Background
Jotham Meeker was born on November 8, 1804 in Hamilton County, Ohio.
Jotham Meeker was born on November 8, 1804 in Hamilton County, Ohio.
Meeker trained in youth as a printer in Cincinnati.
Meeker became a Baptist missionary to the Indians in 1825 serving as teacher and preacher among the Potawatomi, the Ottawa, and later the Chippewa or Ojibway, at missions in what is now Michigan. He mastered the closely related languages of the three tribes and, while at a mission at Sault Sainte Marie in 1832, began his experiments in using the characters of the English alphabet to create an orthography for writing the Indian languages. In 1833 he was ordered to remove to the newly created Indian Territory and to take printing equipment with him. In October 1833 he arrived at the new Shawnee Mission, just beyond the western boundary of Missouri and near the present Kansas City, Kan. On March 8, 1834, he did the first printing in what is now Kansas, in the form of a leaflet containing the text of a hymn in Shawnee. The first book printed in the territory, a twenty-four-page primer in the Delaware language, he completed on March 21. In May 1837 he moved to a mission of his own, among his old charges, the Ottawa, near the present city of Ottawa, Kansas. There for eighteen years he devoted himself to the temporal and spiritual welfare of his Indians, upholding and guiding them in drought, flood, fire, pestilence, and famine, and helping them to become, before his death, a fairly well organized and self-respecting agricultural community. He was their preacher, teacher, physician, banker, broker, and attorney, their model and instructor in farming, building, and other basic industries of frontier life, and, above all, their friend in whom they learned to have unshakable confidence. In 1849 he took the mission printing plant to Ottawa and for a time resumed printing, producing among a few other things a code of the Ottawa tribal laws in the native language and in English. He died at the Ottawa mission.
Meeker was an early advocate of printing native languages and developed an orthography enabling use of standard types.
The diary that Meeker kept reveals him as a practical person not given to expressions of sentiment, devout in his earlier years but toward the close of his life much more a man of practical interests than a missionary, an earnest, honest, sincere man, devoted to his work, with tenacious will advancing in the face of discouragements and reverses and in spite of the handicap of a slight physique and recurring illness.
Quotes from others about the person
Jotham Meeker's influence among the Indians can be seen in the obituary notice that was printed in the Missionary Magazine: "His probity and his interested concern won the most confiding affection of the people. They looked up to him as a father and consulted him on all national concerns; and so single was their trust in him, that they would not receive their money from the government till he had first counted it. "
In September 1830 Meeker married Eleanor Richardson, a fellow teacher at the Ottawa Indian mission on Grand River. They had three children.