Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux. Stephen Return Riggs
always reminding us very forcibly of Bunyan’s description of the “Slough of Despond.” The only accident of this journey was the breaking of the axle of one of Mr. Pond’s loaded carts. It was Saturday afternoon. Mr. Pond and Dr. Williamson remained to make a new one, and Mary and I went on to the stream where we were to camp, and made ready for the Sabbath.
“On the Broad Prairie of ‘the Far West.’
“Saturday Eve., Sept. 9, 1837.
“My Ever Dear Mother:—
“Just at twilight I seat myself upon the ground by our fire, with the wide heavens above for a canopy, to commune with her whose yearning heart follows her children wherever they roam. This is the second day we have travelled on this prairie, having left Traverse des Sioux late Thursday afternoon. Before leaving that place, a little half-Indian girl, daughter of the trader where we stopped, brought me nearly a dozen of eggs (the first I had seen since leaving the States), which afforded us a choice morsel for the next day. To-morrow we rest, it being the Sabbath, and may we and you be in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.”
“Lac-qui-parle, Sept. 18.
“The date will tell you of our arrival at this station, where we have found a home. We reached this place on Wednesday last, having been thirteen days from Fort Snelling, a shorter time than is usually required for such a journey, the Lord’s hand being over us to guide and prosper us on our way. Two Sabbaths we rested from our travels, and the last of them was peculiarly refreshing to body and spirit. Having risen and put our tent in order, we engaged in family worship, and afterward partook of our frugal meal. Then all was still in that wide wilderness, save at intervals, when some bird of passage told us of its flight and bade our wintry clime farewell.
“Before noon we had a season of social worship, lifting up our hearts with one voice in prayer and praise, and reading a portion of God’s Word. It was indeed pleasant to think that God was present with us, far away as we were from any human being but ourselves. The day passed peacefully away, and night’s refreshing slumbers succeeded. The next morning we were on our way before the sun began his race, and having ridden fifteen or sixteen miles, according to our best calculations, we stopped for breakfast and dinner at a lake where wood and water could both be obtained, two essentials which frequently are not found together on the prairie.
“Thus you will be able to imagine us with our two one-ox carts and a double wagon, all heavily laden, as we have travelled across the prairie.”
Thomas Smith Williamson had been ten years a practising physician in Ripley, Ohio. There he had married Margaret Poage, of one of the first families. One after another their children had died. Perhaps that led them to think that God had a work for them to do elsewhere. At any rate, after spending a year in the Lane Theological Seminary, the doctor turned his thoughts toward the Sioux, for whom no man seemed to care. In the spring of 1834 he made a visit up to Fort Snelling. And in the year following, as has already been noted, he came as a missionary of the A. BC F. M., with his wife and one child, accompanied by Miss Sarah Poage, Mrs. Williamson’s sister, and Mr. Alexander G. Huggins and his wife, with two children.
This company reached Fort Snelling a week or two in advance of Mr. Stevens, and were making preparations to build at Lake Calhoun; but Mr. Stevens claimed the right of selection, on the ground that he had been there in 1829. And so Dr. Williamson and his party accepted the invitation of Mr. Joseph Renville, the Bois Brule trader at Lac-qui-parle, to go two hundred miles into the interior. All this was of the Lord, as it plainly appeared in after years. At the time we approached the mission at Lac-qui-parle, they had been two full years in the field, and, under favorable auspices, had made a very good beginning. About the middle of September, after a pretty good week of prairie travel, we were very glad to receive the greetings of the mission families. …
A few days after our arrival, Mary wrote: “The evening we came, we were shown a little chamber, where we spread our bed and took up our abode. On Friday, Mr. Riggs made a bedstead, by boring holes and driving slabs into the logs, across which boards are laid. This answers the purpose very well, though rather uneven. Yesterday was the Sabbath, and such a Sabbath as I never before enjoyed. Although the day was cold and stormy, and much like November, twenty-five Indians and part-bloods assembled at eleven o’clock in our school-room for public worship. Excepting a prayer, all the exercises were in Dakota and French, and most of them in the former language. Could you have seen these Indians kneel with stillness and order, during prayer, and rise and engage in singing hymns in their own tongue, led by one of their own tribe, I am sure your heart would have been touched. The hymns were composed by Mr. Renville the trader, who is probably three-fourths Sioux.”
Doctor Williamson had erected a log house a story and a half high. In the lower part was his own living-room, and also a room with a large open fire-place, which then, and for several years afterward, was used for the school and Sabbath assemblies. In the upper part there were three rooms, still in an unfinished state. The largest of these, ten feet wide and eighteen feet long, was appropriated to our use. We fixed it up with loose boards overhead, and quilts nailed up to the rafters, and improvised a bedstead, as we had been unable to bring ours farther than Fort Snelling.
That room we made our home for five winters. There were some hardships about such close quarters, but, all in all, Mary and I never enjoyed five winters better than those spent in that upper room. There our first three children were born. There we worked in acquiring the language. There we received our Dakota visitors. There I wrote and wrote again my ever growing dictionary. And there, with what help I could obtain, I prepared for the printer the greater part of the New Testament in the language of the Dakotas. It was a consecrated room.
Well, we had set up our cooking-stove in our upper room, but the furniture was a hundred and twenty-five miles away. It was not easy for Mary to cook with nothing to cook in. But the good women of the mission came to her relief with kettle and pan. More than this, there were some things to be done now which neither Mary nor I had learned to do. She was not an adept at making light bread, and neither of us could milk a cow. She grew up in New England, where the men alone did the milking, and I in Ohio, where the women alone milked in those days. At first it took us both to milk a cow, and it was poorly done. But Mary succeeded best. Nevertheless, application and perseverance succeeded, and, although never boasting of any special ability in that line of things, I could do my own milking, and Mary became very skilful in bread-making, as well as in other mysteries of housekeeping.
The missionary work began now to open before us. The village at Lac-qui-parle consisted of about 400 persons, chiefly of the Wahpaton, or Leaf-village band of the Dakotas. They were very poor and very proud. Mr. Renville, as a half-breed and fur-trader, had acquired an unbounded influence over many of them. They were willing to follow his leading. And so the young men of his soldiers’ lodge were the first, after his own family, to learn to read. On the Sabbath, there gathered into this lower room twenty or thirty men and women, but mostly women, to hear the Word as prepared by Dr. Williamson with Mr. Renville’s aid. A few Dakota hymns had been made, and were sung under the leadership of Mr. Huggins or young Mr. Joseph Renville. Mr. Renville and Mr. Pond made the prayers in Dakota. Early in the year 1836, a church had been organized, which at this time contained seven native members, chiefly from Mr. Renville’s household. And in the winter which followed our arrival nine were added, making a native church of sixteen, of which one half were full-blood Dakota women, and in the others the Dakota blood greatly predominated.
One of the noted things that took place in those autumn days was the marriage of Mr. Gideon Holister Pond and Miss Sarah Poage. That was the first couple I married, and I look back to it with great satisfaction. The bond has been long since sundered by death, but it was a true covenant entered into by true hearts, and receiving, from the first, the blessing of the Master. Mr. Pond made a great feast, and “called the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind,” and many such Dakotas were there to be called. They could not recompense him by inviting him again, and it yet remains that “he shall be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.”
Nov. 2.
“Yesterday the marriage referred to was solemnized. Could I paint the assembly, you would