When we reached the Sisseton reservation, we held our usual camp-meeting again at Dry Wood Lake, regulating and confirming the churches, and receiving quite a number of additions, though not so many as in the year previous. The place for the Sisseton agency had been selected, some log buildings erected, and the agent, Dr. Jared W. Daniels, with his family, was on the ground. The time seemed to have come when, to secure the fruits of the harvest, some more permanent occupation should be made in the reservation. Mary was gone up higher. The boys, for whose sakes, mainly, we had made a home in Beloit, were no longer in college. Thomas had graduated, and spent a year in teaching freedmen in Mississippi, and was now in the Chicago Theological Seminary; while Henry had commenced to seek his fortune in other employment. Without apparent detriment, I could break up housekeeping in Beloit, and build at Sisseton. The plan was formed during this visit, and talked over with Dr. Williamson and Agent Daniels. God willing, and the Prudential Committee at Boston approving, it was to be carried into effect the next spring.
And so I returned to my home in Beloit, and went on to attend the meeting of the two General Assemblies at Pittsburg, where their union became an accomplished fact. At the close of this meeting, I spent a couple of weeks in visiting friends in Fayette County, Pa., and the old stone church of Dunlap's Creek, which had been the church-home of my mother when as yet she was unmarried.
For several winters preceding this I had been working on translations of the Book of Psalms and Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. They were printed in 1871. But this winter of 1869-70 was mostly spent with the Santees. Mr. Williamson had left that place and gone to the Yankton agency, where he has since continued with great prosperity in the missionary work. And so there came to me a pressing invitation from Mrs. Mary Frances Pond and Miss Julia La Framboise to come out and help them that winter.
Julia La Framboise was the teacher of the mission-school at Santee. She was born of a Dakota mother, and her father always claimed that he had Indian blood mixed with his French. Julia was a noble Christian woman, who had been trained up in the mission families, completing her education at Miss Sill's Seminary, in Rockford, Ill. I found them all actively engaged in carrying forward mission work. But we conceived more might be done to bring children into the school and men and women to the church. Accordingly, I called together the pastors and elders of the church, and engaged them to enter upon a system of thorough church visitation, which had the effect of greatly increasing the numbers in attendance on both the school and the church.