Julius H. Rubin, a historical sociologist, describes Pershing Heathens: Stories of Protestant Missionaries and Christian Indians in Antebellum America as the culmination of his long career studying and writing about evangelical American Protestant culture, especially religious melancholia. Perishing Heathens, which deals with many of the same themes as his previous works, “recounts the stories of missionary men and women in the period from 1800–1830 who responded to the call to save perishing heathens” in missions to the Osage, Cherokee, and Ojibwe (1). He also provides case studies of native responses to these evangelical Protestant missions. Rubin argues that “the lives of these missionary men and women and Native neophytes offer compelling stories of religious vocation, millennial expectations, and agonizing failure” (2).

The book's structure follows Rubin's dual focus on missionaries and Native American converts: the first three chapters provide vignettes about the missionaries while the last three chapters focus on Native Americans who converted to Christianity. Chapter 1 covers David and Alice Bacon, who worked for the Connecticut Missionary Society among the Ojibwe in Michigan. Chapter 2 tells the story of “Miss D,” who proselytized to the Osage in Arkansas Territory and ended up in a private asylum for the insane in Connecticut. The final missionary chapter compresses the stories of multiple missionaries working around the globe to investigate the “endless chain of religious intelligence” that “inspired many readers to dedicate their lives to the cause of extending the light of the Gospel to the darkness of perishing heathens” (75). Despite the missionary propaganda covered in chapter 3—which promoted a heroic vision of missionary work—the first two chapters highlight disease, mental illness, disappointment, and failure as key themes of antebellum missionary endeavors. In other words: “The lived experiences [of missionaries] did not conform to the romanticized accounts that first drew them to this religious vocation and adventure” (75).

The final three chapters provide vignettes of Osage, Cherokee, and Ojibwe converts. The author admits that these converts were the exception rather than the rule; during the antebellum period, very few Native Americans converted to Christianity (162). Chapter 4 continues Rubin's theme of religious melancholia and the psychological stresses of missionization through the story of “K,” an eighteen-year-old Osage who was involuntarily committed to a New England asylum for the insane. His incarceration followed “cycles of religious mania and melancholy,” which occurred during his time at the Cornwall School, a mission school for indigenous peoples in Connecticut (99). Chapter 5 covers several “mixed-race elite” Cherokee converts to Christianity, including Catharine Brown, her brother David, and Margaret Scott Van (Sister Margaret Ann). Finally, chapter 6 discusses Métis converts—especially Jane Johnston Schoolcraft—at the Mackinaw Mission.

All six chapters are short, readable, and offer interesting biographical and contextual information. Rubin is at his best illustrating American evangelical religious culture during the antebellum period and accurately captures its psychology, and especially its pathology, for both the missionaries and their native converts. Rubin's information on asylums and religious melancholia—his area of expertise—was especially strong. The author mainly relies on missionary sources and hagiographies of converts, which provides solid information on evangelical missionary culture. The author focuses on both male and female missionaries but could have offered further discussion of missionary women and how gender organized their experiences differently from men.

At the end of his chapter on the Osage convert “K,” Rubin summarizes my own main critique of his book. Rubin noted that, due to a lack of documents or statements from “K,” “we are left with a compelling story and many unanswered questions” (120). Many of his unanswered questions related to the second half of the book on native converts. While Rubin's first three missionary case studies were representative, his case studies of native converts were not. First, as the author himself notes, there were very few Indian converts. Second, those who converted to Christianity, like Henry Schoolcraft's wife Jane or Margaret Scott Van, were hardly representative of their tribes; rather, they were mixed-blood elites. The author also notes that the Christian converts were a “construction of the missionary imagination” (135). However, as “constructions,” the motivations and agendas of the converts remain elusive and leave many questions unanswered. Moreover, the author largely rejects historians like Theda Perdue who have argued that Cherokee converts integrated traditional spirituality and ceremonies into their practice of Christianity. His evidence for rejecting Perdue, however, comes from letters written by the neophytes to the missionaries, which may have been composed to reinforce what the missionaries wanted to hear. He also references materials from missionary hagiographies as evidence of converts' piety (130). Finally, most of the converts Rubin discusses were women. Similar to the chapters on missionaries, further consideration of issues related to gender would have strengthened his final chapters.

Rubin provides a clear account of antebellum evangelical Protestant culture that demanded the salvation of the “perishing heathens.” Each chapter could stand alone as a story that contributes to this theme. The Native American converts remain elusive, however, due to the sources consulted. These documents tell more about the missionaries and their religious culture than they do about the native converts themselves. As Rubin notes, stories about the native Christian converts served “as another link in the endless chain of missionary intelligence as a victory for those who devoted their lives to the project of redeeming perishing heathens” (161).