Mary and I: Forty Years with the SiouxRiggs, Stephen Return
History
Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux
Riggs, Stephen Return
Dakota Indians -- Missions; Riggs, Stephen Return, 1812-1883
In this hill town of Washington, on the 30th of June, 1810, Gideon
Hollister, the younger of the two brothers, was born. His parents were
Elnathan Judson and Sarah Hollister Pond. Gideon was the fifth child,
and so was called by the Dakotas _Hakay_. Of his childhood and youth
almost nothing is known to the writer. He had the advantage of a New
England common-school education; perhaps nothing more. As he grew very
rapidly and came to the size and strength of man early, he made a full
hand in the harvest field at the age of sixteen. To this ambition to
be counted a man and do a man's work when as yet he should have been
a boy, he in after life ascribed some of his infirmities. This
ambition continued with him through life, and occasional over-work at
last undermined a constitution that might, with care and God's
blessing, have continued to the end of the century.
He came to the land of the Dakotas, now Minnesota, in the spring of
1834. The older brother, Samuel, had come out as far as Galena, Ill.,
in the summer previous. The pioneer minister of that country of lead
was Rev. Aratus Kent, who desired to retain Mr. Pond as an adjutant in
his great and constantly enlarging work; but Mr. Pond had heard of the
Sioux, or Dakotas, for whose souls no one cared, and, having decided
to go to them, he sent for his brother Gideon to accompany him.
When they reached Fort Snelling, and made known their errand to the
commanding officer of the post, Major Bliss, and to the resident
Indian agent, Major Taliaferro, they received the hearty approval and
co-operation of both, and the agent at once recommended them to
commence work with the Dakotas of the Lake Calhoun village, where some
steps had already been taken in the line of civilization. There, on
the margin of the lake, they built their log cabin. Last summer Mr.
King's grand Pavilion, so called, was completed on the same spot,
which gave occasion for Mr. Gideon H. Pond to tell the story of this
first effort in that line:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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