Excerpt from Jesse Walker, Pioneer Preacher

Gathering material and information on Jesse Walker has been a difficult assignment. All I had to go on before were generalities, hearsay, and a couple of things I was able to uncover in our church office. He appears to have been well known among his friends and personal acquaintances; and mention is made of him in the Will County History. It seems though that Rev. Walker was a modest man who didn't spend much time trying to immortalize himself. Much has been written about him, but sparingly and this is somewhat hard to trace. Men of lesser fame have written their own stories, but it seems Jesse Walker never did and, if indeed he did, it has since been lost to us. Also, his trail is difficult to follow for he covered a great deal of territory during his pioneer ministry on the frontier. Frontiers are not known for their newspapers, nor for giving people the time to read and write things like journals or diaries. Jesse Walker's frontier was no different. We must remember too that he lived here about one hundred and fifty years ago and time has a way of making the past appear dimand distant. So, when preparing this manuscript it was under these difficulties and drawbacks that I labored; I only hope that the end result will not disappoint you too much.

In this paper on the life and career of the Rev. Jesse Walker I will draw largely on a few limited, but original sources and writings. We have access to personal accounts of Walker by John Scripps and the Bishop Thomas A. Morris, who both traveled many long and weary miles with him in the wilderness. I also use the work of the Rev. Stephen R. Beggs, who quotes from a manuscript which may have been prepared by Walker himself and later lost, and he adds information of his own that he got firsthand from Jesse Walker during their four or five year association here in northern Illinois when Walker was by then in his latter years. Peter Cartwright, who was also very famous in his own right, was a close, personal friend of Walker's and he leaves us some, brief information of him. I draw on that relationship in this paper. The Rev. A. D. Field, a Methodist historian of the Rock River Conference, followed closely on Walker's career, especially in Chicago, and he leaves us some information and later material which I use here. There have been references made to Walker also'by others who knew him, but they are rather small, brief, and scattered and not really of too much use to me in this endeavor.

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