Mrs. Morris was willing to undertake the hard work these sixteen boys imposed upon her, because she had just met with a great sorrow. She had gone on East with _two_ children, and came back with only _one_. "As I sit and mend," she writes, "the alarming holes which the boys make in their clothes, an unbidden tear sometimes falls when I think of _our_ blue-eyed, sunny-haired boy, whose last resting-place is in the valley of the Susquehanna. And I think how much rather I would have worked for him than for these boys. But I say to myself, '_My darling is safe and out of reach of harm_'; and these boys need the doing for that my darling one will never need more. For
"' Mine in God's garden runs to and fro, And that is best.'
And I know that somehow the Lord knows what is best; and he does as he will with his own."
In the early spring of 1874, I was requested jointly by the American Board and the American Missionary Association to visit and report upon various Indians agencies, where their appointees, or nominees rather, were agents. Accordingly, I started in the month of May, by St. Paul, on the Northern Pacific Railroad, to Bismarck, and thence by steamboat up the Missouri to Fort Berthold. At this time Major L. B. Sperry, who had been a professor in Ripon College, was the nominee of the American Missionary Association. It was not my good fortune to find Agent Sperry at home, but Mrs. Sperry, in a very ladylike way, gave me the best accommodations during the week I remained.
Here were gathered the remnant of the Mandans, only a few hundred persons, and the Rees, or Arricarees, a part of the Pawnee tribe, and the Gros Ventres, or Minnetaree, properly the Hidatsa. Altogether they numbered about two thousand souls. We had before this entertained the desire that we might be able to establish a mission among these people, and this thought or hope gave interest to my visit. The Mandan and the Hidatsa languages were both pretty closely connected with the Dakota; but what seemed to bring these nearer to us was the fact that many of all these people could understand and talk the Dakota, that forming a kind of common language for them.
_Howard Mandan_, or "The-man-with-a-_scared-face_," as his Indian name is interpreted, was the son of _Red Cow_, the principal chief of the Mandans, and had been taken down by Gen. C. H. Howard, a year before, and placed in A. L. Riggs' school at Santee. Howard had returned home before my visit, and also Henry Eaton, a Hidatsa young man, who had been East a good many years and talked English well.