Hymn. The Indian's Prayer

[Boston]: Shepley & Wright, Printers, Congress Street, 1835. Broadside, 8.75 x 5.25 inches. Ample margins, but unevenly trimmed along bottom edge. Otherwise light wear. Near fine. A nice example of a scarce broadside song sheet once attributed to William Apess, a Pequot Methodist minister, though it was in fact written by British Methodist emigre to Nova Scotia. This is the first separate printing of the song, arranged in three five-stave musical notation followed by the lyrics printed in five six-line stanzas. The song itself is focused squarely on Native American religious conversion; the note just below the title reads: "Religion -- the pure religion of the BIBLE -- is the same in substance, where it was received into the humble mind, -- among untutored Indians, as among the most civilized of our race. See, in the following Hymn, the 'inside heart,' of a truly penitent Indian, who had embraced the gospel with his whole soul." The tune became a standard in the Methodist Church in the ensuing years, with early generations believing it was written by Apess because of its publication in the 1831 second edition of Apess's autobiography A Son of the Forest. It had actually been published first twenty years earlier, in Cowdell's The Nova Scotia Minstrel. Despite its misunderstood origins, the song itself lived on in Methodist hymnals and even in publications by the assimilationist Carlisle Indian School. Of additional interest to American printing historians, the broadside is one of the few surviving products of the short-lived Boston printing firm of Shepley & Wright.