THE INDIANS.
A VISIT TO THE DAKOTAS.
BY SECRETARY J. E. ROY.
In 1871, on a tour of home missionary supervision in Dakota, I came over the Missouri in a canoe, the only mode then of transportation to this Santee Agency School. I found here Rev. A. L. Riggs, who had come the year before to take up the newly initiated work of Rev. J. P. Williamson, who removed up the river thirty miles to open a mission upon the reservation of the Yankton Sioux. At that time Mr. Riggs had already displaced the cabin home and cabin school-house by a frame residence and a frame chapel school-house about 30×50. Now I find that the chapel has been spread out upon the sides and elongated in the rear, with sliding doors to shut off each of the several new parts into additional recitation and Sunday-school rooms, and the whole to be crowded for morning prayers and Sabbath service. There have also come on, the Dakota Home for Young Women, the Bird’s Nest for Little Children and the Cottage for Little Boys, each of the three under a matron, and the Dakota Hall for Young Men, with one of the teachers’ families there in charge. Then come the well-built shops for shoemaking, carpentry and blacksmithing; and lastly, the three-story dining-hall, with accommodation for a hundred and fifty at the tables, with rooms for teachers and workers, and a whole story yet to be finished off, when funds are in hand, to accommodate more girls. The whole is heated by furnaces and supplied with the most approved apparatus for cooking, baking and laundry work.
But, beyond this expanding of the shell, I find the inner institution matured into a good deal of character and strength. Though it has grown by itself, it has come to be very much like our best boarding-schools at the South. The course of the year makes up more than two hundred pupils, and there are now here one hundred and thirty. The mass of them have learned the English, and the classes are taught in it. Many of them have been advanced in English studies. The régime everywhere takes on the Christian type. A great majority of the scholars have been brought to a personal acquaintance with Christ. A good number of teachers and preachers have already been sent forth. Music—vocal and instrumental—brings in its refining influence. A splendid corps of teachers is employed. Every pupil, male and female, has some work to do. The shops for blacksmithing, carpentry and shoemaking have each a competent workman as instructor, and those departments are run under the closest inspection. I have seen one Indian doing a fine job of shoeing horses, that most important of all work in blacksmithing.
Mr. Riggs, the father of the Theological Institute of Chicago Seminary, has brought the same feature in here. And so for two weeks, about twenty-five men, young pastors and divinity students, coming in from their fields, are drilled in the practical Bible doctrines and methods of preaching and pastoral work. The lectures have run from two to four in a day. Clearly it has been a season of stimulus and of replenishment to the young brethren. Those who were pleased with the young people from this school, who sang at the Chicago Council, at the New Haven Anniversary and over the East, last fall, will be glad to learn that at least half a hundred of equal cultivation could be sent out as specimens. Three native teachers are here employed, and they can use either language. It has been a great delight to me to hear Pastor Artemas Ehnamani preach in his own pulpit in the presence of his church, that numbers a couple of hundred, and without the chopping up of his address by the intervention of an interpreter.