Johnston Lykins was a Baptist minister, teacher and self-taught doctor who worked with several American Indian tribes, including the Potawatomi, in Indiana, Michigan, Missouri and Kansas during the first half of the nineteenth century. He was a follower and son-in-law of the Baptist missionary to the Indians, Isaac McCoy.
Lykins joined the McCoy mission among the Wea in northern Indiana as a young man of 20 in 1819. He was hired as a schoolteacher. He was not a Christian, much less a missionary. The work was arduous; he spent more time getting supplies and running other errands required to keep the missions going than he did teaching school. He quit several times over the first several years but always came back.
McCoy moved his mission to Fort Wayne, home of the Miamis, in 1820. In late 1822, the little group moved again, this time founding the Carey Mission among the Potawatomi in Michigan. Lykins was baptized in that year and was appointed to the post of missionary by the Baptist Board of Missions for the United States. By 1824, Lykins was able to read religious discourses in Potawatomi. Although an additional mission working with the Ottawa on the Grand River was started later, the Carey Mission remained open and Lykins continued to serve there part of the time. Lykins married McCoy's daughter in 1828.
The Removal was well underway in 1831 when Lykins went west to found a mission in Missouri, near the Shawnee reservation. The McCoy group had begged the Baptist mission board for a printing press for some time, and finally received funding for their project to prepare reading materials in the various Native American languages. Jotham Meeker, another of McCoy's missionaries, brought the first printing press to Kansas in 1833. The printing operation was located at the Shawnee mission. Books in Delaware, Shawnee, Potawatomi and other native languages were rapidly put to work in missionary educational programs. Lykins was actively involved and edited the Sinwiowe Kesibwi (Shawnee Sun), a small newspaper published entirely in Shawnee.
From time to time throughout his career, Lykins was called upon to negotiate with tribal leaders on various matters, generally having to do with their leaving their homes and moving west. He was not very successful in these efforts. In 1841, he attempted to convince the Potawatomi residing in Council Bluffs to move to Kansas, to no avail.
His part-time medical career went better, at least for a time. He had no formal training, but medical training was often casual in those days. Faced by the desperate need of his Native American students and their families, who were succumbing to one disease after another, he read and did what he could.
He already had acheived a reputation as an effective physician when he first went to Missouri. There he was confronted by a smallpox epidemic on the Shawnee reservation and began a vaccination program. This simple and practical response hardly seems noteworthy to the modern reader, but it is always mentioned by Lykins' biographers. The conclusion that such vaccination programs were unusual is a sad one, and difficult to avoid.
In the spring of 1843, Lykins founded a mission among the Potawatomi, at a location near Topeka. In 1843, some of the Potawatomi requested that he be named their tribal physician, a government post that provided him with a salary that was necessary to support the mission. His appointment was opposed by the Jesuits and the Potawatomi allied with them, but was finally granted in 1844.
Today the restored mission, which was improved and expanded in later years, is a museum.
Lykins began a trade school at the mission in March, 1848; by September of 1851, attendance had grown to 90. Quarrels abounded between clergy of the different Christian religions and even clerics of the same faith. Lykins was an enthusiastic participant in these, and made many enemies. The criticism of his lack of medical credentials never let up and he was dismissed from his official post as Physician to the Potawatomi in 1851. He left the Potawatomi mission shortly thereafter. He served at his former post until it was closed in 1855. He then moved to Kansas City, to be near his son, and remained there until his death in 1876.
Johnston Lykins' translation of the Gospel of Saint Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles into Potawatomi was published in 1844 by Willam C. Buck's printing firm in Louisville, Kentucky. One of the rare copies is held by the Library of the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis. It is available on microfilm through the Interlibrary Loan Program.
