In October, 1800, he resigned his pastorship at Blandford and received a regular dismissal. The Connecticut Missionary Society, whose central office was at Hartford, had formed a high estimate of the character and piety of Rev. Joseph Badger, and at once tendered him the appointment to go, under the auspices of the society, as a missionary to the Western Reserve. This was the kind of Christian labor in which he preferred to engage. He therefore accepted the appointment; and leaving his family at home until he could explore somewhat his new field of service, he took his departure on horseback, Nov. 15, 1800, bound for the Western Reserve. He took what was then called the southern route, crossed the Alleghany mountains in the midst of a snow-storm, and after a weary journey, arrived at Pittsburgh on the 14th of December. Here he rested for a day or two, and then resumed his "journey through the wilderness," and after a weary ride of nearly a hundred miles, reached Youngstown, one of the earliest settlements in the Reserve, on Saturday night at a late hour, and was kindly received. The next day he preached at Youngstown his first sermon in the Reserve. The town at that time consisted of some half-dozen log cabins. His audience included nearly every soul in town, though but a handful, who had assembled in one of the larger cabins, and who seemed pleased to receive from his lips "the good tidings of great joy." Gratified with his reception at Youngstown, and resolving to lose no time in expediting his missionary labors, he rode the next day to Vienna, where but one family had settled; thence to Hartford, where but three families had settled, and thence to Vernon, where he found but five families. In making these successive visits he did good work. While at Vernon he was informed that Mr. Palmer, the head of the family settled at Vienna, had been taken suddenly sick and was not expected to live. There was no doctor residing in all that region of country. Rev. Mr. Badger hastened at once to the relief of the sick man, and nursed him for eight days, when he so far recovered that his providential nurse could safely leave him. In this way Rev. Mr. Badger visited, in the course of the year 1801, every settlement and nearly every family throughout the Western Reserve. In doing this he often rode from five to twenty-five or thirty miles a day, carrying with him in saddlebags a scanty supply of clothing and eatables, and often traversing pathless woodlands amid storms and tempests, swimming unbridged rivers, and suffering from cold and hunger, and at the same time here and there visiting lone families, giving them and their children religious instruction and wholesome advice, and preaching at points wherever a few could be gathered together, sometimes in a log cabin or in a barn, and sometimes in the open field or in a woodland, beneath the shadows of the trees. At about this time he preached the first sermon ever heard in Cleveland.