There is another influence of which I would speak, the influence of the home.  Here in our happy homes we know but very little of what that means to the Indian.  An Indian has no home, in our sense of the word.  Some years ago I went with a party of Indians 175 miles west of the Missouri River in the middle of winter.  We climbed a mountain and looked away to the east.  We could see, I should think, 150 miles, and the Indian as he sat there on the edge of a rock, covered his head up in a blanket and cried.  Said he:  “This is my country, and we have had to leave it.”  That was his idea of home—­such a barren stretch as that, the snow glistening in the sunlight.  The Dakota Indian lives in a region, not in a place.  The Christian home coming into the midst of a village carries there an ideal of which the Indian knows nothing, and he is taught by the power of example day after day.  The Christian woman in that home keeps her house clean, keeps her children clean, and stands there as a persistent example of the power of the gospel of soap, just as the man himself there who has become a Christian no longer steals horses.  A party going out into an enemy’s country would go as often for the sake of bringing back stolen horses, as they would for scalps.  The man who has become a Christian is recognized at once as shut out from that privilege.

Reference has been made to the opening up of the reservation, and the crisis is now upon us in connection with our Indian work.  We have eleven million acres of land there just west of the Missouri River to be thrown open for settlement.  Do you know what that means?  Were any of you down at Oklahoma this last season?  It means the rush of a swarm of people, good, bad and indifferent—­chiefly bad and indifferent—­and these settlers will crowd themselves in as a wedge between the two divisions of the Indian reservation, and we shall have Indians both to the north and to the south.  They will be exposed to influences from which they have been kept as yet; influences which will tend to uplift in the outcome, as well as to degrade.  I thank God for it.  I thank God that he is bringing the white man into the midst of the Indian country.  It may seem that this is a heroic remedy.  So it is, but it is time for heroic remedies.  We need to meet the question as it comes to us to-day.  There is a ranchman out on Bad River, who tells me that there is no such thing as an Indian question.  “Why,” said I, “what are you talking about?” “There is no such thing,” said he.  I asked him how he explained it.  “The simple thing to do is just to treat them as men, and that will be all there is to it.  That will settle it, and there will be no such thing as an Indian question.”  Treat them as men and make Christians of them, and we will settle the whole thing.

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ADDRESS OF REV.  HENRY A. STIMSON, D.D.