It was my privilege to take a cordial letter of greeting from Supt.  Dorchester of the Government Indian Schools to the A.M.A. missionaries at Santee Agency, Neb.  It was an encouragement to these earnest toilers in this far-away field to know that there was appreciation on the part of the Government of the Christian work among these Indians.  Great care, intense study, great deliberation of action will be necessary if these new Government officers succeed in bettering the condition of the red men, as they are doubtless sincerely desirous of doing.  They must know what they are doing, before they do it.

The Government schools which I visited furnished abundant evidence that considerable time would be necessary to correct the evils existing in these, and to make them what they should be before any radical policy could be safely adopted by the Government in reference to contract missionary schools.  The Roman Catholic influence seems to have been a dominant power in the control of these schools for some time.

Wolf Chief, a Mandan Indian, called on me while at Fort Berthold and begged that his tribe be protected against a Catholic priest who, he said, wanted to compel them to send their children to a school that he proposed to establish near them.  “We Mandans are Congregationalists,” said this Indian chief, “and we want to send our children to your mission.”

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Incidents both amusing and pathetic are of frequent occurrence in this Indian work.  Such incidents throw light upon the inside life of the Indians and missionaries, and are often useful in the “Monthly Concert,” and so I record some of them here.

“Cherries-in-the-mouth,” a somewhat aged and highly-painted Indian, was very much taken with one of the missionaries.  He came to the Superintendent of the mission and offered eight ponies for her, or, I believe, more correctly, said he would give eight ponies, if he had them.  His affection was larger than his pocket-book, as is sometimes true of his pale-faced brother.

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“Plenty Corn” was a sweet little Indian girl, who attended the mission at Fort Berthold.  She had won her way wonderfully into the hearts of the teachers, and when she died last spring, there were sorrowful hearts in the mission, as truly as in the Indian tepee.  The parents had been reached also by the influence of the mission.  They permitted the missionary to lay the body in a coffin.  The Indians took up the little white casket and bore it to the boat in which it was to be taken across the Missouri River.  The father rowed the boat, as the mother sat on the opposite bank waiting for her dead darling, and from the boat there went up the piteous wailing of the father, which was echoed back from the bank in the piteous wail of the mother.  It was a sad, sad sight, and emphasized painfully the need of Christian instruction, that the hope of the Gospel may break through the superstitious darkness of these sad lives.