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"Our Mission To The Indians": An Account Of A Danish Immigrant Church's Mission To The Cherokee Indians In 1892, John Mark Nielsen

The Bridge

On April 1, 1892, a letter by Detlev Leerskov appeared in Kirkebladet, the church newspaper of the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church Association in America, otherwise known to Danish immigrants as the Blair Church. Leerskov, who had emigrated from Denmark ten years earlier, married a Cherokee woman, and settled among the Cherokee in what was then Indian Territory, wrote to tell the readers of Kirkebladet how he had received a copy of their paper from his brother in Hutchinson, Minnesota, and that this had been "the first Christian reading in the Danish language" that he had seen in ten years. Moreover, …