In the early spring of 1874, I was requested jointly by the American Board and the American Missionary Association to visit and report upon various Indians agencies, where their appointees, or nominees rather, were agents. Accordingly, I started in the month of May, by St. Paul, on the Northern Pacific Railroad, to Bismarck, and thence by steamboat up the Missouri to Fort Berthold. At this time Major L. B. Sperry, who had been a professor in Ripon College, was the nominee of the American Missionary Association. It was not my good fortune to find Agent Sperry at home, but Mrs. Sperry, in a very ladylike way, gave me the best accommodations during the week I remained. Here were gathered the remnant of the Mandans, only a few hundred persons, and the Rees, or Arricarees, a part of the Pawnee tribe, and the Gros Ventres, or Minnetaree, properly the Hidatsa. Altogether they numbered about two thousand souls. We had before this entertained the desire that we might be able to establish a mission among these people, and this thought or hope gave interest to my visit. The Mandan and the Hidatsa languages were both pretty closely connected with the Dakota; but what seemed to bring these nearer to us was the fact that many of all these people could understand and talk the Dakota, that forming a kind of common language for them. _Howard Mandan_, or "The-man-with-a-_scared-face_," as his Indian name is interpreted, was the son of _Red Cow_, the principal chief of the Mandans, and had been taken down by Gen. C. H. Howard, a year before, and placed in A. L. Riggs' school at Santee. Howard had returned home before my visit, and also Henry Eaton, a Hidatsa young man, who had been East a good many years and talked English well. George Catlin had, many years ago, interested us in the Mandans, by his effort to prove, from their _red hair_ in some cases--perhaps only _redded_ hair--and in some instances blue eyes, and the resemblances which he claims to have found in their languages, that they were the descendants of a Welsh colony that had dropped out of history a thousand years ago. And Dr. Washington Matthews of the United States Army had created in us a desire to do something for the spiritual enlightenment of the Hidatsa, by his admirable grammar and dictionary of their language. In his introduction to this book he gives us much valuable information about the people.