THE INDIANS
OUR S'KOKOMISH MISSION.
BY DISTRICT SECRETARY J.E. ROY.
The S'kokomish Reservation is at the extreme southwestern corner of the Puget Sound, where the S'kokomish River empties in, and is three miles square, with five thousand acres, embracing rich bottom land and mountain timber land, the river and the sound furnishing the best means of transportation to the market. On the place I measured the stumps of red cedar that were eight, ten and twelve feet in diameter. The waters at hand are of the best for fishing. As we—Mrs. Roy was with me—were going up from the river where we had been set across after a ten-mile mountain drive from Shelton, we saw a Mr. Lo lugging a three-foot salmon into the missionary home; and at Olympia, the capital, and another point on the sound, the fishmonger told us they did not sell such fish by the pound, but by the piece, twenty-five cents each. When, in 1855, this reservation was set apart by the treaty, it was for the three bands of this tribe and for [pg 187]the Clallams up at the entrance of the Sound, who, because of variance with one of the other bands, never left their ancestral habitation to go to the selected spot. The people belonging to the Reservation now number about six hundred and twenty.
The handling of the Indians here was one of the first fruits of President Grant's Peace Policy, by which the agencies were assigned to the several missionary societies, which were to nominate their respective agents. This was one of those which were assigned to the American Missionary Association. In 1871 the Association nominated to this Agency Edwin Eells, Esq., the eldest son of Rev. Gushing Eells, D.D., who was one of the mission band that crossed the Rocky Mountains in 1838, under commission of the American Board, to be associated with Dr. Marcus Whitman's series of Indian Missions. Here is an illustration of the wisdom of that policy, which has secured a highly successful management in all the secular, educational and religious affairs of the Agency, and one that has been continued on through the changes of governmental administration, and also one that has resulted in repeated promotions, until now Agent Eells has charge of five of the seven distinct Reservations in the State of Washington. His present headquarters are at the Puyallup Agency, near Tacoma, where he has just completed an eight thousand dollar building to displace an old one, for the Government Boarding School. In all these five reservations, lands have been secured in severalty to the Indians, and largely through his persistent devotion to their welfare. For two or three years his father had care of the S'kokomish Mission under the American Missionary Association, and in 1874, his brother, Rev. Myron Eells, was appointed to the same work, in which he still abides. Besides the preaching, the care of the Sunday-school and the prayer meetings and the pastoral work, in which he gets around among his people as often as once in a month, he has also the charge of the Indian Church among the Clallams, near New Dunginess, the brethren of that station, in the pastor's absence, maintaining stated worship. The people at S'kokomish have gotten beyond Government payments; they live on their own allotted lands, in cabins or frame houses, wearing citizens' dress, and doing business as white men do it. One of Pastor Eells's first Sundays at the mission was noted for the celebration of Christian marriage on the part of seven or eight couples who had been living together under their heathen way of taking up. So they have been shuffling off their polygamy. While we were there, a man of middle life came to the pastor's house with his first wife, to be married to her after the Christian form, having made a satisfactory pecuniary arrangement with the second, who was a sister of the first. In this case there were no children to complicate settlement. After I had addressed the church upon their duty of doing more for the support of their pastor, even as I had betimes had to do before in white home missionary churches, the several responses were as decorous and assuring as could be desired.
[pg 188]As another advantage of this Grant plan, the Government School and the Mission are found to be in entire harmony, the principal, Mr. Foster, and his assistants and the industrial teacher all being Christians and caring for the moral advancement of their pupils. Nor does the missionary administration come in any way to overlie the governmental. From the herd of cows kept for the service of the boarding school, neither is one set aside for the pastor's family, nor is he allowed to buy their milk. He gets his supply from outside. Nor does the preacher use from Uncle Sam's wood pile. He buys from the Indians.
Some may wonder how a man in such a field can keep from drying up. Come with me into this missionary study. The first thing that strikes you is a growth of English ivy, from its root in the earth outside creeping through a crack in the siding and climbing up one corner and then around the upper corners of the four sides of the room. That evergreen wreath is a symbol of the fresh intellectual life in that study, which has all the air and fix of a workshop. On the shelves, besides the ordinary outfit, there is an extensive geological collection, which in its classification and nomenclature shows scientific investigation. Then there is a fine cabinet of Indian relics and curios, appropriate to the calling of the incumbent: and there is a supply of Indian literature, historic and scientific, out of which this student is transmuting the essential elements of the Indian problem of the Pacific Northwest. And so it is a small library of his own that has thus been elaborated. The first is a "History of Indian Missions on the Pacific Coast," published by the American Sunday-school Union; and the second is "Ten Years at S'kokomish,"—1874-1884—published by our own Congregational Sunday-school and Publishing Society. These books would make an enrichment of any Sunday-school library, giving the very essence of romance and of heroism along with Christian instruction. The others are monographs, among them the following:
"Marcus Whitman, M.D.: Proofs of his Work in Saving Oregon to the United States, and in promoting the immigration of 1843;" "Justice to the Indian;" "Indian Traditions as to Religion;" "Hand of God in the History of the Pacific Coast;" "Papers on the Anthropology of the Indians of Washington," as published in the Smithsonian Report of 1886-7. Another such monograph he now has ready for the press—"God's Hand in the Missions to the Indians beyond the Rocky Mountains," a paper read at the recent fiftieth anniversary of the organizing of Dr. Whitman's church. And beyond all this literary work is the occasional supply of destitute white congregations round about, and service as a Trustee of the Pacific University in Oregon, and of the Whitman College, at Walla Walla, Washington. Surely in literary work, to the names of Jonathan Edwards among his Stockbridge Indians, and John Eliot among his Naticks, and S.R. Riggs among the Dakotas, and not a few others, maybe added this of Myron Eells among the S'kokomish.