"She Gave Us The Jesus Way":
Isabel Crawford, the Kiowa People, and
the Saddle Mountain Indian Baptist Church

Clyde Ellis

At the east end of the Saddle Mountain Indian Baptist
Church cemetery near Mountain View, Oklahoma, there
is a modest granite grave marker bearing the inscription
"I Dwell Among Mine Own People." The tombstone and
its message are not out of place in this isolated cemetery,
where rows of stones bear witness to the power of the
Christian gospel carried by missionaries to the Kiowa-
Comanche-Apache Reservation in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Numerous crosses, small
American flags, piles of artificial flowers, and small
bundles of tobacco laid on the graves confirm that this is
sacred and powerful space, for it is here that part of the
collective memory of the Kiowa people has been laid to
rest during the last century.

But the marker bearing the inscription "I Dwell Among
Mine Own People" does not memorialize a Kiowa; it
celebrates the remarkable life of Isabel Crawford, a
Canadian who arrived at the reservation in 1893 as a
twenty-eight-year-old missionary. By the time of her
departure in 1906, Crawford had not only overseen the
creation of a flourishing church, she had endured a life-
changing experience. Although she lived another fifty-
five years, her work at Saddle Mountain remained the
indelible moment in her life and in the lives of the Kiowa
people with whom she shared thirteen extraordinary
years. She never forgot them and in 1906 declared that

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