‘We are coming, Father Abraham,
Three hundred thousand more,’
from out those same homes stole a procession of women, not clandestinely, not timidly, but brave of soul and strong of heart and inflexible of purpose, though without ostentation. The Bible and spelling-book were their only weapons, and their song was of ‘the mercies of the Lord forever,’ and their ‘trust under the feathers of his wings!’ ‘Neither the terror by night,’ ‘the arrow by day,’ ‘the pestilence in darkness,’ nor ‘destruction at noon,’ nor the ‘thousands falling on their right hand, and on their left,’ could make them afraid; ‘because they had made the Lord their strength, even the Most High their refuge.’ They went forth to ‘tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon.’ Scorn, insult, slander, poverty, loneliness, sickness and death, they trampled under their feet; for ‘through the work of the Lord were they made glad,’ and they ‘triumphed in the work of His hands.’
“Away on in the Elysian fields of Heaven, when the cycles of eternity shall have encircled the universe, and rolled back upon their track in such repeated and intricate mazes as only the Infinite mind can trace, they shall receive from the lips of the ransomed of all nations, ‘the blessing of those once ready to perish;’ and the blessed assurance that the torch they lit in the Freedman’s hut, lit a beacon that illumined the world.
“If the South is saved to civilization, its chief human Saviour was ‘the nigger school-teacher.’”
Capt. Payne, who was ejected from the Indian Territory, which he invaded last spring in defiance of the President’s proclamation, again defies the Government and the Courts, and has gone to the Territory with a company of men. Parties in St. Louis have purchased machinery and various kinds of goods for his colony, and the issue is made most unequivocally with the Administration. We anxiously await the action of President Hayes.
The Poncas, of whose wrongs we spoke in the last number of the Missionary, failing to receive justice at the hands of Congress, have commenced a suit to recover possession of their houses and lands now held by the Sioux, to whom the General Government has ceded them. The plaintiffs rely upon the fact that the Constitution of the United States makes a treaty a part of the supreme law of the land, and also extends the judicial power of the Government to all cases in law and equity arising under treaties; and they have in their favor established precedents by the courts for applying to the treaties with themselves this provision of the constitution. Judge Dundy has decided that an Indian is a person within the meaning of the laws, and, therefore, discharged from the custody of Gen. Crook the Poncas whom he held for the purpose of forcibly returning them to the Indian Territory from which they had escaped. Thus it is decided that they may have the question judicially tested in the Federal courts whether they have been illegally restrained of liberty. This suit is to determine whether they may have not only their liberty, but their homes which have been forcibly taken from them in violation of solemn treaties.