all winter, and in the spring, two
hundred Dakotas were added to the church in one day, and when they
were transferred to the prison at Davenport, they went out in chains,
but singing the 51st Psalm to the tune of Old Hundred. They carried
the fire from heaven with them to the Davenport prison, and when, in
1886, the prisoners were released, more than four hundred were
hopefully converted, and when they joined their families in Nebraska,
these gathered together in one communion, and called it the Pilgrim
Church--about two hundred years after John Eliot, of the Pilgrims at
Boston, gave his life to the Indians of Massachusetts. A people as
remote from civilization as were the Indians of 1640 founded their
Pilgrim Church.

Now at length the Dakota missionaries began a new life among these
tribes. By the wonderful and strange providence of God, there had
been prepared in prison native teachers and preachers, and the way
was opened for expansive work.

After a period of ten years of this work, the American Board
transferred its Indian missions to the American Missionary
Association. This Association, thirty years previous to this, had
Indian missions in the northwest, with twenty-one missionaries.
Various causes had led to _their_ abandonment, the chief one being
the demands of the newly-emancipated slaves after the war.

Six years before the transfer of these missions to this Association,
it had an interest in Indian missions in Washington Territory and in
Minnesota. The transfer on the part of the American Board brought
under our care the mission at Santee, Nebraska, with its large school
and industrial departments; the Fort Sully mission, those on the
Cheyenne River, and at Fort Berthold, Dakota. These have since been
developed, until now, the facilities for missionary work and the
force of workers have been greatly increased.

There are at the present time in the United States, exclusive of
Alaska, 247,761 Indians. Our missions are chiefly among 40,000 of the
Sioux or Dakota tribe, in the great Dakota reservation; among the
Poncas in Nebraska, and the Gros Ventres and Mandans on the Northern
Missouri.

At the Santee Normal School, we are teaching about two hundred Indian
youth of both sexes. We are instructing them also in agriculture and
trades. There is a department for theological study, where
missionaries are prepared from the Indians for the Indians. Sixty-one
missionaries and teachers have caught the spirit