FootNote
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While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
No facts in this field can
be of more interest to the readers of the
Missionary than those contained in the
following thrilling account of the
conversion of three young Indians in Miss
Collins' mission field. We give the facts as
written by this self-sacrificing missionary.
Last Sabbath, Mr. Riggs came up from Oahe
and we had communion, and there were five
children baptized and seven grown people,
and seven more were examined and advised to
wait till the next communion. It was a most
interesting season.
Three of the young men were the leaders in
the Indian dance. They have always been the
head ones in all Indian customs. A year ago,
one of them said in the dance that he should
follow the Indian customs a year longer—give
himself up to them wholly and try to be
satisfied, and if he had in his heart the
same unsatisfied feeling, the same longing,
that he then had, he should throw it all
away.
On last New Year's day, the same young man,
"Huntington Wolcott," came to me and
said—"Last night I arose in the dance and
told them that I had given the old customs
and the old Indians a fair trial, and that
they did not satisfy, now I should leave
them forever and give myself to God, and if
any others were ready to follow to arise and
so make it known. The other two leaders
arose, stood silently a moment, and walked
out." From that time they have given
themselves up to singing, praying and
studying the Bible. They had, for two years,
been halting between two opinions, attending
the school, church, etc., and the Indian
feasts and dances, too. These three having
come out so boldly on God's side, has made a
great change in our work here.
Poor old Running-Antelope feels very sad. It
is his desire to keep the young men from
learning Christianity and civilization as
long as he can. He wants them to have
everything in common, and to feel that for
an individual to accumulate anything is a
disgrace. As long as they feel so, of course
squalor and suffering will be the natural
consequences.
The young men are working hard to build up
homes and to accumulate something for their
families during the winter. One young man
has cut logs and is building a house. I try
to teach them that long prayers and loud
singing is not all of Christianity—that
however regularly a man attends to his
church duties, if he fails to provide for
his family, his religion is vain; and if he
gives all his goods to his friends and lets
his wife and children cry for bread, that
their cries will reach the ears of God, and
his prayers and hymns will be lost in this
round of wailing of the hungry. All this is
very different from their old Indian
doctrine and hard to understand.
Elias, our native teacher, has formed a
class of young men who meet [226]every
Tuesday night and talk and pray and sing
together, and he directs their thought. I
think it will prove very helpful. Then on
Thursday night I have my Bible class, which
now numbers about twenty. It is formed of
the young men and women who wish to follow
Christ's example, and band themselves
together to learn of him. It has been the
training school of the young Christians.
What could be more encouraging than such
facts as these? An Indian unattended by any
white person, dissatisfied with the religion
of his fathers, walks out of heathenism; out
of sympathy and connection with his tribe;
out of the religion and customs of his
fathers and into the customs of civilized
life, into the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus
Christ! In the words of that quaint old
Negro hymn, let those who so earnestly
desire the conversion of the Pagans in
America exhort one another to "Pray on: Pray
on."
Miss M.C. Collins
During the recent measles epidemic a large
number of children died on the Agency. At
this village, a little child had been
conjured until they thought it was dying,
and then they sent for me. I found the poor
little one all bruised with the hands of the
conjurer. I showed the mother how to bathe
it, and I poulticed the throat and sent
Josephine over again to change the poultice,
and she reported the child as breathing
quietly. The next morning the swelling had
gone down and the baby seemed much better;
all day it continued to improve, and the
next day sat up and ate rice soup which I
carried it. The mother said, "She is well
now!" I said, "O, no, she is not; keep her
in the house three days and I will visit
her, then she will be well perhaps." If an
Indian is not in a dying condition, they do
not consider anything the matter. So, after
I left, she took her child out and walked
about two miles. The child caught cold, and
that afternoon grew worse. They had an
Indian to conjure it, and it died
immediately. They sent for me to come and
pray with them. Josephine went for Elias,
and we went to the desolate home. The baby
had been dead an hour and was closed up in a
box, the grandfather singing a mourning
song, the mother wailing, "O my daughter, my
daughter, I loved her and she has left me."
Over and over again she cried out in her
sorrow. The grandmother had cut her flesh,
and the streams of blood running down from
her hair over her face only made all seem
more desolate, and more weird and terrible.
They were trying to be Indians, and yet they
had asked for me to come. I suppose it was
to give the child the full benefit of both
religions, so that there should be no
mistake in the future world.
My Bible class now numbers ten; six of them
are candidates for church membership. One of
them spoke very nicely at our last prayer
meeting. Among other things he said: "No man
can kill God's Word. It will live and his
church will grow. We have tried to kill it
in this village, but look at it now. It has
taken hold of us, and we who have fought
against it are now its followers. No man can
kill God, because he alone is the creator of
life, and it is only foolish to try to stand
upon his word and keep it down. The Indian
customs fall before the Word of God wherever
the Bible has gone. My friends, stop
fighting against God, believe on him and
rejoice." This is Wakutemani (Walking
Hunter) whom I named Huntington Wolcott for
Mr. Wolcott of Boston. Because he said he
wanted a long name and the name of a good
man, I combined the two. He is now ambitious
to become a teacher. He will be ready for an
out-station whenever you are able to build
one. He says they have already asked him to
come up on Oak Creek to teach them, and I
gave him a Bible and hymn books and primer,
and he goes about reading and singing and
praying for Christ. May he be indeed the
Walking Hunter, going about seeking souls.
God be with him to the end.
Nearly all of our Indians signed the bill to
open the reservation. John Grass took the
lead. He is a very wise man, and a good one
for an Indian who represents the wild
Indians. I attended all the sessions of the
Council except the last. I see by the papers
that a Roman Catholic priest on this Agency
says he touched the pen first, and that
caused all the Indians to sign. Grass says
he wants me to dispute that, that he refused
to sign last year because he did not like
the bill. This year, the Commissioners were
men of brains and the bill was a better one,
and was so explained that the Indians
understood it, and that they of their own
accord thought the best thing they could do
was to sign it, that the said priest had no
power or influence over them whatever. He
said, "Tell our friends this for me, and
tell them the Commissioners know that we
signed it of our own will because we
believed it was for the good of our people."
I told him I would write it East.
It used to be a proverb among the Indians
that "The white man is very uncertain." The
following brief extract from the letter of a
missionary among the Indians not only shows
that the Indian is unstable, but illustrates
the difficulty of fixing the Indians in a
given locality and at steady work:
The Commissioner was at —— the other day,
and our Indians had a chance to sign, and
almost all of them did so, but still to many
of them the opening seems an evil. I am
afraid they are not going to maintain their
places in the face of settlement by the
whites. Already six families have slipped
away to the Indian Territory, and I shall
not be much surprised if in the next two
years a considerable majority of them go;
and still it is about as difficult to tell
what an Indian will do, as it is to forecast
western weather. I think they have never
done so well in farming as this year, but
one case will illustrate how unstable they
are. One man sold three young horses for
about half what they were worth. He had
about eight acres of wheat, twelve acres of
corn, and an acre of oats, all of which he
abandoned to go South, though all his crops
were very fine and had been well worked by
himself.
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