for many years by a native pastor--my brother, Rev. John Eastman.
Nearly all built good homes. Mr. Williamson says, and Moody County
records corroborate the statement, that for twenty years there was not a
single crime or misdemeanor recorded against one of these Indians.

As the Big Sioux valley is noted for its fertility, it was not long
before the rest of the land was taken up by white farmers. These Indians
proved good neighbors. It is told of them that, during the hard years
1873 to 1875, when drought and grasshoppers afflicted the land, they
organized a relief society for the benefit of their poorer white
neighbors, and in many instances furnished them with cordwood as well as
seed-corn and potatoes.

For years the Flandreau Sioux controlled the politics of Moody County,
and although after the district had become more thickly settled they
lost their numerical preponderance, they still wielded much influence in
years when the parties were pretty equally divided. As late as 1898 they
held the balance of power, and were accordingly treated with respectful
consideration.

From this little Indian community more than one earnest youth has gone
forth to work for race and country in a wider field. My father brought
me there from wild life in Canada in 1872, and after two years in the
little day school he sent me away to master the secret of the white
man's power. Only a few years earlier he himself was a wild Sioux
warrior, whose ambitions ran wholly along the traditional lines of his
people. Who can say that civilization is beyond the reach of the
untutored primitive man in a single generation? It did not take my
father two thousand years, or ten years, to grasp its essential
features; and although he never went to school a day in his life, he
lived a broad-minded and self-respecting citizen. It took me about
fifteen years to prepare to enter it on the plane of a professional man,
and I have stayed with it ever since.

It is noticeable that when the Flandreaus consented to reenter their
names on the tribal rolls in order to regain their inheritance, they
fell into the claws of the professional politicians, and a degree of
demoralization set in. Yet during the early period of free initiative
and self-development, some of their best youth had gone out and are now
lost in the world at large, in the sense that they are wholly separated
from their former life, and are contributing their mite to the common
good. Those who