BYINGTON, Cyrus, missionary among the Indian: b. at Stockbridge, Mass., 11 March 1793; d. Belpre, Ohio, 31 Dec. 1868. His early educational advantages were limited, but in his youth he was taken into the home of Joseph Woodbridge in his native town, under whose tuition he studied Latin and Greek and with whom he afterward read law. He was ad mitted to the bar in 1814 and began to prac tice, but soon after entered the theological seminary at Andover, Mass., at which he grad uated in 1819. Having been ordained to the ministry, he entered the service of the Amer ican Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mis sions (Congregational) and was assigned labor among the Choctaw Indians in Mississippi. Journeying overland from Massachusetts to Pittsburgh, he descended the Ohio and Missis sippi rivers in a flatboat to the point nearest his destination. After working among the Choctaw people in Mississippi for a dozen years, he accompanied them on their westward migration to the Indian Territory, opening up and building a new mission station near Eagle town, in the southeastern part of the Choctaw Nation, which he named in honor of his native town — Stockbridge. His health failing, in
1851, he went to New York, but later returned and resumed his work among the Choctaw people, which he continued until the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to all mission ary enterprises in that section. Early in his missionary career he began to make an ex haustive study of the Choctaw language, a grammar of which was completed in 1834. He also compiled a Choctaw-English dictionary, upon the seventh revision of which he was en gaged at the time of his death, nearly half a century after the beginning of his missionary labors. This work, entitled "A Dictionary of the Choctaw Language," was issued as Bulle tin 46, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, in 1915.