The American Missionary — Volume 52, No. 02, June, 1898Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 52, No. 02, June, 1898
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
Ten years ago last Jan. 12, a day made memorable by the great blizzard
which swept over our land with death and destruction, in the early
morning, long before daylight, I was aroused from slumber by a knock
at the door of our little log house on Oak Creek. One stops to think
twice before he jumps out of a warm bed when the temperature is out of
sight below zero in the room, the fire has gone out and a blizzard is
howling outside. The rapping at the door was continued till I opened
it. A rope was placed in my hand in which were two knots. They showed
the length and width of a coffin the man wished to make, and for which
he wanted lumber. I had only an old packing-case to give him. At
daylight, breakfastless, I went over to the tent and helped him make a
coffin from the case, a soap box and a small stable door. It was a
crude and weak affair. Ignorant of the language, I could only read
words of comfort from the Word of God and try to sing two Indian
hymns. Only a few of us stood about the grave, which the husband and
myself had dug.
In the coffin had been placed dry crusts of bread, waste pieces of
meat, a rusty knife, fork and spoon. In the grave were first placed
some thick comfortables and a filthy pillow, on which the coffin,
warmly wrapped, was placed. Then over the mouth of the grave was laid
the broken tent poles, the tent covering folded and laid over, then a
great mound of earth. At the grave everything the family had was given
away. And this was only ten years ago. But how great an improvement on
the custom of laying the body on the top of a high hill, or in the
branches of a tree, or even leaving the top of the coffin even with
the surface of the ground, which has been done away with only in the
last twelve years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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