FootNote
The new kid on the block, FootNote is known for digitizing historical
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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!
The seventh annual gathering
of this Conference, Oct. 2-5, was the
largest ever assembled. Among those present
for the first time were Ex-President Hayes,
Gen. O.O. Howard, Gen. John Eaton, Prof.
Wayland and Dr. Wayland. The newspaper
press, religious and secular, was very fully
represented; Abbott, Buckley, Dunning,
Gilbert, Ward and Wayland are perhaps best
known. The venerable Judge Strong well
represented the law, while the absence of
Senator Dawes was sincerely regretted.
A marked feature of the Conference was the
presence of Gen. Morgan, Commissioner of
Indian Affairs. For weeks prior to the
meeting of the Conference, rumors had gone
abroad that he intended to abolish the
"contract schools"—that is, schools of the
missionary societies which the Government by
a "contract" agrees to assist. Articles had
appeared in the newspapers remonstrating
against this course, and it was believed
that this topic would be one of most
practical interest in the Conference. The
Commissioner early in the meetings read a
paper outlining his plan for the
establishment of Government schools for all
Indian children—the attendance to be
compulsory. The omission of all mention of
the "contract schools" in this paper
confirmed the impression to which rumor had
given currency. An animated discussion
followed the reading of his paper, in which
the Commissioner freely participated. It
appeared that he had been misunderstood—at
least in so far as any immediate curtailment
of the "contract schools" is concerned, and
he impressed the Conference warmly in his
favor as a Christian man with broad views,
impartial and progressive. He will meet, we
feel sure, with the cordial support of all
the societies engaged in Indian educational
work.
The final action of the Conference was
embodied in a platform substantially
repeating the utterances of last year,
urging national education for all Indian
children and approving the continuance of
"contract schools." Other planks of the
platform related to lands in severalty, to
the legal rights of the Indians, etc.—all of
which were unanimously approved, and thus
[pg 303] once more this remarkable
Conference followed its predecessors in free
and frank debate, consummated by entire
harmony in the result.
The varied and unique scenery of Lake Mohonk
was shown at its best by three days of
bright and bracing weather. The welcome of
Mr. and Mrs. Smiley to their increased
number of guests, who taxed to the utmost
limits the accommodations of the large
establishment, was as cordial and genial as
ever. The hearty and enthusiastic vote of
thanks, the only compensation permitted, was
a far less reward than the gratification of
their own benevolent feelings in doing good;
and that gratification is probably to be
enhanced by the calling together of another
Conference in the early summer in behalf of
a still larger class of our needy
fellow-citizens than the Indians.
There are 260,000 Indians in this country.
Compared with our great fields in the South,
this is small. But there is an emphasis on
this work which is not made by figures.
Those who were native to this land have been
made foreigners. Those who were the first to
receive missionary work here, and who
responded as readily as any heathen people
ever did, are still largely pagans. While
one Christian has been telling the Indians
the story of the gospel, another calling
himself a Christian has been shooting them.
They have not yet had a full chance to learn
what Christianity is. From place to place
they have been pushed so that they have not
had time to build their altars to the true
God. We have wronged them and we owe them
more than we shall pay. We shall meet our
obligations but in part, when we do all we
can to save them.
We have in bur Indian work eighteen schools
and six churches, one new church having been
added this year. In these, 68 missionaries
have been doing noble service for the Indian
and for the country. Shall the Indian
problem forever perplex and shame both the
country and the Church? Will not the
churches enable us to send all the workers
and do all the work needed to be done, and
thus hasten the day when it can be joyfully
proclaimed that the Indians are
evangelized—no longer pagans and foreigners,
but our fellow Christians and our fellow
citizens?
By Rev. Addison F. Foster, D.D., Chairman
The committee on the work of the American
Missionary Association among the Indians
respectfully report that they gratefully
recognize the good hand of God in the work
already done.
Since the American Missionary Association
took the work, the expenditures have
increased from $11,000 to $52,000, the
out-stations for direct evangelistic effort
from seven to twenty-one, and the churches
from two to six. This last year, the
Association has established three new
out-stations: the Moody station among the
Mandans, fifty miles north of Fort Berthold;
the Moody Station No. 2 among the Gros
Ventre, twenty-five miles north of Fort
Berthold; the Sankey Station among the
Dakotas at Cherry Creek. It has just put up
a mission house, with a room for church
worship, at Rosebud Agency. It has organized
anew church at Bazille Creek, some distance
out from Santee; a branch church at Cherry
Creek, on the Sioux Reservation, and is just
forming a church at Standing Rock, for which
a building is now completed.
This record is certainly gratifying and
shows that the Association appreciates the
emergency, and is striving to meet it, so
far as the means put in its hands allow. But
your committee feel also that never before
was there so great an opportunity as now
brought before the Christians of this land,
and especially our own denomination, for
work among the Indians.
The relations of the Government and of the
churches in Indian work are now unusually
harmonious and kindly. The present
Administration is thoroughly in sympathy
with missionary operations, and will do
nothing to impair their efficiency. We
believe it to be sincerely actuated by a
desire to promote the best welfare of the
Indians, and ready to cooperate with all
good people in efforts in this direction. It
aims to educate every Indian child. We
desire to see this done, and believe that
when the Government assumes, as it should,
the primary education of all Indians of
school age, we shall be called on to turn
our efforts to a much larger work for direct
evangelization.
Our opportunity is enlarging further by the
breaking down of the old pagan prejudices of
the Indians. The testimony of all the
workers on the field is to this effect. The
Indians are desirous of living as white men.
They are rapidly losing their distinctive
Indian ideas and are imbibing the notions of
their white neighbors. This is seen in their
burials, which now are not uniformly, as of
old, on scaffolds, but are more and more
interments. It is shown in their feeling and
behavior when death comes into their
households. They no longer fill their houses
with hideous outcries, but instead seek the
missionaries to inquire about the life in
the other world.
A further opportunity is to be noted in the
fact that the Dakota Indians have specially
fallen into our care. Our chief missions are
located among them, at Santee, Rosebud,
Oahe, Standing Rock, and outlying stations.
But the Dakota Indians number 40,000 in all,
or about one-sixth of all the Indians in the
country. We have mastered the Dakota
language; and a Bible, hymn-book, dictionary
and other books are printed in that tongue.
We have, then, special ability to carry on
mission work among them, and are bound to
utilize it to the full. The time is ripe for
immediate action. It must be taken without
delay if taken at all. The opening up to
white settlement of a large strip of land
though the center of the great Sioux
reservations is to bring the Indian into
contact with the influence of white men as
never before. It is impossible that that
influence shall be altogether good. The
contact of the Indian with the frontiersmen
of our own people has resulted most
deplorably in the past, and we cannot hope
for much better results now. Rum and
licentiousness are sure to work untold harm
to the Indian unless they are met by the
gospel. This opening up of Indian territory
to white settlement lays, therefore, a most
imperative and immediate obligation on
Christian people to protect the Indian from
ruin by giving them the gospel.
We are satisfied that nothing but the gospel
will suffice. Education alone can not save,
and may simply give new strength to evil
habits and influences. It must be a
Christian education; schools should be
simply preliminary and altogether subsidiary
to the most energetic and wise presentation
of the gospel. The uniform policy of the
American Missionary Association in all
departments of its work has been in this
direction, and we gladly recognize the fact
that its Indian work has steadily progressed
with the idea of evangelizing the Indian.
We know very well that the Association is
laboring for 8,000,000 Negroes and for
2,000,000 Mountain White people and for
125,000 Chinese, as well as 262,000 Indians.
We know that the proportion of the Indians
is comparatively small. At the same time we
urge that this disproportion is to a large
degree counterbalanced by the special
opportunities we have considered. The Indian
problem is before us for immediate
settlement. It admits of no delay. Care for
these few Indians now, Christianize them
now, as we may, and the Indian becomes as
the white man, and our missionary efforts
will then be released for other fields.
In this special emergency we feel strongly
the necessity laid on the Association for an
enlargement of its administrative force.
Since the death of our lamented brother,
Secretary Powell, the force at the New York
office of the Association has been
short-handed. We hope that the earnest
efforts which are being made by the
Executive Committee to find a suitable
person to become another Secretary of the
Association may be at once successful. An
emergency is upon us, and we say this with
the conviction that the demands of the
Indian work are now so imperative as to
require a large portion of the time and
thought of such a Secretary. It is a
necessity that such a Secretary should
frequently visit the field and be in
constant communication with the workers.
It was said of Dr. Williamson by an old
Indian that he had an Indian heart. I, too,
have an Indian heart, and I can lay claim to
that possession as but few can. It would
take but a very little while to go from here
into the very midst of our present Indian
field. It took my father and Dr. Williamson,
when they first entered the field, some six
months to reach it. I could start to-morrow
morning, and taking the cars in this city,
and reaching Pierre by the following night,
could be farther off by Saturday, farther
from the border of the mission field, than
my father and Dr. Williamson could after
they had travelled six months.
I would like to invite you to go with me on
a tour of inspection of the mission field
itself. I would take my two ponies and drive
out to the Cheyenne River, and take you to
one of our out-stations, and show you
something of the influences at work in the
field to-day. As we went up the valley, we
would see the Indian village located there,
and in the midst, on a rising piece of
ground, the mission station. Over some of
the houses we would see a red flag flying.
That is a prayer, a votive offering; there
are sick in that house, and that is a prayer
to the gods that healing may come, and that
death may be kept from them. Over on the
right we would see the dance-house—a great
octagonal house with an open roof, in which
the Indians gather night after night to
dance to the monotonous beating of the drum.
That is a very common sound out in the
Indian villages, bringing to us always that
thought of slavery to evil. As we go up to
the station itself, we would see something
more of the work than you have as yet been
able to see. If it be on the Sabbath, as we
go in we would see a young man there, with
his audience before him, not a very large
audience—old men, old women, boys and
girls—gathered on the rough benches, and
very much as they are in their own homes.
Some of the old women have their hair down
over their faces, the boys with dirty hands,
old men with their dirty blankets, and yet
they are gathered around there to hear the
word of life. The preacher, as he stands
before them, tells them of God's wonderful
love, and takes as his text that most
wonderful verse in the Bible, "God so loved
the world that he gave his only begotten
Son."
Then, as you look at the man who is
preaching there, you would hardly recognize
in him one who thirteen years ago was a
savage, a painted Indian. As I look at him
it seems a most wonderful thing that such a
change has taken place. I knew him as a
savage; a splendid fellow he was, and he is
now a more splendid man than ever he was a
savage; and he is teaching the gospel of
Christ to his own people. I have been out
there seventeen years, and if there were not
another result to show for those seventeen
years of work than the lifting up of this
Clarence Ward, and making of him a man in
Christ Jesus, I should be abundantly
satisfied.
There is another influence of which I would
speak, the influence of the home. Here in
our happy homes we know but very little of
what that means to the Indian. An Indian has
no home, in our sense of the word. Some
years ago I went with a party of Indians 175
miles west of the Missouri River in the
middle of winter. We climbed a mountain and
looked away to the east. We could see, I
should think, 150 miles, and the Indian as
he sat there on the edge of a rock, covered
his head up in a blanket and cried. Said he:
"This is my country, and we have had to
leave it." That was his idea of home—such a
barren stretch as that, the snow glistening
in the sunlight. The Dakota Indian lives in
a region, not in a place. The Christian home
coming into the midst of a village carries
there an ideal of which the Indian knows
nothing, and he is taught by the power of
example day after day. The Christian woman
in that home keeps her house clean, keeps
her children clean, and stands there as a
persistent example of the power of the
gospel of soap, just as the man himself
there who has become a Christian no longer
steals horses. A party going out into an
enemy's country would go as often for the
sake of bringing back stolen horses, as they
would for scalps. The man who has become a
Christian is recognized at once as shut out
from that privilege.
Reference has been made to the opening up of
the reservation, and the crisis is now upon
us in connection with our Indian work. We
have eleven million acres of land there just
west of the Missouri River to be thrown open
for settlement. Do you know what that means?
Were any of you down at Oklahoma this last
season? It means the rush of a swarm of
people, good, bad and indifferent—chiefly
bad and indifferent—and these settlers will
crowd themselves in as a wedge between the
two divisions of the Indian reservation, and
we shall have Indians both to the north and
to the south. They will be exposed to
influences from which they have been kept as
yet; influences which will tend to uplift in
the outcome, as well as to degrade. I thank
God for it. I thank God that he is bringing
the white man into the midst of the Indian
country. It may seem that this is a heroic
remedy. So it is, but it is time for heroic
remedies. We need to meet the question as it
comes to us to-day. There is a ranchman out
on Bad River, who tells me that there is no
such thing as an Indian question. "Why,"
said I, "what are you talking about?" "There
is no such thing," said he. I asked him how
he explained it. "The simple thing to do is
just to treat them as men, and that will be
all there is to it. That will settle it, and
there will be no such thing as an Indian
question." Treat them as men and make
Christians of them, and we will settle the
whole thing.
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