Dr Ernest Gustav Herman Miesslerdocumented
Missionary to the Ojibwe, then physician
- Born
- 12 January 1826, Reichenbach, Silesia
- Died
- 1 March 1916, Chicago, Illinois
- Buried
- Wunder's Cemetery, Chicago
The famous one, and not a direct ancestor. He is listed on Friedrich Theodore's memorial as his brother, which makes him a great-great-great-granduncle of the present generation rather than a grandfather of it.<span class="tag high">documented</span>
He sailed in 1851 as a student, not an ordained pastor — designated as assistant to E. R. Baierlein and sent by the Dresden Mission Society, the Saxon confessional body that later moved to Leipzig. He was not a Löhe man and did not train at Neuendettelsau.<span class="tag high">documented</span>
When Baierlein left for India in 1853 he was left running the Bethany mission alone at twenty-seven. He held its first Communion service that Christmas.<span class="tag high">documented</span>
His wife Johanna Pinkepank died in 1857, aged twenty-six, and is buried at Bethany Indian Cemetery — the only white woman there. An infant son is buried beside her.<span class="tag high">documented</span>
The synod recalled him in 1869. He left the ministry, studied medicine in his forties, and spent the rest of his long life as a physician in Chicago. His daughter Minna died at seventeen and lies with him.<span class="tag high">documented</span>
Bethany, and where it actually was
The mission stood in Bethany Township, Gratiot County, Michigan, on the Pine River. It is frequently and wrongly placed at Sebewaing, which was a separate Lutheran Chippewa mission in Huron County. The confusion has a mundane cause: the standard devotional history of the mission was published in Sebewaing, and a publication place got read as an event place. This record has made that error before and corrects it here.documented
The part the family story leaves out
The mission did not operate on neutral ground. The Saginaw Chippewa were pushed to Isabella County under the Treaties of Detroit of 1855 and 1864. When Miessler followed them there and built his log church, he was following a forced relocation.documented
The Anishinaabe account of that period belongs to the people who lived it, and it is kept by the Ziibiwing Center of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. Anyone reading this page should read theirs.
He was not much good at it
The devotional literature treats him as a pioneer. The standard scholarly history of Lutheran mission work among American Indians does not. Keiser, writing in 1922, refers to “the regrettable lack of vision and initiative on the part of Miessler,” and records that converts petitioned the mission board to have him removed. The synod recalled him in 1869 and he took a call from a white congregation instead.documented
The mission's own converts asked for a different man. That is in the record, and a family site that prints the 1851 sailing date but not this one is not telling the truth about it.
What he did next
He left the ministry, studied medicine in his forties, and practised in Chicago until he died in 1916 at ninety.documented It is the strangest turn in the family's history and almost nothing is known about it — not the school, not the kind of practice. His own account of his life exists, published in 1979 from a typescript translated by one of his grandsons, and it has never been digitised.