Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux

by Stephen Return Riggs

In starting the paper, the main object proposed was to stimulate education among the Dakotas, so that we were not disappointed to find that, in addition to all that came in from subscriptions, several hundred dollars were required from the missionary funds to square up the year. But we lived in hope, and do so still, that the time will come when the enterprise will be self-supporting. It has proved itself to be an exceedingly important assistant in our missionary work, which we can not afford to let die.

With the homesteaders on the Big Sioux, on the 23d of June, 1871, we held our first general conference of the Dakota churches.[7] From the Sisseton Agency there went down John B. Renville, Daniel Renville, and Solomon, of the pastors, with several elders and myself. Dr. Williamson came up from St. Peter; and John P. Williamson, A. L. Riggs, and Artemas Ehnamane, and others, came over from the Missouri River. Year by year, from that time on, we have continued to hold these meetings, and they have constantly increased in interest and importance. On this first occasion, four or five days were spent, and religious meetings held each day. The circumstances by which we were surrounded intensified the interest. As yet there was no church or school-house in which we could assemble, and our meetings were held out-of-doors, or under a booth in connection with Mr. All Iron’s cabin.

[7] This was preliminary to the regularly organized conference which met the next year.

This colony of more than one hundred church members had located near the eastern line of Dakota Territory, in the beautiful and fertile valley of the Big Sioux River. Their settlement lay along that stream for twenty-five or thirty miles, its centre being about forty miles above the thriving town of Sioux Falls.

The most of these men were in 1862 engaged in the Sioux outbreak in Minnesota. For three years they were held in military prisons. Meanwhile, their families and the remnants of their tribe had been deported to the Missouri River; so that when they found themselves together again, it was at Niobrara, Neb., or soon afterward at the newly established Santee agency a few miles below.

What impulse stirred them up to break away from their own tribe, to which they had but just returned, and try the hard work of making a home among coldly disposed if not hostile whites? What made them leave all their old traditional ties and relationships and go forth as strangers and wanderers? It must be borne in mind that they left behind them the food which the government issued weekly on the agency, to seek a very precarious living by farming, for which they had neither tools nor teams. They also gave up the advantage of the yearly issue of clothing, and the prospect of such considerable gifts of horses, oxen, cows, wagons, and ploughs, as were distributed occasionally on the agency. More than this: those who had already received such gifts from the United States Indian Civilization Fund had to leave all behind, though they went out for the very purpose of seeking a higher civilization. They went forth in the face, moreover, of great opposition and derision from the chiefs of their tribe. The United States Indian agent was also against them. Whence, then, did they have the strength of purpose which enabled them to face all this opposition, brave all these dangers?

The germs of this movement are only to be found in the resolves for a new life made by these men when in prison! There all were nominally, and the larger part were really, converted to Christ. All of them in some sense experienced a conversion of thought and purpose. There they agreed to abolish all the old tribal arrangements and customs. Old things were to be done away, and all things were to become new. And as they had been electing their church officers, so they would elect the necessary civil officers.

But when they came to their people they found the old Indian system in full power, backed by the authority of the United States. Of the old chiefs who ruled them in Minnesota, Little Crow and Little Six, the leaders of the rebellion, were dead; but the others, who had been kept out of active participation, not by their loyalty to the United States, but by their jealousy of these leaders, had saved their necks and were again in power. A few had been appointed to vacancies by the United States agent, and the ring was complete. And our friends were commanded at once to fall in under the old chiefs before they could receive any rations. They must be Indians or starve! Nothing was to be hoped for from within the tribe, nor from Washington. The Indian principle was regnant there also. Nothing was left to them but to seek some other land. One said: “I could not bear to have my children grow up nothing but Indians”; so they all felt.

They made their hegira in March, 1869. In this region this is the worst month in the year, but they had to take advantage of the absence of their agent and the chiefs at Washington. Twenty-five families went in this company. A few had ponies, but they mostly took their way on foot, packing their goods and children, one hundred and thirty miles over the Dakota prairies. About midway a fearful snow-storm burst upon them. They lost their way, and one woman froze to death. The next autumn fifteen other families joined them, and twenty more followed the year after. Even one of the chiefs, finding the movement likely to succeed, left his chieftainship and its emoluments to join them. He thought it more to be a man than to be a chief.

Existence was a hard struggle for several years; for these Indians had neither ploughs nor working teams. But they exchanged work with their white neighbors, and so had a little “breaking” done. And in the fall and early spring they went trapping, and by this means raised a little money to pay entry fees on their lands and buy their clothes. On one of these hunting expeditions, Iron Old Man, the acting pastor of their church and a leader in the colony, was overtaken, while chasing elk, by one of the Dakota “blizzards,” and he and his companion in the hunt perished in the snow-drifts.