During the school year of 1888, we made a box of clothing to send to the Indian mission school in Dakota. We would meet every Saturday evening and sew until we had made enough to fill our box. Whenever one of us finished a piece we would write our name and pin it on. One of our girls wanted to sew a little on every article, so as to have her name on all of them. Well, when we had finished our box of presents, we each wrote a letter and put into it. We intended to make this a Christmas present, but severe snow-storms prevented it from reaching its destination in time. They received it about a month after Christmas, and the things were divided among the Indian girls. Some of them wrote to us, thanking us for the presents which they had received. After our society grew to about twenty or thirty, we were divided into tens. Each ten had a name given it, such as the Truthful Ten, the Judge Not Ten, the Do Without Ten and the Polite Ten. Most of us find it hardest to be Judge Not Tens and Truthful Tens.—From the Tougaloo Quarterly.
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THE INDIANS
OUR S’KOKOMISH MISSION.
BY DISTRICT SECRETARY J.E. ROY.
The S’kokomish Reservation is at the extreme southwestern corner of the Puget Sound, where the S’kokomish River empties in, and is three miles square, with five thousand acres, embracing rich bottom land and mountain timber land, the river and the sound furnishing the best means of transportation to the market. On the place I measured the stumps of red cedar that were eight, ten and twelve feet in diameter. The waters at hand are of the best for fishing. As we—Mrs. Roy was with me—were going up from the river where we had been set across after a ten-mile mountain drive from Shelton, we saw a Mr. Lo lugging a three-foot salmon into the missionary home; and at Olympia, the capital, and another point on the sound, the fishmonger told us they did not sell such fish by the pound, but by the piece, twenty-five cents each. When, in 1855, this reservation was set apart by the treaty, it was for the three bands of this tribe and for the Clallams up at the entrance of the Sound, who, because of variance with one of the other bands, never left their ancestral habitation to go to the selected spot. The people belonging to the Reservation now number about six hundred and twenty.
The handling of the Indians here was one of the first fruits of President Grant’s Peace Policy, by which the agencies were assigned to the several missionary societies, which were to nominate their respective agents. This was one of those which were assigned to the American Missionary Association. In 1871 the Association nominated to this Agency Edwin Eells, Esq., the eldest son of Rev. Gushing Eells, D.D., who was one of the mission band that crossed the Rocky Mountains in 1838, under commission of the American