the sled and hitching the team on forty feet down the hill we were soon on solid ground.  After eleven hours of hard work I reached Black Pipe Creek, where our Northfield Station is situated.  In ordinary weather the trip would take five or six hours and not worry a team.  But the longest road generally leads to a warm house and the coldest drive is forgotten when your team is in a warm stable and the prospects are good for a hot supper.

Spotted Bear, who is the native teacher and preacher at Northfield Station, has gone to work with earnestness and enthusiasm.  Here is a large community, perhaps fifty houses, heathen to the core.  Reuben Quick Bear, a Carlisle student, lives here.  Beyond him few know anything of Christianity.  Spotted Bear has an evening school of twenty or more young men.  He teaches Dakota, and as much English as he can.  A few can read.  These he puts into a Bible class.  The New Testament is the text book.  On Sunday he holds two or three services, and the house is always full.  A larger room is needed at once.  To build this will be my first spring work.  The value of just such work as this cannot be overestimated.  Spotted Bear himself got his education in just such a school.  As soon as Mrs. Ellen Spotted Bear had given me a supper, cooked as carefully and nicely as any woman could, and served on neat dishes, figured, and with plated knives, forks and spoons, Spotted Bear asks me for the Iapi Oaye—­the news and religious paper published in Dakota.  He opens the paper and he and his wife read it.  One item of news is the change of Government in Brazil.  He asks me just where Brazil is; why they change the Government.  He reads of the fire in Boston and Lynn.  He inquires where Lynn is.  Being a Congregationalist he knows Boston as a Jew knows Jerusalem and a Mohammedan knows Mecca.  Then he reads the church and Y.M.C.A. news.

Here is a man, who by his life is denying what nine out of every ten men in the United States are saying:  “It is no use to work among the adult Indians.”  He was twenty-five and over before he commenced study of any kind.  He is now a citizen, Republican, Prohibitionist, church officer, teacher, preacher, all of which require a fair amount of intelligence and information.

His work, too, is invaluable if the aim is to change the Indian to an American citizen.  In this village this one room only is the opening to civilization.  Some of the young men are tired of Indian ways.  They think the dance is something that ought to be thrown away.  These young men now have a place to spend their evenings, beyond the dance house.  These houses and native helpers break down more superstition and Indian life than any other influence on the reservation.  In the matter of dress it is the same.  Here is an Indian woman who is not ashamed to wear a dress like a white woman.  The teachers in the day schools complain that they cannot get the girls to wear the civilized dress when they leave school.  And Indian dresses mean Indian dirt and carelessness.  One Indian woman advocating “dress reform” by example, will do more than any teacher on the reservation.