An Apostle to the Sioux: Bishop Hare of South Dakota

SANCTITY and chivalry were so inherent in the nature of William Hobart Hare, that ‘saint’ and ‘knight’ stand in the first rank of the generic terms by which he may be characterized. More specifically, he was also an ‘apostle’ and a ‘pioneer.’ If John Eliot had lived in the nineteenth century, it is easy to imagine that his apostleship to the Indians would have expressed itself in many of the words and deeds of Bishop Hare. As a pioneer, moreover, he exerted an influence not exclusively limited to the work of a Christian missionary. He bore an important part in preparing a wild region for civilization; and when civilization began to come, it came the more quickly and surely for what he had done, and continued to do, towards making the Indians better neighbors to the whites and to each other, and towards working a corresponding benefit to the whites themselves. This vital and many-sided service he rendered through overcoming difficulties which a man of his sensitive fibre, both physical and spiritual, might have dodged without cowardice. He faced them all, with a high fortitude and helpful humor, and with a deep devotion to the Christian religion as a system, and to its founder as a living, personal director of daily life.

When such things can truly be said of a man, it is impossible to say also that he is of those regarding whom

The world has a right to ask and to know something about them. Some glimpses at Bishop Hare’s early experiences in what is now South Dakota may suggest why the titles of saint and knight and apostle and pioneer may be linked with one modern name.

William Hobart Hare was born in Princeton, New Jersey, May 17, 1838. Most of his boyhood was spent in Philadelphia, where he received his education and took orders in the Protestant Episcopal Church. After about ten years of parish work in and near Philadelphia, he became Secretary and General Agent of the Foreign Committee of the Board of Missions, with headquarters in New York. In January, 1873, he was consecrated Missionary Bishop of Niobrara, a new jurisdiction made up largely of the present State of South Dakota. Thirty-five years old, seven years a widower, he went forth to his labors.

The conditions of life about to confront the young bishop presented the sharpest contrast with those under which his life so far had been spent. He had lived only in the two leading cities of the country and their immediate surroundings. His personal background had been enriched by a multitude of kinsmen and friends holding definite places in a long established social order. All the comfortable amenities of life in the Middle States in the decade beginning with the Civil War had been his by every right of inheritance and possession. Over against all this was to be set a frontier existence of the roughest sort. The colonization of Dakota Territory had begun but little before 1860. The first territorial legislature met in 1862, but even in 1873 the population of whites was scanty and scattered. Railroad building had begun only in 1872, and in 1873 had been carried up the Missouri River only so far as Yankton. The buffalo were virtually gone, — Bishop Hare confessed after four or five years in the country that he never saw one, — but every other token of primitive conditions remained. The Indian population greatly outnumbered the white, and most of the Indians were unreclaimed from barbarism. The work of the pioneers of civilization was waiting, almost in its entirety, to be done.

In the field of Indian missions, the Roman Catholics had already done something; the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, especially through the labors of Riggs and Williamson and the attendant translation of the Bible and hymns into the Dakota tongue, had more specifically cleared the way. The Protestant Episcopal Church was represented by the thriving work of the Santee Mission, and in several remote posts. Under the policy of the Grant administration, the Indian agents were appointed on the recommendation of the religious bodies working at the several agencies. The field was rough, but it was full of opportunity and promise.

On the way to his field, Bishop Hare visited the Oneida Mission in Wisconsin, and confirmed the grandchildren of Indians whom his own grandfather, Bishop Hobart, had confirmed in New York, fifty years before. He also visited the Indian Territory. In some Reminiscences, written fifteen years later, he pictured his taking up of the work before him: —

‘While I was en route, the whole country was plunged into a frenzy of excitement and of denunciation of the whole Indian race, by the Modoc massacre, and the mouths of many sober men were filled with calls for revenge, such as at other times they were wont to denounce as the characteristic of the vindictive Sioux. The general of the army telegraphed a subordinate that he would be “ fully justified in the utter extermination”of the Modocs. Friends wrote me that a blow had been struck at all efforts for the Indians which was simply fatal, conclusive; and that it would be folly in me to persist. I pressed on, nevertheless, only lamenting that the treachery of a handful of Indians was allowed by an intelligent people to govern opinion, while the good behavior of tens of thousands of Indians was utterly forgotten.

‘From the Indian Territory I made my way to Dakota, like Abraham, who went out not knowing whither he went. I reached Yankton City, April 29, 1873. A military officer, to whom I was there introduced as being the Missionary Bishop to the Indians, somewhat bluntly replied, “Indeed! I don’t envy you your task.” I recalled the words, “ Let not him who putteth on his armor boast himself as he that putteth it off,” and simply replied, “A minister, like a military officer, obeys orders.” Whatever was uncertain, I was at least sure of my commission.

‘My arrival in Yankton occurred just after one of the most memorable storms that Dakota has ever known, and the effects of it were plainly to be seen in the carcasses of cattle which had perished in it, and in huge banks of snow which lay still unmelted. The storm had overtaken Custer’s celebrated cavalry, while they were encamped about a mile or two outside of Yankton, and brave men, who never quailed before the foe, had fled in complete rout before the tempest and taken refuge in any house where they could find a shelter, leaving all their camp equipment and horses to their fate.

‘From Yankton I passed up the Missouri River, along which the main body of the Missionary enterprise of our Church among the Indians was then located. I found that Missionary work had been established on the Santee, Yankton, and Ponca Reserves, and three brave young deacons, fresh from the Berkeley Divinity School, had, the previous fall, pressed up the river and begun the task of opening the way for Missionary effort among the Indians of the Lower Brulé, the Crow Creek and Cheyenne River Reserves. . . .

‘It was not long before I saw both sides of Indian life. The better side: said a shrewd Christian Yankton chief, as I was about to leave the rude chapel erected among his people, “Stop, friend, I have a few words to say. I am glad to hear you are going to visit the wild, upper tribes. Companies of them often come down to visit my band, and I always take them to see this chapel. I think a good deal depends upon the impression my chapel makes on them. I think if it was put in better order it would make a better impression than it does. The rain and snow come through the roof. This floor is not even. Now, you are called an Apostle. That is a good name. I believe it means ‘one sent.’ But there are many people to whom you are sent to whom you cannot go; for they are wild people. But these visitors of mine go everywhere, and tell everywhere what they have seen.” The wilder side, too, I saw; for among the Lower Brulés, a fellow rode up by the side of our party, with an airy, reckless, dare-devil manner, and remarked, as he flourished his weapon: “I want my boy to go to school, but I am an old man. I am wounded all over. I like to fight. I love war. I went off the other day among some strange Indians. They said: ‘Go away, or we’ll kill you.’ ‘Kill away,’ said I: ‘that’s what I like.’” He was a type of hundreds and thousands. But is it an unheard-of thing for white men to hate the restraints of religion and morality for themselves, and yet wish them for their children?’

The Reminiscences proceed with an account of the plans he made at once for boarding-schools and other undertakings for the good of the Indians. Passing from details to general considerations, he wrote: —

‘From the first, therefore, I struggled against the notion that we were missionaries to Indians alone, and not missionaries to all men. I pressed the study of the English language and its conversational use in our schools, and, however imperfect my efforts, the aim of them has been to break down “the middle wall of partition” between whites and Indians, and to seek not the welfare of one class or race, but the common good.

‘The character of the work to be done appears from the fact that the Indians with whom the Mission has had to deal were some of the most reckless and the wildest of our North American tribes, and scattered over a district some parts of which were twelve days’ travel distant from others. So desolate was the country that on one of my trips I remember not seeing a human face or a human habitation, not even an Indian lodge, for eight days. Emissaries of evil had reached the Indians long before the Missionaries of the Cross appeared. “All the white men that came before you,” replied a chief, “said that they had come to do us good, but they stole our goods and corrupted our women; and how are we to know that you are different?”’

‘This,’ said Bishop Hare in another account of the incident, ‘was carrying the war into Africa with a vengeance; but I replied, “Well, you must watch and see how we live.”’

The life which he proceeded to live was a thing which the Indians could see with their own eyes. We can see it chiefly through the pictures which Bishop Hare himself made of it from time to time. A vigorous passage at the end of his first annual report will suggest something of the spirit behind all his activities.

‘ Discussions of the probable future of the Indians are beside the question and dangerous, because they drown the call of present duty. Suppose these people to be designed by Providence to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. Our duty is to fit them for that lot. Suppose that they are to be merged in our more numerous race. Our duty is to fit them for that absorption by intermarriage, and so arrest the present vicious intermingling. Suppose that they are to die out. Our duty is to prepare them for their departure. Our duty is the plainer, because the treatment which will fit these people for any one of these lots will fit them for either of the others.

‘But I have heard it said that practical men have come to the conclusion that Indians should be EXTERMINATED. What if some one should make this reply? If they are to be exterminated, now is the golden opportunity. Nature has laid the Santee Indians low with small-pox. Let the advocates of extermination come to her help. Their task is easy. Whole tribes of Indians have perished from small-pox in the past. Parched with fever, its victims have crawled to the river brink to slake their thirst, and, too weak to make their way back again, have died there, until the river’s bank has been lined, for miles, with row upon row of ghastly corpses. With a little timely help given to nature’s work among the Santees, such a scene may be beheld again. There are thirty or forty Santee scouts just on their way back towards their homes, from service with a military expedition sent out to protect a railroad survey from molestation from their savage brethren. Brave, gallant fellows they are, some of them communicants of our Church, who have won commendation of their officers. A telegram has been sent that they ought not to return. Let some advocate of extermination telegraph them just the contrary. They are panting to see their wives and children, and will be glad of an excuse. Indians have children, black-eyed and merry as larks. Let the gentle members of the Sisterhood of Extermination wrap them up and sing them to sleep in infected blankets stripped from their dying mothers. Let them gather together the cast-off clothing and bedding of the sick and send it off among the upper tribes. The winter is coming on. Many are shivering for want of clothing. The advocates of extermination may easily scatter these infected garments and the fatal plague with them wherever they will. Here, then, is work for the advocates of extermination. I call for volunteers.

‘ Manifestly, the cry for extermination is but a grim joke — perforce, perhaps, resorted to by intensely practical men to startle our too great enthusiasm into common sense. Rightly conducted and presented, Missions to the Indians will commend themselves to all. Real advocates of extermination, there are none.’

These are the words of a man passionately in earnest. The intensity of feeling in them was matched by the intense activity which he brought to his work at the first, and maintained to the end. The Indians in general came to know him primarily as a traveler, moving from camp to camp, from agency to agency, with a celerity which won him the name of Zitkana duzahan, or swift bird. We may well turn, then, to a few passages illustrating the method and scope of his movements about the jurisdiction. In the early days of his work, before the railroads had stretched far into the country, the Missouri River was an important highway. A picture of travel on one of its steamboats is found in an early letter, ‘To the Indian Aid Associations and to my many dear friends among the children of the Church’: —

MY DEAR FRIENDS, — ... Having visited our lower Missions, I am now on my way farther up the Missouri River to the Missions among the Yanktonnais Sioux Indians, and to those among the Sans Arc, Blackfeet, Minneconjou, and other bands of Sioux. Far up the River as you think of the Yankton Mission as being, and shallow as the River is here (the Mate, even while I write, stands upon the side of the boat, and, as he plunges his measuring pole into the water, in a drawling tone calls out its depth, ‘Five feet scant!’ ‘Four feet!’ ‘Three and half feet!’), boats capable of carrying three and four hundred tons of freight navigate its waters for about seventeen hundred miles above our Missions. The Steamer Far West, on which I am traveling, is, like the rest of these up-river boats, about twice the length of the little stern-wheel steamers which ply on the Schuylkill and Connecticut Rivers.

Fortunately, the berths on this boat are cleaner than those one sometimes hits upon, which is a great comfort. It is not over-crowded either, the only passengers besides myself being Mr. Hall and Mr. Ashley, of the Mission, and an officer and post-surgeon stationed at one of the river Posts. The Captain, Clerk, and Engineer are a pleasant, hearty set of fellows. We are on the best of terms, and out of this state of things issued two very interesting Services yesterday, Sunday.

The boat hands, however, are the lowest of the low. They are taken from the loafers who frequent the river towns, who are called out here ‘roustabouts,’ I suppose because they have no settled homes, but roost about, now here, now there. They are men who, having ended a trip and got their pay, go off on a wild carouse till their money is all spent, when they re-ship, their eyes bunged up, their bodies stiff and black with bruises, their faces cut and battered, and their minds so stupid from the effect of their excesses, that they know only enough to stumble down to the levee and aboard a boat and to answer automatically with their tongues, ‘Aye, aye, Sir,’ to the orders of the Mate, while they have such imperfect control of their arms and legs that they can at first hardly do more than fumble pointlessly at, or spread themselves over, the gang-plank and other articles that he bids them lift. They have been two or three days aboard now, however, and are a little straightened out, and I managed to induce even a number of them to attend the Service.

I was down among them on the lower deck a number of times on Saturday, wishing to win their good opinion in the hope of gaining some of them. They looked at me askance at first, as if they felt that a Parson and they had nothing in common. They laughed and halfexcused themselves on Sunday, as if they hardly took in what I meant, when I told them that I was going to have Service and wished that they would come. They took the invitation a little more seriously when I added that the Captain said they might come if they chose. Then several of them went off and shouted down the hold to their companions in a half-serious, halfcomic tone, ‘Say, Bill, Joe, come along. We ’re going to Church! ’ And presently a dozen or twenty of them appeared in the saloon and became very attentive listeners. . . .

But a word more about these miserable men. It is from them and such as they that the Indians get their first notions of what we white men are. The laboring man they first see is not the honest farmer who each year finds the reward of his labor in the increase of his stock and the improvement of his farm buildings, but the half-drunk ‘roustabout’ who, notwithstanding his hard work, never betters his condition. Shall we wonder if the Indians are slow to adopt the white man’s ways? Shall we be impatient if the new Missionary has to spend a year or so in earning for himself a character? And when the world is thus pouring the dregs of civilization into the Indians’ cup, already full of barbarism, shall Christian liberality not send them men of love who will offer them in farms and schools and churches the cup of Salvation? . . .

The steamers were not always so good as the Far West, an historic craft of which one my learn more in Mr. J. M. Hanson’s Conquest of the Missouri. From another steamer Bishop Hare once wrote to his sister, ‘It is not very comfortable. They had nothing to offer me but a berth in the clerk’s office and the soiled sheets of its previous occupant!’ His son recalls the discomforts of other trips, 舒 the tedious waiting for irregular boats, the laborious gaining of forty miles a day against the current, the sharing of state-rooms with utter and none-toocleanly strangers.

In after years Bishop Hare quoted with relish a Maori saying apropos of crude conditions, and the different ways in which noble-minded men and vulgar missionaries took them. ‘Gentlemengentlemen don’t mind; pig-gentlemen mighty particular.’ There were frequent occasions on river and in camp in these early days to show himself one of the ‘gentlemen-gentlemen.’ A single passage from a letter to his sister will throw its light upon both the difficulties and the humors of travel in these earliest days: —

(TO MISS MARY H. HARE)
YANKTON CITY,
February 22, 1874.
MY DEAR SISTER, — My dating from this place needs explanation. You may remember that I mentioned in my annual report the enterprise of some Santee Indians who had given up all their tribal privileges and gone off to Flandreau and there entered claims and formed a community as ordinary citizens of the United States. They are about one hundred and five miles northeast of this town. They have sent me many messages asking me to come and see them, and I have wished ever since I came out here to grant their request.
Thursday last I started from the Agency to put my long-deferred hope into execution. A prosperous day’s drive brought me a little over sixty miles to this town Thursday evening. Friday early I started for Flandreau, being somewhat alarmed on starting at hearing that there was a good deal of snow a little farther north. We have had so little snow, however, and the country has been so bare for weeks and weeks that I hardly credited the stories which I heard. We had not gone a dozen miles north, however, when we came upon the snow, which increased in depth every mile we drove north, until it became so heavy that it was almost impassable. No one knows the oppressive sense of helplessness that comes over a traveler on these vast plains when he finds his horses’ strength giving out, and the natural warmth of his body departing, and remembers that timber and therefore fuel there is none within ten or twenty miles. To add to my alarm the wind began to rise towards twilight, and the mercury to fall, and when I saw a house in the distance and drove up to it about half past eight o’clock, I could hardly have been more relieved had I pulled up at 1345 Pine.
The wind blew a gale, and was so keen that it seemed that it was hopeless to face it and live. To my dismay I found that a donation party had assembled during the day at the house where I was to find entertainment, which was that of a Baptist Minister. The building was literally jammed. They were the best-natured people in the world, but, oh, how I longed for rest and quiet! The party was kept up till about half past ten when the company began to disperse. Hardly a half hour had elapsed, however, before many of them came back again, reporting that it was impossible to face the storm and asking accommodation for the night.
Twenty-seven people slept there, a few in beds, more in chairs, and still more on the floor. Fortunately I was treated as a favored guest and had a bed assigned to me and my Indian deacon who was with me. The wind seemed to drive right through the thin boards, and I believe my ears would have frosted while I slept had I not taken the precaution to go to bed with my fur cap drawn down over my ears and most of my face.
I determined that it would be foolhardy to attempt to push on farther, and therefore retraced my steps with the morning light and reached Yankton without mishap about nine o’clock last night. A storm of snow which came on during the night and has prevailed all day admonishes me that I did not return too soon. . . .
Thus moving about ‘in journeyings often,’ it was primarily as the minister of the Gospel that he came and went. To the impulses of every messenger who believes with all his heart in the message he is bearing, Bishop Hare in his travels added specifically the duties of a pioneer in Indian Education and of an official or semi-official representative of the ‘Great Father’ at Washington, and of the whole encroaching manner of life known as ‘ the white man’s way.’ In each of these three capacities he needed all the confidence that his course soon won for him with the unfortunate people to whom he ministered. In each capacity he gives an adequate account of himself.
As a minister of the Gospel he found a people with primitive religious instincts, responsive to the spiritual elements of Christian belief. Again and again his thought reverted with satisfaction to one of his first journeys and the meeting with a chief who, receiving him courteously inside a tepee, listened unmoved for some time to the message he brought. ‘As I talked on, however,’ said Bishop Hare, ‘an Indian motioned to another near by to lend him his pipe. Tobacco pouch and pipe were produced and the owner, having filled the bowl with tobacco, handed the stem to his companion and touched a live coal to the tobacco. The latter took a puff or two, and, as the smoke was wafted by the heat of the fire toward the sky, lifted the pipe, pointing it toward heaven, and simply but reverently said, “ I smoke to God.”’ Bishop Hare liked also to tell of a chief who once illustrated for him the religious courtesy of the Sioux by saying, ‘We Indians have no paper from God (no Bible); but we pray to God; and when we think we have something that will please Him, like a piece of meat, or skin, we lift it up and ask Him to take it and have pity on us.’ Their sense of chivalry appealed to him, their vigor of thought and speech. ‘ You white men come to teach us!’ said one of them. ‘You white men killed the Son of God. Our people never did anything like that.’
Their mysticism touched him. ‘These Indians,’ he said in the course of an early speech in New York, ‘generally do not pass the age of sixteen or seventeen without getting in some way or other a deep sense, a vivid sense, of some particular spirit who shall be their patron God. It is very common for their boys of that age to go aside and seclude themselves, fast days and nights, until they have got their bodies in such condition that all sorts of strange hallucinations come over them. Then they think they see a musk-rat coming to them, or an elk, and it is singing a song, and they hear the muskrat say that if in the hour of extremity they will appeal to him and sing that song, his spirit will always come to them and be their guardian spirit. Our boys here of sixteen or seventeen never — at least, I did not — fast day and night for two or three days to get a keener sense of the invisible. I say these people are an intensely religious people. You must not hand them over to mere civilization.’
The singing muskrat and elk are characteristic figures in the folk-lore which provided the Sioux with their religion. The primitiveness of it all may be illustrated by a Dakota tradition, narrated with much earnestness by the old Chief Red Cloud to members of the Black Hills Commission visiting the Red Cloud Agency in September, 1876. It was printed in the June, 1878, number of Anpao or The Daybreak, a Dakota journal established by Bishop Hare. If the legend seems unduly long, its significance and this opportunity to put it on record may plead in extenuation.
‘Red Cloud began by asking Gen. Gaylord, then legal advisor for the Interior Department, whether he, or any of the gentlemen present, had ever heard of a mule’s giving birth to a young one. When all had said “no,” with some surprise at his curious inquiry, he replied that neither had he or any of the Dakotas heard of such a thing yet, but that after we were all dead it would occur, and with that event the Indian and white races would become one people, and there would be no more wars or trouble between them, for they would then both be alike in appearance, interests, customs, habits, etc. God, he said, had particularly favored you white men in all respects, and given to the Indian that which was of less value, yet we Indians have ever listened to His words and been content with our lot as assigned to us by Him, while you white and highly favored ones have always been disobedient and dissatisfied.
‘Again, God sent to the white man his only Son to be his guide and teacher — the best gift possible for Him to bestow; but they despised His teachings and crucified their Saviour. To the Indians God sent His daughter — a woman. She came on earth about the same time His Son came to the whites, and lived and taught among a tribe of the Dakotas on the upper Missouri. They loved, respected, and obeyed her, and have ever treasured her words as the words of God to them, and looked forward to the fulfillment of her prophecies for their people.
‘She came in a cloud from Heaven, and was first seen by two young men who were out hunting buffalo. One of these youths was virtuous and desired only what was pure and good, the other was of bad character and evil habits. As they went over the prairie far from their homes, they saw at a short distance from them a beautiful white maiden with golden hair and perfect form. As they stood filled with admiration for her graceful form, the bad young man suggested that this was an opportunity which they should not lose to obtain for themselves a woman of such rare beauty, and proposed that they should seize and take her captive. The other protested strongly against such a wicked act, but to no purpose. His companion rushed forward, and was about to lay his hand upon her when, suddenly, with a noise like that of a powerful whirlwind, both she and the young man were enveloped in a cloud. This cloud took the form of a cone, beautiful from the top to where it rested on the earth, with colors in order: at the top bright scarlet, then blue, yellow, white and black. The white and black represent the white race, and the others are the colors of the Indians. Scarlet being at the top meant that it was the highest order, and hence the Dakotas prize it above all the rest, and use it and the others for painting themselves, ornamenting their pipes, blankets, etc. The cloud gradually arose and disappeared from sight, but nothing was ever found of the bad young man but his bones lying on the prairie where the cloud had rested.
‘The maiden told the good young man that she would meet him at a certain time in a particular lodge, and vanished from sight. She met him according to this appointment, and as the Dakotas had no books she gave to them a pipe (which they still have) that his people might remember her words and the future of the Indian race, which she revealed to him as follows: It was that the Indian, from the first the less favored race, was to be the first to pass away, or rather to be merged into the more favored one. There were yet ten generations to come, and at the end of those generations a mule should give birth to a young one, and with that event the Indian race and white race should become one. “Now,” said Red Cloud (somewhat in error as to his chronology), “seven of those generations have passed away, and but three yet remain to the Indian. This is the decree of God, made known to us by his daughter —you have not the power to alter that decree or to hasten the set time — let us live in peace until the appointed season, and then the Indians will cease as a race, and the white man will possess both them and all else.”'
The element of imagination revealed in this legend, joined with the other Indian qualities already mentioned, made the soil of their nature fertile for the labors of a man with just such a nature as Bishop Hare’s. The chivalric and romantic elements in him responded quickly to corresponding traits in the Indians. This response was always under the control of a strong element of common sense. His own conception of his duty as a missionary was set forth clearly in a letter which he wrote in 1875 to a clergyman who was planning to join his force of workers. ‘You are about to enter a work where a hopeful and kindly heart and a high sense of duty are the first requisites. I pray you to make the possession of them your earnest endeavor. Your duties will be to teach school daily, and to prove yourself a friend of the Indians in every way, however practical and humble, which interested ingenuity can devise.’
Stronger than all the other appeals which the Indians made to Bishop Hare was the appeal of their essential humanity. In June of 1873 he wrote: ‘The sum of the whole matter is this: the Indians are Men. We differ from them in degree, not in kind. Exactly where, or nearly where, they now are, we once were; what we are now, they will (if not absolutely, yet according to their measure) by God’s blessing yet become. This is my wish. This is my prayer. This is my belief.’ Concerning the unexpectedness of their offenses against good order, he wrote in later years: ‘All this is thoroughly Indian, but very thoroughly Indian because completely human.’ Because so human they deserved in his eyes the same opportunities for development that make other human beings what they are. So many of the opportunities are those of educational training that the problem of schools immediately presented itself with great force. The Indians were all as children, and all needed what good schools could give them. But there was no possibility of giving it to any but the young. Hence the early concentration upon the conduct of boarding-schools. One good reason to hope for their success was naïvely expressed by a Christian Indian, formerly ‘one of the most exultant warriors of the dare-devil sort,’ who came to Bishop Hare in the early days and asked to have his grandchildren baptized. ‘Are their parents Christians?’ asked the bishop. ‘No,’ said the Indian, ‘they are not, but I am.’ He continued, ‘I have noticed that old antelopes are very wild and scary, and our hunters find it very hard to catch them. So they catch the young ones. The old ones come to seek their young, and then our hunters catch them too. And I thought if you would take and baptize these little grandchildren of mine, you might catch their parents too.’
Though the Indians in general believed that their children would develop better if left wholly to themselves,there were those besides the maker of the antelope similitude who saw the value of the new opportunities offered to them. One of them was reported by Bishop Hare as saying, —
‘My friends, all animals take care of their young. No — I am mistaken. One animal does not. It is the mudturtle. It comes up out of the water and lays its eggs in the sand, and then goes back to the water and leaves them to take care of themselves. When the young turtles are hatched, they run right down to the water. I think the Great Spirit teaches them. Their parents do not.
‘We Dakotas, my friends, are those mud-turtles. We are unlike other men. We have not taught our children. The Great Spirit has taught them direct, I think. Otherwise they could not have lived at all. And now I think that as the Great Spirit has been so kind to us when we were foolish, we ought to be very t hankful to him and try henceforth to teach our children wisdom as well as we can.’
The wisdom offered to them in Bishop Hare’s boarding-schools — long before the principles of industrial training had won their present repute — was that which they needed most for everyday living. ‘The ideas which governed me,’ he wrote, ‘in laying out the whole boarding-school work of the Jurisdiction were that the schools should be plain and practical, and not calculated to engender fastidious tastes and habits which would make the pupils unhappy in, and unfitted for, the lowly hard life to which their people are called; that, as the Indians had not been accustomed to labor, the school training should be such as would not only cultivate their intellect but also develop their physical functions, and teach them to do well the common acts of daily humble life.’ The carrying of Christian influences back into their uncivilized homes was of course a fundamental part of the plan.
It is possible to reconstruct in some measure the daily life in St. Paul’s School for boys at Yankton Agency where Bishop Hare himself lived in these early years. His son recalls a visit to his father at the school, where he arrived even before the pupils were received.
‘The plaster in it had not dried. There was no means of heating it except by sheet-iron stoves placed in each room. The only fuel was cottonwood, which burned like tinder and made the stove red-hot for half an hour, then rapidly died down unless re-fed. On going to bed at night the room was comfortably warm. On rising in the morning its temperature was often below zero, and the dampness in the plaster had turned into frost on the walls. When the cottonwood fire got fairly started, this moisture would trickle down the walls. This went on for many days and nights. As all food had to be hauled by wagon for sixty miles, it was most limited in variety and none too good. The only water obtainable was that of the muddy Missouri River, flowing at the rate of four miles an hour under eighteen inches of ice, and it was customary to send a wagon loaded with barrels to the river, to cut a hole in the ice, fill the barrels with water and drag them about half a mile up the bluff to the School. There was, therefore, no water for ordinary bathing, and very little for any other purpose. The cold was so great, I remember, that even the chickens, which were allowed to roost in the stable where the horses were, all lost their combs through frost-bite. At this time the Indians were still disposing of their dead on scaffolds, and erected one not far from the schoolhouse, upon which they laid a corpse, and then killed a horse underneath in order that the warrior might have something to ride on in the Happy Hunting Grounds. Meat was obtained by killing a steer, quartering, and then laying it at the foot of the haystack, where it remained frozen for as many days or weeks as passed before it was devoured.’
Writing to the Secretary and General Agent of the Indian Commission in New York, Bishop Hare himself described the effects of a winter storm in his new residence:—

(TO REV. R. C. ROGERS)
YANKTON AGENCY,
January 8, 1875.
. . . We have now a terrific storm upon us; t he mercury 23 degrees below zero; wind blowing almost a hurricane. We quail before it in our stone building. God pity the poor Indians in their tepees! The boys while asleep instinctively hugged themselves, heads and all, under the clothes, and I believe slept through it all. The dormitory looked this morning more like a snowbank than a bed-room.
On the sounding of the ‘Rising Bell,’ the boys were lifted from their snowy beds and carried to the other end of the room, from which they scampered away, without much regard to appearances, crying out, ‘Osnida! It’s very cold! ’ to the warm wash-room on the floor below.
Our water privileges hardly deserve the name. When the water for this large household of fifty people has to be dipped in buckets from the river and hauled in barrels a quarter of a mile, while the temperature is so low, that what is water one moment is (to exaggerate a little) ice the next. The boys who constitute the Water Squad have done their duty nobly throughout this whole cold term of ten days, during which the mercury has each morning ranged from 5 degrees to 23 degrees below zero. The Wood-Chopping Squad deserves equal credit. Our consumption of fuel in this school and in Emmanuel Hall near by is enormous. The boys have to cut all the wood in the open air, and, even with the violent exercise of wood-chopping, it is a question often whether they can generate as much heat as old Boreas can cold. Of course, we save them all we can, and they are required to do nothing which the head master and other teachers do not join in.
Three years later, Bishop Hare told something of the efforts the Indian boys themselves made to enter St. Paul’s School. He had recently met on the prairie two boys trudging from their homes at Santee, thirty-five miles away. A white boy driving with him exclaimed that he would never walk thirty-five miles to go to boarding-school, and Bishop Hare admitted that as a boy no more would he have done it. But another Indian boy made his way on foot to St. Paul’s from Flandreau, a hundred and fifty miles away, and two others from Cheyenne Agency, a distance of two hundred miles. With ‘all outdoors’ as home to run away to, there were some at first who fled from the restraints of a routine life. There were difficulties, too, with parents: some half or wholly hostile; others so friendly that they made themselves a nuisance by sitting about with loaded rifles on their knees to guard the teachers against possible attacks; all ignorant of the rights of privacy, and walking unbidden into any room the teachers might occupy. But, one by one, the difficulties were overcome.
A wise accommodation of means to ends appears in an account of an early commencement at St. Paul’s where the ‘ meritorious,’ the ‘very meritorious,’ the ‘most meritorious,’ pupils received as prizes respectively a pair of chickens, a pig, and a heifer apiece, to be held conditionally until the school course was finished, and to become their absolute property when they should graduate with the certificate given to those who had won their teachers’ commendation. In manifold ways the basis was laid in the work of the boarding-schools for an ultimate success with the mission at large, which must have seemed in those days of small beginnings hardly more tangible than a dream.
In representing the government to the Indians, in the days when they knew it chiefly through rapacious agents and commissions which generally contrive to get the better of land bargains, Bishop Hare had frequent opportunities to show himself the Indians’ friend. The government itself promptly recognized the value of such fairminded service as he was ready to render. Directly and indirectly, acting himself upon government commissions, meeting and corresponding with the President and the Secretary of the Interior, urging the use of military power where a merely sentimental churchman would have counseled against it, constantly leading the Indians forward on the road to self-helpfulness, he exerted an influence of the highest value. Through thirty-seven years his service in the cause to which he gave himself in early manhood continued unbroken except for the vicissitudes of uncertain health. The fruit of his labors, measured by mere statistics, stands as one of the most extraordinary achievements of civilizing missions. Measured by the truer tests of personal character and of the love and admiration of a community on which so rare a character stamped itself, the work of Bishop Hare becomes a national possession.