Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux

by Stephen Return Riggs

“Gifted with an uncommonly fine constitution, the subject of this sketch met with an accident in his early days, from the effects of which it is questionable if he ever entirely recovered. He broke through the ice at Lake Harriet in the early part of the winter, and as there was no one at hand to afford aid, he only saved his life after a desperate struggle, by continuing to fracture the frozen surface until he reached shallow water, when he succeeded in extricating himself. His long immersion and exhaustive efforts brought on a severe attack of pneumonia, which for many days threatened a fatal termination.”

My own personal acquaintance with Mr. Pond commenced in the summer of 1837. He was then, and had been for a year previous, at Lac-qui-parle. In September my wife and I joined that station, and the first event occurring after that, which has impressed itself upon my memory, was the marriage of Mr. Pond and Miss Sarah Poage, sister of Mrs. Dr. Williamson. This was the first marriage ceremony I had been called upon to perform; and Mr. Pond signalized it by making a feast, and calling, according to the Saviour’s injunction, “the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind.” And there was a plenty of such to be called in that Dakota village. They could not recompense him, but “he shall be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.”

Mr. Pond had long been yearning to see what was inside of an Indian. He sometimes said he wanted to be an Indian, if only for a little while, that he might know how an Indian felt, and by what motives he could be moved. When the early spring of 1838 came, and the ducks began to come northward, a half-dozen Dakota families started from Lac-qui-parle to hunt and trap on the upper part of the Chippewa River, in the neighborhood of where the town of Benson now is. Mr. Pond went with them and was gone two weeks. It was in the month of April, and the streams were flooded and the water was cold. There should have been enough of game easily obtained to feed the party. But it did not prove so. A cold spell came on, the ducks disappeared, and Mr. Pond and his Indian hunters were reduced to scanty fare, and sometimes they had nothing for a whole day. But Mr. Pond was seeing inside of Indians and was quite willing to starve a good deal. However, his stay with them, and their hunt for that time as well, was suddenly terminated, by the appearance of the Ojibwa chief Hole-in-the-Day and ten men with him. They came to smoke the peace-pipe, they said. They were royally feasted by three of the families, who killed their dogs to feed the strangers, who, in turn, arose in the night and killed the Dakotas. As God would have it, Mr. Pond was not then with those three tents, and so he escaped.

No one had started with more of a determination to master the Dakota language than Gideon H. Pond. And no one of the older missionaries succeeded so well in learning to talk just like a Dakota. Indeed, he must have had a peculiar aptitude for acquiring language; for in these first years of missionary life, he learned to read French and Latin and Greek, so that the second Mrs. Pond writes: “When I came, and for a number of years, he read from the Greek Testament at our family worship in the morning. Afterward he used his Latin Bible, and still later his French Testament.”

In this line of literary work General Sibley’s testimony is appreciative. He says:—

“Indeed, to them, and to their veteran co-laborers, Rev. T. S. Williamson and Rev. S. R. Riggs, the credit is to be ascribed of having produced this rude and rich Dakota tongue to the learned world in a written and systematic shape, the lexicon prepared by their joint labors forming one of the publications of the Smithsonian Institute at Washington City, which has justly elicited the commendation of experts in philological lore, as a most valuable contribution to that branch of literature.”

While Mr. Pond was naturally ambitious, he was also peculiarly sensitive and retiring. When the writer was left with him at Lac-qui-parle, Dr. Williamson having gone to Ohio for the winter, although so much better master of the Dakota than I was at that time, he was unwilling to take more than a secondary part in the Sabbath services. “Dr. Williamson and you are ministers,” he would say. And even years afterward, when he and his family had removed to the neighborhood of Fort Snelling, and he and his brother had built at Oak Grove, with the people of their first love, Gideon H. could hardly be persuaded that it was his duty to become a preacher of the Gospel. I remember more than one long conversation I had with him on the subject. He seemed to shrink from it as a little child, although he was then thirty-seven years old.

In the spring of 1847, he and Mr. Robert Hopkins were licensed by the Dakota presbytery, and ordained in the autumn of 1848. We were not disappointed in our men. Mr. Hopkins gave evidence of large adaptation to the missionary work; but in less than three years he heard the call of the Master, and went up through a flood of waters. Mr. Pond, notwithstanding his hesitation in accepting the office, became a most acceptable and efficient and successful preacher and pastor.

After the treaties of 1851, these Lower Sioux were removed to the Upper Minnesota. White people came in immediately and took possession of their lands. Mr. Pond elected to remain and labor among the white people. He very soon organized a church, which in a short time became a working, benevolent church—for some years the banner Presbyterian church of Minnesota in the way of benevolence. When, in 1873, Mr. Pond resigned his pastorate, he wrote in his diary, “I have preached to the people of Bloomington twenty years.” He received home mission aid only a few years.