 CHAPTER XI. A PIONEER IN GERREN GANZI. Some twenty years ago a young Scotchman, Fred S. Arnaud by name, who was travelling from the Upper Zambezi towards Benguela on the West African coast, met a company of men from the far interior with a letter in their charge. The letter was sent by Missidi, King of Gerringanze, and contained an earnest appeal that white men would come to his country. Arnaud did not doubt that by white men Missidi meant traders, by whom he and his people might be enriched. He was no trader, but a pioneer missionary who had already crossed Africa from east to west, seeking to do good to the native tribes, and who at that very time was wondering where it would be best for him to settle down more permanently as a Christian teacher. Yet Missidi's appeal came to him with all the force of a personal call, and he decided that as soon as he reached Benguela he would make preparations for a march to the Gerringanze country. Gerringanze lies to the west of Lake Moero and Bangueolo, near the latter of which Dr. Livingston died. It is thus in the very heart of Central Africa, some fifteen hundred miles each way from the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. It has now been absorbed by the Congo Free State, but at that time it was a powerful independent kingdom. The people, judged by an African standard, had attained to some measure of civilization, and King Missidi in the same comparative sense was an able and enlightened monarch. The country was one of the most densely populated in that part of the continent, famed far and near for the abundance of its corn, rice, sugarcane, and other agricultural products, and not less for its copper mines, which were worked by the inhabitants, who cleansed and smelted the copper out of the ore with remarkable skill. Up to 1886, the year of Arnau's arrival, only two Europeans had visited Missidi's dominions, a German traveller from the east and a Portuguese from the south, and in both cases the visits were very brief. Livingston had never reached Garanganzi, although he was drawing near it when he died at Ilala, not far from the shores of Lake Banguiolo. But though Livingston himself never entered Garanganzi, it was a pioneer of Livingston's own type who first brought the Christian gospel to Missidi's people. Fred S. Arnau may be described as one of the most remarkable of the many heroes of African travel, not so much for what he actually accomplished as for the manor and spirit in which he accomplished it. It is here that he especially reminds us of Dr. Livingston. His methods of progress were not those of the well-equipped and hustling explorer, but of the lonely wanderer who makes his way quietly, patiently, and in the spirit of love, from village to village and from tribe to tribe. He had already served his apprenticeship to African travel. Landing in Natal in 1881, he had slowly trekked through the Orange Free State and the Transvaal to Kama's country, had next crossed the awful Kalahari Desert, and so made his way to the Zambezi. A whole year was occupied in this journey which brought with it many experiences of danger and suffering. Repeatedly he had been on the point of perishing from hunger or thirst. Once after marching in the desert for three days and eight nights without a drop of water, he met some bushmen who supplied him with a drink after their own fashion. They dug a pit in the sand and sank long tubes made of reeds into the ground at the bottom. By and by water began to gather, as they knew it would, at the sunk end of the tube. They invited Arnaud to drink. He tried, but was quite unable to suck the water up the long tube. The bushmen, whom frequent practice had made adepts in the art, accordingly sucked it up for him and then spat it out into a tortoise shell and handed it to the stranger. It was fraughty stuff, he writes, as you may imagine, but I enjoyed it more than any draught I ever took of luck-catrine water. His ways of getting food had sometimes been peculiar also. On the Zambezi he often depended for his supper on the crocodiles, which are very plentiful in that great river. Not that he ate those loathsome reptiles, but he was thankful at least to share their meals. When one of the larger game comes down to the river to drink, the crocodile creeps up stealthily, seizes the animal by the nose, drags it under water, and then hides the body under the river bank until it becomes putrid. When it is high enough to suit his taste, Master Croc brings it to the surface and enjoys a feast. The hungry traveller used to lie on the bank and watch one of those animals, as it rose, with perhaps a quarter of an antelope in its jaws. Then he fired at its head and compelled it to drop its supper, and in this way provided himself with his own. He admits that it was anything but a dainty repast. Coming at last to the malaria Sparotsi Valley on the Upper Zambezi, he settled down there for two years, doing what he could to teach the people and to wean them from their habitual cruelties. But at last his health completely broke down, and he decided to march for the West Coast in the company of Sr. Porto, a Portuguese traveller who was going in that direction. It shows the stuff of which Arnaud was made, that, in spite of his reduced condition, he decided to ride on an ox instead of being carried, like his fellow traveller in a Maschila or hammock. The reason he gave was that that would be too comfortable a way of travelling and might make me discontented and extravagant at other times. It was on this journey from the Borotsi Valley to Benguela that he fell in with the messengers of King Messidi, as mentioned above, and resolved to make Garanganze the goal of another expedition in the interior. It was in the beginning of June 1885 that he set out on this journey, which was to occupy between eight and nine months. In its earlier stages the march lay across a well-trodden route in Portuguese territory from Benguela to Bihé. First came the low-lying desert region between Benguela and Cantumbella, which is just at the foot of the hills that marked the beginning of the lower section of the characteristic African plateau. These hills climbed, he found himself for a time in the fertile tropical country, but by and by another and higher table-land rose before him, on climbing which he passed so suddenly out of the climate of the tropics, that he could almost mark the line of demarcation between trees like the Baobab and the more familiar vegetation of the temperate zone. At Bihé Arno had no end of difficulty in getting porters to accompany him on his tramp into the unknown regions which now stretched before him like an unexplored ocean, but at length he succeeded in gathering a motley company, some of the members of which he has sketched for us as typical African characters. Chippuka, stammer as he speaks, but is lively under all circumstances, has a bad festering toe which, however, does not prevent him from carrying his sixty-pound load. Though limping badly, his only response to expressions of sympathy is a broad grin. Seombo is another representative man, perfectly hideous in his looks, but vanity has made his ugliness appear comical. All who come to the camp, he seems to think, have come to see him. So, as soon as a few strangers gather, he is not prepared for more hut-building or wood-cutting, but must go and sit down in front of them, laughing and clapping his thighs with delight and trying to crack jokes. Then we have the sulky grumbler amongst us who has always something to complain of. Now his load is not right, next his rations, then his pay, or a thorn pricks his foot, and he can carry no longer that day. The work has to be done, but certainly not by him. Besides his men and his horned steed, for once more he took an ox as his bearer, are no numbered on his camp-roll a faithful dog and a parrot. Signor Porto, his recent companion, was accustomed to carry a cock with him on his travels by way of an animated chronometer, whose morning crows announced to all that it was time to commence the day's march, or no found a cock unnecessary, the cooing of the wood-pigeons being a sufficient signal to his men that dawn had come and that it was time to be stirring. But he recommends a parrot as a valuable addition to the resources of an African caravan. His pawl was of great service in keeping up the spirit of his boys. It was a true mark-taply of a bird, seeming as if it watched for opportunities when there would be some credit in being jolly. When every one was dull and depressed it would suddenly make some ridiculous remark or break out in imitation of an old man's laugh. So it relieved the monotony of the march, and put the weary carriers into good humor again. Mr. Arnaud gives us a clear picture of the daily routine of an African journey. By break of day the camp is a stir, for the porters are always anxious to get well along the road in the cool of the morning. Breakfast they do not trouble about, being content to have one good meal at the close of the day. They buckle on their belts, shoulder their loads of sixty pounds each, and trot off through the forest. Probably some one begins a solo in a high key, and all join lustily in the chorus. One or two halts are made, and there may be considerable delay when rivers have to be crossed, but for the most part all press on steadily for the next camping-place, which is generally reached by noon. When a site for the camp has been fixed upon, some of the party are sent out to the nearest villages to buy food, the staple diet being maize-meal made into a thick porridge, of which an African will consume an astonishing quantity. Meanwhile the others busy themselves with erecting shelters for the night. Polls are cut down in the forest, and stacked after the manner in which soldiers pile their rifles. Against these branches are rested, and if it is the rainy season a thatching of the long African grass is added. Then fires are kindled to cook the supper, and these are kept up through the night to scare away wild beasts. An African camp at night, says Mr. Arnaud, would make a fine picture on canvas, the blazing fires, the black faces clustered round them, the men singing, talking, laughing, and all about a pitchy darkness made doubly deep by the dense shadows of bush and forest. Every night it was the leader's habit to sit with his men around the camp fires, trying in every possible way to convey to them intelligent thoughts as to his mission. He felt that it was of the first importance that they should understand something about his message and his motive in bringing it, and so should be able to give an answer to the thousands of natives who would be sure to bombard them with the questions as to who this white man was and why he had come. One of the districts traversed by the caravan was the Chibaokei country, a land of beeswax hunters who spend weeks on end in the depths of the forest gathering beeswax to sell to the beehive traders, and living meanwhile on little else than wild honey. A high region was crossed where one day, in the space of two or three hours, they saw the fountain heads of streams which flow respectively into the Congo and the Zambezi, and so ultimately into the Atlantic on one side of the continent and the Indian Ocean on the other. Then came a wide tract where population was scanty and food scarce, and Arnaud had a good deal of trouble with his men. They demanded more rations and especially more meat. One day they flung down their loads crying, Monare, their name for Arnaud, give us meat! Why don't you hunt? You are starving us! Anxious though he was to press on, he saw that there was nothing for it but to devote the day to hunting. He seized his gun, forgetting that it was loaded, and as he was pulling off the cover the charge suddenly went off, shattering the point of his left forefinger. There was no one with him who could dress a wound, and he thought it best to get one of the men to cut off the top joint according to his directions. The accident had a subduing effect on the men, who felt as if they were to blame for it, and in spite of hunger they tramped on bravely. Starvation, however, had begun to stare them in the face when Arnaud succeeded one day in shooting two warthogs, one of which weighed over two hundred pounds and had tusks over a foot long. A time of feasting followed, and as the men marched along once more their leader heard them saying, Don't you remember what things we said of the white man and his god, what names we called them, but the white man's god has been with us and has filled our bodies with pig meat. The trials of the long journey were now nearly over. A few days more brought them to the Guarunganzee country, where, after so many days in a desert region, it was a delight to see fields of grain and abundance of food, and still more to be hospitably received on every hand. On reaching the capital Arnaud expected to have an early interview with the king, but it was not Missedee's habit to welcome strangers all at once. For some time the white man was placed in a sort of quarantine, while various tests were employed by witch-doctors and diviners to see whether his intentions were good or bad, and whether his heart was as white as his skin. A little piece of bark, for instance, was placed at night in a certain decoction. If next morning the bark appeared quite sound, that showed that the heart of the newcomer was equally so. If, on the other hand, it was in the least decomposed, the inference was that his heart was rotten and that he must not be trusted. Fortunately, after several days had been spent in experiments of this kind, everything turned out in Arnaud's favour, and the king accorded him a public reception. The reception was both friendly and imposing. Missedee, an elderly man with a white beard, folded his arms around the traveller in the most fatherly manner, and then introduced him to his wives, of whom he had five hundred, as well as to his numerous brothers, cousins, and other relatives. Arnaud found that Livingston's name was one to charm with. Missedee had heard of the doctor's approach from the east in 1873, and of his death at Illala, and was pleased to learn that his visitor was a man of peace and good will like Livingston, and that he hailed from the same country. He begged Arnaud to remain in Garanganze and to build himself a house on any site he pleased, and this was the beginning of the Garanganze mission. For two years Arnaud toiled on all alone in that remote land, making tours of exploration from the capital into the surrounding districts. In most places the people had never seen a white man before, and his appearance created a great sensation. The very print of his boots on the path was important. His feet, they said, are not a man's feet, they are the feet of a zebra. He had many strange adventures and not a few narrow escapes. But perhaps his most trying experience was when he spent a whole night in the open, alone and in pitch darkness, surrounded by a ring of hungry wild beasts. He had gone out in the company of a native to shoot antelopes at a time when food was scarce, and after a long tramp had succeeded in getting near to a herd and bringing down three, by this time, however, the sun was setting and the dismal howl of the hyena began to be heard. The nearest village was far off, but Arnaud sent his companion to bring assistance, resolving to keep guard himself over the game throughout the night. He had no means of kindling a fire, and to make matters worse, his ammunition was all expended, so that he had no weapons but an empty rifle and a hunting-knife. One of the antelopes, which lay at a distance of about a hundred yards from the rest, he soon had to surrender, but he marched up and down beside the other two, shouting and stamping and making as much noise as possible. The cold grew so intense by and by that he drew his hunting-knife and skinned one of the antelopes as best he could in the dark, rolled himself in the warm hide, and laid down on the ground, but no sooner had he done this than he heard stealthy footsteps approaching, so that he had to spring up again. Only by rushing up and down for several hours, shouting all the time, was he able to keep his savage assailants at bay. When daylight came, he saw from the footprints that he had been surrounded through the night by a band of hyenas and cheetahs. It was fortunate for him that no lions had been attracted to the spot. For two years, as we have said, Arnaud held this missionary outpost single-handed before any reinforcements arrived, and during all that time he never had a chance of receiving even a letter from the outer world. The oppression of this loneliness was increased by the heathen vices and cruelties which went on in Garanganze just as in other parts of darkest Africa. All around him in particular the horrors of the slave traffic prevailed, and infants were constantly done to death because their owners had no use for them. The slave traders regarded them as positive nuisances, not only encumbering their mothers on the march, but preventing them from carrying loads of ivory or some other commodity, and as no one wanted to buy the helpless little creatures, the slavers quite commonly flung them into a river or dashed out their brains against the trunk of a tree. As we read of the sights that were to be seen in Garanganze day by day, we do not wonder that the saying passed from mouth to mouth among the slave population, cheer up slave, the emperor, death is coming along to save you. One day the body of a fine little boy with a fatal spear gash through and through was picked up on the road. It was a child whose owner shortly before had pressed our no to take it. Another infant whom he had felt unable to accept was thrown into the bush and devoured by the beasts, and so he was led to resolve that he must at all cost save these poor slave-children, a decision which soon brought him an embarrassing family of youngsters to whom he had to take the place of both father and mother. Not less painful than the accompaniments of slavery was the prevalence of human sacrifice. Misidi never entered upon any enterprise without seeking to ensure himself of success by putting someone to death. No one knew beforehand who the victim might be. The king simply said that so-and-so was to be taken, and straight away the appointed man or woman was led out to the slaughter. There is a heroism of patient endurance and continuance as well as a heroism of bold achievement. It sometimes needs more courage to hold the trenches than to lead the forlorn charge. Arnaud showed himself a hero in both kinds. His marches through Africa, first from Natal to the West Coast, and then again from Benguela to Garanganzi, reveal some of the best qualities of the intrepid explorer, but his quiet persistence in his chosen work as a messenger of Christ, through loneliness and sickness, through danger and disappointment, tells of other qualities which are nobler and finer. It is men like this hero of Garanganzi who are the true saviours of Africa. Of Stanley's different expeditions to Africa, the greatest, though in some respects the least successful, was the last, when he marched by way of the Congo for the relief of Iminpasha, and of all the thrilling chapters of In Darkest Africa, where he tells the story of that long struggle against frightful difficulties, none are more fascinating than those in which he describes his march through the vast primeval forest of the upper Congo and its tributary, the Arouimii, and his encounters with the strange dwarfish people who dwell in that region of interminable gloom. Rumours of the pygmies had come to the civilized world from time to time, especially through the reports of Arab traders, but few persons believed those rumours to have much more reality behind them than the tales of Baron Munchausen. Stanley proved, however, that the existence of the pygmies was a fact and not a fable, and it was natural that a later traveller, who, in addition to Stanley's courage and love of adventure, possessed a large share of the missionary spirit, should visit the great forest with the view of learning something about the religion of the pygmy folk, and particularly of seeing what prospect there might be of carrying the light of Christian civilization with success into that shadowy world in which this unknown people lived and died. Mr. A. B. Lloyd, the hero of this enterprise, was a young missionary of the C. M. S., who had been working for some time in the district of Toro on the western side of the Uganda protectorate, under the very shadow of the giant snow-capped peaks of Ruinzori, anciently known as the Mountains of the Moon. His experiences already had been of an exciting kind, for he had been in the thick of the fighting in Uganda during the year 1897, when the Sudanese troops mutinied, and Mwanga, the dethroned king, himself raised the standard of rebellion against the British rule. Primarily Mr. Lloyd's duties in the campaign had been to act as interpreter to the British forces, and to give the wounded the benefit of such surgical skill as he possessed. But he was a good shot with a martini rifle, and a handyman, generally, who could work a maxim gun in case of need. He did not hesitate, accordingly, as a loyal British subject, to play his part like a soldier in the suppression of the rebellion, along with the handful of white men who at that time represented Queen Victoria and the British flag in the heart of Africa. His companion and friend, the Reverend G. Pilkington, fell in the course of the fighting, and Mr. Lloyd himself had several narrow escapes in the eleven engagements in which he took part. At last, after a long period of great strain, a reaction came, and he was laid down with malarial fever. On recovering from the attack he was ordered to give up his work for a time, and leave for England in order to recruit. In these circumstances ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have made for home from Uganda by the ordinary East Coast route via Zanzibar. But Mr. Lloyd was the hundredth man, and he decided to strike westwards right across the continent by way of the pygmy forest of the Upper Arawimi. His preparations were soon made, for unlike Stanley he had no intention of advancing at the head of a small army. He secured as a guide a man who had once before passed through the forest, furnished himself with provisions for three months, gathered a few porters, and, with a bicycle, a camera, a donkey, and a faithful little dog named Sally, set out upon his tramp into the unknown. For the first stages of the journey the way was plain. The mighty mass of Ruinzori, which barred direct progress to the west, had to be circumvented, and thereafter the route lay through a charming plain abounding in game, where to the delight of his followers Mr. Lloyd was able to supply them plentifully with elephant stake and antelope joints. After five or six days pleasant marching a river was crossed which forms the boundary between the Uganda protectorate and the Congo Free State, and four days progress through King Leopold's territory brought the party to a Belgian fort called Mbene, where they rested for two days. Here they saw running along the western horizon along dark belt which, they were told, was the commencement of the great forest. Leaving Mbene they made for the center of this black line, and soon plunged into a mysterious region of darkness and solitude from which they were not to escape for many days. The great forest of the Congo has an area of no less than three hundred thousand square miles, about six times the area of England not including Wales. The scenery which meets the traveler's eye is described by Mr. Lloyd as possessed of a beauty of its own, a beauty that is thoroughly weird and uncanny. Majestic trees tower up towards the sky to the height often of two hundred feet, interlacing their foliage so closely that not even the rays of the tropical sun are able to pierce through the dense barrier. The day at best is a dull twilight while at night a blackness falls which might almost be described as solid. In spite of the want of sunshine, however, the vegetable life is wondrously profuse. Strange ferns and flowers spring on every hand, and gigantic creepers with cables which are sometimes a foot in diameter, climb up the trunks and along the branches from tree to tree until the whole forest becomes a confused tangle of luxuriant growths. The animal life is not less exuberant. Insects swarm and chirp and buzz on every hand. Birds of the most variegated plumage flit from bow to bow, some of them uttering deep musical sounds like the tolling of a bell, others of the parrot tribe whose only music is the harshest of screams. And there are other denizens of this vast woodland. Elephants and buffalo are met with constantly, sometimes in herds, sometimes singly, wild pigs and forest antelope, many species of gazelles, chimpanzee, gorilla, and vast quantities of monkeys of every kind are seen, leopards, panthers, wild cats, civets, hyenas, and reptiles. Deadly snakes will be found hanging from the branches of the trees or curled up amongst the decaying vegetation beneath. Huge black adders, pythons, bright green snakes with wicked red eyes, whip-cored snakes which look for all the world like green twigs. The forest is threaded with a network of rivers and streams, and all seemed full of fish. There are also crocodiles and hippos, water snakes and lizards, leeches and slow worms. With the great majority of these animals the traveller was quite familiar, for by the necessity of his calling, a pioneer missionary in Central Africa, is something of a sportsman, since the very life of his followers and himself, when on the march, may depend on his skill in shooting game. Elephants, buffaloes, and antelopes he had often dealt with. The roar of the lion and the yelp of the leopard in search of its prey were familiar sounds to his ears. But he had not long entered the forest when evidence came of the near presence of the gorilla, an animal which is only to be found in Central Africa, and there only in the depths of the forest primeval. They had reached a particularly dark bit of the forest where no light at all seemed to come from the sky, so that, though it was only one p.m., a gloom as of night was all about them. Suddenly they heard a strange noise not far off, as of deep voices angrily quarreling. For a moment everyone was scared, but the guide assured them that it was nothing else than Niquema Nacoubois, big monkeys. The Belgians at Fort Mabeni had told Mr. Lloyd that he would probably meet with gorillas, and gorillas these doubtless were. But for the present he was quite content with hearing their voices, having no desire at the head of his unarmed porters to make their closer acquaintance. For six days the little expedition fought its way through wood and jungle without meeting with any adventures of an especially thrilling kind. Every day, however, the difficulties of steady progress grew greater. The undergrowth seemed to get thicker and thicker as they advanced, and Mr. Lloyd had to walk in front of the line with an old sword bayonet, chopping away for himself and for the porters who followed with the loads. The guide, too, it soon turned out, was hopelessly at sea as to direction, and so Mr. Lloyd had further to pilot his company as best he could with the help of a compass, trying to keep a north-westerly course with the view of striking the Itori River, a principal affluent of the Araweeme, and then of proceeding along its banks until they should emerge from the forest. Besides overcoming the obstacles presented by the tangles of bush and creeper, the caravan had every now and then to cross one or other of the numerous marshy streams which find their way through the forest, most of them being deep enough to take a man up to the armpits, and some of them so polluted with rotting vegetation as to be highly offensive to the smell. A day's march under such conditions was very exhausting, but the work of the day was far from over when the day's tramp was done. A piece of ground had to be cleared where a tent could be pitched, and a strong zariba or fence built round it as a protection against wild animals, leopards, panthers and elephants, which gave the travellers many an uneasy moment. Through the night they often heard elephants squealing loudly and trampling through the bush in the immediate neighborhood of their little camp. And one morning, when Mr. Lloyd had risen early and gone out of the tent before any of his men were awake, he found a huge old tusker with its head over the zariba, evidently in deep thought and wondering what on earth this could mean. Six days had passed since entering the forest, and not a trace of the pygmies had anywhere been seen. Mr. Lloyd began to wonder if the pygmy stories were really true. But on the seventh day, as he was walking in advance of the caravan, rifle in hand, accompanied by his black boy and looking out for a shot at some wild pigs which had been sighted shortly before, the boy stopped of a sudden, cried monkey, and pointed towards the top of a high cotton tree beneath which they were passing. Mr. Lloyd looked up, and there sure enough was a creature which from its size he took to be a gorilla. Now his men had been glad to eat monkey meat before this when nothing better was to be had. So he raised his rifle to his shoulder, took careful aim, and was in the act of pulling the trigger when his boy hastily pulled his arm and exclaimed, Don't shoot! It's a man! At once he saw that the boy was right. It was a strongly built little man, who, seeing that he was observed, ran along the branch on which he stood, and jumping from tree to tree with the agility of a monkey soon disappeared in the depths of the forest. They had pitched their tent that same afternoon, and Mr. Lloyd had sat down at the tent door with a book in his hand intending to read for a little, when, on looking up, he saw a number of little faces peering at him through the thickets in front, and one in particular, which was nearer than the rest, peeping round the trunk of a huge tree that grew right opposite. The boys, who were cooking food for the evening meal, noticed the little people at the same time and sprang up in alarm, for they knew the pygmies only by report, and thought of them as a kind of devils. For some time the white man and the dwarves remained motionless, gazing silently at one another in a mutual fascination, though Mr. Lloyd felt all the while that at any moment he might be transfixed with a shower of poisoned arrows from the bows with which the pygmies were armed. Stanley had characterized them as malicious dwarves, and his warlike company had been greatly harassed by them again and again. But at length it occurred to the missionary, still sitting peacefully in his camp-chair, to call out the ordinary salutation of the people of Toro, and when he did so, to his great surprise, one little man immediately returned to the greeting in the same language. He then said, Come here and let us talk together, and very shyly the nearest of the dwarves crept forwards, followed by a few of the others, half covering his face with his hand and staring through his fingers at the white man in a sort of amazement. As the pygmies approached, Mr. Lloyd was struck first of all by their extreme shortness of stature, four feet being the average height of a full-grown man, but next by their exceedingly well-knit figures and powerful limbs, the one who replied to his salutation turned out to be the chief of the party. This man had once come in contact with some people from Toro, and hence knew a little of the Toro language. With him Mr. Lloyd was able to carry on an imperfect conversation in which he learned something of the pygmies and their ways. One of the first things the chief told him was that for six days he and his people had been following the caravan and keeping it under constant observation. But we never saw you, the traveller objected, whereupon the little man laughed with great glee, accepting this as a high complement to the forest craft of himself and his followers. During the whole of that time the pygmies had the caravan entirely in their power, but the very smallness of the company and the evident peacefulness of its intentions had disarmed their suspicions. Mr. Lloyd's experience in the forest, so different from Stanley's, showed that the dwarves are by no means so malicious as that great explorer imagined. And his testimony, like that of Dr. Livingston or Mr. Joseph Thompson, points to the conclusion that where no war-like demonstrations are made, the African savage of whatsoever tribe is in ordinary circumstances a good-natured fellow, who is ready to give the right hand of fellowship to those who show themselves peaceful and friendly. With the pygmies Mr. Lloyd struck up a friendship on the spot. The chief testified to his good will by presenting him with an antelope he had just killed, and also with a pot of wild honey, of which great quantities are gathered by these people from the hollows of the trees. That night the two parties encamped in the forest side by side, and they parted next morning on the best of terms, after Mr. Lloyd had made several ineffectual efforts to obtain photographs of the strangers. He found that snapshots were impossible in the forest twilight, while the pygmies were too restless to submit to time exposures, and so, after spoiling about a dozen plates, he had to give up the idea in despair. After this, different parties of pygmies were met with at various times in the further course of the march through the forest, some of whom even brought their women to see the white traveler. The women were comely little creatures, averaging three feet ten inches in height, with light tan-colored skin. Like Stanley, Mr. Lloyd was much struck by the beautiful eyes of the pygmy women. These are singularly large and lustrous, but so quick and restless that they never seem to fix their gaze upon any object for one second at a time. The pygmies are essentially a wandering people. They never think of clearing the ground and cultivating the soil, and are content to wander from place to place, gathering the honey which the bees have stored, and the fruit and beans and nuts which grow plentifully on the trees, but above all living on the spoils of the chase. They are fearless and expert hunters who do not hesitate with their little bows and arrows to attack the largest elephants. Sometimes they have to follow one of these forest monsters for days, and shoot hundreds of arrows into it before it falls down and dies from exhaustion and loss of blood. Then they camp around it and feast upon its flesh day after day. When nothing but the hide and skeleton are left, they seize their weapons once more and go forth in search of another quarry. Particularly interesting to this traveler were the evidences he discovered of the pygmy worship. It has sometimes been alleged that these Congo dwarves have no religion, but Mr. Lloyd had abundant evidence that this was not the case. Sometimes at the foot of a huge tree there might be seen a bundle of food neatly tied up in a piece of bark cloth, or a pot of honey, or a humble offering of forest beans. The pygmies venerate the spirit of their forest home and look upon a giant tree as enshrining that spirit's presence, and besides their tree shrines Mr. Lloyd came upon temples of their own building. Little huts roughly fenced in from the forest, and hardly better than the tiny shelters of bows and leaves in which they lie down at night, but holy places in their eyes, because there they deposit the gifts they wish to offer to the invisible spirit of the woods. Having successfully struck the river Aituri, the expedition made its way along the banks, and at length issued from the forest at a place called Avakubi, where there was a Belgian station with an officer in command. Here the white traveler was kindly received, and stayed for two days, thoroughly enjoying the comforts of civilized life after all the privations of camp arrangements in the pygmy forest. And now it was a comfort to think that though he had still some fifteen hundred miles of African travel to face, no more tramping would be necessary. Fifteen days paddling in a canoe down the Arawimi would bring him to the Congo. Reaching that great river, he would connect with a series of steamers running between Stanley Falls and Leopoldville. At the latter place a passage would be secured by another steamer to Bulma, at the Congo mouth, and from that place the Belgian male boat would carry him homewards. This was a comparatively tame program for one who had just fought his way for weeks through all the dangers and terrors of the great forest, and yet the journey, especially in its earlier stages, was full of interest and not without adventure. More than once the canoe came to grief in shooting the rapids, for African boatmen are not such experts at this kind of work as the North American Indians, and once at least Mr. Lloyd was all but drowned. Moreover the Arawimi for a long distance runs through a country in which cannibalism is practiced almost as a fine art, by a bold and warlike race known as the Bangua. More than once on landing at a Bangua village Mr. Lloyd had to face a trying experience. A crowd of tall savages, each with a cruel looking knife shaped like a sickle, walked round him, looking him up and down, as if taking stock of his condition and considering whether he was worth killing. The trial was all the more unpleasant that he knew perfectly well how those same execution knives were used. When about to hold a cannibal feast, the Bangua lead a captive beneath a tree, and bending down a large bow fasten his neck to it. One swish of the keen sickle knife severs the neck completely, and the bow, springing back to its original position, tosses the poor head with a kind of derision high into the air. Apart from disagreeable sensations on his own private account, Mr. Lloyd often had to witness scenes which were horrible and sickening. It was a common thing to see a group of men sitting round a fire and eagerly watching the leg of a man that was being roasted, and next falling upon it and devouring it with unconcealed gusto. The visitor found, however, that the cannibalism of the Bangua was not simply a depraved appetite, but in large part the result of superstition. They firmly believed that the spirit of the dead warrior passes into the body of the man who eats him, so that by partaking of the flesh of his slain foe, a man will increase his own strength and courage. It is in keeping with this that a woman is seldom, if ever, eaten by the Bangua. The donkey with which Mr. Lloyd started from Toro not only proved to be of no use as a steed, but was a source of infinite trouble through her habit of floundering into swamps and sticking fast in the bush on every possible occasion, and he was glad to sell her on the first opportunity. His little dog, Sally, after many exciting adventures and hair-bread escapes, came to an untimely end in the jaws of a crocodile, but his bicycle, which had been carried safely through the forest in sections, he was now able to put together again, and one day in a large Bangua community inhabited by some thousands of people, he appeared suddenly in the village street peddling along at the top of his speed. The sensation he produced was enormous. The cannibals rushed about in consternation, knocking each other down in their eagerness to get out of the way and crying, The white man is riding on a snake! By and by he dismounted, and calling to the chief, tried to persuade him to come and examine this strange flying creature. But his assurances that it was perfectly harmless were of no avail. The cannibal declined to come any nearer, saying, as he pointed to the long trail left by the wheels on the village street, that he always knew a snake's track when he saw it. The intrepid traveller reached Boma safely at last, and caught the male steamer for Europe. He had suffered many hardships, but he had also had not a few experiences that were pleasant, especially in the retrospect. And not the least pleasing of his impressions was the conviction which had grown upon him day by day, whether in the forest of the pygmies, or among the cannibals of the Arawimi river, that great as was the darkness in which those people lived, they had many fine characteristics of their own, and offered a fresh and splendid field for the messengers of the Christian Gospel. The rapidity of his march, combined with his complete ignorance of the languages of the Congo region, so different from those of Uganda, made it impossible for Mr. Lloyd to engage during his journey in any kind of Christian work among the natives. But it was a missionary purpose which carried him through the dark forest, and that missionary purpose had not been fruitless. The CMS, it is true, has not hitherto felt justified in taking up work among the pygmies. But Mr. Lloyd may be said to have claimed that strange people for Christ. Stanley had shown that, so far from being on the plain almost of the brute creation, they were a people of a quick intelligence. Mr. Lloyd proved that they were also possessed of religious ideas which offer a foundation for a higher faith and worship than their own. An American missionary traveler, the reverent Mr. Giel, has followed in Mr. Lloyd's steps by traversing the forest, and has added something further to our knowledge of its very interesting inhabitants. There is every reason to hope that pygmy land, like many another part of the dark continent, will one day be brought into the Kingdom of Christ. Indians and Eskimo of Hudson Bay To those who, as boys, have read Mr. R. M. Ballantyne's Angava and Young Fur Traders, the name of Hudson Bay will always suggest a world of glorious adventure and romance. They have visions of Indians shooting swift rapids in their bark canoes, or of Eskimo on an ice-flow fighting a fierce polar bear or lying in wait for an unwary seal. They see the trapper on a winter morning with his gun on his shoulder, skimming lightly on broad snowshoes over the powdery snow as he goes his rounds from one trap to another through a forest which has been transformed by icicle and snowflake into a wonderland of magical beauty. Or they remember the traitors in a lonely fort doing their best to keep their hearts jolly and their noses free from frostbite at a time when the thermometer is fifty degrees below zero and the pen cannot be dipped into the ink-bottle because the ink has turned into a solid lump of ice. The present writer has a vivid recollection of a sunny mid-summer season spent in the Orkneys. In strongness harbor he saw some strongly built but old-fashioned vessels preparing to set sail and felt an almost boyish thrill of delight as he learned that these were the Hudson Bay ships about to start on their annual voyage for the coasts of Labrador from what is their last port of call in the British Isles. He thought of that solitary route where sometimes never a sail is sighted from one side of the Atlantic to another, and he remembered that though the bright summer sun might be shining on our islands, these ships would have to struggle with many a bristling iceberg before they could discharge at Moose Fort or York Factory the precious cargo on which depended the comfort and even the lives of those who held the outposts of the British Empire along the frontiers of the frozen north. Let us go back to the year 1851 and imagine ourselves on board of a stout old wooden ship of the whaler type which has fought its way from strongness across the north Atlantic and through the flows and bergs of Hudson Straits and is now entering the wide expanse of Hudson Bay itself. She is squarely built and armed at her boughs with thick blocks of timber called ice chocks to enable her to do daily battle with the floating ice. On board of her as passengers are a young Englishman named John Horden and his wife. Horden is a teacher who is being sent out from England by the Church Missionary Society to try to bring some Christian light into the minds and hearts of the Indians and Eskimo scattered round the shores of this great inland sea. The vessel is nearing her destination but the danger is not yet over. Indeed the worst dangers are yet to come. Horden himself describes their experiences. Ahead stretching as far as the eye could reach is ice, ice. Now we are in it. More and more difficult becomes the navigation. We are out to stand still. We go to the masthead ice rugged ice in every direction. One day passes by. Two, three, or four. The cold is intense. Our hopes sink lower and lower. A week passes. The sailors are allowed to get out and have a game at football. The days pass on. For nearly three weeks we are imprisoned. Then there is a movement in the ice. It is opening. The ship is clear. Every man is on deck. Up with the sails in all speed. Crack, crack go the blows from the ice through which we are passing but we shall now soon be free and in the open sea. No prisoner ever left his prison with greater joy than we left ours. A few days after the voyagers reached Moosefort at the extreme southwest corner of Hudson Bay and the young teacher found himself on the spot which was to be his home for the rest of his life. And now let us look at the task which lay before him. When John Wesley said that he took the whole world for his parish, he was speaking figuratively, but this inexperienced young man found himself literally responsible for the educational and religious welfare of a district 1500 miles long by 1500 broad. Indeed, lengthwise his parish stretched out indefinitely into space. For though bounded on the south by the settled parts of Canada, it might be said to extend in the opposite direction right up to the North Pole within this huge area and planted along the coasts of Hudson Bay a few trading posts of the Hudson Bay Company were scattered several hundred miles apart and here and there small bands of Indians and Eskimo were settled who gained a precarious livelihood by hunting and fishing. Apart from those who lived in the neighborhood of Moosefort or visited it from time to time to barter skins and furs for English goods, Horden could reach the people of this vast territory only by toilsome and dangerous journeys, performed in summer in a bark canoe, and in winter on snowshoes or in a sledge drawn by a team of Eskimo dogs. First of all, however, he had to learn something of the language or rather of the languages, for there were several of them. Around Moosefort the Indians were Crees, but in other parts of the country there were Ojibwe ways and Chippeways, each of whom spoke an entirely different dialect. Farther north on both sides of the Bay were the Eskimo, whose speech bore no resemblance to any of the Indian tongues. The language difficulties did not trouble Horden very seriously. Most Europeans are greatly puzzled by the peculiarities of the agglutinative family of languages used by the native tribes of North America, but though Horden confessed that Cree was a jaw-breaking speech and that Greek and Latin in comparison were tame affairs, he had so much determination, combined with such a knack for picking up new words and forms of expression, that in a very few months he was able to preach to the people without the help of an interpreter. He made mistakes, of course, once he was speaking of the creation of Adam and Eve. All went well till he came to describe Eve's manner of coming into the world when he observed that his hearers were smiling audibly. He found that instead of saying that the woman was made out of one of Adam's ribs, he had said, out of one of Adam's pipes, Ospecacun is his rib and Ospoacun his pipe. But by and by he was able to speak with correctness as well as fluency, not in one language but in several. And having taught the people to read and himself learned how to work a printing press, he scattered abroad thousands of Gospels and other books which he had translated into the various tongues. Mr. Horden showed such aptness for his work that before long he was ordained as a clergyman by the nearest bishop, the bishop of Rupert's land, who had to make for this purpose a journey of six weeks, mostly by canoe, and now Horden himself began to make those constant and arduous expeditions to all parts of the territory which formed the most striking feature of the story of his life. Arduous, his biographer says, is but a mild expression for the troubles, trials, privations, and tremendous difficulties attendant on travel through the immense trackless wastes lying between many of the posts, wastes intersected by rivers and rapids, varied only by tracts of pathless forest swept by fierce storms. Sometimes he went on from day to day for four or five hundred miles without ever seeing tent or house or even the trace of a human being by the way. Often he encountered men who delighted in bloodshed and thought little of killing and eating their fellow creatures when other means of subsistence failed. Once he met an Indian who during the preceding winter had murdered and devoured one after another his whole family of six children in order to satisfy the cravings of hunger. As for his own food on these journeys he was obliged to take whatever he could get. I have eaten, he says, white bear, black bear, wild cat, while for a week or ten days I have had nothing but beaver, and glad indeed I have been to get it. Let us follow him to some of his more distant stations and see what he found there, or how he fared by the way. First however let the fact be mentioned that after twenty years of remarkably successful labour he was summoned to England to be consecrated in Westminster Abbey as Bishop of Munsony, the name given to the new diocese of which Moose Fort was the strategic centre. His elevation in rank and dignity made little difference in the nature of his ordinary occupations, and so in describing some of the incidents of his tours we shall take these without distinction from the earlier or the later period of his life. Far up the eastern side of Hudson Bay lies the region of Ungava, with the little whale and great whale rivers flowing through it to the sea. For the Eskimo of this district Horden always had a special affection and regard. He loved his Indian flock too, but he found these Eskimo more responsive, more eager to learn, and more teachable in every way. Bleak and desolate as the country was around Moose, it was colder and wilder still towards Ungava, where from year's end to year's end the snow never entirely disappeared, and the white bear of the flows took the place of the black bear of the forest. In summer the Eskimo lived in tents made of seal skins, but in winter, like their Greenland cousins, in houses built of slabs of frozen snow. Bears and seals were hunted in winter, but in summer there came the fiercer excitement of the great whale drive. The whales would come over the river bars in vast numbers, and then every kayak was afloat, and with harpoon and line the eager sportsmen followed their prey to the death. On one occasion Mr. Horden himself took part in a whale fishery in which no fewer than a thousand prizes were secured, a world of wealth and feasting to the poor Eskimo. But no matter what the Eskimo were about, if they heard that the white teacher had come they dropped spear and harpoon and trotted off to listen, to sing, and to pray in a fashion which showed how deeply interested they were. By and by Bishop Horden was able to obtain for them a missionary of their own who settled on the spot and under whose teaching the whole colony around the whale river region became not only thoroughly civilized, but earnestly Christian. Still farther north than Ungava, but on the opposite side of Hudson Bay is a station called Fort Church Hill. Horden dubbed it the last house in the world, for there was no other between it and the North Pole. There the cold in winter is as intense almost as in any spot on the surface of the globe. The diary of an expedition to this lonely outpost undertaken in the depth of winter is especially interesting. Horden traveled in a cariol, or dog sledge, accompanied by Indian guides. The temperature was never less than thirty and sometimes nearly fifty degrees below zero. The greatest precautions had to be taken against frostbite. Every evening when they encamped in the forest about an hour and a half was spent in erecting a thick high barricade of pine branches as a protection against the piercing wind. An enormous fire was also necessary, for one of ordinary size would have made little impression on the frozen air. When a hearty supper had been cooked and eaten, and the Indians had lighted their pipes, the little company would sit around the blazing pine logs and tell of hunting adventures, or of hair-bread escapes from the perils of the forest and the flood. As bedtime drew near, all joined earnestly in a short service of praise and prayer, and then lay down to sleep under the open sky, which glittered with frosty stars, or glowed and throbbed with the streaming rays of the brilliant northern lights. Though the last house in the world, Fort Churchill had a heterogeneous population of English traders, Indians, and Eskimo. The Eskimo of the West were a fiercer people than those on the eastern side of the Great Bay, and were much feared even by the chip away Indians, themselves dangerous customers to deal with. Often an Eskimo would come to the station with his face marked with red ochre, a sign that he had recently committed a murder. This red mark was their peculiar glory, for while they prided themselves on their prowess in killing a walrus or a polar bear, they thought it a much higher honor to have slain a human being. Churchill was thus a very needful field of operations in the eyes of the bishop, and Horden did not rest until he had planted a church there, with a minister of its own to attend to the wants of the variegated flock. In spite of its rigors and occasional tragedies, life at Churchill was not without its own small humours, too. Horden was fond of telling his friends farther south about the Churchill cows. There were three of them. The first was a dwarf. The second was so lean and supple that she could milk herself with her own mouth, and was therefore condemned to go in harness, carrying a bag round her udder which effectually prevented her from enjoying a drink of fresh milk whenever she pleased. The third member of the dairy had been despoiled of her tail one winter night by some hungry wolves. The result was that when summer came and the flies began to swarm, and in the brief hot summer they do swarm around Hudson Bay. They threatened to eat up all of her that the wolves had left, for without a tail she was perfectly helpless against their assaults. But an ingenious trader bethought himself of a dead cow's tail which was lying in the store. Why not use that? The suggestion was that once acted upon, the tail was attached to the stump by means of some twine, and over it was tied to some canvas, well saturated with Stockholm tar. It was a great success, and the creature was again able to do battle with her diminutive but persevering foes. In the course of his constant journeys in such a land, Bishop Horden, as will readily be imagined, had many a narrow escape. Shooting the rapids in a bark canoe is one of the most exhilarating of experiences, but sometimes one of the most dangerous. Horden, who travelled thousands of miles by water almost every year, had full taste of the dangers. Once a large canoe in which he was ascending a swollen river was caught in a strong current and dragged down towards some difficult rapids, while the Indians, with faces upstream, dug their paddles into the water and strained their muscles nearly to the bursting point. Their efforts, however, were quite fruitless. The canoe went back and back, and at length was swept at lightning speed into the boiling flood. Fortunately, the crew were equal to the emergency. In a moment they all turned swiftly round in their places, thus converting what had been the stern into the bow, and by careful steering through the rocks the canoe shot safely out at last into the smooth water beneath the rapids. On another occasion a smaller canoe struck with a heavy crash upon a rock right in mid-stream. A great hole was made and the water came pouring in, but by great exertions the canoe was brought to shore before it had time to sink, and in an hour or two it was sufficiently patched up again, for if an Indian canoe is easily damaged it is easily repaired. One goes to a birch tree and cuts off a large piece of bark, another digs up some roots and splits them, a third prepares some pitch, and in the course of an hour or two the bark is sewn into the bottom of the canoe, the seams are covered with pitch, and we are once more loading our little vessel. But the narrowest escape that Horden ever made was connected with the sudden break-up of the sea ice. They were crossing a frozen inlet on the south of Hudson Bay when the cold season was rather far advanced for a short cut of this kind to be altogether prudent. Just in the middle when they were about ten miles from the nearest point of land the guide gave a sudden exclamation and pointed seawards. As they looked they saw mass after mass of ice rise up and fall back into the sea, and they knew that with the approach of the warmer weather the solid surface was going to pieces before an incoming tide. The guide next struck his stick sharply on the spot on which they stood and the stick went clean through. Everyone knew what that meant. The ice was quite rotten. Get into the carry-all at once! the guide cried to Mr. Horden. The bishop jumped in, but his weight forced the hinder part of the sledge downwards into the sea. Both sledge and occupant might have disappeared in a moment if it had not been for the prompt action of the sagacious dogs. They seemed to realize at once Horden's danger and their own. Straining on their harness they quickly drew the carry-all out of its terrible position and made for the nearest shore at full gallop while the Indians ran behind not less swiftly. Eskimo dogs and Indians are both good long-distance runners and we are not surprised to be told that neither men nor dogs ever thought of halting until they felt the solid ground once more beneath their feet. There were many trials and anxieties as well as dangers in Bishop Horden's life. Once the annual ship from England so eagerly expected was wrecked on a reef and a large part of the provisions and other goods on which both traders and missionaries depended to carry them through another twelve-month was utterly lost. Sometimes there came a bad season, no game in the forest, no wild yeast for the goose hunters along the shore, and the poor Indians died by the dozen. Above all there was the great trial of parting from his wife and children, for Mrs. Horden, his faithful companion and helpmate from the very first, had to take the boys and girls to England to receive their education. But the good bishop never lost his cheerfulness or relaxed his activity. He was true always to the motto of his life, the happiest man is he who is most diligently employed about his master's business. Even on his deathbed his diligence did not cease. His last letter dictated when he was no longer able to write himself shows him, like Bede in the well-known narrative of his pupil Cuthbert, busy to the last with the task of New Testament translation. He suffered dreadful torture from rheumatism, the natural result of forty-two years of roughing it in a climate where the temperature varies from one hundred degrees in the shade at the height of the brief summer to fifty degrees below zero in the depth of winter. But in the intervals between the sharp attacks of almost intolerable pain, he pushed eagerly on with a revised version of the New Testament in the Cree language. Picture me in my work, he writes to his friends in England. I am lying on my back in my bed. Mr. Richards is sitting at a table by my side. I have my English Bible, the revised version, in my hand. Mr. Richards has my translation before him, which he is reading to me slowly and distinctly. Every sentence is very carefully weighed and all errors are corrected. This is a glorious occupation, and I cannot feel too thankful that I am able to follow it in these days of my weakness. The end came suddenly, but it did not come too soon. Horden had accomplished his task and left behind him a splendid record of heroic work heroically done. See Momentum Requirus, Circumspice, is Sir Christopher Wren's appropriate epitaph in St. Paul's Cathedral. John Horden's monument is to be seen in the presence of a pervasive Christian civilization all around the shores of Hudson Bay. When he went there first, he found the people living for the most part under the cruel spell of their conjurers. It was a common thing to strangle the sick with a bow string in order to save further trouble. Aged parents were got rid of in the same way to avoid the expense of supporting them. Murder, for gain, was rife on every hand. When Bishop Horden died, a complete change had passed over the great part of the Hudson Bay region. More than one Indian had been educated and ordained for the work of the ministry. Twenty-six native lay teachers, Indian and Eskimo, were busily engaged in various parts of the diocese. Thousands of persons had been baptized into the membership of the church and showed by peaceable and upright lives that they were Christians in fact as well as in name. CHAPTER XIV We have seen how, through the influence of Bishop Horden, Christianity was spread among the Indians and Eskimo around the inhospitable shores of Hudson Bay. But we have now to follow the story of a man whose journeys and adventures amidst the snowflakes and sunbeams of the far north throw even those of Horden into the shade. Being a bishop, the latter naturally confined himself to his diocese, though a vast diocese it was. But James Evans, the apostle of the north as he has been called, was not a bishop, and so was free to take for his diocese the length and breadth of half a continent. From lower Canada to the Rocky Mountains, and from Lake Superior to the Arctic Circle, he pushed ever forward as a pioneer of Christianity to the Indian races of British North America. It is three-quarters of a century since he began those incessant labors which make him the modern successor of Brainerd and Elliott. The wheat fields of Manitoba now wave where in those days vast herds of buffaloes roamed over the plains. The railway train and the steamboat have taken in some measure the place of the canoe and the dog sledge. The fur traders lonely fort in the wilderness has been supplanted here and there by the flourishing up-to-date Western city. And yet, after all, civilization has done little more than fringe the borders of those vast territories of the Canadian Northwest through which James Evans journeyed unwirably, whether in the long winter or the short summer, as he bore his message of peace and goodwill to the tribes of the Assiniboine and the Saskatchewan, to the fierce black feet and mountain stonies of the Rockies, and even to those of the Red Skinned Peoples whose hunting grounds lay under the North Star by the shores of Lake Athabasca or along the banks of the Great Mackenzie River which pours its mighty flood of waters into the Arctic Sea. James Evans was an Englishman who, like many another, had gone to Canada in search of a career. Finding it difficult to get employment in business, he became a Backwoods schoolmaster. It was a fine training for the life that lay before him, bringing not only experience as a teacher, but familiarity with those arts of the Hardy Backwoodsmen which were by and by to stand him in good stead. He was a Wesleyan, and as the leaders of the Wesleyan Church in Canada came to know his talents and enterprise as well as his Christian zeal, they offered him a post as teacher in one of their Indian schools in the Lake Ontario District. It was pioneer work of the purest kind, but Evans thoroughly enjoyed it, and lived happily in a tent with his young wife until he had felled cedar trees and sawn them into logs and built both school and school-house with his own hands. His success as a missionary teacher led before long to his being ordained as a minister, and appointed to labour among the Indian tribes on the northern shores of Lake Superior. This involved a dangerous journey of many days in an open boat, but Evans was now an expert canoeist, who could handle a paddle as if to the manner born. He reached Lake Superior in safety, and began his life-long fight against the superstitions and cruelties of red Indian paganism at a place which bore the appropriate name of Devil's Hole. To any ordinary man the far-stretching coasts of the greatest of all the American lakes would have been a field sufficient for a life's labours. But Evans was not an ordinary man. Like Livingston in Africa he was never satisfied unless he was continually pressing on into new regions, and carrying the name of Jesus Christ where it had not been heard before. And in the most unexpected way there came an opening and a call to a new and larger sphere such as he longed for. The fur traders of the great Hudson Bay Company, whose forts were scattered right across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the great lakes to the Arctic Ocean, had noticed for some time that many of the Indians of the North were drifting steadily southwards. This gave them much concern, for it was from the northern part of their territories that they got a large proportion of their most valuable furs, and this southerly movement of the native hunters threatened the company with serious loss. At first the migration was set down simply to a desire to escape to a more genial climate, but further investigation revealed that the true reason was very different. The Indians of the North had heard some word of a new and wonderful religion which had come to their brothers in the south, a religion given by the great spirit to the red man as well as to the white. Around many a campfire the tidings had been discussed, and at last religious curiosity became so strong that, in the words of Mr. Egerton Young, the biographer of Mr. Evans and one of his present day successors, family after family embarked in their birch canoes and started for the land of the south wind in order to find the teacher and the book. And so it occurred to the directors of the company that it would be to their advantage to bring the missionary to the Indians, instead of leaving the Indians to go in search of the missionary. They applied accordingly to the Wesleyans in England to send without delay several suitable men to work among the tribes of the Northwest. This the Wesleyan society at once proceeded to do, and as the most competent man to be the leader of the movement, their choice fell upon Mr. Evans. He lost no time in transferring himself from Lake Superior to Norway House, which is situated at the northern end of Lake Winnipeg, the Lake of the Sea, and in those days was one of the Hudson Bay Company's most important forts. As illustrating the conditions of life at that time in those remote regions of the British Empire, it is interesting to know how Norway House received its name. So great were the hardships and loneliness that had to be faced in the service of the Hudson Bay Company that few Englishmen cared for such employment. Hence, as a matter of fact, it was largely Scottish Highlanders and Islanders, or men from the fjords and fields of Norway, who manned the outlying forts. Norway House was originally occupied by a contingent of Norwegians, and it was in complement to them that the title was given to the fort. We cannot dwell on the long canoe journey of fifteen hundred miles to the northern lake, though it included perils in the rapids, an adventure with a black bear, and dangers on Lake Winnipeg itself, which got its name from the Indians because of its great size, and the sudden storms which burst upon it and raise its waves to the height of ocean billows. On reaching his destination Mr. Evans was received with great kindness by the officials of the company, and was soon plunged into the kind of work he delighted in. For here were Indians from far and near. Those of the district around the fort were called swampy crees, and were a splendid class of men both in physique and intelligence. But in addition to these there came to Norway House large bands of hunters from the warlike tribes of the Rocky Mountains, men who had come down the Saskatchewan in their canoes for more than twelve hundred miles. And here too were Indians of a more peaceful blood from the McKenzie and Peace rivers in the distant north. All came on the same errand. They brought for sale the skins and furs of bears and beavers, otters and ermines, black and silver foxes, and many other animals. And in exchange they carried back English goods which had come across the Atlantic and through the ice packs of Hudson Straits and Hudson Bay, and after being landed at York Factory had been brought up country for many hundreds of miles with infinite toil by canoe and dog-train. Evans turned his attention in the first place to the Indians of Lake Winnipeg itself. Their minds were full of superstitions. They believed in a Kesa Manitou, or good God, but also and still more strongly in a Mootje Manitou, or evil spirit, whose power was thought to be the greater of the two. They listened eagerly to the good news which the white preacher brought to their wigwams of a divine love which conquers all evil, and a father in heaven to whom every one of his children, whether white-skinned or red-skinned, is equally dear. It was more difficult, however, for the Ayumea Ukemao, or praying master, as Evans was called, to get them not only to believe in the divine love, but to give up their own hatreds and cruelties and other wicked ways. There was one chief named Meskepatun, a man of magnificent stature and strength, who liked Mr. Evans greatly, but said that this new religion was only fit for old women. I will never be a Christian, he cried, so long as there is a scalp to take or a horse to steal from the black feet. He was a man of such an ungovernable temper that he scalped one of his own wives in a fit of displeasure. And yet this same man by and by met the murderer of his son on the prairie, and writing up to him Tomahawk in hand, said, By all the laws of the Indian tribes you deserve to die, but I have learned that if we expect the great spirit to forgive us, we must forgive our enemies, and therefore I forgive you. But Evans not only taught the Indians religious truth, he taught them to work, a very necessary lesson. No doubt there were times when work seemed quite superfluous, for deer abounded in the forest and multitudes of buffaloes browsed on the prairie. There were seasons, however, when game was scarce, and times when the Indians perished by the score for lack of some other means of subsistence. Hitherto they had thought it a degradation for a hunter to engage in any kind of manual toil. But Evans introduced new ideals. He won their respect by his own skill as a shot, and then by his example induced them to till the fruitful soil and build themselves comfortable houses. By the shores of the lake and not far from Norway house, they're sprang up the neat Indian village of Rossville, with its houses and gardens and school and church, which is still one of the largest and finest Indian missions in North America. Those who have read Mr. R. M. Ballentine's Hudson Bay will remember his humorous and yet sympathetic account of an Indian school festival at Rossville, of which Mr. Evans was the presiding genius, and at which the famous writer of Boy's Storybooks was himself present when he was a young clerk in the service of the Hudson Bay Company. And now Mr. Evans began to turn his attention to those far-off tribes which had their settlements along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains or the banks of the Mackenzie River. Now began those great expeditions by waterway or dog trail, which surpassed in extent even the historic journeys of the Apostle Paul, for Evans would undertake a circuit of 5,000 or 6,000 miles in a single season. It is these immense journeys through the unknown wilderness that provide the most romantic elements in the story of his life. It was by them that he became known among the Red Indians through all the regions of the Northwest, not only like other Christian preachers as the Ayumea Ukemao or Praying Master, but as the Kiche Ayumea Ukemao, the great Praying Master. At one time we find him in his canoe toiling upstream or darting down the swift rapids with a thrill of dangerous delight to which the artificial joys of the modern watershoot cannot be compared for a moment. Again he is camping out on those rolling plains of the far west which are now the most fruitful cornfields in the world, but were then the special preserves of the Buffalo. Sometimes as he lay down at night the roaring of the bulls in the immediate neighborhood would be so loud and incessant that it was impossible to fall asleep, and often as he closed his eyes he knew that if the herd should be seized with a sudden panic and stampede in the direction of his little camp nothing could save him and his companions from being trampled to death. But it is his winter journeys by dog-train over the frozen snow that strike us most with a sense of adventure and romance. His favorite team of dogs was famous all over the land. They were hybrids, half dogs, half wolves, possessed of such strength that they could do their eighty or ninety miles a day, dragging a load of three hundred pounds or more. In harness they were easily controlled, and yet they were so fierce that they had always to be chained up at night, while through the summer when sledging was over for the season they were carefully shut up in a high stockade. Their savage disposition brought about their death. One morning an old chief who had come to look for Mr. Evans opened the gate of the stockade yard, thinking he might be inside. In a moment the wolf dogs sprang upon him and mangled him to death before they could be beaten off. For this crime, of course, they were immediately shot. Let us take one or two glimpses of a tour in the depths of winter. The sledge which glides so swiftly over the snow is shaped like a boy's toboggan, but is eight or ten feet long, about eighteen inches broad, and is drawn by a team of four powerful dogs. On a long journey two or three of these sledges are necessary, for a plentiful supply of provisions must be carried, as well as bedding and camp utensils. As the train sweeps forward there is often not a landmark to be seen. Nothing from horizon to horizon but a vast unbroken sheet of snow. But the Indian guide pushes on with confidence, led by an instinct which never fails him, and is almost as mysterious as that by which the swallows flying south find their way across the trackless sea. After a long day's drive through an air which is trying enough at forty, fifty, or even sixty degrees below zero, though infinitely worse when accompanied by a wind sufficiently strong to raise the fine, powdery snow into a blinding, choking blizzard, both men and dogs are thankful when camping time comes with its prospect of rest and warmth and food. The camp is nothing more than a square hole in the deep snow, scooped out with snowshoes which have to serve as shovels. On three sides the snow is banked up, while on the fourth a huge fire is kindled with logs cut from the forest. The kettles are then filled with snow and as soon as the snow is melted a goodly chunk of frozen buffalo or bear or beaver is popped into the largest kettle to be boiled. Meanwhile the dogs are being fed, mostly with frozen fish, which has first to be thawed before the fire, and if the night is unusually cold they are allowed to get on their dog shoes which are not unlike a boy's socks. For the privilege of getting on their shoes they often beg by howling piteously. Supper is never luxurious and is always taken under difficulties. When the cold is fifty degrees below zero, meat taken out of the boiling kettle freezes so fast that it has sometimes to be thrust back into the water two or three times in the course of a meal. The tea is flavored with milk which is quite sweet, though it may be several months old, and is presented not in a milk jug but in a bag, from which pieces of it are broken off with a hatchet as required. There is no lingering over the tea cups or rather the pans that do service in the wilderness for those symbols of civilization, and that for the very good reason that if the tea is not quickly drunk it cannot be drunk at all, having already become solid. After evening prayers and the evening song there comes the process of going or rather being put to bed. An Indian has a knack of rolling himself up securely in a warm rug of rabbit skins, but a white man is the better for being tucked in. Mr. Evans's Indians always attended to this duty most carefully. They spread blankets and rugs over him and tucked in his head as well as his shoulders and feet, leaving not the least chink for the entrance of the outer air at any point. Under such treatment Mr. Evans felt at first, as if he were being suffocated, but he soon learned to adjust himself to the necessary conditions of safety. For there is a real danger to the sleeper in neglecting these precautions. Mr. Eagerton Young tells of one restless traveller who could not lie still in his camp bed, and so shook his face free from the protecting blankets. Wakening by and by, he put his hand up and felt what he took to be the icy handle of an axe. It turned out to be his own frozen nose. Sometimes in the night a snowstorm would come on, and the travellers would waken in the morning to find themselves completely buried. But to those properly wrapped up the dry snow did little harm. It was more discomposing when the wolves, as often happened, gathered in a grim circle round the campfire, and kept up their blood-curdling howl through all the hours of darkness. Then it was necessary that a watch should be kept, and that the watcher should rise every now and then and pile on a fresh supply of logs, for there is no better protection against a pack of wolves than the glow of a blazing fire. On a long march Mr. Evans frequently slept during the day and travelled through the night. The reason for this was that the intense white glare of the snow, with the sunshine reflected from it, was apt to bring on a distressing complaint of the eyes called snow blindness. At night there was no similar risk. Besides to a lover of nature there was a peculiar charm about the winter nights, especially in the sub-artic zone. Those northern nights were nearly always beautiful, whether the moon was flooding the world with a soft radiance, or the frosty stars sparkled like diamonds through an atmosphere of absolute purity, or the aurora flashed and blazed, sending its mysterious ribbons of coloured light pulsing up to the very zenith, and filling even those who had seen at times without number with a sense of awe in the presence of a glory so unearthly. But from these romantic wanderings of the Apostle of the North we must pass to notice another feature of his varied activities and another great item in the debt owed him by the red Indians of British North America. He was not only an intrepid and indefatigable traveller, but a remarkable linguist and a man also of real inventive genius. A matter which troubled him greatly was the difficulty of teaching the Indians to read in the ordinary way. He brooded for years over the problem of inventing a simpler and easier path than that of the alphabet and the spelling book, and at last hit upon the plan which is known as Decree's syllabic system. Taking the Cree language as his model, he found that it contained only thirty-six principal sounds, and by devising thirty-six simple characters to represent these sounds, he made it possible for any Cree Indian who learned to identify the characters to read at once without further difficulty. No spelling was necessary, only the pronunciation of the sound that corresponded to the character. The result was that in a very few days old and young alike were able to read, but next came the difficulty of supplying them with books. Evans had no materials for printing and no experience in work of this kind, but he begged from the traders at Norway House the thin sheets of lead with which their tea-chests were lined, then having carved out models of his syllabic characters and made casts of them in clay, he melted the lead and poured it into the molds, and so, after many failures, obtained a sufficient supply of type. Printing ink he manufactured out of soot mixed with sturgeon oil. Paper he could neither get nor make, but he found that sheets of birch bark would serve his purpose very well. Finally, in lieu of a printing press, he begged the loan of a jackscrew used for packing bales of furs, and with no better equipment than this turned out the first books which his Indian flock had ever seen. The excitement produced by these printed sheets of bark was immense, for it seemed to the people nothing less than magic that birch bark could talk, and something still more wonderful that it could bring them a message from the Great Spirit himself. The result was that thousands, young and old, became readers of God's word, and when the Society in England realized the value of Mr. Evans's invention, he was furnished with a properly equipped printing press, from which, year by year, there came a steady supply of Bibles and Testaments in the native tongue. The syllabic characters, says Mr. Eagerton Young, are still in use. The British and Foreign Bible Society now furnish all these northern missions with Bibles and Testaments free of cost. Hundreds of Indians are reading out of them every day of the year. Missionaries to other tribes have utilized these syllabics for other languages by adding additional signs for sounds not found among the Crees. Methodists, Episcopalians, Moravians, Roman Catholics, and others use these syllabics of James Evans and find them of incalculable value. As illustrating both the remarkable character of the hero of this chapter and the kind of influence he exerted even over Indians who remained heathen, a tragic incident in his history is worthy of notice. One day he was out in a canoe shooting ducks along with a young Indian named Hassell, who had become a Christian, by some accident which he never understood his gun went off. The full charge entered the head of poor Hassell, who fell back dead into the canoe. Mr. Evans's grief was terrible, the Indian was a Chippewyan, and all his people were heathen. As such they retained their superstitious beliefs and cruel customs, and held in particular that blood must be given for blood and life for life, but his sorrow and sense of responsibility for his companion's death made him feel that he must surrender himself to Hassell's relatives, even though, as he well knew, it might result in his being put to death himself. Accordingly he wound up all his personal affairs, made arrangements for the management of the mission, and after a trying scene of farewell with his wife and daughter, set out all alone for the distant part of the country in which the Chippewis lived. Reaching the encampment of the tribe he asked for the wigwam of Hassell's father. When it was pointed out to him he entered, and sitting down on the ground told his sad story, tears of sorrow, meanwhile trickling down his face. At once the tent was full of excitement, grasping their tomahawks and drawing their knives, the men of the family cried out for the blood of this pale face who had slain their kinsmen. But there was one person in the tent who had already resolved that the pale face should live. This was no other than Hassell's old mother herself. She had been stricken with anguish when she heard of her son's death, but she had watched the stranger's countenance, and listened to the tones of his voice as he told his story, and she knew by the instincts of love and of grief that Evans was the true friend of her boy, and that his sorrow for what had happened was not less sincere than her own. And so when the Avengers of Blood were about to spring upon him, as he sat unresisting on the ground, she ran forward and, putting both her hands on his head, said firmly, He shall not die. There was no evil in his heart. He loved my son. He shall live, and shall be my son in the place of the one who is not among the living. And so the Christian missionary was actually adopted, after the Indian custom, into the tribe and family of these heathen Chippewise. For a time he remained in the wigwam with his new father and mother, and after he returned to his own family and work, he still regarded himself as their son, given them in place of the son he had shot. He knew that Hassell, after becoming a Christian, had been very thoughtful of his parents, and had sent them a present from time to time. And though himself a poor man at the best, he made a point to the end of his life of sending regularly to his foster-parents what he regarded as their rightful share of his own yearly income. CHAPTER XV. IN THE LAND OF THE DECOTAS. The title of the present chapter will remind those who have read Longfellow's Hayawatha, of one of the most frequently recurring lines in that poem of melodious repetitions, repetitions which are intended to suggest the steady rushing of great rivers and the water-falls monotonous music. In the land of the decotas, where the falls of many ha-ha flash and gleam among the oak trees laugh and leap into the valley. But Longfellow's picture of the decotas and their country, though beautiful as poetry, is very misleading as to the realities of life among the uncivilized Indians of the western states. He deliberately put their cruelty and squalor out of his mind, and set himself to weave their legends and traditions into a song of pure romance. The tale we have to tell in the following pages may justly claim to be a story of romance. It takes us to the land of Hayawatha and many ha-ha, the land of lakes and prairies and primeval forests, where the curling smoke of wigwams is seen rising through the trees. But it is in the first place a story of sheer reality. The merely imaginative side of the romance quite disappears in the presence of Indian life as it was actually lived in the land of the decotas little more than half a century ago. And the true romance is seen to lie in the heroism and self-sacrifice of the young American missionary and his wife, who went out to the far west in connection with the American board of foreign missions to spend their days in the midst of those fierce savages. Their life was one of constant toil, of frequent alarms, of hope long deferred. But they had the courage of faith and also its quiet patience. And one of them, at least, was spared to see a transformation among the decotas which went beyond anything for which they had looked. It was in the year 1837 that the Reverend Stephen Riggs and his wife, Mary, left their home in the eastern states and started westwards to begin work among the Sioux, the leading branch of the great Dakota family of Red Indians. Their first destination was Fort Snelling, a lonely military outpost at the junction of the Minnesota River with the Mississippi, not far from the Laughing Falls of Minneapolis, and on the very site of the future city of Minneapolis. It is strange to think that less than 70 years ago the spot which is now the center of the commercial life of the Northwestern states was then an outpost in the wilderness, more difficult of access than most places in Central Africa are today. The greater part of the journey of 3,000 miles they were able to make by water, first down the Ohio River and then up the Mississippi, but so slow was traveling at that time, especially on the upper Mississippi, that it was not till three months after leaving Massachusetts that they reached Fort Snelling. Not far from the Fort there was a mission station soon afterwards to be broken up by a furious and bloody war between the Sioux on the one side and the Ojibwe ways and Chippewise on the other. Here the Riggs is stayed for a few months to learn a little of the Dakotas and their language, and then set out with a wagon across the prairies toward a lake known as La Cui Parle, the speaking lake, which lay some 200 miles farther to the west and near the borderline between the present states of Minnesota and Dakota. For thirteen days they pushed steadily towards the setting sun, and at length reached the lake with the mysterious name, suggestive of the presence of some haunting spirit. There they joined another pioneer missionary, Dr. Williamson, and had a room assigned to them in a log cabin which he had built in the midst of the TPs or wigwams of the Sioux Nation. Their first task was to seek the acquaintance of the inmates of those TPs which were scattered along the shores of La Cui Parle, approaching a Dakota village of that time, one saw a number of conical tents made of buffalo skins, with smoke issuing from holes left at the top, lifting the little door of skin, the only shelter of the inmates against a temperature which in winter often sank to twenty degrees below zero, the visitor found himself in a cold smoky lodge about twelve feet in diameter, where, besides a dirty lounging warrior with his pipe, there might be a mother and her child, a blanket or two, a skin, a kettle, and possibly a sack of corn. The Indians did not give the white men any welcome. On the contrary, they regarded them as intruders into their country, from whom it was legitimate to steal everything they could lay their hands on. They resented to any attempts to interfere with their ancestral habits, and especially with their deadly feuds and murderous attacks upon the Indians of other tribes. There was a notable chief called Eagle Help, a war prophet and war leader among the Dakotas, a man of unusual intelligence, and the very first of all the Sioux Nation who learned from Mr. Riggs to read and write his own language. But when the lust of battle came upon him, as it periodically did, he was the most bloodthirsty of savages. Once when he was about to lead out a war party against the Ojibwe ways for the purpose of slaying and scalping the men and carrying off the women as captives, Mr. Riggs argued with him in vain, and finally said that if the Sioux went on the war trail he would pray that they might not be successful. This so offended the chief that just before starting he and his men killed and ate two cows that belonged to the mission, and when they returned from their expedition, after a long tramp during which they had not fallen in with a single Ojibwe way, he attributed this failure entirely to the white man's charms, and held himself justified accordingly in killing and eating another cow which still remained. After spending five years at Lakwiparl in hard and unpromising labor, Mr. Riggs decided to push out still farther into the wilderness, and so removed to a district called Traverse Desu, where no missionary had ever been before, but if his experiences at Lakwiparl had been trying, those which he now had to encounter were tenfold worse. Accompanied by his wife's brother, a fine young man of twenty-two, by whom they had been joined, he went on in advance and pitched his tent among the Traverse Indians. Many of them objected to his coming, and even tried to drive him away by threats, but his mind was made up to stay, and with the help of his companion he began to cut and haul logs to build a little cabin. The Indians did not interfere with this, but as soon as the two men had felled their logs and painfully dragged them to the spot where they proposed to build, they came down in force demanding payment for the wood taken from the forest, and Mr. Riggs was obliged to give up some of his scanty stock of provisions. Before the cabin was finished Mrs. Riggs and the children arrived, and their arrival was marked by an incident which left a deep and painful impression on the lady's mind. She was attended by three young Dakota Indians who had become Christians, some distance from Traverse the road crossed the Chippewa River, and at this point as one of the three Indians whose Christian name was Simon, was riding on ahead of the little company, a war party of Ojibwe's suddenly emerged from the forest carrying two fresh and bleeding scalps. They came up to Simon and flourished their trophies in his face, but did him no harm, probably because they saw that he was in the company of white people, and vanished across the river as suddenly as they had appeared. Two miles farther on the road Mrs. Riggs and her escort met a band of maddened Dakotas in wild pursuit of the Ojibwe's. They told Simon that one of the two scalps he had just seen was that of his own brother, and when they learned that the Ojibwe's were now beyond their reach, they turned their fury on Mrs. Riggs and her three Indian companions, for not having tried to kill or stop the scalping party. Brandishing their muskets in the air, they clustered with savage faces and angry cries around the wagon in which the lonely white woman sat with a child in her arms. Finally they shot one of the two horses that composed the team, so that she had to get out and walk the rest of the way in the heat of the broiling sun, carrying her little girl in her arms. This was Mrs. Riggs' introduction to Traverse Desu, and it was only one of various similar episodes which helped to turn her dark hair prematurely gray. A few days after her brother was drowned while bathing in the swift river which flowed in front of the cabin, he was a youth of a joyful Christian spirit, and all that mourning, while hard at work on the unfinished house, had been singing again and again a couplet from a simple but very appropriate hymn, our cabin is small and coarse our fare, but love has spread our banquet here. By and by he went down to the stream and plunged in for a swim before dinner, but took cramp and was carried away by the current and drowned, and now in the midst of her weeping for the dead brother, Mrs. Riggs had to take his place in the task of finishing the log house, working with her husband at the other end of the cross-cut saw, because there was no one else who could be got to do it. It was a sad beginning to life in the new sphere, the forerunner too of many another hard experience, but the devoted pair never lost heart. The Dakotas killed their cows and horses, stole their goods, and sometimes threatened their lives, but they worked patiently on, doing their best to live down enmity and opposition. Gradually they made friends with one and another through the power of kindness, but found it difficult to get even the most friendly to become Christians. A red skin might acknowledge that Christianity was true, but the Christian commandments were too much for him. He could not give up his killing and stealing and polygamy. Or if he promised to live a Christian life and actually made a start upon the straight path, a visit to some white trader's settlement where whiskey was to be had was enough to turn him into an incarnate devil once again, ready for the worst of his old evil ways, and using vile and insulting language even to the white lady who had done so much for his own women and children. At length, after several years had been spent at Traverse, the departure of Dr. Williamson to another station made it necessary in the general interests of the mission to the Dakotas that the Riggs's should return to Lakwiparl. Their trials and hardships, however, did not cease with the change. The Indians robbed them as before, though sometimes it must be confessed, the thieves had the excuse that they and their children were almost starving. Fortunately this excuse for stealing was taken away not long after their return. For several years the vast herds of Bison, on which the Indians chiefly depended for their subsistence, had migrated farther and farther to the west, seeming to justify the complaint of the Dakotas that a curse fell upon their country with the coming of the white man's foot. But now the Bison came back again, and all around Lakwiparl the hunters might be seen armed with bow and arrow and riding forth over the prairie to shoot down the noble game. For two years the Dakotas reveled in fresh buffalo meat, and were content to leave the white man's horse and cow alone. The children playing around the tepees grew sleek and fat. The very dogs got plump, and peace and contentment reigned on every hand. But by and by the buffaloes began to move westwards again, a circumstance which the Dakotas might very well have attributed to their own deadly arrows rather than to the white man's foot. The red-skinned thieves resumed their work in the dark nights, and of all the forms of theft which they practiced none was more trying than the spoilation of the gardens of the pale faces. It was hard to sow and plant, to weed and water, and after weeks of toil and months of watching, to rise some morning and find that a clean sweep had been made of all the fruits and vegetables during the night. It almost seemed an allegory of what had been going on for years in the larger sphere of missionary labour. We have sown our seed in toil and tears, Mr. Riggs and his wife said to each other, but where is the fruit? And yet it was just when the hope of much fruit was almost disappearing that fruit came most abundantly, though not in any anticipated way. In the autumn of 1862 a body of four thousand Dakota Indians had gathered at an agency called Yellow Medicine to receive certain annuities from the government to which they were entitled, but through some mismanagement at headquarters, not greatly to be wondered at, seeing that the tremendous struggle with the southern states was absorbing all the energies of President Lingen's administration at that very time, the annuity money had not come, and the agent could not say when it would arrive. He wished the Indians in the meantime to disperse again to their homes. But as their homes in many cases lay at a distance of a week's journey or more, they refused to go back, and they also demanded that while they were kept waiting they should be fed. By and by they grew unmanageable, and began to attack the stores and help themselves to provisions. Resistance being offered they became violent, and several white men were killed. As soon as word of this outbreak reached the nearest fort, an officer of the United States Army hurried off with fifty men hoping to quell the rising. But the Indians met this little company with alacrity, and easily defeated it. Half of the soldiers were killed, and the rest had difficulty in making good their escape. This victory over the regulars set the prairie on fire. All over the land of the Dakotas the red men rose against the whites. Fortunately for the missionaries, the Indians who knew them best proved friendly towards them at this crisis, and did what they could to shelter them from the storm of savagery which had burst over the country. The rigs were smuggled stealthily to an island in the Minnesota river, where for a time they lay concealed. But their situation there was too precarious, and flight to the east was decided on. A terrible flight it was, especially for the women and children. The nearest place of safety was the town of Henderson, far down the Minnesota. They had to make their way cautiously, often in the dead of night, through the long grass of the trackless prairie, grass that was heavy and sodden with water, for it rained incessantly for nearly a week. Starvation stared the fugitives in the face again and again, but they found food more than once in cabins which had been hurriedly deserted by white settlers, and once, coming upon a cow left in a stable, they did not hesitate to kill it and cook themselves a hearty meal. All the time, by day and by night, there lay heavy on their hearts the horror of the red Indian pursuer with his tomahawk and scalping knife. But they reached Henderson safely at last, where they were received by the inhabitants as persons alive from the dead. Why we thought you were all dead was the first greeting they received, and they found that a telegram had come from Philadelphia saying, Get the bodies at any cost. The Sioux rebels were defeated at last in a pitched battle, and four hundred of them were taken prisoners. When brought before a military commission, three hundred of these were found guilty of having deliberately taken up arms against the U.S. government, and were sentenced to death. President Lincoln, however, who had the right of reviewing the findings of the commission, leaned towards clemency and gave instructions that in the meantime only those should be executed who were proved to have taken part in individual murders or in outrages upon white women. These special crimes were brought home to thirty-eight of the prisoners, and an arrangement was made by which they were all hanged simultaneously in full view of the camp by the cutting of a single rope. Through the crevices in the walls of their log prison house the rest of the captives saw their comrades hanged, and the site produced a profound impression upon them, an impression not only of fear, but in many cases of guilt. Mr. Riggs and Dr. Williamson, who had been present in the camp as interpreters from the first, at the request of the commanding officer, found their time fully occupied in dealing with the prisoners who listened to their message of the love of God and salvation through Christ for the sinful as no Indians had ever listened to them before. Formerly, even in Church on the Lord's Day, the Dakotas had heard the most earnest preaching with an air of stolid indifference. They would never rise to their feet at any part of the service, and they continued smoking all the time. Now their whole demeanor was changed, and as the days passed a wonderful wave of conversion passed through the camp, in which there were now gathered, in addition to the prisoners, some fifteen hundred other Dakotas who were anxious about the fate of their friends. It was not long till three hundred adult Indians in that camp made public profession of their faith in Christ, and were baptized into the communion of the Church. Eventually the prisoners were pardoned by the President, and allowed to return to their homes. But the work begun by the missionaries under such strange circumstances at the close of the war still went on, and resulted in the Christianization of the greater part of the Dakotas. A few years after the Sioux War was over, brave Mary Riggs passed away, worn out by labors and sorrows. Her husband, however, was spared to see his name become an honored one in America, and not only among the friends of Christian missions, but in academic circles as well. For this bold pioneer of the Church militant had also the instincts of an original scholar. Through all his years of frontier toil and peril, often with no better study than a room which served at the same time for kitchen, bedroom, and nursery, and no better desk than the lid of the meal-barrel, he had carried on laborious researches into the language of the Indians, which resulted at last in his Dakota Grammar and Dakota Dictionary, and brought him the well-deserved degrees of D.D. and L.L.D. But his highest honors were written not in the records of universities, but in the changed lives of the Dakota people. In his old age, looking back over forty years of service, he could trace a wonderful contrast between then and now. In 1837, when he came to the far west, he was surrounded by the whole Sioux nation in a state of ignorance and barbarism. In 1877 the majority of the Sioux had become both civilized and Christianized. Then in the gloaming his young wife and he had seen the dusky forms of Indian warriors flitting past on their way to the deeds of blood. Now the same race was represented not only by sincere believers, but by native pastors in the churches and native teachers in the schools, and on the same prairies where the war-woop of the savage had once been the most familiar sound, the voice of praise and prayer might be heard to rise with each returning day of rest, from Indian cabins as well as Indian sanctuaries.