THE INDIANS.

FORT BERTHOLD, DAKOTA TERRITORY.

A Discouraging First View. School Teaching and Brick Making. Increasing Hope.

E. H. ALDEN, INDIAN AGENT.

My work here since January has been incessant, and unprecedented in trial and difficulty in all my experience. I can labor on the wild frontier of Minnesota, organize Sunday-schools and churches, and labor with my own hands in the erection of meeting houses, with the mercury more than 30° below zero. But harder still it is to have the burden of care for 1,200 savages, bowed down by superstition and sin, through whom the rough ploughshare of the most degraded and vile white civilization has been driven for the last fifty years. With the prejudice of Indians against all agents to overcome, the strife arising from the desire to make money, in conflict with the desire to promote the highest and best welfare of the Indian, in our very midst, the underground whiskey traffic, with the vilest of all whites to encounter—these were barriers requiring time and pluck to overcome. Added to this, the red-tape of the department, making one always feel the force of the Latin words—“Incidet in Scyllam qui vult vitare Charybdim.”

The time for forwarding my report for your anniversary came when this deep, dark gulf of difficulty first opened to my view, and the letter that I then wrote, but did not send, had scarcely a gleam of hope for these savages. I am glad it was not sent. Since then, I have been laboring to overcome the difficulties, and I believe it is possible to do what I then thought was impossible. I have just come in from visiting our school of 40 Indian boys and girls, in the new schoolhouse we have built this summer. It was a pleasant sight. Miss Briggs has care of the Arickarees, and Miss Calhoun, Missionary of the A. B. C. F. M., has care of the Grosventres and Mandans, both excellent Christian young ladies, who guarantee success. Not far away is a new building for Indian supplies, 120×20; and at the new agency a barn 400×22, just completed. And near by is a pile of superior brick, which the Indians have aided in manufacturing, in the face of obstacles to overcome in the clay, probably unprecedented in the history of brick making.

While I am writing, “Son of the Star,” chief of the Arickarees, an intelligent, sensible man, comes in and gives me the shake of his friendly hand—one of the great majority of all the tribes who now look up to me with confidence as their friend and “chief.” All this assures me that the Indian can be civilized and Christianized.