Farming.
Then they study our garden, with its variety of different vegetables and roots, and its young trees. They are doing well at agriculture—better than most Indians in the territory of Dakota. This year their crops of corn, potatoes, squashes and beans are large and fine; but they raise nothing else; and they have not learned to care for stock, to milk, to make butter, and grow feed for cattle. They do not put up hay for their ponies, but let them grow poor during the winter, on such dried grass, and corn-stalks, and cotton-wood bark as they can pick up on the prairie or the bottoms by the Missouri. They are not of much value in harness, but are one with their rider, and endure fatigue and hunger with him marvellously. They think I ought to keep a horse. I tell them my cow gives milk and butter, and their horses don’t. So they look on at our methods of life, and see their superiority; and gradually want to copy them.
Death.
We have striven to open the way for the Gospel by sympathy with, and help for, the sick and dying. One young man among the Mandans died last year as I stood beside him. Before he grew unconscious, he had said to his friend that the white people were coming for him, and he was going. Perhaps some revelation of heaven and God’s love came to him in that shape. There was a woman once who touched only the hem of a garment. There is One who does not quench the smoking flax. Another poor consumptive died this spring, telling her people not to believe what bad Indians said about our malign influences; that we were good; that if she got well she would come to church; that father and mother must not grieve for her, but, if they felt sad, go to us to be comforted. God has been teaching us how to comfort bereaved parents and friends by taking away our own baby, Harry, to the home over there. An atmosphere of sorrow is about all our Dakota mission-stations. Mrs. Thomas Riggs has been suddenly taken from a useful, active life, near Fort Sully, D. T., and lies buried on her field of work; and Mrs. Renville is taken from the Flandreau people, and Miss Williamson from the Yankton people. But “sorrow is the atmosphere that ripens hearts for heaven,” and, ripe for heaven, they are best for earthly usefulness also.
Conversions.
The white employés and white men living among the Indians were all interested this spring, and we hope there were several conversions and much good influence at work. One young man, born of missionary parents in the South Seas, who had wandered here from England and from the Lord, we trust has gone back home to live a better life. One man, with a half-breed family, said: “The white people have been teaching the Indians better ways of living; then you have had school, a good school, and now we are going to have church and religion, and do better.” God grant it, but we have to sow and wait, and wait. Our seasons are short, our spiritual zone northern. Yet God will conquer!
From Devil’s Lake three or four days’ hard travel across the prairies to the north-east, there came a word of cheer in the early summer. Some, especially one man who had been under missionary influence in the Southern part of our Territory, but apparently cared for none of these things, came to see us, and to sympathize with us in our loss (he had lost children), and to get what help he could from us in understanding his Bible, and teaching his friends to read. He went away with the urgent request that we come to Devil’s Lake and preach to them.
Devil’s Lake is a Roman Catholic agency, and they do not preach to them in their own tongue. One thing is certain: if the sons are to talk English to us, we must preach in the Indian tongue to the fathers.