And all nature seems to say,
"Welcome, welcome, blooming May."
It was 1834. A lovely day—the opening of the merry month of May!
The Warrior, a Mississippi steamer, glided out of Fever River, at Galena, Illinois, and turned its prow up the Mississippi. Its destination was the mouth of the St. Peters—now Minnesota River—five hundred miles to the north—the port of entry to the then unknown land of the Upper Mississippi.
The passengers formed a motley group; officers, soldiers, fur-traders, adventurers, and two young men from New England. These latter were two brothers, Samuel William and Gideon Hollister Pond, from Washington, Connecticut. At this time, Samuel the elder of the two, was twenty-six years of age and in form, tall and very slender as he continued through life. Gideon, the younger and more robust brother was not quite twenty-four, more than six feet in height, strong and active, a specimen of well developed manhood. With their clear blue eyes, and their tall, fully developed forms, they must have attracted marked attention even among that band of brawny frontiersmen.
In 1831 a gracious revival had occurred in their native village of Washington. It was so marked in its character, and permanent in its results, that it formed an epoch in the history of that region and is still spoken of as "the great revival". For months, during the busiest season of the year, crowded sunrise prayer-meetings were held daily and were well attended by an agricultural population, busily engaged every day in the pressing toil of the harvest and the hayfields. Scores were converted and enrolled themselves as soldiers of the cross.
Among these were the two Pond brothers. This was, in reality with them, the beginning of a new life. From this point in their lives, the inspiring motive, with both these brothers, was a spirit of intense loyalty to their new Master and a burning love for the souls of their fellowmen. Picked by the Holy Spirit out of more than one hundred converts for special service for the Lord Jesus Christ, the Pond brothers resolutely determined to choose a field of very hard service, one to which no others desired to go. In the search for such a field, Samuel the elder brother, journeyed from New Haven to Galena, Illinois, and spent the autumn and winter of 1833-34 in his explorations. He visited Chicago, then a struggling village of a few hundred inhabitants and other embryo towns and cities. He also saw the Winnebago Indians and the Pottawatomies, but he was not led to choose a field of labor amongst any of these.
A strange Providence finally pointed the way to Mr. Pond. In his efforts to reform a rumseller at Galena, he gained much information concerning the Sioux Indians, whose territory the rumseller had traversed on his way from the Red River country from which he had come quite recently. He represented the Sioux Indians as vile, degraded, ignorant, superstitious and wholly given up to evil.
"There," said the rumseller, "is a people for whose souls nobody cares. They are utterly destitute of moral and religious teachings. No efforts have ever been made by Protestants for their salvation. If you fellows are looking, in earnest, for a hard job, there is one ready for you to tackle on those bleak prairies."
This man's description of the terrible condition of the Sioux Indians in those times was fairly accurate. Those wild, roving and utterly neglected Indians were proper subjects for Christian effort and promised to furnish the opportunities for self-denying and self-sacrificing labors for which the brothers were seeking.