ADDRESS OF REV. THOMAS L. RIGGS.
It was said of Dr. Williamson by an old Indian that he had an Indian heart. I, too, have an Indian heart, and I can lay claim to that possession as but few can. It would take but a very little while to go from here into the very midst of our present Indian field. It took my father and Dr. Williamson, when they first entered the field, some six months to reach it. I could start to-morrow morning, and taking the cars in this city, and reaching Pierre by the following night, could be farther off by Saturday, farther from the border of the mission field, than my father and Dr. Williamson could after they had travelled six months.
I would like to invite you to go with me on a tour of inspection of the mission field itself. I would take my two ponies and drive out to the Cheyenne River, and take you to one of our out-stations, and show you something of the influences at work in the field to-day. As we went up the valley, we would see the Indian village located there, and in the midst, on a rising piece of ground, the mission station. Over some of the houses we would see a red flag flying. That is a prayer, a votive offering; there are sick in that house, and that is a prayer to the gods that healing may come, and that death may be kept from them. Over on the right we would see the dance-house—a great octagonal house with an open roof, in which the Indians gather night after night to dance to the monotonous beating of the drum. That is a very common sound out in the Indian villages, bringing to us always that thought of slavery to evil. As we go up to the station itself, we would see something more of the work than you have as yet been able to see. If it be on the Sabbath, as we go in we would see a young man there, with his audience before him, not a very large audience—old men, old women, boys and girls—gathered on the rough benches, and very much as they are in their own homes. Some of the old women have their hair down over their faces, the boys with dirty hands, old men with their dirty blankets, and yet they are gathered around there to hear the word of life. The preacher, as he stands before them, tells them of God's wonderful love, and takes as his text that most wonderful verse in the Bible, "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son."
Then, as you look at the man who is preaching there, you would hardly recognize in him one who thirteen years ago was a savage, a painted Indian. As I look at him it seems a most wonderful thing that such a change has taken place. I knew him as a savage; a splendid fellow he was, and he is now a more splendid man than ever he was a savage; and he is teaching the gospel of Christ to his own people. I have been out there seventeen years, and if there were not another result to show for those seventeen years of work than the lifting up of this Clarence Ward, and making of him a man in Christ Jesus, I should be abundantly satisfied.
There is another influence of which I would speak, the influence of the home. Here in our happy homes we know but very little of what that means to the Indian. An Indian has no home, in our sense of the word. Some years ago I went with a party of Indians 175 miles west of the Missouri River in the middle of winter. We climbed a mountain and looked away to the east. We could see, I should think, 150 miles, and the Indian as he sat there on the edge of a rock, covered his head up in a blanket and cried. Said he: "This is my country, and we have had to leave it." That was his idea of home—such a barren stretch as that, the snow glistening in the sunlight. The Dakota Indian lives in a region, not in a place. The Christian home coming into the midst of a village carries there an ideal of which the Indian knows nothing, and he is taught by the power of example day after day. The Christian woman in that home keeps her house clean, keeps her children clean, and stands there as a persistent example of the power of the gospel of soap, just as the man himself there who has become a Christian no longer steals horses. A party going out into an enemy's country would go as often for the sake of bringing back stolen horses, as they would for scalps. The man who has become a Christian is recognized at once as shut out from that privilege.
Reference has been made to the opening up of the reservation, and the crisis is now upon us in connection with our Indian work. We have eleven million acres of land there just west of the Missouri River to be thrown open for settlement. Do you know what that means? Were any of you down at Oklahoma this last season? It means the rush of a swarm of people, good, bad and indifferent—chiefly bad and indifferent—and these settlers will crowd themselves in as a wedge between the two divisions of the Indian reservation, and we shall have Indians both to the north and to the south. They will be exposed to influences from which they have been kept as yet; influences which will tend to uplift in the outcome, as well as to degrade. I thank God for it. I thank God that he is bringing the white man into the midst of the Indian country. It may seem that this is a heroic remedy. So it is, but it is time for heroic remedies. We need to meet the question as it comes to us to-day. There is a ranchman out on Bad River, who tells me that there is no such thing as an Indian question. "Why," said I, "what are you talking about?" "There is no such thing," said he. I asked him how he explained it. "The simple thing to do is just to treat them as men, and that will be all there is to it. That will settle it, and there will be no such thing as an Indian question." Treat them as men and make Christians of them, and we will settle the whole thing.