NOTES IN THE SADDLE.
BY FIELD-SUPERINTENDENT C. J. RYDER.
I have no extended missionary trip to report this month, as the schools of the Association are closed, and the church work is somewhat quiet this season of the year.
A run into Ohio, to assist in the ordination of Rev. J. F. Cross, who goes as a missionary among the Sioux Indians, may, however, legitimately furnish a basis for “Notes in the Saddle.” A good New England friend recently asked, in all seriousness, if there really were a horse belonging to the A. M. A., or whether I hired one, from time to time, as the occasion demanded? What a wild Tam O’Shanter ride it would be from Washington to Texas in four or five days! But such a ride, taken once or twice a year, would only cover a small portion of the field of the Association. Here on the west is the work among the Indians, stretching from Santa Fé, New Mexico, away up to Dakota. The A. M. A. has schools and churches all along the line. This Council in Ohio gave its commission to a new harvester going out into this field.
Mr. Cross is a graduate of Adelbert College, Cleveland, and of Yale Theological Seminary. He has had somewhat peculiar preparation for the missionary work upon which he now enters, through experience gained in home missionary fields. He enters upon this new work with his eyes open, fully appreciating its hardships. He will be located at Park Street Station, among the Blanket Sioux. Three villages, containing some 8,000 Indians, will constitute his parish. His work will include school teaching and almost every form of religious service. His nearest missionary neighbor will be at Rosebud Agency, sixty-five miles away. In 1885 an old building was purchased from the natives, and in 1886 a new building was erected, the Park Street Church, Boston, contributing the funds. This building is not a modern parsonage, with hot and cold water, gas, furnace, and all the luxuries with which many churches delight to furnish their pastor’s home. This parsonage of the prairie is a log building, with shingle roof, containing two rooms; and yet it answers the purpose for which it was built well. A native missionary with Christian passion for his people, has gone into this field already. Brother Cross follows Jacob Good Dog, who was the Boniface in this pioneer missionary work. In a letter written by Francis Frazier, who is the son of Rev. Artemus Ehnamani, the Indian pastor, there is the following pleading petition for his people: “Thus God has blessed this people; and that God will give them understanding to go on to comprehend His laws, and that they may believe and have faith in Him, when you pray will you remember them?” This tender and passionate appeal for the Indians gains additional emphasis by the going out of a new missionary to this field.
The churches and pastors of Ohio I found were greatly stirred up by the proposed outrages against our missionaries and teachers in Georgia. Cordial words were spoken on every side in endorsement of the A. M. A., and in condemnation of the un-Christian and un-American attempts to violate personal liberty and freedom of conscience under the flimsy pretense of legal right. A tremendous Republican uprising will follow this attempt on the part of Georgia to introduce again the policy of suppression and inhumanity that had its culmination, years ago, in the cruelties of the prison stockade of Andersonville. The thumb screw and rack and chain-gang as instruments for the suppression of freedom of opinion, are things of the past, and no feeble attempt to legalize them can be permanently successful in this land to-day.
Sad news just reaches us from Texas of the defeat of the prohibitory amendment to the State constitution. Ignorant Mexicans were brought over the border to vote for rum, and so overcame the honest vote of the Christian and moral people of the State. Jefferson Davis, after permitting a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, who was more enthusiastic than patriotic, to pin a silver badge of that society upon his coat in evidence of the esteem in which this prohibition society held him, wrote a letter to the people in Texas denouncing the prohibitory movement. Mr. Davis’ prohibition seems much like his patriotism, “conspicuous for its absence.”