Among the Sioux : a story of the Twin Cities and the two Dakotas

by Creswell, R. J. (Robert J. )

  tvS AMONG THE SIOUX.

  Hgious journal pnb.lished in the state, and he was also the first preacher of the gospel in the city of Minneapolis.

  In whatever position he was placed in life, he ever proved himself to be a wise, conscientious, consecrated Christian gentleman. "None knew him, but to love him; none knew him, but to praise. He was boni in Connecticut, June thirtieth, 1810, and on the twentieth of January, 1878, he passed from his Oak Grove Mission Home through the gates of the celestial city, to go no more out. They laid him to rest in the midst of the people, whom he had loved and served so well for four and forty years and by whom he was universally beloved and admired. None were more sincere in their demonstrations of sorrow than the little company of Dakotas to whom he had been a more than father.

  ANPETUSAPAWIN

  A Legend of St. Anthotiy Falls

  Long ere the white man's bark had seen These flower-decked prairies^ fair and wide, Long ere the white man's bark had been Borne on the Mississippi's tick, So long ago, Dakotas say, Anpetiisapawin was born, Her eyes behekl these scenes so gay First opening on life's rosv morn.

  —S. W. Pond.

  In the long ago, a young Indian brave espoused as his wife this Indian maiden of whom the poet sing-s. AVith her he lived happily for a few A-ears, in the enjoyment of ever}' comfort of which a savage life is capable. To crown their happiness, they were blessed with two lovely cliildren on whom they doted. During this time, by a dint of activi(ty and perseverance in the chase, he became signalized in an eminent degree as a hunter, having met with unrivaled success in the pursuit and capture of the wild denizens of the forest. This circumstance contributed to raise him high in the estimation of his fellow savages and drew a crowd of admiring friends around. This operated as a spur to his ambitions.

  At length some of his newl' acquired friends suggested to him the propriety of taking another wife, as it would be impossible for one woman to manage the afl^airs of his household and properly wait upon the

  ;o AMONG THE SIOUX.

  many guests his rising importance would call to visit him. They intimated to him that in all probability he would soon be elevated to the chieftainship. His vanity was fired by the suggestion. He yielded readily and accepted a wife they had already selected for him.

  After his second marriage, he sought to take his new wife home and reconcile his first wife to the match in the most delicate manner possible. To this end he returned to his first wife, as yet ignorant of what had occurred, and endeavored, by dissimulation, to secure her approval..

  "You know," said he, "1 can love no one" as I love you; yet I see your labors are too great for your powers of endurance. Your duties are daily becom.ing more and more numerous and burdensome. This grieves me sorely. But I know of only one remedy by which you can be relieved. These considerations constrain me to take another wife. This wife shall be under your control in every respect and ever second to you in my afll-ections." She listened to his narrative in painful anxiety and endeavored to reclaim him from his wicked purpose, refuting all his sophistry bv expressions of her unaffected conjugal affection. He left her to meditate. She became more industrious and treated him more tenderly than before. She tried ever}^ means in her power to disuade him from the execution of his vile purpose. She pleaded all the endearments of their former happy life, the regard he had for her happiness and that of the offspring of their mutual love to prevail on him to relinquish the idea of marrying another wife. He then informed her

  of the fact of his marriage and stated that compHance on her part would be actually necessary. She must receive the new wife into their home. She was determined, however, not to be the passive dupe of his duplicity. With her two children she returned to her parental teepee. In the autumn she joined her friends and kinsmen in an expedition up the.Mississippi and spent the winter in hunting. In the springtime, as they were returning, laden wi;th peltries, she and her children occupied a canoe by themselves. On nearing the Falls of St. Anthony she lingered in the rear till the others had landed a little above the falls.

  She then pain.ted heirself and children, paddled her canoe into the swift current of the rapids and began chanting her death song, in which she recounted her former happy life, with her husband, when she enjoyed his undivided affection, and the wretchedness in which i"he was now involved by his infidelity. Her friends, alarmed at her imminent peril, ran to the shore and begged her to paddle out of the current before it was too late, while her parents, rending their clothing and tearing their hair, besought her to come to their arms of love; but all in vain. Her wretchedness was complete and must terminate with her existence! She continued her course till her canoe was borne headlong down the roaring cataract, and it and the deserted, heartbroken wife and the beautiful and innocent children, were dashed to pieces on the rocks below. No traces of the canoe or its occupants were found. Her brothers avenged her death by slaying the treacherous husband of the deserted wife.

  They say that still that song is heard Above the mighty torrent's roar,

  When trees are by the night-wind stirred

  And darkness broods on stream and shore.

  AUNT JANE

  The Red Song Woman

  Miss Jane Smith Williamson, the subject of this sketch, was one of the famous missionary women in our land in the nineteenth century. She was widely known among both whites and Indians as "Aunt Jane." The Dakotas also called her ''Red Song Woman." She was born at Fair Foresit, South Carolina, March 8, 1803. Through her father she was a lineal descendant of the Rev. John Newton and Sir Isaac Newton. Her father was a revolutionary soldier.

  Her mother was Jane T Smith) Williamson. They believed that negroes had souls and therefore treated the twenty-seven slaves they^had inherited like human beings. Her mother was fined in South Carolina, for teaching her slaves to read the Bible. Consequently, in 1804, in her early infancy, her parents emigrated to Adams county, Ohio, in order to be able to free their slaves and teach them to read the Word of God and write legibly.

  The storv of Aunt Jane's life naturally falls into three divisions.

  I PREPARATION FOR HER GREAT LIFE WORK.

  This covered forty years. She grew up in an atmosphere of sincere and deep piety and of devotion to Christian principles. Her early educational advanta-o-es were necessarily limited, but she made the most of Ihem. She became very accurate in the use of Ian-

  AUNT JANE, Or, The Ked Song Woman.

  giiage, wrote a clear round hand and was very thorough in everything she studied. She was a great reader of good and useful books, possessed an excellent memory and a lively imagination and very early acquired a most interesting style of composition.

  From her ancestors she inherited that strong sympathy for the colored race, which was a marked characteristic of her whole life. In her young womanhood, she taught private schools in Adams county, Ohio. The progress made by her pupils was very rapid and her instruction was of a high order. She sought out the children of the poor and taught them without charge. She admitted colored pupils as well as whites. For this cause, many threats of violence were made a-gainst her school. But she was such an excellent teacher that her white pupils remained with her; and a guard of volunteer riflemen frequently surrounded her school house. She calmly oursued the even tenor of her way.

  In 1820, when she was oniy 17 years of age, she and her brother rode on horseback all the way from Manchester, Ohio^ to .South Carolina and back again, and brought with them two slaves they had inherited. They could have sold them in the • South for $300 each, and stood in great need of the money; but instead, they gave to these two poor colored persons the priceless boon of liberty. Miss Williamson's slave was a young woman of her own age, called Jemima. She was married to another slave named Logan. She was the mother of two children. Logan was a daring man, and rendered desperate by the loss of his young

  wife, he determined tc be free and folloAv her. He fled from South Carolina, and after passing through many adventures of the most thrillin
g character, he found liis wife in Ohio, and lived and died a free man. He was fully determined to die rather than return to slavery. Jemima lived to a great age, surviving her husband, who was killed accidcntly in the fifties. They left a family highly respected.

  During all these years ''Aunt Jane" was a very active worker in Sabbath schools, prayer meetings and missionary societies. In her own day schools, she made religious worship and Bible study a prominent feature of the exercises. In 1835, when her brother. Dr. Williamson, went as a missionary to the Dakotas, she strongly desired to accompany him. But her duty required her to remain at home and care for her aged father, who died in 1839, at the age of yy. She did not join her brother, however, until 1843, ^t the age of forty.

  II—HER WORK AMONG THE DAKOTAS.

  This covers one-third of a century. The missionary spirit was a part of her life,—born with her,—a heritage of several generations. The blood of the Newtons flowed in her veins. When she arrived in Minnesota, she went to work without delay and with great energy and with untiring industry greatly -beyond her strength. She was very familiar with the Bible. She taught hundreds of Indians, perhaps fully one thousand, to read the Word of God, and the greater part of them tc write a legible letter. She visited all

  the sick within her reach, and devoted much of her time to instructing the Dakota women in domestic duties. She conducted prayer meetings and conversed with them in reference to the salvation of their souls. Many of them, saved by the Holy Spirit's benediction upon her self-denying efforts, are now shining like bright gems in her crown of glory on high.

  Lac-qui-Parle,—the Lake-that-speaks,—^two hundred miles west of St. Paul, was her first missionary home. There she gathered the young Indians together and taught them as opportunity offered. The instruction of the youth—especially the children, of whom she was ever a devoted lover, was her great delight.

  It was more than a year before any mail reached her at this remote outpost. She was absent in the Indian village when she heard of the arrival of her first mail. She. in her eagerness to hear from her friends in Ohio, ran like a young woman to her brother's house. She found the mail in the stove-oven. The carrier had brought it through the ice, and it had to be thawed out. That mail contained more than fifty letters for Iitr and the postage on them was over five dollars In 1846, she removed with her brother to Kaposia, Little Crow's village (now South St. Paul), and in 1852 to Yellow Medicine, thirty-two miles south of Lac-qui-Parle. The privations of the missionaries were very great. White bread was more of a luxury to them then, than rich cake ordinarily is now. Their houses and furnishings were of the rudest kind. Their environments were all of a savage character.

  y6 AMONG THE SIOUX.

  Their trials were many and sore, extreme scarcity of food in mid-winter, savage threats and bitter in-snks. Thev were ''in journeying-s often, in perils of waters, of robbers, by the heathen and in the wilderness." All this she endured contentedly for Christ's sake and the souls of the poor ignorant savages around for the evangelization and salvation of the degraded Dakotas,—lost in sin.

  She possessed great tact and was absolutely fearless. In 1857. during the Inkpadoota trouble, the father of a young Indian, who had been wounded by the soldiers of Sherman's battery, came with his gun to the mission house to kill her brother. Aunt Jane met him with a plate of food for himself and an ofifer to send some nice dishes to the wounded young man. This vv^as effectual. The savage was tamed. He ate the food and afterwards came with his son to give them thanks. Scarcely was the prison-camp, with nearly four hundred Dakota prisoners, three-fourths of them condemned to be hanged, established at Mankato, ^/hen Aunt Jane and her brother came to distribute paper and pencils and some books among them.

  When their lives were imix^rilled, by their savage pursuers, during the terrible massacre^ Aunt Jane calmly said; "Well if they kill me, my home is in Heaven." The churches were scattered, the work apparently destroyed, but nothing could discourage Aunt Jane. She had, in the midst of this great tragedy, the satisfactory knowledge that all the Christian Sioux had continued at the risk of their own lives, steadfast in their lovaltv, and had been instrumental in

  SOWING AND REAPING. -jj

  saving the lives of many whites. They had, also, influenced for g-ood many of their own race.

  TIT—TTiE CrX)SING YEARS OF HER LIFE.

  After that terrible massacre the way never opened for her to resume her residence among the Dakotas; but she was given health and strength for nineteen years more toil for the Master and her beloved Indians. Her home was with her brother, Dr. Williamson, near St. Peter, until his death in 1879, and she remained, in his old home several years after his death. During this period, slie accomplished much for the education of the Indians around her and she kept up an extensive and helpful correspondence with native Christian workers. All the time she kept up the work of self-sacrifice for the good of others. In 1881 she met a poor Indian woman, su fife ring extremely from intense cold. She slipped ofif her own warm skirt and gave it to the woman. The result was a severe illness, which caused her partial paralysis and total blindness from which she never recovered. In 1888 she handed the writer a $5 gold coin for the work among the ireedmen with this remark: '* First the f reedman ; then the Indian." Out of a narrow income she constantly gave generously to the 'boards of the church and to the poor around her. She spent most of her patrimony in giving and lending to needy ones.

  The closing years of her life were spent with her nephew the great Indian missionary the Rev. John P. Williamson D.D. at Greenwood, South Dakota. There at noon of March 24, 1895, the light of eternity dawn-

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  ed upon her and she entered into that sabbattic rest, which remains for the people of God. Such is the stors' of Aunt Jane, modest and unassuming—a real heroine,, who travelled sixteen hundred miles all the way on horseback and spent several months that she might rescue two poor colored persons whom she had never seen or even known.

  Without husband or children, alone in the world, she did not repine, but made herself useful, wherever she was, in teaching secular learning and religiou.s truth, and in ministering to the sick and afflicted, the down-trodden and oppressed. She never sought to d^-any wonderful things,—but whatever her ^hand found to do, she did it with her might and with an eye to the honor and glory of God. Hers was a very long and most complete Christian life. Should it ever be forgotten? Certainly not. while our Christian religion endures.

  "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors and their works do follow them."

  —Rev. 14: 13.

  ARTEMAS, THE WARRIOR PREACHER

  He was one of the fiercest of the Sioux warriors. He fought the Ojibways in his youth; danced the scalp-dance on the present site of MinneapoHs, and waged war against the whites in '62. He was converted at Mankato, Minnesota, in the prison-pen, and for thirty-two years, he was pastor of the Pilgrim Congregational church at Santee, Nebraska.

  Artemas Ehnamane was born in 1825, at Red Wing, Minnesota, by the mountain that stands sentinel at the head of Lake Pepin. ''Walking Along" is the English translation of his jaw-breaking surname. As a lad, he played on the banks of the mighty Mississippi. As a youth, he hunted the red deer in the lovely glades of Minnesota and Wisconsin. He soon grew tall and strong and became a famous hunter. The war-path, also, opened to him in the pursuit of his hereditary foes, the Chippewas. He danced the scalp-dance on the present site of Minneapolis, when it was only a wind-swept prairie.

  While in his youth, his tribe ceded their ancestral lands along the Mississippi and removed to the Sioux Reservation on the Minnesota River. But not for long, for the terrible outbreak of 1862, scattered everything and landed all the leading men of that tribe in prison. Artemas was one of them. He was convicted, condemned to death, and pardoned by Abraham Lincoln. While in the prison-pen at Mankato,

  Su AMONG THE SIOUX.

  he came into a new life ''
that thinketh no evil of his neighbor." The words of the faithful missionaries, Pond and Williamson and Riggs, sank deep into his heart. His whole nature underwent a change. Arte-mas once explained his conversion thus:

  . *'We had planned that uprising wisely and secretly. We had able leaders. We were well organized and thoroughly armed. The whites were weakened by the Southern war. Everything was in our favor. We had prayed to our gods. But when the conflict came, we wTre beaten so rapidly and completely, I felt tlliat the white man's God must be greater than all the Indians' gods; and I detemiined to look Him up, and I found Him, All-Powerful and precious to my soul."

  Faithfully he studied his letters and learned his Dakota Bible, which became more precious to him than any record of traditions and shadows handed down, from mouth tO' mouth by his people. He soon became possessed of a great longing to let his tribe know his great secret of the God above. So when the j>rison-ers were restored to their families in the Missouri Val-Iv in Nebraska, Artemas was soon chosen one of the preachers of the reorganized tribe. His first pastorate was that of the Pilgrim Congregational Church at Santee, Nebraska, in 1867. It was also his last, for he was ever so beloved and honored by his people, that they would not consider any proposal for separation.

  No such proposition ever met with favor in the Pilgrim Church for Artemas finnly held first place in the affections of the people among whom he labored so earnestlv. He served this church for thirtv-two vcars

  and passed on to take his place among the Shining Ones, on the eve of Easter Sabbath, 1902.

  Artemas seldom took a vacation. In fact there is only one on record. In 1872, his church voted a vacation of six weeks. True to his Indian nature, he planned a deer hunt. He turned his footsteps to the wilds of the Running Water (Niobrara River), where his heart grew young and his rifle cracked the death-knell of the deer and antelope. One evening, in the track of the hostile Sioux and Pawnees, he found himself near a camp of the savage Sicaugu. He was weak and alone. They were strong and hostile.