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Hopkins were first stationed at Lac-qui-Parle. After one year they were transferred to Traverse des Sioux, near the present site of St. Peter, Minnesota. Here they gave seven years of the most faithful, devoted, self-sacrificing toil for the lost and degraded savages around them. They built a humble home and established and maintained a mission school. Five children were born to them there.
Thus for more than a quarter of a century, the glorious work of conquering the Sioux nation for Christ went on. It was pushed vigorously at every mission station from Lac-qui-Parle to Red Wing and from Kaposia to Hazelwood. Great progress was made in these years. And such a work! The workers were buried out of sight of their fellow-white men.
Lac-qui-Parle was more remote from Boston than Manilla is today. It took Stephen R. Riggs three months to pass with his New England bride from the green hills of her native state to Fort Snelling. It was a further journey of thirteen days over a trackless trail, through the wilderness, to their mission home on the shores of the Lake-that-speaks.
It was organized at Fort Snelling, June 11, 1835, and still exists as the First Presbyterian church of Minneapolis, with more than five hundred members. Early in July, Dr. Williamson pushed on in the face of grave difficulties, two hundred miles to the west, to the shores of Lac-qui-Parle, the Lake-that-speaks.
It involved on the part of the translators a knowledge of the French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Sioux tongues and required many years of unremitting toil on the part of those, who wrought out its accomplishment in their humble log cabins on the shores of Lakes Calhoun and Lac-qui-Parle, and at Kaposia and Traverse des Sioux, Yellow Medicine and Hazelwood.
Round about these two churches cluster half a dozen other congregations, worshipping in comfortable church homes. These form only a part of the The original Presbytery of Dakota was organized September 30, 1844, at the mission Home of Dr. Williamson, at Lac-qui-Parle, Minnesota. It was organized, by the missionaries, among the Dakotas, for the furtherance of their peculiar work.
Very soon they adopted the white woman's custom, and, becoming fond of standing over the washing-tub, they took to washing Mrs. Riggs' clothes as well as their own. For doing so they were, of course, paid. The missionaries who had preceded the Riggs at Lac-qui-parle had not been very successful, if success be judged by the number of converts made.
It was a weary, weary pilgrimage of weeks by boat and stage, by private conveyance and oft-times on foot. One can make a tour of Europe today with greater ease and in less time than those isolated workers at Lac-qui-Parle could revisit their old homes in Ohio and New England.
It was about fifty miles from Track's End to Lone Tree, with three sidings between, and a water-tank at No. 14. After the fire the people all went to Lac-qui-Parle, sixty miles farther back; so that at the time of which I write there was nothing between Track's End and Lac-qui-Parle except sidings and the ashes of Lone Tree; but these soon blew away.
Did the missionaries suppose the braves would follow the lead of squaws? Ugh! Ugh!! For the first seven years, at Lac-qui-Parle, mission work was prosecuted, with marked success in spite of many grave hindrances. But for the four years following 1842-46 the work was seriously retarded. The crops failed and the savages charged their misfortunes to the missionaries.
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