3. An agricultural, mechanical and Normal School, to be founded perhaps somewhere in Peoria Bottom, a new Hampton located on the border, with the white man’s civilization on one hand and the Indian reservations close on the other. This, though it is an urgent want and essential to the filling out of our general plan, must await the careful search for a fitting location and the means to give it a suitable inauguration.
Where shall the work be done for the Indian? One successful teacher in Indian schools says that the children should all be brought East, and trained amid the white man’s civilization; another gentleman, long connected with a Mission Board, holds that the education should be given wholly among the tribes, so that the pupils would be trained amid their people and not away from sympathy with them. We believe both methods are necessary. The youth trained at home elevates his people as he rises, and is himself strengthened and helped by his friends who come from the East with the higher touch of the white man’s culture. Our schools and missions, those now in progress and the one proposed, afford the advantages of both plans. We shall aim to combine the industrial, normal and religious training so as to fit the pupils, male and female, for the practical duties of life in the field, the shop and the home, in the school room, in the pulpit and the church.
We have undertaken much. The hour has come for it, and we know that the friends of the Indian will not suffer us to fail for want of means.
A VISIT TO THE DAKOTA MISSION.
REV. ADDISON P. FOSTER.
The transfer by the American Board of its Missions among the Dakota Indians to the American Missionary Association made it desirable that some of the officers of the Association should acquaint themselves personally with the work. Accordingly, Rev. M. E. Strieby, D.D., Secretary of the Association, and Rev. Wm. Hayes Ward, D.D., of the Independent, C. L. Mead, Esq., and your correspondent, all members of the Executive Committee, met by appointment at the Santee Agency. Three of the party then visited the mission station at Oahe, D.T., connected with the Cheyenne Agency, where the party divided, Dr. Strieby returning by way of the Sisseton Agency, Dr. Ward and Mr. Foster, under the leadership of Rev. Thomas L. Riggs, the efficient missionary, entering the great Sioux Reservation and traveling in an open wagon between three and four hundred miles, mostly in Indian country. This last-named expedition had not a little of excitement and adventure. Camping out at night, fording swollen streams, sleeping in an Indian wigwam, driving across trackless prairies by the aid of a compass, running the divides, killing a rattlesnake, preaching to the wild Indians through an interpreter, spending days in Indian villages, where hideous heathen mummeries were in full view, visiting the Indians’ strange earth-built lodges, and their offensive scaffold burying grounds, we passed through a series of experiences not soon to be forgotten.
The American Missionary Association has become possessor of three considerable mission stations among the Indians, in or near Dakota Territory. At the Santee Agency, which is just across the Missouri in Nebraska, about thirty miles up the river from Yankton, is a large and very successful school, a church of Indians with an Indian pastor, and one out-station with an immediate prospect of a second. This school and mission work are under the general superintendence of Rev. Alfred L. Riggs. The children in the school come not only from the Santees on the Agency, but from long distances, from the Sisseton Agency, Fort Berthold and Montana. We were greatly pleased with the intelligence, the neatness and Christian spirit of these students. They will certainly compare favorably in every way with the bright young Indians we have seen at Hampton.
Oahe is the centre of a wide evangelistic work, which has been organized and is carried on with great energy and success by Rev. Thomas L. Riggs. At Oahe itself is a mission home, a neat chapel, also used as a school-house, and three miles away, a second school-house. A native church is organized here, ministered to most acceptably by Yellow Hawk, an exemplary and industrious Indian. We were specially interested in a prayer meeting of Indian women, which was fully attended and heartily sustained. Oahe is on the east side of the Missouri, where a considerable number of Indians have given up their tribal relations, taken up land in severalty, and become voting citizens of the United States. Immediately across the river is the Sioux Reservation. This is greatly cut up by sizable streams which flow down from the Black Hills. On every stream are extensive and very fertile bottom-lands. Here the Indians are located, living mostly in tents, but some in log houses. They are chiefly wild Indians, only a few years since being on the war-path, mainly different sections of Sitting Bull’s band. They still wear blankets, and are gaudy in bead-work, and paint and feathers. But they are now in wholesome fear of the government and, better still, are anxious to be as white men. Mr. Riggs has established four stations in Indian villages on the Cheyenne River, and a fifth on the Grand River. At three of these stations there is preaching by native pastors, Solomon Martun (or Bear’s Ear), Isaac Renville and Edward Phelps, by name; at the other places are schools. The mission at Ft. Berthold is among the Rees, Mandans and Gros Ventres. These three small tribes long since combined in one village for protection against their ancient foes, the Sioux. Rev. C. L. Hall is the missionary here. A mission home and a chapel are the buildings, both in excellent condition. The work at this mission is slow in developing results, not from any lack of faithfulness or adaptation on the part of the missionaries, for their consecration and fitness are marked, but because these Indians by their tribal divisions are jealous of one another, and by their contact in the past with white men of bad character are corrupt and hard to reach. Mr. Hall has an out-station in his care at Devil’s Lake, where Rev. David Hopkins, a Sisseton Indian, is laboring.
The Advance.