At the Sisseton agency, in the month of September, a semi-treaty was made by Agents M. N. Adams and W. H. Forbes, and James Smith, Jr., of St. Paul, United States commissioners, with the Dakota Indians of the Lake Traverse and Devil's Lake reservations, by which they relinquish all their claim on the country of North-eastern Dakota through which the Northern Pacific Railroad runs. By this arrangement, education would have been made compulsory, and the men would have been enabled to obtain patents for their land within some reasonable time; but the Senate struck out everything except the ceding of the land and the compensation therefor. Our legislators do not greatly desire that Indians should become white men. When Thanksgiving Day came this year, Mr. Adams dedicated a fine brick school-house, which he had that summer erected, in the vicinity of the agency. Of this occasion he wrote, "It was indeed a day of thanksgiving and praise with us, and to me an event of the deepest interest. And I hope that good and lasting impressions were made there upon the minds of some of this people." In the work of Bible translation, I had been occupied with the book of Daniel in the summer, and, in the winter that followed, my first copy of the Minor Prophets was made. When the spring came, I hied away to the Dakota country. This time my course was to the Missouri River. Thomas had been married in Bangor, Me., to Nina Foster, daughter of Hon. John B. Foster, and sister of Mrs. Charles H. Howard of the _Advance_. They came west, and, as the winter was not yet past, Thomas went on from Chicago alone, and Nina remained with her sister until navigation should open. And so it came to pass that she and I were company for each other to Fort Sully.