In the early 1830s, George and Arvilla Smith set off from Vermont with their little son for the wilds of Michigan, impelled by a stern Calvinist faith to be missionaries to the Ottawa Indians. We can only marvel at the hardship and sorrow they endured in their efforts to bring a Protestant God and an Anglo-American civilization to an alien people. Fortunately for our understanding, both Arvilla and George kept diaries, and, in George’s case, a memoranda book, which help to illuminate their lives.

Historian Susan Gray came across Arvilla’s diary while working on a research project at the University of Michigan library. “As I began to read,” she recalls, “I became completely engrossed. The archivist saw my interest and told me about the diary of George Smith, Arvilla’s husband.” The next day Gray returned to read his journal and was caught in the grip of a “sheer lust for storytelling.”

“I am a big admirer of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and her book, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812,” says Gray. Because Ulrich had only Martha’s diary, however, she could present just one side of the Ballard family’s story. In the Smiths’ case, the existence of diaries from both husband and wife and George’s memoranda books, which describe his work for the mission, give an almost unparalleled opportunity to compare two views of the same events. “You just don’t get that kind of ‘he said, she said’ very often,” Gray explains.

The Smiths’ story reads like an unexpurgated version of one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Arvilla’s journal begins in 1834, nine months after she and George arrived in Michigan, and ends in 1845, when she returned to Vermont to recuperate from the physical and emotional collapse brought on by the deaths of four of her children and the rigors of pioneer life. George kept a diary between 1842 and 1845 and recorded his work with the Ottawa in memoranda books from 1840 to 1879, two years before his death.

Life in the Michigan wilderness was difficult, especially for Arvilla, who came from a family with pretensions to gentility. She was related to the well-known artist, Hiram Powers, on her father’s side, and to John Brown, the abolitionist, on her mother’s. Her father was a physician, but a physician with a drinking problem.

Born in 1808 in St. Alban’s, Vermont, Arvilla attended a local female academy, receiving a good education for a young woman of that time. While at school, she met George, who was studying for the Congregational ministry. They married in 1830.

George taught school until he felt called to minister to the Indians in Michigan. By 1836, he had organized a church in Plainfield, Michigan (now Plainwell), where he was ordained. Two years later he became an agent for the Western Michigan Society to Benefit the Indians, which was supported by the Presbyterian Synod of Michigan and the American Board of Foreign Missions.

The federal government at that time wanted to move the Ottawa west of the Mississippi. George’s task was to help the Ottawa?who naturally wanted to stay where they were?to purchase with their treaty annuity monies federal land near present-day Holland, Michigan. The Smiths moved to this newly-purchased land in 1839 to begin work at Old Wing Mission. A few years later, George was appointed by the federal government to teach at the mission.

Ironically, many of the Indians that George had felt called to convert were already Christians?but they were Roman Catholic, an anathema to Protestant George. Indians attended his services, but would periodically return to visit the Catholic priest. Over the years, however, George did become more tolerant. “By the 1850s,” Gray notes, “George has mellowed enough to have a semi- friendly relationship with a Catholic priest.”

Home at the Old Wing Mission for the Smiths and their by then three young children was a small, unfinished cabin without shelves or cupboards, crammed with trunks, two beds, chairs, and a table. Although they had been promised help in constructing a house, money was scarce, supplies were inadequate, and the succession of people who served as interpreters and helpers all too often turned out to be drunken or lazy. George frequently traveled, leaving Arvilla alone with the children, with no friends and little food. On her thirty-first birthday, November 27, 1839, Arvilla writes: “How many changes have taken place. Ten years ago, I knew not the cares of a Mother. Then I was in my native land, one of ten children, all situated near one another. Now a thousand miles separate some of us. I with my family of three children and husband are acting in the capacity of Missionaries of the cross of Christ. Not a family [is] within five miles of [here].”

In1842, Arvilla suffered a miscarriage. Four days afterwards, George hopes that “she may recover soon” as “I do most of the housework.” Then he muses about artificially induced abortions: “Such people must be awfully guilty.” Arvilla, on the other hand, writes, “[I] was obliged to take care of my family from the third day and from necessity have done more than I have been able as there has been no one in doors or out to do any thing [but my?] husband.”

By 1845, Arvilla had lost three prematurely born infants, as well as one of her favorite children, little Esther Eliza, who died from an infection. Indeed, of the ten Smith children, only four survived to adulthood.

By 1847, Dutch settlers moved into the land around Old Wing and began taking over Indian property and land, seizing the opportunity when the Ottawa left on one of their seasonal hunting-gathering expeditions. Bowing to the inevitable, the Ottawa sold their land to the Dutch and moved, along with the Smith family, to the Leelanau Peninsula. There George and Arvilla stayed the rest of their lives, devoting themselves to one band of Ottawa and teachings and preaching to both Indians and white settlers.

Despite her arduous life and many serious illnesses, Arvilla lived to age 87, publishing her reminiscences in the Grand Travers Herald in 1892. In them, George does not come out well. Arvilla has a lot of scores to settle, and presents herself as dependent for happiness only on God. Gray admits that George was not lovable, although he was sincerely fond of his children. “He was zealot, with massive energy and high principles.”

One of George's great sins, in Arvilla’s eyes, was marrying their daughter Mary Jane, not yet sixteen years of age, to a young Ottawa, Payson Wolfe. “It seems to have been a love match,” Gray says. Wolfe had grown up at Old Wing and was educated at the mission school. Moreover, he was a baptized Christian and was a nephew of the chief. It would have been against George’s principles, and impolitic besides, to deny the couple their wedding. “George was quite liberal on race,” Gray believes. “He tried to show that Indians could be as civilized as white people. Not marrying them would have given the lie to this belief.”

It is interesting to note that after Arvilla’s death, her half-Indian granddaughter published a tribute to her Yankee grandfather. In this instance, Arvilla is the one who does not come out well.

Gray says that Arvilla and George’s marriage has to be put into historical context. The so-called companionate marriage was the nineteenth-century ideal. Men were superior to women in terms of legal advantages, but they were not supposed to be tyrants. “Each sex had a separate and equal sphere,” Gray explains. “Neither was whole without the other.” Woman’s place was in the home; her place was private. Man lived in the world.

Arvilla never wanted to be a missionary, but her duty was to accompany her husband into the wilderness. In recompense for this loyalty, George’s obligation was to protect and care for his wife and children. “Arvilla indicates in her writings, often indirectly, that he failed to live up to his part of the bargain,” says Gray.

Arvilla’s and George’s journals give a rich picture of the period, including life on the frontier, how the Indians adapted to white society, and the story of a marriage. “Every time I work on a facet of it,” Gray says, “I see other pieces that have to be investigated. And all in all, this really is a ripping good yarn.”

Ellen Marsh is a freelance writer in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Susan Gray, assistant professor in the department of history at Arizona State University in Tempe, has received an Endowment grant to research the diaries of George and Arvilla Smith.