1887 Board of Indian Commissioners
"Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners," pp. 911-1049. In U.S. House. 50th Congress, 1st Session. Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1887 (H.Ex.Doc.1, Pt .5, Vol. 2). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1889. (Serial Set 2542)

From: E. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference, First Day—Second Session, pp. 971-978.

. . . DR. ELLINWOOD. "The thought, Mr. President, with which I come to this conference has been thrown out by one or two speakers, namely, this: That having, in previous conferences, given attention to the opening of the way for the civilization of the Indian, by securing the disintegration of the reservation system, by the allotment of lands, we have now opened the way for a new class of duties. it seems to me the question before this conference should be, what shall we do, how shall we go to work to realize the civilization of the Indian, which I believe can only be accomplished by his Christianization. . . . What are some of the difficulties? . . . You can’t run a common-school system. The day-school is not accessible except in some cases. Among the Chippewas and the Indians of Idaho the day-school is an impossibility. . . . I went on among the Nez Perces and was told that when the fishing season came it was just as much an impossibility to keep these Indians in school as it would be to keep wild ducks from migrating, and when the hunting season came all these Indians would rush off; the farms and everything else would be left. In a boarding-school, if the children are taken sick, they will connect some superstition with it, and it is only where there is some kind of power that they can be kept in boarding-school. . . . Still another type of woman’s work: About the close of the war there was a woman, whose name I will not call, whose heart was buried in the grave of a Confederate officer. She applied to the Presbyterian Board of Missions and went out among the Rocky Mountains in Idaho, and there consecrated her life to the work among the Indians. She had love for the Indians which led her to devote her life entirely to them, to learn their language, to get into their thoughts and into their hearts. She has never thought any more of coming back East to visit her friends than of going to Patagonia. She is a good, strong Scotch woman, with a masculine intellect and yet a woman’s heart. She knows theology—the New Testament and the Old Testament—she is really a living theological seminary, and she has trained up more ministers than all the male missionaries in that country have for the last five years, I believe. There are to-day in that mission seven of her preachers besides other licentiates. Five of them the Presbytery have not hesitated to ordain. She sent me, not long ago, a letter asking me if they might not have some funds to send some Indian missionaries over among the Crows and Cheyennes in Montana. . . .