John Dunbar

John Dunbar (1804–1857) was a missionary who tried to Christianize the Pawnee Indians of Nebraska during the 1830s–1840s. Early life Born in Palmer, Massachusetts, John Dunbar grew up in the fertile cultural soil of western New England. The Connecticut River Valley was a region awash with revivalistic evangelical religion and the zeal for social reform, much as the more well-known Burned-over district of Western New York. Indeed, Dunbar grew up in the shadow of missionary endeavor. He attended Williams College, where the 1806 Haystack Prayer Meeting took place, the birthplace of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the symbolic origin of the entire antebellum missionary movement. Heading West Dunbar continued his education at Andover Theological Seminary, even as he began considering the cause of missions. He graduated and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1834 and left for the western frontier that same year under the authority of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He was joined on the journey by Samuel Parker and an assistant missionary, Samuel Allis. Their original aim had been to go farther West and minister to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, known at the time as the Flatheads. In St. Louis, the missionaries changed their minds, and Parker headed back to New England, though he would go on to fame as a missionary to Oregon. The Pawnee Mission Instead, Dunbar and Allis decided to apply their evangelistic efforts more locally and instead made a base camp in Bellevue, Nebraska, where Moses Merrill, a Baptist missionary, was already at work amongst the Otoe–Missouria Indians. Over the next two years, Dunbar and Allis joined the Pawnee Indians bands on their biannual buffalo hunts across the Nebraskan Great Plains. Dunbar returned to Massachusetts to marry Esther Smith whose sister had died in the mission field at the Bombay Mission in modern-day Mumbai. Allis and the Dunbars continued to work sporadically with the Pawnees from Bellevue until 1841, when the missionaries built their own lodgings not far from the Pawnees' main village nearby modern-day Fullerton, Nebraska, in rural Nance County. A small settlement of white settlers developed around the mission, as treaty-appointed blacksmiths, teachers and farmers arrived to assist the Pawnee on the federal dime.