John Dunbar

While nothing standing remains, the Pawnee Mission was located right here, next to modern-day Council Creek.

John Dunbar (1804–1857) was a missionary who tried to Christianize the Pawnee Indians of Nebraska during the 1830s–1840s.

Early life Born in Palmer, Massachusetts, John Dunbar grew up in the fertile cultural soil of western New England. The Connecticut River Valley was a region awash with revivalistic evangelical religion and the zeal for social reform, much as the more well-known Burned-over district of Western New York. Indeed, Dunbar grew up in the shadow of missionary endeavor. He attended Williams College, where the 1806 Haystack Prayer Meeting took place, the birthplace of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the symbolic origin of the entire antebellum missionary movement.

Heading West Dunbar continued his education at Andover Theological Seminary, even as he began considering the cause of missions. He graduated and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1834 and left for the western frontier that same year under the authority of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He was joined on the journey by Samuel Parker and an assistant missionary, Samuel Allis. Their original aim had been to go farther West and minister to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, known at the time as the Flatheads. In St. Louis, the missionaries changed their minds, and Parker headed back to New England, though he would go on to fame as a missionary to Oregon. Allis and the Dunbars continued to work sporadically with the Pawnees from Bellevue until 1841, when the missionaries built their own lodgings not far from the Pawnees' main village nearby modern-day Fullerton, Nebraska, in rural Nance County. A small settlement of white settlers developed around the mission, as treaty-appointed blacksmiths, teachers and farmers arrived to assist the Pawnee on the federal dime. Factionalism soon divided the American settlement, based in part upon disagreements about how to resolve Pawnee-white disputes. Dunbar and Allis largely supported the Pawnees' perspectives during these disagreements, worsening the factionalism but allowing the missionaries to maintain warm relations with the Pawnees. Nonetheless, none of the Pawnees were particularly drawn to the Christian message. Dunbar's efforts had come up empty and the growing threat of Lakota raids in the region forced the missionaries to flee the mission in 1846.