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Lac-qui-Parle, the Lake-that-speaks, two hundred miles west of St. Paul, was her first missionary home. There she gathered the young Indians together and taught them as opportunity offered. The instruction of the youth especially the children, of whom she was ever a devoted lover, was her great delight. It was more than a year before any mail reached her at this remote outpost.
He was the youngest son of Joseph Renville, a mixed blood Sioux and French, who was a captain in the British army in the War of 1812 and the most famous Sioux Indian in his day. After the war, he became a trader and established his headquarters at Lac-qui-Parle, where he induced Dr. Thomas S. Williamson to locate his first mission station in 1835.
Here, an Indian church of seventeen members was organized by Dr. Williamson. It increased to a membership of thirty in the next decade. In March, 1854, the mission houses at Lac-qui-Parle were destroyed by fire. A consolidation of the mission forces was soon after effected. Dr. A comfortable mission home was erected.
From Fort Snelling they departed on September 5, 1837, for their destination Lac-qui-parle, travelling with two one-ox carts and a double wagon. On September 18 they arrived at the station to which they had been appointed, and received a hearty welcome from the two missionaries who had settled there some time before at the earnest request of a Lac-qui-parle trader.
But four years later the news reached them that since their departure from Lac-qui-parle there had been a sad falling back into heathenism among the converts, and they hurried back to their old station. Backsliders were reclaimed, and the missionary work carried on with increased energy. But the missionaries had much to contend with.
Alfred L. Riggs, D.D., the white moderator, who talked so glibly alternately in Sioux and English and smiled so sweetly in both languages at once, was "Good Bird," one of the first white babes born at Lac-qui-Parle. John, The Beloved, one of the chief white workers, as a boy had the site of Minneapolis and St. Paul for a play-ground, and the little Indian lads for his playmates.
They were indeed choice spirits, well-fitted by nature and by training for a place in that heroic band, which God was then gathering together on the shores of Lakes Calhoun and Harriet and Lac-qui-Parle, for the conquest of the fiercest tribe of prairie warriors that ever roamed over the beautiful plains of the New Northwest.
After the wedding festivities, the guests from the fort were imprisoned at the mission for the night, by a blizzard, which swept over the icy face of Lake Harriet. In the previous November, at Lac-qui-Parle, the younger brother was united in marriage to Miss Sarah Poage, by the Rev. Stephen R. Riggs. It was a unique gathering.
In mid-winter, with the thermometer many degrees below zero, he hauled flour and other provisions for the missionaries, on a hand sled, from Lac-qui-Parle to Yellow Medicine, a distance of thirty-two miles. The fish gathered in shoals, an unusual occurrence, near the mission and both the Indians and the missionaries lived through that terrible winter.
At the beginning, translations from the French of a portion of Scripture were read and some explanatory remarks were made by Joseph Renville. The first school for teaching Indians to read and write in the Dakota language, was opened in December, 1835, at Lac-qui-Parle, in a conical Dakota tent, twenty feet in height and the same in diameter.
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