"The annual meeting of the Dakota Mission was held at Yankton agency, commencing June 13. We esteem it a rare privilege to have been present on that occasion and to have seen with our own eyes the marvelous transformations wrought by the Gospel among this people. Thirty-six hours by rail took us to Yankton, the border town of civilization. Twelve hours more in stage and open wagon along the north bank of the Missouri--the Big Muddy, as the Indians rightly call it--carried us sixty miles into the edge of the vast open prairie, and into the heart of the Yankton reservation. Here, scattered up and down the river bottom for thirty miles, live the Yanktons, one of the Dakota bands, about 2000 in number. Thirty miles below, on the opposite bank, in Nebraska, are the Santees. Up the river for many hundreds of miles at different points other reservations are set off, while several wilder bands still hunt the buffalo on the wide plains that stretch westward to the Black Hills. The Sissetons, another family of this tribe, are located near Lake Traverse, on the eastern boundary of Dakota Territory. This is the field of the Dakota Mission. The chief bands laid hold of thus far are the Sisseton, the Santee, and the Yankton. A new point has recently been taken at Fort Sully, among the Teetons. "It was from these places, lying apart in their extremes at least 300 miles, that more than a hundred Indians gathered at this annual meeting. On Thursday afternoon the hospitable doors of Rev. J. P. Williamson's spacious log house opened just in time to give us shelter from a fierce storm of wind and rain. The next morning the Santees, fifty of them from the Pilgrim Church, some on foot, some on pony-back, and a few in wagons, straggled in, and pitched their camp, in Indian fashion, on the open space near the mission house. About noon the Sissetons appeared, a dilapidated crowd of more than forty, weary and foot-sore with their 300 miles tramp through ten tedious days. Among them was one white person, a woman, with her two children, the youngest an infant, not a captive, but a missionary's wife, traveling thus among a people whom the Gospel had made captives themselves, chiefly through the labors of an honored father and a mother of blessed memory. It intimates the courage and endurance needed for such a trip to know that there were almost no human habitations on the way, and that swollen rivers were repeatedly crossed in the wagon-box, stripped of its wheels and made sea-worthy by canvas swathed underneath. "An hour afterward, from 200 miles in the opposite direction, the Fort Sully delegation appeared. For Father Riggs, and the younger son, famous as a hard rider, this journey was no great affair. But the tenderly reared young wife--how she could endure the five days of wagon and tent life is among the mysteries.