My own personal acquaintance with Mr. Pond commenced in the summer of 1837. He was then, and had been for a year previous, at Lac-qui-parle. In September my wife and I joined that station, and the first event occurring after that, which has impressed itself upon my memory, was the marriage of Mr. Pond and Miss Sarah Poage, sister of Mrs. Dr. Williamson. This was the first marriage ceremony I had been called upon to perform; and Mr. Pond signalized it by making a feast, and calling, according to the Saviour's injunction, "the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind." And there was a plenty of such to be called in that Dakota village. They could not recompense him, but "he shall be recompensed at the resurrection of the just." Mr. Pond had long been yearning to see what was inside of an Indian. He sometimes said he wanted to be an Indian, if only for a little while, that he might know how an Indian felt, and by what motives he could be moved. When the early spring of 1838 came, and the ducks began to come northward, a half-dozen Dakota families started from Lac-qui-parle to hunt and trap on the upper part of the Chippewa River, in the neighborhood of where the town of Benson now is. Mr. Pond went with them and was gone two weeks. It was in the month of April, and the streams were flooded and the water was cold. There should have been enough of game easily obtained to feed the party. But it did not prove so. A cold spell came on, the ducks disappeared, and Mr. Pond and his Indian hunters were reduced to scanty fare, and sometimes they had nothing for a whole day. But Mr. Pond was seeing inside of Indians and was quite willing to starve a good deal. However, his stay with them, and their hunt for that time as well, was suddenly terminated, by the appearance of the Ojibwa chief Hole-in-the-Day and ten men with him. They came to smoke the peace-pipe, they said. They were royally feasted by three of the families, who killed their dogs to feed the strangers, who, in turn, arose in the night and killed the Dakotas. As God would have it, Mr. Pond was not then with those three tents, and so he escaped. No one had started with more of a determination to master the Dakota language than Gideon H. Pond. And no one of the older missionaries succeeded so well in learning to talk just like a Dakota. Indeed, he must have had a peculiar aptitude for acquiring language; for in these first years of missionary life, he learned to read French and Latin and Greek, so that the second Mrs. Pond writes: "When I came, and for a number of years, he read from the Greek Testament at our family worship in the morning. Afterward he used his Latin Bible, and still later his French Testament." In this line of literary work General Sibley's testimony is appreciative. He says:--