was a spirit of intense
loyalty to their new Master and a burning love for the souls of their
fellowmen. Picked by the Holy Spirit out of more than one hundred
converts for special service for the Lord Jesus Christ, the Pond
brothers resolutely determined to choose a field of very hard service,
one to which no others desired to go. In the search for such a field,
Samuel the elder brother, journeyed from New Haven to Galena, Illinois,
and spent the autumn and winter of 1833-34 in his explorations. He
visited Chicago, then a struggling village of a few hundred inhabitants
and other embryo towns and cities. He also saw the Winnebago Indians
and the Pottawatomies, but he was not led to choose a field of labor
amongst any of these.

A strange Providence finally pointed the way to Mr. Pond. In his
efforts to reform a rumseller at Galena, he gained much information
concerning the Sioux Indians, whose territory the rumseller had
traversed on his way from the Red River country from which he had come
quite recently. He represented the Sioux Indians as vile, degraded,
ignorant, superstitious and wholly given up to evil.

"There," said the rumseller, "is a people for whose souls nobody cares.
They are utterly destitute of moral and religious teachings. No efforts
have ever been made by Protestants for their salvation. If you fellows
are looking, in earnest, for a _hard job_, there is one ready for
you to tackle on those bleak prairies."

This man's description of the terrible condition of the Sioux Indians
in those times was fairly accurate. Those wild, roving and utterly
neglected Indians were proper subjects for Christian effort and
promised to furnish the opportunities for self-denying and
self-sacrificing labors for which the brothers were seeking.

Mr. Pond at once recognized this peculiar call as from God. After
prayerful deliberation, Samuel determined to write to his brother
Gideon, inviting the latter to join him early the following spring, and
undertake with him an independent mission to the Sioux.

He wrote to Gideon:--"I have finally found the field of service for
which we have long been seeking. It lies in the regions round about
Fort Snelling. It is among the savage Sioux of those far northern
plains. They are an ignorant, savage and degraded people. It is said to
be a very cold, dreary, storm-swept region. But we are not seeking a
soft spot to rest in or easy service. So come on."

Despite strong, almost bitte