In 1836, within one year from the arrival of Dr. Williamson and his
missionary party at Lac-qui-Parle, a church was organized, with six
native members, which in 1837, consisted of seven Dakotas, besides
half-breeds and whites, and, within five years, had enrolled forty-nine
native communicants. Of this congregation Alexander G. Huggins and
Joseph Renville were the ruling elders.
An adobe church edifice was erected in 1841, which for eighteen years
met the wants of this people. In its belfry was hung the first church
bell that ever rang out over the prairies of Minnesota, the sweet call
to the worship of the Savior of the human race. The services of the
church were usually held in the native language. The hymns were sung to
French tunes, which were then the most popular. At the beginning,
translations from the French of a portion of Scripture were read and
some explanatory remarks were made by Joseph Renville.
The first school for teaching Indians to read and write in the Dakota
language, was opened in December, 1835, at Lac-qui-Parle, in a conical
Dakota tent, twenty feet in height and the same in diameter. At first
the men objected to being taught for various frivolous reasons, but
they were persuaded to make the effort. The school apparatus was
primitive and mainly extemporized on the spot. Progress was slow; the
attendance small and irregular, but in the course of three months, they
were able to write to each other on birch bark. Those who learned to
read and write the language properly, soon became interested in the
gospel. The first five men, who were gathered into the church, were
pupils of this first school. Of the next twenty, three were pupils and
fourteen were the kindred of its pupils. Among their descendants were
three Dakota pastors and many of the most faithful and fruitful
communicants.
[Illustration: MINNEAPOLIS IN 1857.]
One large log-house of five rooms, within the Renville stockade,
furnished a home for the three mission families of Dr. Williamson, Rev.
Stephen R. Riggs and Gideon H. Pond. One room was both church and
school room for years. Under this roof the missionaries met frequently
for conference, study and translation of the word of God. Here,
September 30, 1844, the original Dakota Presbytery was organized.
For several years most of the members of this congregation were women.
Once in the new and then unfinished church edifice, more than one
hundred Indian men were gathered. When urged to accept Christ and
become members of this church, they replied that the church was made up
of squaws. Did the missionaries suppose the braves would follow the
lead of squaws? Ugh! Ugh!!
For the first seven years, at Lac-qui-Parle, mission work was
prosecuted, with marked success in spite of many grave hindrances. But
for the four years following--1842-46--the work was seriously retarded.
The crops failed and the savages charged their misfortunes to the
missionaries. They became very ugly, and began a series of petty yet
bitter persecutions against the Christian Indians and the missionaries.
The children were forbidden to attend school; the women who favored the
church had their blankets cut to pieces and were shut away from contact
with the mission. The cattle and horses of the mission were killed, and
for a season the Lord's work was stayed at Lac-qui-Parle. Discouraged,
but not dismayed His servants were watchful for other opportunities of
helpful service.
In 1846, the site of the present, prosperous city of St. Paul, was
occupied by a few shanties, owned by "certain lewd fellows of the baser
sort," sellers of rum to the soldiers and the Indians. Nearby,
scattered over the bluffs, were the teepees of Little Crow's band,
forming the Sioux village of Kaposia. In 1846, Little Crow, their
belligerent chieftain, was shot by his own brother, in a drunken revel.
He survived the wound, but apparently alarmed at the influence of these
modern harpies over himself and his people, he visited Fort Snelling
and begged a missionary for his village. The United States agent
stationed there forwarded this petition to Lac-qui-Parle with the
suggestion that Dr. Williamson be transferred to Kaposia. The
invitation was accepted by the doctor, so in November, 1846, he became
a resident of Kaposia (now South St. Paul). To this new station, he
carried the same energy, hopefulness and devotion, he had shown at the
beginning. Here he remained six years, serving not only the Indians of
Little Crow's band, but also doing great good to the white settlers,
who were then gathering around the future Capital City of Minnesota.
Here in 1848, he organized an Indian church of eight members. It
increased to fifteen members, in 1851, when the Indians were removed.
Then followed the treaty of 1851, which was of great import, both to
the white man and to the red man. By this treaty, the fertile valley of
the Minnesota was thrown open for settlement to the whites. This took
away from the Sioux their hunting-grounds, their cranberry marshes,
their deer-parks and the graves of their ancestors. So the Dakotas of
the Mississippi and lower Minnesota packed up their teepees, their
household goods and gods, some in canoes, some on ponies, some on dogs,
some on the women, and slowly and sadly took up their line of march
towards the setting of the sun.
No sooner did the Indians move than Dr. Williamson followed them and
established a new station at Yellow Medicine, on the West bank of the
Minnesota river and three miles above the mouth of the Yellow Medicine
river. The first winter there, was a fight for life. The house was
unfinished; a very severe winter set in unusually early, the snows were
deep and the drifts terrible; the supply-teams were snowed in; the
horses perished, the provisions were abandoned to the wolves and the
drivers reached home in a half-frozen condition. But God cared for His
servants. In this emergency, the Rev. M. N. Adams, of Lac-qui-Parle,
performed a most heroic act. In mid-winter, with the thermometer many
degrees below zero, he hauled flour and other provisions for the
missionaries, on a hand sled, from Lac-qui-Parle to Yellow Medicine, a
distance of thirty-two miles. The fish gathered in shoals, an unusual
occurrence, near the mission and both the Indians and the missionaries
lived through that terrible winter. Here, an Indian church of seventeen
members was organized by Dr. Williamson. It increased to a membership
of thirty in the next decade.
In March, 1854, the mission houses at Lac-qui-Parle were destroyed by
fire. A consolidation of the mission forces was soon after effected.
Dr. Riggs and other helpers were transferred from Lac-qui-Parle to a
point two miles distant from Yellow Medicine and called Omehoo
(Hazelwood). A comfortable mission home was erected. The native
Christians removed from Lac-qui-Parle and re-established their homes at
Hazelwood. A boarding school was soon opened at this point by Rev. M.
N. Adams. A neat chapel was also erected. A church of thirty members
was organized by Mr. Riggs. It grew to a membership of forty-five
before the massacre. These were mainly from the the Lac-qui-Parle
church which might be called the mother of all the Dakota churches.
There were now gathered around the mission stations, quite a community
of young men, who had to a great extent, become civilized. With
civilization came new wants--pantaloons and coats and hats. There was
power also in oxen and wagons and brick-houses. The white man's axe and
plow and hoe had been introduced and the red man was learning to use
them. So the external civilization went on.
But the great and prominent force was in the underlying education and
especially in the vitalizing and renewing power of Christian truth. So
far as the inner life was changed, civilized habits became permanent;
otherwise they were shadows. Evangelization was working out
civilization. It is doing its permanently blessed work even yet.
About this time occurred the formation of the Hazelwood Republic.
This was a band of Indians somewhat advanced in civilization, who were
organized chiefly by the efforts of Dr. Riggs, under a written
constitution and by-laws. Their officers were a President, Secretary
and three judges, who were elected by a vote of the membership for a
term of two years each. Paul Maza-koo-ta-mane was the first president
and served for two terms. This was an interesting experiment, in the
series of efforts, by the missionaries, to change this tribe of nomads
from their roving teepee life to that of permanent dwellers in fixed
habitations. The rude shock of savage warfare, which soon after
revolutionized the whole Sioux nation, swept it away before its
efficiency could be properly tested. Surely it was a novelty--an Indian
band, regulated by written laws and governed by officers, elected by
themselves for a term of years. It now exists only in the memory of the
oldest of the tribesmen or the missionaries.
In 1843, a new station was established at Traverse des Sioux (near St.
Peter, Minnesota,) by the Rev. Stephen R. Riggs. This station was
doomed to a tragic history. July 15, 1843, Thomas Longley, the favorite
brother of Mrs. Mary Riggs, was suddenly swallowed up in the
treacherous waters of the Minnesota and laid to rest under what his
sister was wont to call the "Oaks of weeping"--three dwarf oaks on a
small knoll. In 1844, Robert Hopkins and his young bride joined the
workers here. In 1851, July 4, Mr. Hopkins was suddenly swept away to
death by the fatal waves of the Minnesota and his recovered body was
laid to rest under the oaks where Thomas Longley had slept all alone
for seven years. Thus the mission at Traverse des Sioux was closed by
the messenger of death. It was continued, however, in the nearby
frontier town of St. Peter, whose white settlers requested the Rev. M.
N. Adams, one of the missionaries to the Sioux, to devote his time to
their spiritual needs. He complied and founded a white Presbyterian
church and it is one of the strong Protestant organizations of Southern
Minnesota.
In 1843, also the Pond brothers established a station at Oak Grove,
twelve miles west of the Falls of St. Anthony. It was never abandoned.
For many years it was the center of beneficent influences to both races
for miles around. It developed into the white Presbyterian church of
Oak Grove, which still stands as a monument to the many noble qualities
of its founder, Rev. Gideon Hollister Pond. On the Sabbath scores of
his descendants worship within its walls. The surrounding community is
composed largely of Ponds and their kindred.
In 1846, a mission was established at Red Wing by the Reverends J. F.
Aiton and J. W. Hancock, and another in 1860, at Red Wood by Rev. John
P. Williamson.
In 1858, a church was organized at Red Wing with twelve members. This
was swept away by the outbreak in 1862.
Dr. John P. Williamson, who was born in 1835, in one of the mission
cabins on the shores of Lac-qui-Parle, who has spent his whole life
among the Sioux Indians, and who with a singleness of purpose, worthy
of the apostle Paul, has devoted his whole life to their temporal and
spiritual uplift, thus vividly sketches missionary life among the Sioux
in his boyhood days: "My first serious impression of life was that I
was living under a great weight of something, and as I began to discern
more clearly, I found this weight to be the all-surrounding
overwhelming presence of heathenism, and all the instincts of my birth
and culture of a Christian home set me at antagonism to it at every
point.
"This feeling of disgust was often accompanied with fear. At times,
violence stalked abroad unchallenged and dark lowering faces skulked
about. Even when we felt no personal danger this incubus of savage life
all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those
hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many
lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the
heathen dance or the chill thrill of the war-whoop.
Ours was a serious life. The earnestness of our parents in the pursuit
of their work could not fail to impress in some degree the children.
The main purpose of Christianizing that people was felt in everything.
It was like garrison life in time of war. But this seriousness was not
ascetical or moroseful. Far from it. Those missionary heroes were full
of gladness. With all the disadvantages of such a childhood was the
rich privilege of understanding the meaning of cheerful earnestness in
Christian life."
[Illustration: REV. STEPHEN R. RIGGS, D.D., LL.D.,
Forty-five Years a Missionary to the Dakotas.]