When the Cherokee Nation migrated from Georgia to the newly formed Indian Territory, John Fisher Wheeler, who had been head printer of the Cherokee Press at New Echota, proceeded to the Union Mission Station on the Grand River, near the present location of Mazie, Okla. There the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions supplied him with a new press on which in August 1835 he did the first Oklahoma printing. Wheeler had served his apprenticeship at Huntsville, Ala.[98]

One of two or three extant copies of the third recorded issue of Oklahoma's first press is present in the Library of Congress collections: Istutsi in naktsokv. Or The Child's Book. By Rev. John Fleming. Missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Printed before October 31, 1835, in an edition of 500 copies, it is a 24-page primer with text in the Creek language rendered in the Pickering alphabet and with woodcut illustrations of animals and other subjects. A Creek Indian named James Perryman or Pvhos Haco ("Grass Crazy") assisted with the translation.[99] Fleming's work among the Indians has earned for him a notice in the Dictionary of American Biography, where his "chief claim to remembrance" is said to be "that he was the first to reduce to writing the Muskoki or Creek language, which was a task of peculiar difficulty on account of the numerous and puzzling combinations of consonants involved."

The Library of Congress obtained the rare copy of its earliest Oklahoma imprint through the Smithsonian Deposit (see p. 52, above) in 1878.