e opened at Red Lake, Shakopee, and other places in Minnesota. During
the summer of 1843 Mr. Riggs commenced a mission station at Traverse des
Sioux, which attained considerable proportions, and remained until
overtaken by white settlement, about 1854.

Mr. Riggs and Dr. Williamson also established a Mission at the Yellow
Medicine Agency of the Sioux, in the year 1852, which was about the best
equipped of any of them. It consisted of a good house for the
missionaries, a large boarding and school house for Indian pupils, a
neat little church, with a steeple and a bell, and all the other
buildings necessary to a complete mission outfit.

These good men adopted a new scheme of education and civilization, which
promised to be very successful. They organized a government among the
Indians, which they called the Hazelwood Republic. To become a member of
this civic body, it was necessary that the applicant should cut off his
long hair, and put on white men's clothes, and it was also expected that
he should become a member of the church. The republic had a written
constitution, a president and other officers. It was in 1856 when I
first became acquainted with this institution, and I afterwards used its
members to great advantage, in the rescue of captive women and the
punishment of one of the leaders of the Spirit Lake massacre, which
occurred in the northwestern portion of Iowa, in the year 1857, the
particulars of which I will relate hereafter. The name of the president
was Paul Ma-za-cu-ta-ma-ni, or "The man who shoots metal as he walks,"
and one of its prominent members was John Otherday, called in Sioux,
An-pay-tu-tok-a-cha, both of whom were the best friends the whites had
in the hour of their great danger in the outbreak of 1862. It was these
two men who informed the missionaries and other whites at the Yellow
Medicine Agency of the impending massacre, and assisted sixty-two of
them to escape before the fatal blow was struck.

What I have said proves that much good attended the work of the
missionaries in the way of civilizing some of the Indians, but it has
always been open to question in my mind if any Sioux Indian ever fully
comprehended the basic doctrines of Christianity. I will give an example
which had great weight in forming my judgment. There were among the
pillars of the mission church at the Yellow Medicine Agency (or as it
was called in Sioux, Pajutazee) an Indian named Ana-wang-mani, to which
the missionar