Then broke out the dreadful Minnesota massacre, when the missionaries were compelled to flee for their lives, and the missions were abandoned. Twelve hundred United States troops at last scattered the savages and took about five hundred prisoners. They were incarcerated at the Mankato prison in Minnesota, where thirty-eight were hung in one day. The remainder in prison were visited by the missionaries, and the prison house became a chapel. Soon it was a Bethel, a great revival began, which lasted all winter, and in the spring, two hundred Dakotas were added to the church in one day, and when they were transferred to the prison at Davenport, they went out in chains, but singing the 51st Psalm to the tune of Old Hundred. They carried the fire from heaven with them to the Davenport prison, and when, in 1886, the prisoners were released, more than four hundred were hopefully converted, and when they joined their families in Nebraska, these gathered together in one communion, and called it the Pilgrim Church--about two hundred years after John Eliot, of the Pilgrims at Boston, gave his life to the Indians of Massachusetts. A people as remote from civilization as were the Indians of 1640 founded their Pilgrim Church. Now at length the Dakota missionaries began a new life among these tribes. By the wonderful and strange providence of God, there had been prepared in prison native teachers and preachers, and the way was opened for expansive work. After a period of ten years of this work, the American Board transferred its Indian missions to the American Missionary Association. This Association, thirty years previous to this, had Indian missions in the northwest, with twenty-one missionaries. Various causes had led to _their_ abandonment, the chief one being the demands of the newly-emancipated slaves after the war. Six years before the transfer of these missions to this Association, it had an interest in Indian missions in Washington Territory and in Minnesota. The transfer on the part of the American Board brought under our care the mission at Santee, Nebraska, with its large school and industrial departments; the Fort Sully mission, those on the Cheyenne River, and at Fort Berthold, Dakota. These have since been developed, until now, the facilities for missionary work and the force of workers have been greatly increased. There are at the present time in the United States, exclusive of Alaska, 247,761 Indians. Our missions are chiefly among 40,000 of the Sioux or Dakota tribe, in the great Dakota reservation; among the Poncas in Nebraska, and the Gros Ventres and Mandans on the Northern Missouri.