Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux. Stephen Return Riggs
Forty years ago this first day of June, 1877, Mary and I came to Fort Snelling. She was from the Old Bay State, and I was a native-born Buckeye. Her ancestors were the Longleys and Taylors of Hawley and Buckland, names honorable and honored in the western part of Massachusetts. Her father, Gen. Thomas Longley, was for many years a member of the General Court and had served in the war of 1812, while her grandfather, Col. Edmund Longley, had been a soldier of the Revolution, and had served under Washington. Her maternal grandfather, Taylor, had held a civil commission under[Pg 23]
[Pg 24] George the Third. In an early day both families had settled in the hill country west of the Connecticut River. They were the true and worthy representatives of New England.
As it regards myself, my father, whose name was Stephen Riggs, was a blacksmith, and for many years an elder in the Presbyterian church of Steubenville, Ohio, where I was born. He had a brother, Cyrus, who was a preacher in Western Pennsylvania; and he traced his lineage back, through the Riggs families of New Jersey, a long line of godly men, ministers of the gospel and others, to Edward Riggs,[1] who came over from Wales in the first days of colonial history. My mother was Anna Baird, a model Christian woman—as I think, of a Scotch Irish family, which in the early days settled in Fayette County, Pa. Of necessity they were pioneers. When they had three children, they removed up into the wild wooded country of the Upper Alleghany. My mother could tell a good many bear stories. At one time she and those first three children were left alone in an unfinished log cabin. The father was away hunting food for the family. When, at night, the fire was burning in the old-fashioned chimney, a large black bear pushed aside the quilt that served for the door, and, sitting down on his haunches, surveyed the scared family within. But, as God would have it, to their great relief, he retired without offering them any violence.
[1] Heretofore, we have supposed the first progenitor of the Riggs Family in America was Miles; but the investigations of Mr. J. H. Wallace of New York show that it was Edward, who settled in Roxbury, Mass., about the year 1635. The name of Miles comes in later. He was the progenitor of one branch of the family.
Mary’s education had been carefully conducted. She had not only the advantages of the common town school and home culture, but was a pupil of Mary Lyon, when she taught in Buckland, and afterward of Miss Grant, at Ipswich. At the age of sixteen she taught her first school, in Williamstown, Mass. As she used to tell the story, she taught for a dollar a week, and, at the end of her first quarter, brought the $12 home and gave it to her father, as a recognition of what he had expended for her education.
It was a joy to me to meet, the other day in Chicago, Mrs. Judge Osborne, who was one of the scholars in this school, as it was in her father’s family; and who spoke very affectionately of Mary Ann Longley, her teacher.
Contrasted with the present appliances for education in all the towns, and many of the country districts also, the common schools in Ohio, when I was a boy, were very poorly equipped. My first school-house was a log cabin, with a large open fireplace, a window with four lights of glass where the master’s seat was, while on the other two sides a log was cut out and old newspapers pasted over the hole through which the light was supposed to come, and the seats were benches made of slabs. One of my first teachers was a drunken Irishman, who often visited the tavern near by and came back to sleep the greater part of the afternoon. This gave us a long play spell. But he was a terrible master for the remainder of the day. Notwithstanding these difficulties in the way of education, we managed to learn a good deal. Sabbath-schools had not reached the efficiency they now have; but we children were taught carefully at home. We were obliged to commit to memory the Shorter Catechism, and every few months the good minister came around to see how well we could repeat it. All through my life this summary of Christian doctrine—not perfect indeed, and not to be quoted as authority equal to the Scriptures, as it sometimes is—has been to me of incalculable advantage. What I understood not then I have come to understand better since, with the opening of the Word and the illumination of the Holy Spirit. If I were a boy again, I would learn the Shorter Catechism.
My ambition was to learn some kind of a trade. But I had wrought enough with my father at the anvil not to choose that. It was hard work, and not over-clean work. Something else would suit me better, I thought. About that time my sister Harriet married William McLaughlin, who was a well-to-do harness-maker in Steubenville. This suited my ideas of life better. But that sister died soon after her marriage, and my father removed from that part of the country to the southern part of the State. There in Ripley a Latin school was opened about that time, and the Lord appeared to me in a wonderful manner, making discoveries of himself to my spiritual apprehension, so that from that time and onward my path lay in the line of preparation for such service as he should call me unto. My father, as he said many years afterward, had intended to educate my younger brother James; but he was taken away suddenly, and I came in his place. Thus the Lord opened the way for a commencement, and by the help of friends I was enabled to continue until I finished the course at Jefferson College, and afterward spent a year at the Western Theological Seminary at Alleghany.
Mary had been educated for a teacher. She was well fitted for the work. And while she was still at Ipswich, a benevolent gentleman in New York City, who had interested himself in establishing a seminary in Southern Indiana, sent to Miss Grant for a teacher to take charge of the school near Bethlehem, in the family of Rev. John M. Dickey. It was far away, but it seemed just the opening she had been desiring. But a young woman needed company in travelling so far westward. It was at the time of the May meetings in New York. Clergymen and others were on East from various parts of the West. In several instances, however, she failed of the company she hoped for, by what seemed singular providences. And at last it was her lot to come West under the protection of Rev. Dyer Burgess, of West Union, Ohio. Mr. Burgess was what was called in those days “a rabid abolitionist,” and had taken a fancy to help me along, because, as he said, I was “of the same craft.” And so it was that during his absence I was living in his family. This is the way in which the threads of our two lives, Mary’s and mine, were brought together. A year and a half after this I was licensed to preach the gospel by the Chillicothe Presbytery, and we were on our way to her mountain home in Massachusetts.
Before starting for New England, the general plan of our life-work was arranged. Early in my course of education, I had considered the claims of the heathen upon us Christians, and upon myself personally as a believer in Christ; and, with very little hesitation or delay, the decision had been reached that, God willing, I would go somewhere among the unevangelized. And, during the years of my preparation, there never came to me a doubt of the rightness of my decision. Nay, more, at the end of forty years’ work, I am abundantly satisfied with the way in which the Lord has led me. If China had been then open to the gospel, as it was twenty years afterward, I probably should have elected to go there. But Dr. Thomas S. Williamson of Ripley, Ohio, had started for the Dakota field the same year that I graduated from college. His representations of the needs of these aborigines, and the starting out of Whitman and Spalding with their wives to the Indians of the Pacific coast, attracted me to the westward. And Mary was quite willing, if not enthusiastic, to commence a life-work among the Indians of the North-west, which at that time involved more of sacrifice than service in many a far-off foreign field. Hitherto, the evangelization of our own North American Indians had been, and still is, in most parts of the field, essentially a foreign mission work. It has differed little, except, perhaps, in the element of greater self-sacrifice, from the work in India, China, or Japan. And so, with a mutual good understanding of the general plan of life’s campaign, with very little appreciation of what its difficulties might be, but with a good faith in ourselves, and more faith in Him who has said, “Lo, I am with you all days,” Mary left her school in Bethlehem, to which she had become a felt necessity, and I gathered up such credentials as were necessary to the consummation of our acceptance as missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and we went eastward.
Railroads had hardly been thought of in those days, and so what part of the way we were not carried by steamboats, we rode in stages. It was only the day before Thanksgiving, and a stormy evening it was, when we hired a very ordinary one-horse