When the Cherokee Nation migrated from Georgia to the newly formed Indian Territory, John Fisher Wheeler, who had been head printer of the Cherokee Press at New Echota, proceeded to the Union Mission Station on the Grand River, near the present location of Mazie, Okla. There the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions supplied him with a new press on which in August 1835 he did the first Oklahoma printing. Wheeler had served his apprenticeship at Huntsville, Ala.[98]
One of two or three extant copies of the third recorded issue of Oklahoma's first press is present in the Library of Congress collections: _Istutsi in naktsokv. Or The Child's Book. By Rev. John Fleming. Missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions._ Printed before October 31, 1835, in an edition of 500 copies, it is a 24-page primer with text in the Creek language rendered in the Pickering alphabet and with woodcut illustrations of animals and other subjects. A Creek Indian named James Perryman or Pvhos Haco ("Grass Crazy") assisted with the translation.[99] Fleming's work among the Indians has earned for him a notice in the _Dictionary of American Biography_, where his "chief claim to remembrance" is said to be "that he was the first to reduce to writing the Muskoki or Creek language, which was a task of peculiar difficulty on account of the numerous and puzzling combinations of consonants involved."
The Library of Congress obtained the rare copy of its earliest Oklahoma imprint through the Smithsonian Deposit (see p. 52, above) in 1878.
[Footnote 98: See Lester Hargrett, _Oklahoma Imprints 1835-1890_ (New York, 1951), p. ix-x, 1-2.]
[Illustration: Du Buque Visitor. "TRUTH OUR GUIDE, THE PUBLIC GOOD OUR AIM." VOL. I. DU BUQUE (LEAD MINES) WISCONSIN TERRITORY, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 1837. NO. 37]
The initial issue of the weekly _Du Buque Visitor_, dated May 11, 1836, is the oldest example of Iowa printing. John King, the first proprietor of this four-page newssheet, acquired the press on which it was printed at Chillicothe, Ohio. He employed William Cary Jones of Chillicothe to "perform the duties of foreman in the printing office ... and likewise such other duties in superintending the publication of the newspaper as may be required,"[100] and he employed the Virginia-born printer Andrew Keesecker, lately of Galena, Ill., to be the principal typesetter.