Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux

by Stephen Return Riggs

It was now the month of May, but there were deep snow banks still in the ravines on the north side of the river. A terrible storm had swept over the country from the north-east about the middle of April. A hundred Indian ponies and forty or fifty head of cattle at the Santee agency had perished. This made spring work go heavily.

I was interested in examining the building erected last summer for the girls’ boarding-school. It should have been completed before the winter came on, according to the agreement. But now it is intended to have it ready for occupancy the first of September. When finished, it will accommodate twenty or twenty-four girls and also the lady teachers.

On the Sabbath we spent there, I preached in the morning, and Pastor Artemas Ehnamane preached in the afternoon. The Word Carrier tells a good story of this Santee pastor. In his younger days, Ehnamane was one of the best Dakota hunters. Tall and straight as an arrow, he was literally as swift as a deer. And he learned to use a gun with wonderful precision. Only a few years before this time, I was traveling with him, when, in the evening, he took his gun and went around a lake, and brought into camp twelve large ducks. He had shot three times.

Well, in the fall of 1872 his church gave him a vacation of six weeks, and “he turned his footsteps to the wilds of the Running Water, where his heart grew young, and his rifle cracked the death-knell of the deer and antelope.

“Being on the track of the hostile Sioux who go to fight the Pawnees, one evening he found himself near a camp of the wild Brules. He was weak, they were strong and perhaps hostile. It was time for him to show his colors. His kettles were filled to the brim. The proud warriors were called, and as they filled their mouths with his savory meat, he filled their ears with the sound of the Gospel trumpet, and gave them their first view of eternal life. Thus the deer hunt became a soul hunt. The wild Brules grunted their friendly ‘yes,’ as they left Ehnamane’s teepee, their mouths filled with venison, and their hearts with the good seed of truth, from which some one will reap the fruit after many days.”

On the 13th of June, 1873, the second regular annual meeting of the Dakota Conference commenced its sessions at Rev. John P. Williamson’s mission at the Yankton agency. The Word Carrier for August says this was a very full meeting: “Every missionary and assistant missionary, except Mrs. S. R. Riggs and W. K. Morris, was present, also every native preacher and a full list of other delegates.” I came down from Fort Sully with T. L. Riggs and his wife, who had only joined him a few weeks before. Martha Riggs Morris and her two children came over from Sisseton—three hundred miles—with the Dakota delegation. They had a hard journey. The roads were bad and the streams were flooded. There was no way of crossing the Big Sioux except by swimming, and those who could not swim were pulled over in a poor boat improvised from a wagon-bed. It was not without a good deal of danger. Those from the Santee agency had only the Missouri River to cross, and a day’s journey to make. The interest of our meeting was greatly increased by the presence of Rev. S. J. Humphrey, D.D., District Secretary of the American Board, Chicago; and Rev. E. H. Avery, pastor of the Presbyterian church in Sioux City.

Mr. Williamson’s new chapel made a very pleasant place for the gatherings. Pastoral Support, Pastoral Visitation, and Vernacular Teaching were among the live topics discussed. Their eager consideration and prompt discussion of these questions were in strong contrast with the stolid indifference and mulish reticence of the former life of these native Dakotas, and showed the working of a superhuman agency. Our friend S. J. Humphrey wrote and published a very life-like description of what he saw and heard on this visit, and it does me great pleasure to let him bear testimony to the marvels wrought by the power of the Gospel of Christ.

“The annual meeting of the Dakota Mission was held at Yankton agency, commencing June 13. We esteem it a rare privilege to have been present on that occasion and to have seen with our own eyes the marvelous transformations wrought by the Gospel among this people. Thirty-six hours by rail took us to Yankton, the border town of civilization. Twelve hours more in stage and open wagon along the north bank of the Missouri—the Big Muddy, as the Indians rightly call it—carried us sixty miles into the edge of the vast open prairie, and into the heart of the Yankton reservation. Here, scattered up and down the river bottom for thirty miles, live the Yanktons, one of the Dakota bands, about 2000 in number. Thirty miles below, on the opposite bank, in Nebraska, are the Santees. Up the river for many hundreds of miles at different points other reservations are set off, while several wilder bands still hunt the buffalo on the wide plains that stretch westward to the Black Hills. The Sissetons, another family of this tribe, are located near Lake Traverse, on the eastern boundary of Dakota Territory. This is the field of the Dakota Mission. The chief bands laid hold of thus far are the Sisseton, the Santee, and the Yankton. A new point has recently been taken at Fort Sully, among the Teetons.

“It was from these places, lying apart in their extremes at least 300 miles, that more than a hundred Indians gathered at this annual meeting. On Thursday afternoon the hospitable doors of Rev. J. P. Williamson’s spacious log house opened just in time to give us shelter from a fierce storm of wind and rain. The next morning the Santees, fifty of them from the Pilgrim Church, some on foot, some on pony-back, and a few in wagons, straggled in, and pitched their camp, in Indian fashion, on the open space near the mission house. About noon the Sissetons appeared, a dilapidated crowd of more than forty, weary and foot-sore with their 300 miles tramp through ten tedious days. Among them was one white person, a woman, with her two children, the youngest an infant, not a captive, but a missionary’s wife, traveling thus among a people whom the Gospel had made captives themselves, chiefly through the labors of an honored father and a mother of blessed memory. It intimates the courage and endurance needed for such a trip to know that there were almost no human habitations on the way, and that swollen rivers were repeatedly crossed in the wagon-box, stripped of its wheels and made sea-worthy by canvas swathed underneath.