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Before the automobile or airplane, Sheldon Jackson managed to log nearly one million miles from 1858 to 1908, primarily west of the Mississippi, as he served his Presbyterian denomination and the United States. Along the way, the five-foot, four-inch missionary managed to get a few things done:

He organized the first Presbyterian churches in Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Arizona, and Alaska (leaving 77,105 new communicants in his wake), and he started 53 schools in Alaska. He founded Westminster College in Salt Lake City in 1895, started two newspapers (the Rocky Mountain Presbyterian and Sitka's North Star), and organized an Alaska Society of Natural History and Ethnology in Sitka. Sheldon Jackson College (Presbyterian), also in Sitka, bears his name.

"I have never seen him idle for a moment," wrote fellow traveler Alice Palmer Henderson. "He never hurries but just persists." Even through setbacks—poor health, one arrest and two legal trials—he persisted. Sheldon Jackson ranks as perhaps the most remarkable and controversial American missionary in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Jackson's whirlwind life began quietly on May 18, 1834, in Minaville, upstate New York. His parents were staunch Presbyterians. He graduated from Union College in 1855, and in 1857, while studying at Princeton Theological Seminary, he wrote, "It was to be [for] the mission service that I was dedicated in infant baptism."

After graduation, he married Mary Voorhees and immediately applied to the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board to go overseas. The board turned him down, claiming he was not physically strong enough, and instead asked him to teach Choctaw boys in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). After 12 months of unpleasant duties and three bouts of malaria, he resigned.

Jackson next ministered to immigrants in La Crescent, Minnesota, then served as a Union Army chaplain during the Civil War, and then led a church in Rochester, Minnesota. But none of these fields could hold him. One of Jackson's friends said he could not resist "running ahead of the crowd, climbing a hill, scaling a mountain, following a valley, opening a schoolhouse … constantly searching out the land."

His pioneering desires were fueled for a lifetime at a presbytery meeting in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1869. There, atop Prospect Hill, he had a vision of missionary service that spanned the West. Believing that the church must keep pace with the waves of people crashing westward, Jackson convinced the denomination to appoint him superintendent for Iowa, Nebraska, Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah—some 571,000 square miles. (Iowa, Nebraska, and Dakota were soon assigned to other missionaries, while Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona were later added to Jackson's responsibilities.) Though there was no money to pay him or to fund construction of churches, he accepted the position and began touring by rail and stagecoach.

Jackson and his family had lived on a meager income for years. Rather than complain, Jackson raised support by soliciting money from friends and fellow Presbyterians, much to the consternation of mission board officials. In his first two years as superintendent of the West, he raised $10,000 for the church-planting work.

In his first year, Jackson started 22 churches and traveled 29,000 miles, primarily through Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Nebraska. His journeys were long and arduous. He once spent four straight days and nights in a bumpy stagecoach, sleeping on a 4-and-a-half-foot board. Sometimes he rode with a shotgun on his knees for fear of Indian attack. According to his first biographer, friend Robert Laird Stewart, 12 revolvers once pointed at him during a stagecoach robbery, and, on another journey over the mountains, he had to jump from a carriage to escape plunging with it over a cliff.

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