Faith Martin
Faith Martin enjoys nothing more than reading history, especially biographies. She taught English in public schools before serving as executive director of the Reformed Presbyterian Home for thirty-six years. She has traveled to China, Africa, and Europe, and her family lived for a time in Germany before settling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she and her husband now live in retirement.
Featured book
The White Chief of Cache Creek
The White Chief of Cache Creek begins in 1889 when William Work Carithers leaves his comfortable home in western Pennsylvania to become a missionary to the Indians of southwestern Oklahoma. He has two well-defined goals in mind: he wants to bring Christianity to the Indians, and at the same time he wants to help them gain skills necessary to survive in the White culture that is about to envelop them. He is racing against the clock, because the US government has decided to open Indian reservations to White settlement.
His hopes are fulfilled to a remarkable degree. He establishes Cache Creek Mission in the center of the Kiowa–Comanche–Apache Reservation. Important Comanche Chiefs are converted, and the church grows in influence. Carithers is able to win the confidence of the Indians and government agents in time to play a significant role in the allotment of choice land around the mission. But, as it turns out, he has only twelve years before White settlement comes crashing into the reservation; its effect upon the Indian way of life is devastating.
Twelve years was too brief a time to accomplish all that he had dreamed, and at the end of his life, when the once successful mission begins to falter, we listen as Carithers assesses just what has been accomplished.
Robert WuthnowHaving lived in neighboring Kansas and known people like the pioneering missionaries described in this book, I was fascinated with the details captured here….a story that is well worth remembering.
Professor of sociology, Princeton University, author of What Happens When We Practice Religion
William J. EdgarThoroughly researched and clearly written, The White Chief of Cache Creek tells how God, who made all peoples from one, sent a preacher in answer to a defeated Comanche Chief’s prayer to the sun. The sweat, love, loneliness, faith, pain, and hope of this frontier mission will stay with you.
author, History of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America 1871-1920
Matthew StewartThis is an inspiring and poignant story of God's work in the lives of wise and courageous missionaries and faithful Indian converts walking the "Jesus Road" together during an era of intense turmoil and drastic change. Readers will be challenged and edified by this powerful history.
associate editor, Front Porch Republic
Gordon J. KeddieWhat a treat this wonderful book is! Beautifully written and an accessible and easy read, it is both a scrupulously honest and totally engrossing account of the Reformed Presbyterian Indian Mission to the Comanche–Kiowa–Apache Reservation near Fort Sill in what is now Oklahoma.…You have to get this book.
author, retired pastor
Jonathan WattThis story beckons you with an engrossing account of God’s tender reach toward indigenous Americans during a tumultuous juncture in the US's history.
professor of sociology and anthropology, Geneva College and Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary, pastor
Barry YorkJust as the sons of Abraham number as the stars, so do their stories. In this meticulously researched and well-written account of Reformed Presbyterian mission work among Native American tribes in Oklahoma, Faith Martin (based on earlier work done by Charles McBurney) brings alive the incredible tale of one such shining star.…Read with fascination and benefit The White Chief of Cache Creek!
president, the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary