E 98 M6 B29 B9P CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY DATE DUE ''• lUI «.-• "T'5*ir^ JB*rr1| 13GiL> "IM^ fine; r i^^rhu ami 1 /\/Mr> iniOTtrw l^fiMskmM ^ -' ' ' CAVLORO PRINT EDINU.S A. HISTORICAL SKETCH MISSIONS OF THE AMERICAN BOARD AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. Rev. S. C. BARTLETT, D. D. BOSTON: C-.\V,.U„^^^ PUBLISHED B^^ THE BOARD, 'f^', *.' 1 SoMEKSET Street. *§ ^ Z 1876. .:^'^i" ,.,^'|,, 829 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924009318506 B K I T T S H P O S S K S S 1 f) X H -f : DKVII.S I.AKK l-fK.S Stadoiis oftlieABCFM imdcrlined. Scale 60 Afi les^ i lndi = "" ~i ~ ' 103 BARTLETT'S SKETCHES. MISSIONS AMONG THE NORTH AMERICANS INDIANS. It has been often said, You can not tame an Indian,. The statement betrays a singular ignorance of facts. No more docile pagans have been found than some of the North American tribes. Seldom have earlier fruits been reaped than in the Indian missions ; seldom have brighter promises of a glorious harvest been blasted by adverse events and Wicked interferences. It has "been so from the first. Within a year of the landing at Plymouth, Elder Cushman informed his friends inlEngland of the "tractable disposition" of the Indian youth. As early as 1643, John Eliot had been through " varieties of intercourse with them, day and night, sum- mer and winter, by land and by sea," and had had. ♦' many solemn discourses with all sorts of nations of them, from one end of the country to another." Probably by this time commenced the long-continued and successful labors of Bourne and Tupper at Marshpee. And in 1646 began, in good earnest, the preaching of Mayhew on Martha's Vineyard, and of Eliot around Newton. Eliot's work has become historical. The index aad monument of bis achievements and his prospects is found in that famous Indian Bible — the first, and long iJie- only, Bible printed in America. It has scarcely one 1 2 SKETCHES OP THE MISSIONS. living reader now ; yet thirty-five hundred copies of it once issued from the Cambridge press. Eliot had, in 1674, a circuit of fourteen villages, and eleven hundred praying Indians. Next year came the terrible blight of " Philip's War," and cut down his congregations to four. They never recovered from the shock. In fact, only their Christian connections saved the whole of them from extinction at the time, ^he suspicions, jealousies, irri- tations, and revenges then aroused never ceased. Then began the long catalogue of organized Indian miseries. The General Court collected the remnant, and removed them to the islaufis in the bay, where they suifered " in- credible hardships ; " and the five hundred removed had, in 1698, shrunk to two hundred and five Indians in all what was then Massachusetts proper. Removal ! The old, old story, ever new ; the fatSl rock of all their prospects. In the next century, various efforts were equally hope- ful, and equally frustrated. The relics of the Mohegans, at Stockbridge, were gathered by John Sergeant into a thriving town, with twenty houses, built in English style, and a church of forty communicants. The Revolution- ary War made, in various modes, sad havoc among them ; and after the war, they removed, first to Central New York, then to Indiana, then to Green Bay, then to Lake Winnebago. A relic of them remained in New York, and were transferred, in 1827, with the relies of other tribes, to the care of the American Board. But in all their removals, averaging one for every twenty or twenty-five years, the tribe never lost its civilization. An early and most hopeful mission of the Moravians to the Indians of New York was thrice broken up by fire and sword, and three or four times broken down by AMONG THE NOKTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 3 removals. David Brainerd's mission in New Jersey, and the opening efforts of Eleazer Wheelock's Indian school and college, with its various Indian missionaries, seem to have been almost fatally interrupted by the struggles, absorptions, and complications of the Revolu- tionary War. A generation passed away. Within three years and a half of the time when Hall and his associates sailed for India, the American Board was adopting measures (1815) for carrying the gospel to the Indians. One hundred thousand of them were then supposed to reside east of the Mississippi, of whom about seventy thousand were comprised in the four southern tribes — Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees. The Prudential Committee, whose previous purposes had "from ti/ne to time been frustrated," now brought the matter in earnest before the Board and the Christian public. They ap- pealed to the success with which Rev. Gideon Black- burn, of the Presbyterian Church, had already labored among the Cherokees, in five years enabling four or five hundred youth to read the English Bible, and receiving several individuals as " hopeful and exemplary Chris- tians." Before another annual meeting, the first Indian missionary of the American Board, Cyrus Kingsbury, fresh from Andover Seminaryj had visited the Chero- kees. He passed through Washington, on the way, where a Cherokee chief expressed his deep interest in' the effort. He said that his nation had long wished for schools, and had even " thought of devoting a part of their annuity to the object." President Madison also ordered the Secretary of War to say that the Agent for Indian Affairs would erect a house for the school, and^ one for the teacher, to be followed by others, as occasion' 4 SKETCHES OP THE MISSIONS. might require, and success might justify. The agent would also be instructed to make the munificent provision of " two plows, six hoes, and as many axes, for the pur- pose of introducing the art of cultivation among the pu- pils," and when female pupils should be received, and a female teacher engaged, " a loom, half a dozen spinning- wheels, and as many pair of cards." All these, how- ever, " will remain public property, to be employed for the benefit of the nation " — a nation of many thousand souls. The government would gladly have done more, but its means were " limited." Mr. Kingsbury went on his way rejoicing. In Octo- ber he had a grand talk with the assembled chiefs of the Cherokees and the Creeks, at the close of which a principal chief took him by the hand, and sententiously informed him : " We have listened to what you have said, and have understood it. We are glad to see you. We wish to have the schools established, and hope they will be of great benefit to the nation." Another chief was appointed to assist in selecting a site, and they fixed upon Chickamauga, ten miles from the place forty-seven years later made famous by the repulse of the Union army, on the banks of the creek which some rebel termed the River of Death, and seven miles, also, from the brow of that Lookout Mountain, where, in " the bat- tle of the clouds," the Confederacy received a stunning blow. The missionaries called it Brainerd. A neigh- boring height still bears the name of " Mission Ridge." Mr. Kingsbury, followed at once by Messrs. Hall and Williams, with their wives, and soon after by others, immediately began the enterprise. It was a compound of mission, boarding-school, and agricultural college. The beginning, as well as the continuance of it, entailed AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 5 immense care and labor upon the missionaries. The government contractor, like many of his successors, failed to build the houses agreed upon, and the mission- aries soon found themselves engaged in making twenty thousand bricks, burning lime, digging cellars and a well, besides the by-play of bringing their meal forty miles, and planting " twenty or thirty acres of corn, some cot- ton, flax, and potatoes,'' to say nothing of a school of twenty-six young Cherokees, a Sunday school of thirty blacks, and preaching on the Sabbath. In eighteen months the Treasurer of the Board visited the mission, and was delighted. He found the Indian boys alike willing to work, docile to learn, and orderly and gentle in their behavior. They could plant an acre of corn be- fore breakfast ; fifteen of them could read in the Bible, and eleven in easy lessons ; and eighteen could write. Their deportment at prayers, at table, at school, would have been creditable to white children. Five natives were already in the little church, followed the same year by two others. The religious experiences of some of these Indian converts were most striking and refreshing. One day (May 27, 1819) President Monroe, accompanied by General Gaines, suddenly made his appearance, un- announced till he stood at the door. He expressed him- self so well pleased with all he saw, that, on the spot, he ordered a much better building for the girls' school, at the public expense. No wonder the friends of missions took courage. Christian farmers and mechanics offered their aid. Meanwhile the committee determined to push on to the Chickasaws and Choctaws, who ardently desired them to do so. Accordingly, in 1818, Mr. Kingsbury selected a site among the Choctaws, on the Yazoo, four hundred 6 SKETCHES OP THE MISSIONS. miles south-west of Brainerd, and called it Eliot. He found intemperance already there to an alarmiug extent, and the vicious whites who introduced and fostered it. Here again the first work was chiefly of secular arrange- ment. A dense forest covered the ground, although the works of the ancient mound-builders, here and there, indicated a former population in the wilderness. Amid the sickness of acclimation, and innumerable difficulties and hardships, in eight months they had erected some ten log buildings for various uses, the lumber all hewed and sawed by hand ; cleared and inclosed thirty-five acres of land ; set out fruit trees ; besides cutting roads, building small bridges, and even making tools and furni- ture. So eager were the Choctaws for instruction that eight children were brought a hundred and sixty miles before the missionaries were ready, and the school was prematurely opened in April (1819), under this con- straint. When opened, more scholars applied than could be received. The Choctaw king promised two hundred dollars annually from the nation's annuity ; and at a council, in August, a subscription was made of seven hundred dollars, eighty-five cows and calves, and five hundred dollars a year from the annuity. In one year from that date, the nation, acting in three several dis- tricts, voted to devote to the schools their entire annuity of six thousand dollars from the sale of lands to the United States. The official letters of the nation, an- nouncing this fact, express the earnest hope of " taking their place among the enlightened nations of the land ; " they overflow with gratitude to their " good, white broth- ers," and they add that " more than one thousand chil- dren in our nation are waiting and looliiag up to our white brothers for instruction." AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 7 AmoQg I'ue Choctaws, the missionaries, however, were doomed to incessant annoyances and hindrances, chiefly from the slanderous reports and vile influences of rene- gade whites, who had fled from the restraints of civilized life, and were the sworn enemies of the ■ missionaries. For these, and perhaps other reasons, among the Choc- taws, conversions lingered. But with the Cherokees, everything moved steadily forward. It is believed that from the first there was no year without conversions. " Wicked Jack " becomes a new man, and chooses the significant name of John Crawfish. Six members of one family connection (the Sanders family), men and women grown, are received into the church at one time, dedi- cating their households, too ; and "there is not a dry eye in the house." Old John Sanders says " he can sit all night to hear the word of God ; " Alexander, though tempted, " would not touch a drop of whisky for five hundred dollars ; " and the brothers all became lay- missionaries at once. Catharine Brown, after " emi- nently adorning the doctrine of God" for six years, dies in blessed peace. David Sanders's little girl, fatally burned, passes away in prayer. John Arch, the inter- preter, who had come a hundred and fifty miles to school, offering his gun for clothing, so " wild and for- bidding " in appearance that the missionaries shrunk from receiving him till he almost forced himself in — he, too, after five years of Christian life, leaves " evidence of love to God and man much beyond what is common in the best organized Christian communities." The chief. Rising Sun, comes to secure a school and a pious blacksmith for his home, and is determined to " obey the Bible." The missionary Butrick, in a tour of two thou- sand miles, addresses a hundred and fifty meetings, 8 SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. ranging in size from fifty to two hundred persons, and is everywhere received with attention, and often with gratitude. Men came twenty miles to Willstown, and two men twenty-five miles to Carmel, for religious in- struction. At the latter station, on the 21st of March, 1824, eighteen persons were received to the church, from " the gray-headed sinner of seventy" to "the youth of eighteen." Mr. Butrick preached, by invitation, the previous autumn, before the National Council. The Council observed the Sabbath during its session, and prohibited all trade or business on that day. Sabbath observance began, indeed, to extend to many villages. In one instance, a man came nineteen miles to inquire when the next Sabbath would arrive, because he and his neighbors were intending afterward to keep it as well as they could. All was hopeful. Arrangements were made for a network of mission schools. In 1822 the king's interpreter came to smoke with the missionaries the silver-hooped " pipe of peace," its bowl the head of a tomahawk, and its stem the handle ; and Path-Killer, the king, and his chiefs, in National Council assembled, expressed the warmest thanks, and came, one by one, from their seats, to take Mr. Hoyt, the missionary, by the hand. The old king visited the schools, in company with a principal chief. The tears flowed incessantly down his dusky cheeks while the children sang ; and both of them most aifectionately addressed the school, — the king a second time, — and . closed by taking all the scholars by the hand. The nation soon established regular courts of justice, converted its council into a legislative body, and in 1827 appointed a committee to draft a constitution. Such was the early movement among the Cherokees, AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 9 "when a singular Providence came to its aid just at this point. One George Guess (or Sequoyah), a half-breed Cherokee, about fifty years old, invented the remarkable Cherokee alphabet. He could neither write nor speak English, but simply knew that a mark could be made the sign of a sound. He set himself to work to gather up all the syllables of the Cherokee tongue, which proved to be eighty-six. He used English letters, and various modi- fications flf them, with some characters of his own. The whole was so simple that in "three days" a bright learner could commence letter-writing. When the fact first came to the notice of the Prudential Committee, in 1825, the Cherokees in Wills Valley had for two years been corresponding with their countrymen beyond the Mississippi. In three or four years, half the nation could read ; and in the solitudes of the forest, one might often see the trees inscribed with Cherokee. Within a year of the translation of the four Gospels into their lan- guage, the National Council were appropriating money (1826) for a printing press and types, and a Boston firm were soon engaged in cutting punches. Guess, it is said, never became a Christian, and lamented his invention when he saw it used for circulating the New Testament. But he could no more recall his alphabet than Erasmus his Greek Testament, when it had been launched upon the world. In 1826, besides the missions to the Cherokees of Georgia, then numbering seven stations, and that to the Choctaws of Mississippi, with ten stations, and one to the Cherokees of Arkansas, two hundred miles beyond the Mississippi, the Board received several other Indian missions from the United Foreign Missionary Society, as follows : Among the Osages of the Neosho, or Grand 10 SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. Rivsr ; the Osages of Missouri ; mixed tribes at Macki- naw ; the Ottawas at Maunaee ; the Senecas at Alleghany, Cattaraugus, and Seneca, as also the Tuscaroras in New- York. The Osages were a powerful tribe of several thousand. The New York Indians numbered not more than twenty-five hundred souls. This year, also, the Board took under its charge the little remnant of the Stockbridge tribe, at Green Bay, whose ancestors had enjoyed the miuistrations of John Sergeant, President Edwards, and Dr. West, in Massa- chusetts. Through all their removals, for a hundred years, they had kept alive a school, and probably had exemplary professors of religion among them. Their church had been revived in 1818, and thirty-three mem- bers were added to it in 1827 and 1828. They had their choir of singers, and conducted public worship with Bible and hymn-book in hand ; and their whole settle- ment, of two hundred and fifty souls, bore an aspect of comfort and civilization. In 1827 the mission to the Chickasaws, which had been begun seven years previous by the Synod of Georgia and South Carolina, was received by the Board. And now a glance at these missions, about the close of the year 1830, would have shown a singular state of promise all along the line. It seemed as though all things were now ready for one wide ingathering into complete civilization, and into the kingdom of God. Everywhere were centres of light. The traveler would have found half the Cherokees in Georgia able to read, and leavened with eight churches ; while the arts and methods of civilized life were rapidly spreading. There were scuools, courts, a legislature, and stringent laws against intemperance and the sale of strong drinks. The AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 11 Choctaws, alsc, had at last beea visited by a revival, and during the year, two hundred and fifty persons were re- ceived to church fellowship. There was a church among the Chickasaws, and another among the Cherokees of Arkansas. The haughty Chickasaws, in not a few in- stances, traveled ten miles to an evening meeting, return- ing by torchlight, in foot-paths full of mud and water ; and Mr. Holmes, a teacher, had written, in 1828, " I have never seen a people so hungry for the bread of life." Numerous conversions had just taken place among the Osages, and a few at Mackinaw. About one fifth of the few Stockbridges, at Green Bay, were church members. The Ottawas at Maumee, and the Indians at Tuscarora, Cattaraugus, and Seneca each had their church, their temperance society, and their benevolent organizations. At this time, three fourths of all the church members in the missions of the American Board were among the In- dians ; and it was an ascertained fact, that for twenty years the numbers of the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw tribes had been steadily increasing. But the great southern mission lay upon a volcano, a&d the next year it burst forth. One blushes to write the truth of history. Greedy white men had their eye upon the fine lands guaranteed forever to the Indian tribes. As early as 1819, an attempt was made by the United States to remove the Cherokees from their reser- vatibn. A deputation to Washington, headed by the noble chief, Charles E. Hicks, had baffled the scheme. They had even then pleaded their new hopes of civiliza- tion, and the disastrous effects of removal, as the great objection ; and when by treaty their remaining lands ■were secured to them in perpetuity, amid the abounding joy and gratitude of the nation, & huudrfid thousand 12 SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. acres of the ceded lands were also appropriated as a perpetual school-fund. " This marks, indeed," said the Prudential Committee, " a new and auspicious era." But alas ! the camel's head was already in the cabin window. Once and again, near the beginning of the century, had the tribe been pacified by money payments for lands already occupied by white " squatters." Again, in 1805, under the specious plea that their growing civil- ization required less territory, another sale had been secured. And now, at the time of which we write, " the irritating proximity of the Indians and white men " — a euphemism for the perpetual intrusion of reckless, law- less whites upon the Indian Territory — suggested the wolf's method of " inducing " all the Indian tribes to remove beyond the Mississippi. A great body of Chero- kees were "persuaded" to go in 1819. The Choctaws had ceded a large tract in 1816, and were awaiting further suasion. The tribe of the Chickasaws, whose motto, " Here we rest," still remains embodied in the name Alabama, had already made three cessions ; and about the year 1818, the northern tribes also were bought up. The scheme slumbered for a time 'at the South. But in 1828, the United States Government, pressed by evil agencies behind, began its work. A deputation of the Arkansas Cherokees at Washington, though not authorized, but forbidden by the standing law of the nation, to alienate any portion of their land, con- sented to a new removal, and the pressure began to be applied to the Cherokees of Georgia, and to the Choc- taws, Creeks, and Chickasaws. All four of these tribes were " greatly agitated and distressed " at the prospect of a compulsory removal from lauds guarantied to them by treaty after treaty with the United States. For AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 13 several years, it became Ihe oue absorbing and distract- ing theme of the Cherokees. It threw the Choctaws at once into great trouble, despondency, and violent dissen- sions, in which the missionaries stood between two fires : the pagan portion of the nation falsely charging them with favoring the removal, and the United States author- ities regarding and treating them with suspicion and severity. One is ashamed to write that in September, 1829, United States Commissioners assembled the Choc- taws in council, and proposed terms of removal ; that a committee of sixty Choctaws, representing the three dis- tricts of the nation, reported almost unanimously against it, and the whole body of Choctaws approved the report, and a large proportion of them went home ; that, on the next day, the Commissioners assembled the remainder, and by threats of withdrawing the agent, making them pay the expenses of the treaty, leaving them to the , mercy of state laws, and by bribery of certain chiefs and their relatives, forced the treaty through, to the "general indignation " of the great majority of the warriors and captains ; and that, meanwhile, the presence of the mis- sionaries at the treaty-ground was forbidden by the United States Commissioners in writing, although the presence of all other persons was allowed. But these are dark facts of history. The Cherokees resisted longer. They felt, like the Choctaws, that it was only the begin- ning of the end ; and the few that consented earlier did it in the firm conviction that all would be compelled to go, and that the last would be the worst off. But the vise did not finally hold the victim till the year 1836. In the July previous, the United States sent as Commis- sioner, to persuade the Cherokees, the Rev. J. F. Scher- merhorn. But in vain. In October, another attempt; B 14 SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. again in vain. The Cherokee delegates then departed to Washington to confer directly with the Secretary of War. In their absence, within a month, this gospel messenger called another council of a fraction and faction of the tribe, got up another delegation and another treaty, which was soon ratified by the President and Senate ; although the chief, John Ross, and fifteen thousand of the nation — a vast majority — protested against the treaty in every stage of its progress, as unsatisfactory, contrary to the will of the nation, and made with persons wholly un- authorized. The treaty was concluded, it is alleged, with three chiefs and about six hundred men, women, and children.* The chiefs were afterward put to death by the nation for their treachery, though against the efforts of John Ross. But the Rev. J. F. Schermerhorn's treaty stood ; and General Winfield Scott, and two thousand troops, wei'e afterward detailed to execute its provisions. But the State of Georgia did not wait for the treaty. Three years before it divided up the whole Cherokee country into sections of one hundred and forty acres each, sold them by lottery to its citizens, and extended its laws and courts over the territory. Men with white skins and black hearts rushed in. They carried gambling, in- temperance, lewdness, and outrage among a people broken and despondent. The Cherokee laws against intemper- ance and liquor-selling were overborne by the laws of Georgia, as were those of the Choctaws by the laws of Mississippi. All was demoralization. There was even a reaction against the missions, and a direct loss of influ- ence. The missionaries were viewed as citizens of the nation that oppressed them, and as representing its re- * Kew Am. Cyc. But Bev. W. WlUey writes, " Sixty men and no chiefs," AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 15 ligion ; and, though the missionaries were actually driven out of Georgia into Arkansas, they were suspected as " treaty men." A singular experience was that of the two mission- aries Butler and Worcester, in 1831. In January they and their companions received notification of a law of Georgia, recently enacted, requiring all white men re- siding on the Cherokee lands to take the oath of allegiance to the State of Georgia, and get a license from the Gov- ernor, under penalty, if found there after the 1st of March, of penitentiary imprisonment at hard labor not less than four years. Well knowing this to be in open conflict with their rights under the constitution, laws, and treaties of the general government, they remained at their post. On the 12th of March appeared a detachment of the " Georgia Guard," headed by a colonel. Three of the missionaries were arrested, and taken to the head- quarters of the guard. On being brought, by writ of habeas corpus, before a County court, the Judge released them on the ground that, as missionaries patronized by the general government, they were in some sense its agents, and not within the range of the law. Forthwith a correspondence ensued between the Governor of Georgia and the President, in which the latter declared that he did not consider them in any .sense agents of the govern- ment ; and the Postmaster-General, to clear the track, made haste to remove Mr. Worcester from the office of postmaster. The Governor now sent warning letters, and the agent of Georgia gave them two days to leave. Messrs. Worcester and Butler frankly, but respectfully, declined. And now appeared once more the Georgia Guard and a Georgia colonel. Messrs. Butler and Worcester were arrested, with a Methodist missionary 16 SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. (Mr. Trott) , and a Cherokee named Proctor. The latter was for two nights chained by the neck to the wall of the house, and by the ankle to Mr. Trott, and marched two days chained by the neck to a wagon ; and Dr. But- ler was marched also with a chain about his neck, and part of the time in pitch darkness, with the chain fastened to the neck of a horse. Two Methodist clergymen meet- ing them, and expressing some sympathy and indigna- tion, the gallant Colonel Nelson cut a stick and gave one a severe blow on the head, and his subordinate, Brooks, dismounted the other, and drove him along the road, com- pelling him with the bayonet to keep the centre of the road, through mud and mire, pouring out upon the com- pany the vilest obscenities and oaths, and taunting them, " Fear not, little flock." After eleven days' confinement in a filthy log prison, aggravated by every practicable dis- comfort, a Georgia court (Clayton, J.) sentenced Messrs. Worcester and Butler to four years hard labor in the penitentiary. A memorial was addressed to the Presi- dent of the United States. But President Andrew Jack- son replied by Lewis Cass, the Secretary of War, that he had satisfied himself that the laws of Georgia rendered , the acts of Congress " inoperative," and he had no power^, to interfere. The case was carried to the Supreme Court' of the United States, Judge Marshall presiding ; and the action of the Georgia court was reversed and annulled, and the discharge of the prisoners ordered. The court of Georgia refused to obey, and Governor Lumpkin re- fused to interpose his executive authority to release the prisoners. When, therefore, a generation later, the Union camp-fires blazed on Mission Ridge, as Bragg, and Hardee, and Longstreet fled, defeated and broken, and when Sherman swept all Georgia from Chattanooga AMONCJ THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 17 to Savannah, and the Georgia Governor, as he fled, vainly- released a hundred penitentiary criminals to fight for their native state, it was diflacult for some now living not to remember the days of Nelson, and Clayton, and Lumpkin. For fifteen months and more Messrs. Butler and Worcester lay in the penitentiary. A memorial to the Chief Executive of the nation, requesting the enforcement of the decree for their liberation, was prepared ; but they were dissuaded from presenting it, the more easily, whether wisely or not, because it was well understood that the President of the United States would not enforce that mandate of the Supreme Court of the nation. " Old Hickory " was now a willow wand. They gave notice, however, of a new motion in court. And now appeared on the scene two Georgia congressmen, rejoicing in the allegorical names of Schley and Coffee, to reconcile them to their bitter cup. These gentlemen, and other personal friends of the Governor, promised them that they should be released if the motion were not made. The mission- aries conferred with the Prudential Committee. In view of the facts that their rights had been judicially asserted, ;" that the law itself was now repealed, that their own speedy liberation was guaranteed, that no executive en- forcement of the national judiciary mandate could be counted on, that it was too late thus to benefit the Chero- kee nation, and especially that this might be a case in which it was for Christians rather to suffer than to appeal to force, they withdrew the notice of a motion in court, and were liberated by proclamation of the Governor. Georgia could well afford to repeal its law and liberate its prisoners. It had triumphed over the national court, and handcuffed the national executive. It had mean- 18 SKMCHES OF THE MISSIONS. while put in operation such influences as intimidated and compelled the Cherokees to remove. Within eighteen months of the liberation of the missionaries, the white " squatters " on the Cherokee lands were more numerous than the Indians. And yet, under all the pressure of threats, and bribes, and interruption, and corruption, and outrages, so resolute was the opposition of the nation, that, as we have seen, no treaty of cession could by any fair means be secured. Even when Rev. J. F. Scher- merhorn and his " six hundred" had compounded for the nation with the President and Senate, the nation con- tinued peacefully to struggle for their rights. In the winter of 183fi an effort was made for a new treaty. In July, 1837, a delegation was chosen to visit Washington. They presented their cause at the opening of Congress in a most able and lucid manner, sustained by the signa- tures of almost the whole Cherokee nation, and by nu- merous remonstrances from citizens of the United States. All was vain. No essential modification of the treaty could be effected. Still, they could not believe that a treaty which seemed to them so iniquitous and oppressive would be executed. And while the military were gath- ered round them, like the vultures round their victim, and while numerous fortifications were erected in the country, they remained quietly in their homes. Their grounds were planted for a larger crop than usual, when, on the 23d of May, 1838, the troops began to gather them from their cherished homes to the camps. Late in the season (August 19) the missionaries celebrated the Lord's Supper for the last time at Brainerd, and sixteen thou- sand people soon bade a mournful and reluctant adieu to the lands of their fathers, A five months' journey was before them. Sick and well, old man and infant, mothers AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 19 anil mothers that were to he, through the winter months they traveled on, from six to eighteen miles a day. There were births and there were deaths — but the deaths, alas ! were two to one. They averaged thirteen deaths a day. They arrived at last ; but more than four thousand — more than one fourth of their whole number — in that ten months time they had left beneath the sod. This shocking mortality was not due to special ill-treatment, but inevitable in such a removal. They bore it, on the whole, patiently. Many of the companies had religious services on the way, and all showed the in- fluence of the missionaries in the fact that no such out- breaks of resistance as the government anticipated took place. No wonder that "Indian blood" so far boiled up the next year as to bring to an untimely end the three men who had sold their nation. Major Ridge was way- laid and shot. John Ridge, his son, was taken from his bed and cut to pieces. Ellas Boudinot was decoyed from his house and slain with knives and hatchets. . But John Boss and his friends expressed the deepest regret at such transactions, while the United States officers scoured the country in vain for the murderers. Aside from this, the deportment of the Cherokees, under their terrible trial, was worthy of a Christian people. And when men say tiie ludiaus can not be civilized and Christianized, pos- terity will sadly judge which party displayed the higher type of Christian manhood — John Ross and the Cherokee nation, or Andrew Jackson, Lewis Cass, the Reverend Commissioner Schermerhorn, Congressmen Coffee and Schley, Governor Lumpkin, Colonel Nelson, the Georgia Guard, the Georgia Legislature, and, must we add, the Senate of the United States in 1835. These things are facts of record ; on record let them stand. 20 SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. But the palmy days of Indian missions were past for a generation. The shock of these events, and of the broad scheme to which it belonged, agitated and affected every tribe in the country. The little remnant of the Stock- bridges were, for years, distressed by the question of a new removal. The Indians of New York were kept in a state of bitter complaint and internal dissension. The remainder of this story may as well be briefly dispatched. It was almost a harvest of disasters, spring- ing from one common root. The incoming flood of white and Indian corruption among the Chickasaws compelled the abandonment of that mission in 1834. The Osages, in 1836, made it positively unsafe to remain. In the same year the Creeks, instigated by neighboring whites with slanderous charges, petitioned the United States agent to remove the missionaries ; and they were sum- marily expelled, without a hearing. In the discour- agement of long-continued and still unsettled removal agitations, attended with a steady downward movement, the last missionary among the Stockbridges withdrew in 1848, and left them to a native pastor, Jeremiah Slinger- land. The relics of the Tuscaroras in New York, with many of the marks and some of the vices of civilization, were left to themselves in 1860, having a church of a hundred members, and, for a time, tlie partial services of Peter P. Osunkirhine, a -preacher of the Abenaqui tribe. In the Choctaw nation the influences of religion, never so thoroughly established, had been unfavorably - affected by removal. The nation had recovered, in good degree, from the diminutions and the losses of removal ; but they had learned from their former oppressors to enact stringent laws in defense of slavery. Some of these laws directly conflicted with the liberty of teaching and AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 21 preaching. On the principles that should govern, and the methods that should be pursued in the circumstances, an important diversity of sentiment arose between the mis- sionaries on the one side, and the Prudential Committee, the Board, and its patrons on the other. By reason of these embarrassments the mission was, in the year 1859, discontinued. At that time there were twelve churches, containing thirteen hundred and sixty-two members, of whom a small number, some twenty or thirty, perhaps, were holders of slaves. The Cherokee nation at this time numbered about twenty-one thousand. Our mis- sionary work among them had never resumed its former importance, the four churches numbering only about two hundred communicants. But the Baptists, Moravians, and Methodists had largely entered. Meanwhile the nation had become, though with serious drawbacks, a " nominally Christian nation." For this alleged reason, re-enforced, no doubt, by other grave considerations, the mission was, in 1860, discontinued. The Seneca mission, in New York, was transferred to the Presbyterian Board in 1870, with the tribe increased one third in number (from twenty-five hundred in 1818 to thirty-three hundred and eighty-three in 1870), with houses finished and fur- ifished, and lands cultivated, and their persons dressed like their white neighbors, with the district school system in full operation, and a record of six or seven hundred hopeful conversions during the history of the mitssion. Rev. S. L. Hobbs, M. D., a missionary among the Choctaws many years ago, was urged to resume his labors among the people who had constituted his former charge ; and so earnest was their plea that the Prudential Committee authorized him to comply with their request. 22 SKETCHES OP THE MISSIONS. He arrived at Fort Smith, on the border of the Indian Territory, in November, 1872. His field was very large, and its necessities were very great, partly because of the distressing demoralization which our civil war had caused, and partly because of the lack of any effective evangelistic agency during the ten previous years. But the Lord was pleased to bless his labors, so that when he felt constrained to surrender his commission (June 1, 1876), he left behind him four churches, " well organized," and under the care of a native brother, who had been his pupil at Lenox before the war, but had se- cured ordination, and was supported by the Board of Mis- sions of the Southern Presbyterian Church. The number of persons admitted to Christian fellowship during this brief period exceeded one hundred ; and others were ex- pected to avail themselves of the same privilege at an early day. In addition to this spiritual fruitage, relief had been freely administered to the sick ; a marked im- pulse had been given to the temperance reform, — an object of exceptional importance among the aborigines of this country ; and many other benefits had been conferred upon the Choctaws. The Board has abundant reason, therefore, to be grateful for the privilege of accomplishing so much, with so small an expenditure. The Dakota mission, the only remaining inheritance of the Board among the native tribes, deserves a separate description. BARTLETT'S SKETCHES. MISSIONS AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. — THE DAKOTAS. In the year 1835 the Sioux, or more properly Dakota, Indians were one of the most powerful tribes on the continent, numbering, probably, from forty-five to fifty thousand. Their vast hunting-grounds extended from the forty-third to the forty-ninth degree of latitude, and from the Mississippi to the Black Hills west of the Mis- souri. The great State of Minnesota now occupies their eastern borders ; and only a few years have passed since they were the sole occupants of Winona, Red Wing, and the region about St. Paul. It was within a few miles of one of the first missionary stations, near Fort Snelling, that Longfellow found a name which he has made famous. Minnehaha is a Dakota word, and means " Curling Water." A little ' stream plunges a precipice of sixty feet in a parabolic curve, and goes on its way, " curling along in laughing, childish glee," to join the Father of Waters. The name Dakota, " alliance" indicates the numerous bands that unite to form the tribe. As early as the year 1834, two adventurous young Christian brothers from Connecticut, Samuel W. and Gideon 11. Pond, pushed their way to Fort Snelling, joined a neighboring Indian village, built a log cabin, and applied themselves to learn the language, while in various 23 24 THE DAKOTA.S. ways they made themselves useful to the natives. They afterward became ministers and missionaries of the Boai-d, and their location seems to have determined one of the first two missionary stations, which was at Lake Harriet. One year later the American Board took up the work, sending the Revs. T. S. Williamson and J. D. Stevens, and the farmer Alexander Huggins, with their wives, and two unmarried ladies. Miss Stevens and Miss Poage. They were soon re-enforced by Rev. S. R. Riggs and wife, and the Messrs. Pond, with other lady teachers, and in later times by the children of the earlier mis- sionaries. The rough savage whom the missionaries found was quite a different person from the sentimental red man of the romance and the poem. The only poetic thing about the Dakota was the kind of religious maze — or mud- dle — -in which he lived, whereby everything was wahan, or mysterious. So abundantly did the tahoo-wakan, or the supernatural and mysterious, protrude itself through all nature and life, making gods innumerable, as to con- stitute almost a pantheism, or rather a pan-diabolism ; for " heaven and earth were full of demons, rankling with hate, and engaged in eternal strife ; " and " dread of future evil filled the souls " of the Dakotas. One " Great Spirit," omnipptent and all-pervading, so far at least as this tribe is concerned, is not so much an Indian belief as a white man's dream. Their chief gods were the most grotesque conceptions. The water god, or gods, rather, mightiest of all, one of whom dwelt in an iron den under the Falls of St. Anthony, in the form of a prodigious ox, with horns and tail expansible to the skies, the organs of power ; the thunder gods, of bird-like form, but terrible and hideous proportions, with double or qnad- SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. 25 ruple-jointed wings, and of four varieties, black, yellow, scarlet, and blue, — the last of them globular in shape, without eyes or ears, and with eyebrows made of lines of lightning, hanging down in long, zigzag chains, — all dwelling in a palace, sentineled ou its four sides by a butterfly, a bear, a reindeer, and a beaver, enveloped in scarlet down ; the moving god, dwelling in a boulder and in the four winds, as hard-hearted as the one, and as capricious as the other ; the anti-natural god, in four varieties, one of which carries a huge drum, using as a drumstick a thunder god, whom he holds by the tail, shivering with cold in hot weather, and fanning himself, naked, when the mercury congeals, bold in danger, and terrified in safety, with good for his evil, and evil for his good ; and so on, in infinite inconsistency and hopeless confusion. Their religious rites and worship were worthy of the hideous beings they worshiped. Streaked with blue and red paint, the Dakota performed his holiest services. He ofiered sacrifices to his gods (and to the spirits of the dead) from a piece of cloth or a kettle, a portion of every animal killed in the chase, or that greatest luxury of the Indian's own palate, dog-meat, up to the self-immolation, wherein, somewhat like the Hindu, the Indian cuts be- neath the muscles of his breast, arms, and back, and suspends himself, by ropes passed through the incisions, to the top of a pole, for two or three days together, with- out food or drink. He has religious dances and feasts, in one of which the worshipers howl round a great kettle of boiling meat, seizing the hot meat and devouring it, and then having the hot water thrown upon their legs ; and in another of which they dance round a pile of raw fish, till suddenly inspired, as they say, by the spirit of a 26 THE DAKOTAS. cormorant, they rush upon the fishes, tear them in pieces, and eat them down, scales, bones, entrails, and all. Sorcery and jugglery go naturally together. The modern so-called spiritualism or spiritism of the white man is an old story with the Dakota Indians. They practiced summoning the spirits of the dead, and eliciting information concerning distant relatives and friends, all the while according to the most approved white man's mode, sitting with the fire-light extinguished, their blankets over their heads and singing in a low key, till the spirit comes with his "hair-erecting" dis- closure. Indeed, the lofty feat wherein the Davenport brothers have, by twenty years' practice, acquired such expertness, tying and untying rope-knots in the dark, is, in all its important features, only the domestication of an ancient Dakota trick. Thus the juggler Red Bird, bound with ropes so tight as to break tlie skin, then tied, feet and hands together, and the whole body enveloped in knots and twists, with a bufialo robe fastened over all, was rolled into a tent, the lights extinguished, and all observers withdrawn. The tent is filled with rattlings, drummiogs, and voices. When at length the torches are lighted. Red Bird has slipped out of the robe and out of his fastenings, and left all the knots still tied. There was little romance in Dakota life. It was Hard on the men, and harder on the women. Bark wigwams were for summer, and the winter home was a conical- spreading tent, made of dressed buffalo-skins, supported by a framework of poles. A hole at the bottom let in the Indian, and a hole at the top let out the smoke. A coat- ing of hay on the ground, covered partly by skin mats, with a central space left for the fire, formed floor and bed. Here, in bad weather, men, women, and boys sat SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. 27 aud smoked. The women cut the fire-wood, dug the tepsinna root, dressed the buffalo-skins, cultivated the corn-patch, and packed and often carried the tent. The men did the hunting, fishing, fighting, and lounging. Food was precarious. After a hunt, meat was abundant. At other times, especially on a journey, they were re- duced to great hardships, and went to bed " empty." Mr. Gideon Pond, on such an expedition, had the pleasure of regaling himself with otter, turtles, ground-nuts, and muskrats, while his copper-colored friends pronounced some dead fish, found on the lake shore, to be " good ; " and Mr. S. W. Pond once saw some " hickory chips which had been boiled to get nourishment." When the former gentleman was feasted on turtle-soup, his appetite was reduced by having witnessed the turtles boiled alive in the savory mess, and by seeing a friendly squaw, as a special courtesy, wipe out his dish first with grass from beneath the floor-mat, and secondly with the corner of the short gown she had worn, day and night, all winter. The tribe were not without their amusements, gay or grave. Their dances were varied enough for a more civ- ilized race ; six or seven in number, and crowned by the hideous scalp-dance. The great national game was ball, on which they bet as high as white men, staking not only their trinkets and equipments, but their horses, and some- times their women. They had their more quiet gamea, their " plum-stones," partly answering the purpose of dice, and their " moccasin " game, — not exactly a com- pound of " button " and " hunt the slipper." The tooting of a rude flute or flageolet, and the pounding of a rattling, one-headed drum, or tambourine, sometimes enlivened the smoky wigwam of a winter evening or a stormy day. The language was troublesome to the missionaries. 28 THE DAKOTAS. It not only aboimded in clicks, aud gutturals, and unpre- cedented compositions, splitting a verb with a pronoun or a preposition, but, like other heathen languages, it was sadly defective for the utterance of religions ideas. A " good heart " was but joy ; a " bad heart," grief ; aad a "hard heart," courage. The Walian-Tanka, or "Great Spirit," was but an inferior god. The language was, of course, unwritten, and imperfectly known. Sixteen years from the commencement of the mission saw the publication of a grammar, and a dictionary of fifteen thousand words. In the midst of this degradation, the mission families sent by the Board quietly and hopefully took up their abode, in 1835, at two stations, — at Lake Flarriet, near Fort Snelling and the Falls of St. Anthony, and at Lacquiparle, two hundred miles further west. Their good work began even at Fort Snelling, where they organized a church, and received eight new converts, connected with the garrison, together with six members of other churches. Tlie very first year, at Lacquiparle, brought in seven Dakota converts, and the second winter nine, the third year ten, till, in six years, forty-nine persons had been received. The missionaries found, at Lacquiparle, a fast friend and invaluable helper in Joseph Renville. He was the son of a French father and a Dakota mother. Born in a wigwam, and educated from his tenth year in Canada, he had worked his way up from a trader's "runner" and Indian " brave " to be an interpreter, a British cap- tain, and agent of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company. He had now gained a commanding influence in the Dakota nation, — an influence which he steadily used for the benefit of the Indian, the traveler, and the missionary. In a journey of seven hundred miles, from SKETCHES OP THE MISSIONS. 29 Fort Snelling to the British posts, his ever open mansion was the one welcome resting-place. He furnished the missionaries a temporary home, and became at once their singularly sagacious and competent interpreter of the Scriptures. From the first, when Mr. Williamson ■wanted a chapter to read in meeting, he went to Mr. Renville for a translation. A little later, in 1837, there was from time to time a pleasant sight to be seen in his reception-room. In front of a roaring fire sat Mr. Ren- ville at his ease, and at a table near, with books and writing materials, sat Messrs. Williamson, Riggs, and G. H. Pond. A verse was read aloud from the French Bible, repeated by Mr. Renville in Dakota, and written down by the missionaries. Thus they went through the gospels of Mark and John. Mr. Renville's interest in the missionaries was not without its reward. His In- dian wife was the first full-blooded Dakota convert, and the first that died in the faith. He himself became a worthy and consistent elder in the church, while one of his sons and one or more of his grandsons became preachers of the gospel. For some years the accessions to the church werfr niostly women. Their obstacles were less than those of the men. The change involved far less revolution of dress, habits, life, and pursuit ; drew less attention and less opposition. To the man, it meant complete reversal and reconstruction, outward as well as inward, from the cutting of his long hair, and the putting on of decent apparel, to the abandonment of polygamy ; from the " scalp-dance" to the scalping expedition. Meekness of spirit and industry of life were hard sayings to am Indian brave. But in the end, the word and Spirit of God proved equal to the work. 30 THE DAKOTAS. From the first there were lovely spirits developed in those rude bodies. There was Hapanna, at Lake Cal- houn, long enduring, all alone, not only the social oppo- sition and persecution of her whole band, but from her own husband slanders, threats, beatings, dangerous wounds, and final abandonment ; yet living and dying in the faith, and followed to heaven by her once abusive husband. There was Lightning-Face, wife of Pine- Shooter, once ragged and dirty, and a heathen so zealous as to forbid her children attending the meetings, hide their moccasons, and leave them to go barefoot in the snow, yet led by the Spirit to embrace the gospel with a wonderfully firm and child-like faith. And when, one summer morning, in 1867, a flash of lightning called her away, none doubted she had gone to be with God, where her husband^ had gone before. There was Catharine Brown, willing to be put away as the second wife ; sub- mitting to the cutting up of her blanket, and other simi- lar trials ; keeping the Sabbath, even though it entailed separation from her traveling company ; learning to read, spin, knit, and weave, and entering into every plan for her people's elevation ; bringing up her children for the Lord, and holding fast the faith in a good old age. There were Christian children, like Jenny Simon, weep- ing over her sins, and giving her heart to Christ when eleven years old, and passing away at fourteen, with such words on her lips as these : " I love all my friends here, but I love Jesus more." These, and many like cases, proved from the first the old, but ever new, transforming power of the gospel. The life of the missionaries was not destitute of ad- ventures. Mr. S. \V. Pond barely escaped perishing on a trip from Lake Harriet to Lacquiparle. Overtaken bj SKETCHES OP THE MISSIONS. 31 a storm, losing his way, benumbed with cold, four days fasting, mistrustful of the gun of his Indian guide, a stray horse bore him exhausted to his destination, and saved his life. Dr. Williamson passed one winter in fear of starvation, the young men who went for his winter's supply having been compelled to abandon all, and almost perished on the- way. On one occasion Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins and Mrs. Eiggs encountered an Ojibwa war-party with two fresh Dakota scalps, and just afterward the still more dangerous party of ezcited Dakotas, who laid the blame of the murder upon the missionaries, and killed one of their horses on the spot. The terrified women pursued their way on foot, under a burning sun, comforting their hearts with those same words with which the Georgia colonel had once taunted the Cherokee missionaries : " Fear not, little flock." Mr. Riggs was once a " mark for an Indian arrow," and again " chased by the scalping-knife in the hands of a drunken man." These were stray shots. At length came something of the grapple that is almost inevitable in the history of missions to the heathen. When the gospel began fairly to take hold of the Indian warriors, their chiefs and- braves set themselves to stop it. They frightened away the children and broke up the schools, in some cases for months together. They posted guards to prevent attend- ance on Sabbath worship, and cut up the blankets of those who persisted. In more than one instance men who had embraced or favored the new religion died sud- denly and mysteriously, and there was talk of " bad medi- cine," — the witchcraft of ancient and of modern times.. Sometimes they used the methods of the tempter. Simon,, one of the bravest of the braves, had become a Christian. 32 THE DAKOTAS. For four years he nobly stood the scorn of all his asso- ciates, and the very hootings of the children as he went abroad, that Simon was a woman now. But another band tried friendship and flattery. They invited him to their dog-feasts, praised his prowess, and treated him to " spirit-water." He fell, repented, fell, repented again, and fell deeper. For some years he stood aloof. He was followed by prayers and persuasions. He would listen, promise, and slink away. At length he came and sat on the church doorstep, but would not enter. In 1854 all the mission buildings at Lacquiparle, except the church, burned down. It was the signal for Simon's full and final return. He was restored to his standing, honored his profession, stood by the mission in the hour of its fiery trial, and became at length a preacher of the gospel. But not all the tempted were thus recovered ; and strong drink was one of the chief temptations. There was a time, in 1849, when many of the schools were shut up, the attendance at religious meetings very small, two fifths of the church members in a state of defection, the mission almost disabled by the stealing of their property and the constant killing of their cattle, a war raging between the Dakotas and the Ojibwas, and the country flooded with strong drink. Still it did not pre- vent the formation of two little churches in 1850. Then came the protracted excitement of treaties and cessions to the United States, the influx of settlers and specula- tors in village sites and city lots. But now also came the happy influence of the missionary work on the desti- nies of Minnesota ; for the men who carried the gospel to the aborigines, also aided in forming the religious institutions of the white settlers. Four members of SKETCHES OF THE MISSIOKS. 33 the mission, indeed, withdrew to engage in the home service. Meanwhile new Indian churches were organized at Yellow Medicine and Redwood, the one at Lacquiparle being transferred to Hazelwood ; and when the treaty excitement had passed away, the field seemed more hopeful than ever. In 1856 was formed the " Hazel- wood Republic," with a written constitution, and all the methods of a Christian civilization. It was followed by a similar one at Redwood. The chapel at Yellow Medi- cine had been built without cost to the Board. The little church at Redwood was often filled to overflowing, and the clear-toned bell at Hazelwood often summoned near a hundred worshipers. The Indians built them log, and frame, and — with government aid — brick houses, and began to raise grain, and other farm products, for sale. But now drew nigh the time that tried the faith and tested the work of the missionaries. Opposers had said that the mission was a failure, and that the Christian Indians were more hostile to the whites than were the pagans. God signally branded the falsehood. But he did it, as it could only be done, in scenes of fire and blood. There was a premonition as early as 1857. A white settlement of six or eight families, on the beautiful clus- ter of waters called Spirit Lake, lay near the hunting range of the chief Scarlet End. The winter was snowy, and hunting unproductive. The Indians, after annoy- ing the settlers all around, came to an open rupture at Spirit Lake. They killed forty persons, and carried off the cattle, clothing, and provisions, and four captive women. One of the women was killed at the Sioux River because she could not cross it upon a log, and another afterward in the Indian camp; the third was 34 THE DAKOTiS. purchased, and restored to her friends, by two sons of the early convert Kebekah, and the fourth was recovered by the courage and skill of three Indian messengers. Great excitements and alarms attended the ineffectual attempts of the government to bring the offenders to justice. At one time Dr. Williamson saw the conical tents of five thousand warriors on the prairie between him and the camp of Major Sherman. The escape of Scarlet End and his assassins was not forgotten. Five years passed away. The United States was fairly locked in its great struggle with the southern rebellion. The heathen portion of the Dakotas, stimu- lated by their medicine men and war prophets, had long been growing bitter toward Christianity and civilization, and watched their opportunity. Said they to Mr. Potter, " We do not desire your instruction ; we wish you gone." The government and the traders had badly compromised Christian civilization. Of the general course of the government agents, and the traders to these Indians, it is but historic justice to say that it had been one long- continued imposition and outrage. The traders sold them goods at enormous prices, plunged them in debt, drugged them with spirits, and debauched their women. The traders and the government steadily played into each other's hands. It was the old fable, true at last, of the lion and the jackal. When a cession of lands was to be procured, the traders lent themselves, by fair means and by foul, to bring it about. They threatened loss of trade and of credit on the one hand, they held out the most delusive expectations on the other, and they procured the signatures of the Indians, on false pretenses, to contracts and vouchers not explained nor understood. When the money came, the government SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. 35 agents paid, first of all, the claims of these traders ; and " most of the money due under these treaties," says one who had investigated, " went into the hands of govern- ment officials, traders, and other swindlers." * The gov- ernment had a way, too, of "breaking chiefs" when necessary, and, as Red Iron said to Governor Bamsay, of " having boys made chiefs to sign papers, aad getting single chiefs to council at night to be bribed to sign papers." In one instance four hundred thousand dollars were paid by the government directly to the traders on old indebtedness, of which one Hugh Tyler received (in 1857) fifty-five thousand dollars for getting treaties through the Senate and through the chiefs. Nor were the stipulations about schools and implements carried out. " The treaties," says the writer above quoted, " are born of fraud, and all their stipulations curtailed by iniquity." f These general exasperations were, in 1862, embittered by fresh grievances. In the previous year the govern- ment at Washington had made an arrangement to change their money annuity to goods, which made the payment at the proper time impossible. In July five thousand Sissetons came for their money. It was not ready, nor even promised them. Pinched with hunger, and some of them dying of starvation, they broke into the warehouse, helped themselves, and went home. The agent was thoroughly frightened for the time. A little later some of the traders not only refused the Indians credit, but insulted them by telling them they " might starve or eat dirt." It was close upon the outbreak. * Heard's History of the Sioux War, p. 42. t lb., p. 33. 36 THE DAKOTAS. Rumors of fighting came up from the rebellion, and acted like the distant smell of blood upon a wolf. The Indians kept hearing that their " Great Father was whipped." They saw that whites and half-breeds were invited to enlist. The able-bodied men of the white settlements were away to the war. Now was the oppor- tunity. The prudence of the old chiefs was overridden by the fierce counsels of the young braves, and they de- termined to carry desolation through all the settlements of Minnesota, and seize again the hunting-grounds of their fathers. The tinder was all laid when the spark fell. At Acton, four Indians, first roused by a mutual quarrel, then ejected from a house after a contention with the owner about liquor and a gun, and called " black devils" by his wife at a neighbor's, suddenly shot them and three other persons, and hurried away to their band with the story. All felt it to be an irretrievable step. Next morning, early, a hundred and fifty armed and mounted Indians throng round the house of Little Crow, all eager for a fray. The old chief sits up in bed, and great beads of sweat stand on his forehead. He sees the peril, for he had been in Washington. But the die is cast. His hopes and fears at home, and the excitement of the hour, force him on. " I am with you. Let us go to the agency, kill the traders, and take their goods." Deacon Paul and John Otherday boldly resisted in council, at peril of their lives, but in vain. They then rescued the white families, conferred with the troops, organized op- position, and afterward delivered the prisoners. Little Crow and his vultures hurried to the lower agency, near Redwood, the same day, surrounded the houses and stores in small squads, and on the firing of SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. 37 the signal gun at the store where first they were told to " eat dirt," they commenced an indiscrimiaate slaughter. When the horrid work was finished here, they scattered to spread it through the country. Messeogers were sent to the upper Indians, and numerous bands engaged in the massacre. It was the evening of the 18th of August that woi-d came to Hazelwood of the slaughter, forty miles away, and of a band of fifty soldiers, hastening to the spot, driven back, with the loss of half their number, and all their arms. After dark strange faces were seen flitting round the mission, and the property began to disappear. Larger bands came passing by, and Simon and Paul hastened the mission family away. At mid- night a company of twenty persons might have been seen stealing to the woods in the rear, guided and aided by Indian friends. It was Mr. Eiggs and his company. They were paddled across the Minnesota, followed by au Indian woman with a forgotten bag of provisions. Then they crawled through the ravines to the prairie. Here they joined the company of Mr. Williamson, who had lived two miles away. For a week they plodded on to- gether, through driving rains and long, wet swamp grass, exhausted, and often hungry. The children, as they crawled under the wagons, out of the rain, at night, cried for " home ; " and the young traveling bride from New Jersey thought in the morning "they might as well die as live." They crossed several trails of the murderers, and little knew that one savage party was on their own trail, but was misled by their friend Peter Bigfire. They came in sight of Fort Eidgely ; but it was sending up rockel>-signals of distress, and they went on, by an escape BO narrow that four men who left their company were T 38 THE DAKOTAS. killed an hour after, within hearing of the guns. They reached St. Paul in safety, just as the dispatch had come from New Jersey to recover the bodies of the young bride and her husband. On the same morning, when these left Hazelwood and Redwood, another company of sixty-two left Yellow Medicine. Honest John Otherday was their guide and protector. With the chances of escape, as he said, " one in a thousand," he brought them all safe to St. Paul; " and," said he, " my heart is glad." Simon, too, the relapsed and recovered Simon, proved true as steel. Leaving his own family to shift for themselves, he brought Mrs. Newman and her three children to Fort Ridgely, he and his son hiding in the day time and trav- elling by night. Five weeks later, a hundred captive women and children were found at " Camp Release," also rescued by the loyal Indians, by purchase or per- suasion. But long before this Little Crow and his horde had done their work. With torch and tomahawk they had swept an area of twenty thousand miles, — fifteen or twenty border counties. They had killed some six or seven hundred persons, burnt the mission premises, and the houses of all the Christian Indians, pressed Forts Ridgely and Abercrombie, and defeated a detachment of two hundred troops. In the horrors they committed the savages outdid themselves, and relapsed into fiends. They tortured the living, and offered every conceivable indignity and insult to the dead. They cut off the hands, feet, and heads of their victims, and tore out their hearts. They roasted an infant in an oven, spared not even the unborn, nailed children to tables and doors, threw their knives and tomahawks at them, and amused them- SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. 39 selves by shooting arrows at ■women and children. One wretch killed seven children in one wagon. Still fouler wrongs were inflicted on captive women, to an incredible extent, ended sometimes by natural death, and once at least by the horrid torture of impalement. These mur- ders and tortures of women and children were mostly the work of the younger braves, against the advice of their chief. For three weeks they carried all before them. The Christian party put forth a bold and powerful influ- ence to resist and divide their counsels, and formed a camp for self-protection At length a body of twelve hundred United States troops pushed up the Minnesota Valley, routed the fox-ces of Little Crow at Wood Lake, and finally scattered them to the west and north. The leaders and the most guilty escaped. Little Crow fled, appropriately, to Devil's Lake. In the following July, near the town of Hutchinson, an Indian was shot while picking berries in the woods. His height and his grayish hair, his teeth, double all round, his left arm withered, and his right arm once broken and badly set, marked him as Little Crow, the foremost orator and hunter of the Sioux Indians. His skeleton, we believe, adorns the rooms of an Historical Society. Four or five hundred men fell into the hands of our troops, by capture or voluntary surrender. The govern- ment was now resolved to punish ; but the work was overdone. A military commission tried four hun- dred men in one month, dispatching them at the rate, sometimes, of thirty or forty in a day, and, of course, on very summary grounds. Fifty were acquitted, twenty sentenced to imprisonment, and more than three hundred coudemned to be hung. President Lincoln was wiser 40 THE DAKOTAS. than the military commission. He ordered that sentence of death be executed only on those who were proved guilty of individual murders or of rape. On that find- ing, thirty-eight Dakotas were hung in one day. Only three of them could read, and none of them had ever attended a mission school. Three hundred and thirty remained in prison at Mankato. And here were unfolded the strange plans and methods of God. The prisoners were broken and humbled. Eight or ten of them could read and write. Dr. Wil- liamson and his sister distributed among them slates, paper, and pencils. As the readers and writers began to while away the time, their example became contagions, and soon the whole prison was a school-house. They wrote to their families at Camp Snelling, and that, too, became a school. On a visit made in March, 1863, Mr. Riggs carried some four hundred letters from the camp to the prison, and about as many back to the camp. The Indians lost confidence in their gods, and listened more earnestly to the gospel. By a notable providence, among them was Robert Hopkins Chaskay, an elder in the church at Yellow Medicine. He had been caught hanging fool- ishly round the scene of havoc, with his gun, which he fired at an ox, and was condemned to death. By special efforts of the missionaries his sentence was commuted. He was thus in prison, to cooperate within with the mis- sionaries without. A great revival took place in the prison that winter, and in the spring two hundred Dakotas were added to the church in one day ; and when the government trans- ferred the prisoners by steamer to Davenport, they passed St. Paul in chains, indeed, but singing the fifty-first psalm, to the tune of Old Hundred. The good work SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. 41 spread at the same time, as by electric induction, into their families, and went ou in the prison at Davenport. It was not till 1866 that the prisoners were released and joined their families, then at Niobrara in Nebraska. All the professors of religion, now numbering four hundred, chose to be gathered at first into the one " Pilgrim Church." Next year a long step forward was taken, in the choice of two native pastors, and the licence of two other native preachers of the gospel. And now was inaugurated in the Dakota mission, — although on a more limited scale, — substantially the same policy which was about the same time begun in Central Turkey, of falling back upon the home agency, ■ — apostolic missionaries and native pastors. The mission had now reached the stage where this course was possible. No eye but that of God could have seen, in the great Indian uprising and massacre, the opening of a new missionary expansion. When the missionaries fled from Hazelwood, Miss Martha Eiggs wrote in her journal, " The feeling came over us that our life-work had been in vain." The Lord seeth not as man seeth. It was but the opening of a new era. Since then the prosperity of the business has gone steadily forward, the Lord working marvelously with them for his own name's sake, till, in 1871, the mission was able to report nine stations and out-stations, and eight churches, containing more than seven hundred members, — one hundred of them received during the year. Mr. Riggs is now aided in the good work by two sons, (the younger having gone to Fort Sully in February, 1872), and a daughter, and Mr. Williamson by his son; while Joseph Renville, though dead, preaches the gospel by his son and his grandson. Six pastors, four licen- 42 THE DAKOTAS. dates, and three teachers, all natives, are aiding the missionaries, and planting permanent institutions. Two training-schools are raising up more helpers. A Dakota newspaper is binding the churches together. Three thousand Indians are said to have embraced a civilized life, and the influences of civilization have more or less been brought to bear on ten thousand more. Some of them have renounced all tribal relations and allegiance, and all expectation of sharing in the annuities, that they may become citizens of the United States, own their in- dividual homesteads, and stand on the plane of full civil- ized manhood. The churches are doing much toward the support of their own institutions. There is increasing willingness to hear the gospel in new fields ; young men come from a distance to school ; and the missionaries and native pastors are steadily pushing forth in new ex- plorations, with much encouragement. A station is at once to be occupied at Fort Sully, three hundred miles beyond the Santee agency, among the " wild " Indians on the Upper Missouri. It is also a gratifying fact that the tribe, and particularly the more civilized portion, is steadily increasing. The government policy seems to have changed at last. Congress has taken up an apparently resolute inquiry into the colossal frauds that are perpetrated upon the aborigines of this country, and while this sketch is writing, President Grant has declared " his purpose to see that all the rights and interests of the Indians are protected." If this new policy can but be adhered to, and faithfully executed, and should the present missionary movement be suffered to go on with- out interference, there is reason to hope that the great problem of Indian Christianization, civilization, and presei vation, will at last be effectually solved. SKETCHES OP THE MISSIONS. 43 About the time this sketch was first published (1872), Kev. T. S. Williamson, M. D., and his son, Rev. John P. Williamson, transferred their connection from the Amer- ican Board to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Mis- sions. Somewhat more than one fourth of the native church membership they retained under their supervis- ion; and in all matters involving a common expendi- ture, as in the publishing department, they agreed to bear one third, leaving two thirds to those who remained with the American Board. Notwithstanding this change, the Dakota Mission continues substantially as it was. In the year 1871, an Annual Conference, consisting of all the churches, pastors, and missionaries, was inaugu- rated. This has been a bond of union and strength, as it brings together, at some point in the field, from year to year, the Christian workers, and gives them an opportu- nity for the interchange of sympathy, counsel, and help ; the Holy Spirit has been manifestly present with them. This Conference at its last annual meeting took measures to organize a Native Foreign Mission Society, which, if consummated, will educate these Dakota Christians in the higher work of giving the Gospel to those who still sit in darkness. During the last four years, considerable progress has been made in the various departments of work. The then new station near Fort Sully has become fully or- ganized ; and Rev. T. L. Riggs and wife, with two young lady assistants, are now occupying the main station at Bogue, and they have two out-stations, Hope and Chantier, which are manned by native teachers. At each of these three places there are flourishing schools, and the Gospel has been preached in the Teeton dialect, in the expectation of a spiritual harvest, when the " power from on high " shall be given. 44 THE DAKOTAS. The plans of Kev. A. L. Riggs, at the Santee Agency in Nebraska, have been partly developed. A plain but commodious building has been completed, and it is occu- pied as a girls' boarding school, called the Girls' Home. His training school for young men, for vrhich he has no proper building as yet, has increased from year to year, and this last winter, for a short period, he added to it a theological class of half a dozen. At the Yankton Agency, and in the Settlement on the Big Sioux, two new Bchool and church buildings have been erected. And three of the churches on the Sissiton Eeservation have built houses of worship, in part by their own efforts ; while at the same time they have been in- creasing in their contributions for the support of their own pastors, and' also for benevolent work. The " lapi Oaye," or " Word Carrier," is now in its fifth year, and has demonstrated its necessity by its exten- sive civilizing and Christianizing as well as unifying in- fluences, upon the whole work. The schools, government and missionary, have greatly increased the number of readers. Books have been added to those which were in use before. A Model English-Dakota Reader, prepared by members of the mission, has been published, maiuly at the expense of the government. A beautiful book in Elementary Geography, in Dakota, has issued from the press of Scribner, Armstrong, & Co. The Dakota Bible has received considerable additions during these four years; and a new edition will be published by the American Bible Society this year, containing the whole of the New Testament, and all the books of the Old from Genesis to Second Samuel inclusive, as also from the Psalms to Malachi. For years the members of the Dakota mission have SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. 45 been greatly interested in the Indian community at Fort Berthold, on the Upper Missouri. The three remnants of tribes, living together in one village, the Mandans, the Rees, and Gros Ventres or Hidatsa, are not Dakotas, (though two of them belong to the Dakota language family.) But such has been their connection with our government and people for the last century, that their civilization and Christianization have seemed to become a matter of unquestionable obligation. The Lord has now opened the way for the occupancy of that distant post. Rev. Charles L. Hall, and Mrs. Emma C. Hall, under a commission from the American Board, left the Yankton Agency by a Missouri steamer, April 26, 1876. God giving them prosperity, the station may be regarded as occupied, and an additional appeal may go forth to the Christian people of the land for help, through their sym- pathies, and their prayers, and their contributions. Including Fort Berthold station in the Dakota mission, as also the Presbyterian part of it, there are five stations, ten out-stations, eight ordained native ministers, two licen- tiates, and several students in theology, eight native churches, with an aggregate membership of about 800. MISSIONARIES OF THE AMERICAN BOARD, 1876. MissiosAElES. Began their labors. Key. S. R. Kiggs 1837 Mrs. Annie B. Riggs 1872 Key. Alfred L. Riggs 1870 Mrs. Mary B. Riggs 1870 Mr. Wyllys K. Morris 1870 Mrs. Martha Riggs Morris 1870 Rev. Thomas L. Riggs 1872 46 THE DAKOTAS. Mrs. Nina F. Riggs Miss Maria L. Haines Miss Martha A. Shepard Miss Mary C. Collins Miss Emmie Whipple . Mrs. Adele M. Curtis Miss Lucy Dodge Eev. Charles L. Hall Mrs. Emma C. Hall . 1873 1874 1875 1875 1875 1875 1876 1876 1876 Genekal Summary. The following resumd will show how many Indian tribes the Board has embraced in its plans, for how long a period, with what agency, as also, in part, with what results. {a.) Gherohees. — 1816-60. One hundred and thirteen missionaries, mostly lay and female. Twelve churches and 248 members in 1860. Schools. Printing, 14,084,- 100 pages. Given up because the proper work of the Board was supposed to be done. (A.) Ghoctaws. — 1818-59. One hundred and 'fifty- three missionaries, including lay and female. Twelve churches and 1,362 members in 1859. Schools. Printing, 11,588,000 pages. Given up because of complications arising from the existence of slavery. One missionary resumed labor in 1872, and withdrew in 1876, leaving four churches in the care of a native pastor. (c.) Osages. — 1826-37. Twenty-six missionaries. Two churches of 48 members. Large schools of 354 scholars. Their country ceded to the Cherokees. (d.) Maumee. — 1826-35. Six missionaries. A church of 25 members. Given up because of changes in the population. (e.) Mackinaw. — 1826-36. Seventeen missionaries. A church of 35 members. Given up as above. SKETCHES OF THE MISSIONS. 47 (/) Ohickasaws. — 1827-35. Ten missionaries. A church at one time of 100 members and schools contain- ing 300 pupils. Given up as above. {g.) Siockbridge. — 1828-48. Eight missionaries. A church of 51 members. Given up as above. (A.) Greeks. — 1832-37. Six missionaries. Eighty church members. Given up because of peculiar embar- rassments not to be overcome. (i.) Pawnees. — 1834-44. Ten missionaries. Given up because of the roving character of the Pawnees and the hostile incursions of other tribes. (y.) Oregon. — 1835-47. Thirteen missionaries. Broken up by the massacre of 1 847. (i.) Senecas. — 1826-70. Forty-seven missionaries. Transferred to the Presbyterian Board in 1870. From first to last about 600 church members. (^.) Tiiscaroras. — 1826-60. Ten missionaries. Given up because the proper work of the Board was supposed to be done. From first to last about 200 church members. (m.) Ojibways. — 1831-70. Twenty-eight mission- aries. Transferred to the Presbyterian Board in 1870. Number of converts not definitely known. (n.) Dakotas. — 1835 . Forty missionaries. In part transferred to the Presbyterian Board in 1870. Not far from 1,000 church members from the first. (o.) Abenaquis. — 1835-56. One Indian missionary. Given up because of increasing discouragements. Some 75 church members from the first. Condensed Summakt. Twelve missions closed ; 2J transferred. Five hundred missionaries. Forty-five churches, 3,700 members. Schools and printing more or less in all. The whole number of Indians reached by these missions not far from 100,000. THE MISSIONARY HERALD; A Monthly Magazine of 32 pages octavo ; the organ of the American Board. Price, 81.00 a year. Orders for this publication should be ad- dressed, — Mr. CHARLES HUTCHINS, No. I Somerset Street, Boston. LITE AND LIGHT FOR HEATHEN WOMEN) A Monthly Magazine, published by the Woman's Board of Missions. Price 50 cents a year. Letters relating to this should be addressed, — SECRETAEY WOMAN'S BOARD OF MISSIONS, No. 1 Somerset Street, Boston. CORRESPONDENCE. The Corresponding Secretaries of the Board are Eev. Selah B. Treat and Rev. N. 6. Claek, D. D. Letters relating to the AGssions and General Concerns of the Board, may be addressed SECRETARIES OF THE A. B. C. F. M., No. 1 Somerset Street, Boston. Donations and letters relating to the Pecuniary Concerns of the Board ixcept letters on the subject of the Missionary Herald) should be ad- ■essed LANGDON S. WARD, Treasurer of the A. B.C. F. M. No. 1 Somerset Street, Boston. Letters for the Secretaries of the Woman's Board may be addressed SECRETARY WOMAN'S BOARD OF MISSIONS, No. I Congregational House, Boston. 'Letters for the Treasurer of the Woman's Board should be addressed Mes. BENJAMIN E. BATES, No. 1 Congregational House, Boston. Books Oonoerning Missions and Missionarip The following Books, many of them suitable for Sunday Scl. Libraries^ may be obtained by mail, postage paid, through the Officii the Missionary Herald Memorial Volume of A. B. C. P. M. By Dr. Anderson $1.25 Foreign MieaiouB. By R. Anderson, D. D., LL.D 1.25 History of the Sandwich Itilands Mis- sion. By Dr. Anderson 1.50 History of the Missions of the American Board to the Oriental Churches. 2 Tols. -By Dr. Anderson. Per vol. . 1.50 History of the Missions of the Amer- ican Board in India. By Dr. Ander- son 1.50 Idfe in India. By Caleb 'Wright, A. M. 1.75 Woman and her Saviour in Persia. By Rev. T. Laurie, D. D. .' . . . .1.25 Zulu Land. By Rev. 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By his Daughter, Mrs. Mary Stoddard Johnson 1.75 Heroes of the Desert ; Lives of Moffatt and Livingstone, and Sketches of Missionary Explorations in Africa, by the Author of Mary Powell's Diary 1.25 The Arabs and The Tnrks, their pa^t ' history and present condition, with : Special view to Missionary labors among them. By Rev. Edson L. Clark $ Grace Illustrated, or a Bouquet from the Missionary Garden, by Mr. an^j Mrs. C. H. Wheeler, Ilarpoot, Turkey I Uncle Ben's Bag, and How it is Never Empty. 26 pp Light on the Dark RiTer " OuMiife in China, fey Mrs. Nevius . 1 Af^a's Mountain Valley . ... Menioir of Henry Lyman 1 TheVWeaver Boy who became a Mis- sionary (Dr. Livingstone) . . . .1, Romance of Missions, or Inside Views ' of Life and Labor in the Land of I Ararat. By Miss filaria A. West . . 2| The Land and the Book. By Dr. Thorn- * son . • . 5, Social Life of the Chinese. By Rev. T J. Doolittle 5. China and the Chinese. By Dr. Nevius 1 South Africa, Missionary Travels and Researches in. By Rev. D. Living- | stone, LL.D . &: Bible Lands: Their Modem Customs and Manners Illustrative of Scrip- ture. By Rev. Henisy J. Van Len- nep, D. D. Cloth 6 The Middle Kingdom. By S. Wells Williams, LL. D 4 The Cinnamon Isle Boy Tales about the Heathen Memoir of Uenry Obookiah . . Bartimeus . . The Night of Toil The, White Foi*eigners from over the Water ,1! Kardoo; or, the Hindoo Girl . .V. 1 Dr. Grant and the Mountain NestomaiiB 1; ■Twelve Teargwith tho Children, a^ *■ I Rev. WilHffii Warren, D. D. . . .1! These for Those : Our ludebtediv -> ■> £i Missions ; or, What wc Get fo' V^hat ' we Qi^e. By R^. W. Warren, D. D. 1 Forty Yeju^ in the Tu)'v".h K'nyir; jV or Memoirs of Rev.Witl' n- i;,. aeU, D. D., late Miasjouary id > iu .v. ^i. C. F. M., at ConstautSi^oi lc\ iiy his son-in-law, E. D. G. Prime, D-D. .2 Cornell University Library E 98.M6B29 Historical sl