By COMPARISON with the agencies for the wild Sioux to the northwest,
the Santee Agency had a remarkably placid history during the last
three decades of the nineteenth century. There were no periodic out-
breaks of violence, no frightened appeals by the agent for military pro-
tection, no mass flights from the reservation by the Indians. Instead,
there were the singing of hymns, the daily routine of the classrooms, the
seasonal round of planting and harvest. The contrast was so great that
George Hyde, historian of the Oglalas and Brulés, was led to say of the
Santees, with considerable exaggeration, that in 1870, when Spotted
Tail visited them, "They had placed themselves absolutely under the
control of their missionaries, and they had little thought for anything
in the world beyond piety." ¹ To the extent that this generalization has
any truth to it, the piety and docility of the Santees were due largely to
the activities of the missionaries who had worked among them on the
reservation in Minnesota, during the traumatic period of exile, and
since their settlement in Nebraska.

John P. Williamson and Samuel D. Hinman followed the Indians
down from Crow Creek in the spring of 1866. The American Board
missionaries attempted, without much success, to conduct school in
tents that summer at the Niobrara townsite, and then moved in the fall

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