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numbering a shiftin, restless population of 1,500,000. Episcopalians
were virtually unknown in much of the territory.

Seeing the challenge as "the duty next me" and feeling his health
now equal to rigors of frontier travel, Polk accepted. In the
first eighteen months he spent with his family which now included
three of the eight children which finally completed the group. Of
the six girls and two boys, all but the first and last had children
of their own. The Leonidas Polk descendents are numerous and the
collateral relatives countless.

He made only two trips (1839 and 1844) through the whole area,
another, in 1842, omitting Texas. His recommendations were answered
by election s in 1844 of Nicholas Hamner Cobbs in Alabama and George
Washington Freeman in Arkansas. However, in Mississippi William
Mercer Green was not elected until 1850 and poor Texas, making four
unsuccessful efforts to call a bishop, had to wait until 1859 for
the start of Alexander Gregg's admirable work. Between 1841, when
Polk was elected first bishop of Louisiana, and 1844, when the first
help arrived, he remained defacto {sic} head of the original vast charge.

Polk's missionary work was probably as effective as it could
have been. The congregations he started survived. For instance,
Christ Church, Matagorda, (1838), Christ Church, Houston, (1839),
and Trinity, Galveston (1840), formed the nucleus around which
Freeman of Arkansas built the diocese of Texas. Polk's magnetic
personality and powerful demeanor made lasting impressions. In his