entrusted her care to traditional healers. Their prescriptions reportedly helped little and after she had a severe hemorrhage in her lungs they sent for the missionaries. A week later, Dr. Campbell arrived but her condition was very grave. He had Catharine transported to his home so she would be under constant care. Her mother and sister joined her on the journey by litter, canoe and carriage. On the morning of July 18, 1823, Catharine Brown died at Dr. Campbell’s home. He was said to remark upon her death, “Thus fell asleep this lovely saint, in the arms of her Savior". Impact and legacy After her death, the missionaries at Brainerd commissioned Rufus Anderson to compile a biographical article for Catharine to be included in their magazine, the Missionary Herald. However, so much material was uncovered that the American Board had a book length work published called Memoir of Catharine Brown, A Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation. While the work exalted the efforts of missionaries to spread the virtues of Christianity to the American Indian, it also suggested that the same work had erased almost all of Catharine’s Cherokee identity. In the following years, Catharine’s writings were used in political debates about removing the Cherokees and other tribes to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. She was once viewed by literary critics as a victim of early Christian missionaries who, by conversion, became a tragedy because of the loss of her identity. However, as time passed she began to be viewed as a woman representing the lasting revitalization, survival, adaptability and leadership of the Cherokee culture as a whole. Later collections of her letters and diary cemented Catharine’s place in early nineteenth-century culture and have had an enduring effect on American perceptions of Native Americans. Letters and works The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818-1823 by Catharine Brown, edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul part of the series Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Series published by the University of Nebraska Press 2014, References 1800 births 1823 deaths Cherokee Nation people (1794–1907) American Christian missionaries Schoolteachers from Alabama People from Marshall County, Alabama 19th-century American educators 19th-century American women educators Christian missionaries in the United States Female Christian missionaries Missionary educators 19th-century Native Americans 19th-century Native American women