were added to the church in one day, and when they were transferred to the prison at Davenport, they went out in chains, but singing the 51st Psalm to the tune of Old Hundred.  They carried the fire from heaven with them to the Davenport prison, and when, in 1886, the prisoners were released, more than four hundred were hopefully converted, and when they joined their families in Nebraska, these gathered together in one communion, and called it the Pilgrim Church—­about two hundred years after John Eliot, of the Pilgrims at Boston, gave his life to the Indians of Massachusetts.  A people as remote from civilization as were the Indians of 1640 founded their Pilgrim Church.

Now at length the Dakota missionaries began a new life among these tribes.  By the wonderful and strange providence of God, there had been prepared in prison native teachers and preachers, and the way was opened for expansive work.

After a period of ten years of this work, the American Board transferred its Indian missions to the American Missionary Association.  This Association, thirty years previous to this, had Indian missions in the northwest, with twenty-one missionaries.  Various causes had led to their abandonment, the chief one being the demands of the newly-emancipated slaves after the war.

Six years before the transfer of these missions to this Association, it had an interest in Indian missions in Washington Territory and in Minnesota.  The transfer on the part of the American Board brought under our care the mission at Santee, Nebraska, with its large school and industrial departments; the Fort Sully mission, those on the Cheyenne River, and at Fort Berthold, Dakota.  These have since been developed, until now, the facilities for missionary work and the force of workers have been greatly increased.

There are at the present time in the United States, exclusive of Alaska, 247,761 Indians.  Our missions are chiefly among 40,000 of the Sioux or Dakota tribe, in the great Dakota reservation; among the Poncas in Nebraska, and the Gros Ventres and Mandans on the Northern Missouri.

At the Santee Normal School, we are teaching about two hundred Indian youth of both sexes.  We are instructing them also in agriculture and trades.  There is a department for theological study, where missionaries are prepared from the Indians for the Indians.  Sixty-one missionaries and teachers have caught the spirit of Eliot, Edwards and Brainerd, and are earnestly serving Christ among these tribes.

A Christian civilization is wedging its way in until eighty thousand Indians are now clothed in civilized dress.  Forty thousand have learned to read English, and nearly thirty thousand are living in houses.  There are forty thousand Indian children of school age, and about fourteen thousand enrolled as pupils, leaving between twenty and thirty thousand children for whom as yet there are no schools provided.  Sixty-eight tribes remain without a church, a school or a missionary, absolutely destitute of Christian light.