The American Board began its work among the Dakotas in 1835. It was one of the most powerful tribes on the continent, numbering over 40,000. Their hunting-grounds extended from the 43 degrees to the 49 degrees of latitude, and from the Mississippi River to the Black Hills west of the Missouri. This was a territory equal in extent to that of Scotland. The name Dakota means the "allied one," and indicates the bands that united to form the tribe. The missionary work, which was initiated under Rev. T.S. Williamson, Rev. J.D. Stevens and Rev. S. Riggs, with their wives, and lady teachers, began prosperously, and in six years forty-nine persons were formed into a church. For some years the accessions were mostly women. The acceptance of Christianity was more difficult to the men. The change in the manner of life involved in it was greater. It meant entire reconstruction of their ideas of life, and in the manner of it, the abandonment of polygamy, the adoption of civilized dress, the spirit of obedience and industry. These were the contradictions to centuries of tradition and custom, and meant to an Indian brave the becoming like a woman. At length, however, the gospel did take hold of the warriors. The work and the faith of the missionaries were thoroughly tested by the opposition this aroused, but the gospel won its way. At last, when the rumors of the Civil War between the Northern and the Southern States came to the Indians, it set their hearts aflame for battle with their white neighbors, whose encroachment they resented.
Then broke out the dreadful Minnesota massacre, when the missionaries were compelled to flee for their lives, and the missions were abandoned. Twelve hundred United States troops at last scattered the savages and took about five hundred prisoners. They were incarcerated at the Mankato prison in Minnesota, where thirty-eight were hung in one day. The remainder in prison were visited by the missionaries, and the prison house became a chapel. Soon it was a Bethel, a great revival began, which lasted all winter, and in the spring, two hundred Dakotas were added to the church in one day, and when they were transferred to the prison at Davenport, they went out in chains, but singing the 51st Psalm to the tune of Old Hundred. They carried the fire from heaven with them to the Davenport prison, and when, in 1886, the prisoners were released, more than four hundred were hopefully converted, and when they joined their families in Nebraska, these gathered together in one communion, and called it the Pilgrim Church—about two hundred years after John Eliot, of the Pilgrims at Boston, gave his life to the Indians of Massachusetts. A people as remote from civilization as were the Indians of 1640 founded their Pilgrim Church.
Now at length the Dakota missionaries began a new life among these tribes. By the wonderful and strange providence of God, there had been prepared in prison native teachers and preachers, and the way was opened for expansive work.
After a period of ten years of this work, the American Board transferred its Indian missions to the American Missionary Association. This Association, thirty years previous to this, had Indian missions in the northwest, with twenty-one missionaries. Various causes had led to their abandonment, the chief one being the demands of the newly-emancipated slaves after the war.
Six years before the transfer of these missions to this Association, it had an interest in Indian missions in Washington Territory and in Minnesota. The transfer on the part of the American Board brought under our care the mission at Santee, Nebraska, with its large school and industrial departments; the Fort Sully mission, those on the Cheyenne River, and at Fort Berthold, Dakota. These have since been developed, until now, the facilities for missionary work and the force of workers have been greatly increased.
There are at the present time in the United States, exclusive of
Alaska, 247,761 Indians. Our missions are chiefly among 40,000 of the
Sioux or Dakota tribe, in the great Dakota reservation; among the
Poncas in Nebraska, and the Gros Ventres and Mandans on the Northern
Missouri.
At the Santee Normal School, we are teaching about two hundred Indian youth of both sexes. We are instructing them also in agriculture and trades. There is a department for theological study, where missionaries are prepared from the Indians for the Indians. Sixty-one missionaries and teachers have caught the spirit of Eliot, Edwards and Brainerd, and are earnestly serving Christ among these tribes.
A Christian civilization is wedging its way in until eighty thousand Indians are now clothed in civilized dress. Forty thousand have learned to read English, and nearly thirty thousand are living in houses. There are forty thousand Indian children of school age, and about fourteen thousand enrolled as pupils, leaving between twenty and thirty thousand children for whom as yet there are no schools provided. Sixty-eight tribes remain without a church, a school or a missionary, absolutely destitute of Christian light.
It has been said that these heathen tribes are a vanishing people, destined to decline and finally to disappear. Certainly their condition for two hundred years has tended to decrease them, and yet, when Columbus discovered America there were not double the number that there are now. In happier conditions than formerly, there is a decided increase in the Indian population, as there is betterment in their customs and modes of life. Their missionary teachers find them with the ancient characteristics unchanged—rude in thought, though with a marked intellectual power. The open book of nature, the Indian knows well. He will tell you the habits of bird and beast and tree and plant. He will tell you the time of day by looking at a leaf. But the life of civilization comes hard to him. He does not know the value of time, nor the value of money. It is hard for him to measure his days or to provide for the future, or to care for to-morrow. He has not the heredity of civilization and Christianity, hence missionary work sometimes seems slow in progress, but it is surely gaining upon this almost dead past of half a century. Thirteen Missionary Boards are now pressing forward to teach them the way and the truth and the life.
The doors are wide open as never before. The hearts of the Indians are friendly as never for two hundred years. If the majority of them show as yet no deep desire for that which Christianity brings, they are not, in this, dissimilar from other heathen. But this desire is growing. The Government at last is seeking to redeem the past. It has appropriated for the Indian tribes reservations larger, in square miles, than the whole German Empire. The Republic of France must re-annex considerable of its ancient possessions before it will own as much land as is now the property of the Indians in the United States. Under these conditions, the hopefulness of the past argues for a more hopeful future of missionary work.