whether or not these peripatetic people would keep to the Jesus Road, eschewing all other roads as distractions of ignorance, hubris, and idleness.

For more on the Baptist missionaries of Oklahoma, see Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years, newly republished in January 2026 and available on Amazon at Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years: Lawson, Dr. Russell Matthew: 9780977244805: Amazon.com: Books