George Warren Wood Jr

G. W. Wood Jr. was born in 1844^[1] in Turkey ^[2] as his father was a missionary there. After graduating from Hamilton College in Upstate New York in 1865,^[3] he taught and pursued advanced studies at the college of the City of New York.^[4] He graduated from Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1869.^[5]

Rev. Wood, Jr became ordained as a Presbyterian pastor in the Saginaw Presbytery^[6] and domestic missionary for the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions in Au Sable and Oscoda in January 1872.^[7] He married Harriet Snyder in May 1872 in Iosco County^[8] and then arrived in Charlevoix, Michigan in late November 1872^[9] to be appointed a Home Missionary in that place in 1873.^[10][11] Wood, Jr. ministered in Charlevoix, Michigan, and Bear River, Michigan, from January 1874^[12] to 1879.^[13][4] During 1877–1879, he worked as a colporteur in the same region (reaching mainly homesteaders throughout Emmet County and Charlevoix County)^[14] for the American Bible Society rather than for the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions.^[15] Wood, Jr. had been a lifetime member of the ABS since at least 1873.^[16]

He was a missionary at the Dakota Mission (Fort Peck/Wolf Point)^[17][18] from 1879^[19]-1889.^[1][20] The first Presbyterian presence on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation began when Wood worked with the Native American (primarily Assiniboine and Sioux) population in 1881 and established a mission day school for children in 1883 on the north bank of the Missouri River, about three-quarters of a mile from present-day Wolf Point.^[21] During Wood's tenure in Montana, the natives grappled with the establishment of Camp Poplar River by the 11th Infantry, construction of the Montana Central Railway (later known as the Great Northern Railway), arrival of white settlers, US bans on the Sun Dance and other cultural practices, extinction of the Buffalo in northeast Montana, and starvation during extremely harsh winters. In 1884, Wood oversaw a mission that was suffering from extreme poverty and starvation, and the Indian Rights Association convinced Congress to make a special appropriation.^[22] From 1885 to Montana Statehood in 1889, the tribes associated with Wood in the Dakota Mission participated in agreements with the US government to re-drawing the boundaries of the Fort Peck reservation in exchange for federal subsidies.^[23] The Presbyterian community he started there became "Union Church" in 1914 and celebrated its centennial in 2014 as "First Presbyterian Church" in Wolf Point.