Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux

by Stephen Return Riggs

The mission meeting took place this year at Traverse des Sioux. Among other consultations, it was adjudged wise for Mrs. Hopkins and her three children—the father and husband being gone—to accompany us on their return to her friends in Southern Ohio. The brothers Pond and Rev. Joseph Hancock, who had joined the mission and was stationed at Red Wing, all had their horses, and, the travel by land being difficult, they put them on board our good mission boat Winona, and so we had a full cargo down to St. Paul.

From there we had a steamer to Galena, where we took passage in freight wagons that were going to Elgin, the terminus of the railroad that was then being made west from Chicago. This trip across the country we all greatly enjoyed, stopping at Freeport over the Sabbath, and listening to the somewhat celebrated revivalist Elder Knapp. We crossed Lake Michigan, and by the Michigan Central to Detroit, and then took a lake boat to Cleveland. That night we encountered a lake storm; and, while almost every one was sea-sick, Mary and I stood on the fore deck and enjoyed watching the mountain waves.

Reaching the land in safety, Mrs. Hopkins and her little family went to Southern Ohio, and we spent a few days in Medina, with Mary’s brother, Rev. M. M. Longley. We found that the eight years which had passed since we were East before had made a good many vacant chairs in our home circles. My own father had been called from earth very suddenly, in 1845. He was well and had done a hard day’s work, but ere the evening shadows fell he had passed beyond the river. The angel of death and the angel of life had visited Mary’s home again and again. First the grandfather, Col. Edmund Longley, had gone to his fathers, at the good old age of ninety-five. Then, in 1848, the pater familias, Gen. Thomas Longley, had wrapped his cloak about him and laid him down to rest. The next to hear the summons was the little sister, Henrietta Arms. She had grown to be a woman, and Mary fondly hoped to have her companionship and aid in the Dakota field. But the Master called her up higher. And then, only a few months before we reached Ohio, the loving, cultured, and beloved brother Alfred had passed, through months of weariness and pain, up to the new life and vigor of the heavenly world. He had been preaching for several years in North-eastern Ohio. So many had gone that when we reached the mountain home in Hawley, we found it desolate. Only Joseph and his mother remained. Mary soon persuaded her mother to go down to South Deerfield, that they might together spend the winter with the older sister, Mrs. Cooley. And I went to New York City, and was the next seven months engaged in getting through the press the grammar and dictionary of the Dakota language.

Of the various hindrances and delays, and of the burning of the printing-office in which the work was in progress, and the loss of quite a number of pages of the book, which had to be again made up, I need not speak. They are ordinary incidents. Early in the summer of 1852 the work was done,—and done, I believe, to the satisfaction of all parties. It has obtained the commendation of literary men generally, and it was said that for no volume published by the Smithsonian Institution, up to that time, was the demand so great as for that. It is now out of print, and the book can only be bought at fancy prices.

The question of republication is sometimes talked of, but no steps have been taken yet to accomplish the object. While, as the years have gone by, and the book has been tested by Dakota scholars and found to be all that was ever claimed for it, yet, in case of a republication, some valuable additions can be made to the sixteen thousand words which it contains. The language itself is growing. Never, probably, in its whole history, has it grown so much in any quarter of a century as it has in the twenty-five years since the dictionary was published. Besides, we have recently been learning more of the Teeton dialect, which is spoken by more than half of the whole Sioux nation. And, as the translation of the Bible has progressed, thoughts and images have been brought in, which have given the language an unction and power unknown to it before.[4]

[4] A revised edition will soon be published.

While we were in the East, several offers were made in regard to taking one of our children. These offers came from the best families, where a child would have enjoyed all the comforts and many of the luxuries of life, more than could be had in our Indian home. It was a question that had often claimed our thought, and sometimes had been very favorably considered; but when the opportunity came, we decided to keep our children with us for the present. The circumstances of our home-life had changed somewhat; home education could be carried on to better advantage and with less drawbacks than in the first years of our missionary life.

And so in the month of June, when the Philadelphia market was red with its best strawberries, we started westward, bringing the two children with us. It had been a profitable year to Isabella. The mother and children had spent a couple of the last months with relatives and friends in Brooklyn, and now we made a little stop in the Quaker City, and visited Girard College, Fairmount, and other places of interest. It was September when we had gathered all our six children together and were making the trip across the prairie to Lac-qui-parle. This time we had with us the Misses Lucy and Mary Spooner of Kentucky,—since Mrs. Drake and Mrs. Worcester. They came out to spend two years in the mission. Miss Lucy’s teaching in music, vocal and instrumental, as well as other branches, was of singular advantage to our own children, as well as to the Indians. Miss Mary went into the family of Mr. Adams, who had gathered a little boarding-school of Dakota children. This might be called the first effort in this line made among the Dakotas.

Before our return, Mr. and Mrs. Pettijohn had taken the pre-emption fever, and had left the mission and gone to the Traverse and made a claim. Mrs. Pettijohn had been connected with the mission work since 1839, and Mr. P. for a shorter period. Both had been conscientious workers, and had done good service. They now wanted to make a home for their growing family. Mr. Huggins also, about the same time, left the mission work, and made a home in the same neighborhood. Mr. Potter had left the Dakota field after only a year’s trial, regarding it as a very difficult one, as compared with the one he had left in the Indian Territory South. Now, in the years 1852 and 1853, our numbers diminished very rapidly. The Indians were to be removed, according to the stipulations of their treaties, to their reserve on the Upper Minnesota. Both the brothers Pond elected to stay where they were, and minister to the white people who were rapidly settling up the country. Both were successful in organizing churches, one at Shakopee and the other at Bloomington. Both still live, but have retired from the work of the ministry, and are waiting for the translation to the upper world.[5]

[5] Since this chapter was written, Rev. G. H. Pond, the younger of the brothers, has gone to see the King in his Beauty, in the Land that is not very far off. He departed on the 20th of January, 1878, leaving a family of fifty,—twenty-two were grandchildren,—and all except the sixteen youngest professing Christians.