Daniel Sabin Butrick (or Buttrick) (August 25, 1789 – June 8, 1851) was commissioned in 1817 as a minister of the Word of God, in the service of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).
His effort to prove that the ancestors of the Cherokee were the lost ten tribes of Israel became an obsession to correct, or at least to spotlight, the injustices which the natives suffered at the hands of the Americans.
These relationships bring attention to the role which Cherokee Christians played in the creation of the John Howard Payne Papers while offering insight into the complexities of Butrick's engagement with the Indians as he undertook his project.
During this era, Butrick wrote with an emotional tone ranging from disillusionment and grief during the early 1840s (after the Trail of Tears) to a feeling of hopeful optimism that he had gained shortly before his death in 1851.
[3] "Indian Antiquities" refers specifically to the edited manuscript bearing that title in the John Howard Payne Papers of Chicago's Newberry Library.
Payne undertook the difficult work of compiling and editing Butrick's "Indian Antiquities", although they were not published until 160 years later, when his successors issued them as The Payne-Butrick Papers (2010).
[3][4][page needed][8][9] Twentieth-century author Thomas Mails's (1920–2001) observation about the ethnological material contained in "Indian Antiquities" provides a suitable transition into the importance of this topic.
Virtually every published book on the tribe mentions the manuscript in one way or another and in particular refers to its material on ancient festivals as the most voluminous and worthwhile extant.
Considering the many monographs that have contained Butrick's perspectives, it is ironic that he asked of John Howard Payne:[3] Please, let none of this manuscript go from your hands; and if you think it will, on the whole conduce to evil more than good, you will oblige me by burning the whole instead of publishing it.
[6]Butrick apparently did not appreciate the wealth of material his collaboration with Payne produced, nor the importance it would hold for future generations of academic researchers.