The Life and Letters of Bishop Hare: Apostle to the Sioux

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Contents

PAQB

I Trs Bot and ths MaNj 1858-1859 ... 8

II In Parish and Missions Office^ 1860-1872 12

II Ik Pabi8h And Missions Office

1860-1872

JUST as William Hare passed naturally from the studies of boyhood into those for the ministry, and thence into the ministry itself, so the duties of his calling presented themselves first at his very door. Near to his father's house in Philadelphia was St. Luke's Church, of which the Rev. Dr. M. A. DeWolf e Howe was rector. Here the young clerg5rman's work began, soon after the taking of deacon's orders, in the post of assistant minister. St. Luke's was a large parish, with many activities both within and beyond the walls of the parish church on Thirteenth Street. It afforded a full opportunity for the discovery of a young man's powers both by himself and by others. The immediate result of this discovery by others was that in May of 1861 Mr. Hare became rector of St. Paul's ' Church in the Philadelphia suburb of Chestnut Hill. In May of the foUowing year Bishop Alonzo Potter ordained him to the priesthoodL

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Meanwhile, on October 80, 1861, his marriage with Mary Amory Howe had taken place. She was a daughter of the Rev. Dr. Howe of St. Luke's and his fibrst wife, Julia Bowen Amory of Roxbury, Massachusetts. To her yoimg husband of twenty-three she brought a sympathetic understanding of his profession and its demands. In purity and beauty of character, in responsiveness to all promptings of the religious nature, she was, to a marked degree, his counterpart. "We are very cozily settled at Chestnut Hill,*' he wrote to Miss E. N. Biddle, within two months of his marriage, "and Kving almost too happily for earth." Near the end of the same letter to this dear older friend of the young couple and their families, a lady rarely distinguished for piety and good works, he wrote of his bride: "She is fast eclipsing the Rector of St. Paul's, Chestnut Hill, and he is glad if he is only allowed to shine in reflected light. I have discovered by experience what I ought to have known before, that if a candle is ambitious of being seen, it is very suicidal for it to make love to the sun/^

Again in this letter, devoted by no means entirely to the enthusiasm of the newly married, he wrote: ^'We have been depleted as much as we shall be by the return to town of the summer residmts^ and I am glad to find that the places of the absentees are almost entirely supplied by the middle and lower classes who had been crowded out by the influx of crinolines and silks. The new church will be under roof in a few days, and I hope the time may never come again when it cannot be said of my church, 'To the poor the Gospel is preached/ "

Here spoke the future missionary bishop, though still in the youthful stage which set ''crinolines and silks" over against "the middle and lower classes." In the letters of this period there are, moreover, evidences of his following the progress of the war with a fervent patriotism, and, by inference from his declination of calls to other parishes, many tokens of the impression he was beginning to make. The regular course of his work in the ministry, however, was sorely affected by the rapidly failing health of his wife. In the summer of 1863 he felt obliged to take her, with their son a year old, to Michigan and Minnesota in search of such benefit as a change of climate might yield, and in September to resign his parish in Chestnut HUl. From Minnesota, where the effects of the Massacre of 1862 were still conspicuous, he wrote a letter to the Sunday-school pupils at home which may be read, almost in its entirety, as the record of his awakening to the cause to which so many of the best years of his life were to be given:

IN PARISH AND MISSIONS OFFICE Ifli

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St. Paul, Minn., September 18, 1868. My Dear Young Friends:

You remember that when I was with you, I used to talk to you often of different objeets to which I wished you to make offerings. I have not forgotten you nor your monthly collections since I have been away, and I now write because I want to interest you in the poor Indians of whom I have lately seen a good deal. There is a war raging in this state against them so that now we never see them, but when I was in Marquette on tlie shore of Lake Superior I saw numbers of them every day — sometimes they were lounging about the streets, sometimes picking berries in the woods and at other times paddling their canoes along the shore of the lake. But no one seemed to take any interest in them. • . . They wandered about like sheep without a shepherd. But though no one taught them what was good, there were not wanting those who taught them what was eviL

"'As I sat in my room on the Fourth of July I heard an unusual noise and on looking out of my window I found that some of the white people had got about a dozen Indians together to make the day hideous with their savage exhibition. There they stood before the hotel almost naked, and so bedaubed with paint and set off Willi feathers that they were frightful to look upon. At a given signal they began their dance. They pounded the earth with their feet, they crouched to the ground, they leaped, and sang and whooped and yelled, occasionally firing their guns into the air, until I was sickened at the indecent sight. Thus, my dear children, I have seen white people, your and my brethren, teach the Indian evil and make them almost like that man possessed with the devil, mentioned in the Grospel, who roamed among the mountains crying and cutting himself with stones. • • •

''A young man in Connecticut some years ago who was studying for the ministry felt himself called to go and preach the Gospel to the Indians. He accordingly came out to Minnesota, and began a mission under the care of Bishop Whipple. For a year he went in and out among them teaching and preaching the Gospel, but he met with little success so far as he could see. But a single Indian was baptized during the whole time. Soon after, however, it appeared as if their eyes were being opened to see the kindness and love of the Saviour and many became interested in the Gospel. Another and another was added to the number ; they were baptized, and so there came to be quite a Christian community among the heathen Indians. Many persons contributed to build them a church, and it was nearly finished when the savage

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Indians made an attack on the whites, murder* ing or taking prisoners men, women and children. Not one of the Christian Indians joined in these outrages. On the contrary they warned the missionary and his teachers, they hid the diurch Bihie from the savages, and on succeeding in getting some of the white prisoners away from their captors, they sent them in safety to General Sihley, who was coming at the head of an expedition to punish those who had committed the outrages. Thus they proved themselves Christians indeed. But the government passed a law that all the Indians of the tribe should be sent away from the state and so the Christian friendly Indians, though they had done all they could to help the whites, were brought to Fort SneUing and were there tried to find whether they had joined in the massacre. If they had been found guilty they would have been hanged, but they were all pronounced innocent, and sent hundreds of miles away from their homes to, a place they had never seen before on the Upper Missouri.

""But God meant that the white man's cruelty should turn out for the Indian's eternal good, and so, having no one else to flee to in their misery, they fled to Christ. While at Fort SneUing nearly a hundred Indians were baptized, and when I met the missionary the other day he told me that now after the expiration of some six months he has every reason to trust in their sincerity and single-minded piety. He also told me how God had accomplished this wonderful work. You know the Indians place great confidence in their medicine men, as they are called. They are jugglers who pretend to cure diseases, to keep people well or make them sick and all that sort of thing. Well, as long as they refused the Gospel the others would not receive it. At last, however, four of the medicine men were converted and the missionary called a council of the Indians. Some three hundred came together. The missionary called upon one of the four medicine men to say whatever he had to say. He looked confused, and so the missionary told them that when white men held a council not only the men who called the council but others expressed their opinions. He said this council was called to consider Christianity and he wanted to know what the medicine man had to say on the subject. He now understood what was meant and said that he had believed in four religions in his life. He described them all and said none of them satisfied him. They all were false. The last religion he had had was the Grand Medicine and he knew that was all a lie, and, turning around to the medicine men who were present, he said they knew it too. He then proclaimed himself a Christian and brought his drums and feathers and the other things he had formerly used when he was a juggler and laid them at the missionary's feet.

"The rest of the Indians were very much impressed when they saw their medicine men owning that their religion was all a cheat and soon many of them became Christians too. They have now all gone to their new home. Their missionary has gone with them. They have the New Testament and a large part of the Prayer- Book in the Dakota language and every Sunday, if you were there, you would hear them saying the same prayers and creed and singing the same chants as you say and sing at St. Paul's, Chestnut Hill, only in the Indian language. They now caU upon you, my dear boys and girls, for help. . • .

"Most affectionately your friend and pastor,

"William H. Hahe."

These very Indians, sent from Minnesota to Fort SneUing, and thence to a place they had never seen before on the Missouri, formed the nucleus of Bishop Hare's own Niobrara mission ten years later. Their plight, as he first saw it, made a powerful appeal to his sympathies. A few weeks after writing the letter just cited, he recurred to the subject in a letter to Miss Biddle:

*'The Church ouUide Minnesota must do the work. The indifference of the people here to the eternal interests of the Indian is simply astounding. They are concerned in only one thing, their extermination. There is a reward paid by the authorities for every Sioux killed by private individuals. I saw by the paper yesterday that the reward has just been raised to $200 to stimulate greater activity in this humane enterprise!"

It does not seem unduly fanciful to associate the depth of the impression made by these first observations of the treatment of Indians by whites with the more personal experience through which Mr. Hare was then passing. His wife's health remained such that he must have felt her hold upon life to be increasuigly uncertain. The wrongs they saw together must have been the more repugnant to him for their very effect upon her. Their effects upon him, in aU the circumstances, could hardly have been other than permanent.

It was partly that Mrs. Hare might change the climate and conveniences of a suburban place for those of the city that he resigned his parish in Chestnut Hill. He returned to St. Luke's Church in Philadelphia, taking entire charge of it for a time during his father-in-law's absence, and in 1864 asstmied special care of the Church

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of the Ascension, a mission of St. Luke's. When this mission became an independent parish in 1867> he was chosen its rector.

Before this responsibility came to him he had been left to face all responsibilities alone. On January 7, 1866, the pulmonary disease which for several years had threatened Mrs. Hare's life brought it to an end. Yet he was not alone. His son of three years — ^now the well-known medical writer, teacher and practitioner. Dr. Hobart Amory Hare of Philadelphia — ^remained to him; and, to share the management of his httle household, his sister. Miss Mary H. Hare, came immediately to his side and remained there until he took up the work of a Missionary Bishop. Nor in the more intimate sense could he have been so much alone as the death of his wife seemed to leave him. Her life, especially as its end drew near, was so preponderantly a life of the spirit, that it could continue in vital relations with his own spiritual existence. And so it did continue — ^if one may put a reasonable interpretation upon obvious causes and ejQTects — ^not only through the^ dark days of readjustment, but far into the years through which he shaped and followed the course he must have known she would have him take. ^^Sit anima mea cum Hid,'* he wrote in his wife's Bible, opposite the record ot her death; ^'qvis non dedderet Ulam dwtatem unde amicus non emt, quo inimicus non intratf The course he took remained at first in the grooves of a city parish. In the summer of 1868 he sought relief from it in a few months of foreign travel, through which we may not follow him. A single passage from a letter, written in Switzerland, to a brother-in-law also traveling in Europe, tells something of his need for rest and of the discretion with which even his pleasures had to be taken: 'Tray remember that in your case and mine, health and not sight-seeing is of first importance. I find I can do very little of the latter without prejudice to my health. I lie awake at night thinking in a sort of ecstasy of what I have seen, and find it necessary to sandwich a week of seclusion between my spells of sight-seeing. Pray be wise and do the like."

Returning to Philadelphia he continued for about two years in the routine of parish work, when he was appointed Secretary and General Agent of the Foreign Committee of the Board of Missions. His Philadelphia parishioners were loath to part with him. Bishop Stevens, in a letter of a later day, wrote: "During the whole of his ministry in Philadelphia, it was under my eye continually, and I can bear solemn testimony before God to its marked success and usefulness.'' But the call to the Missions Office in New York was a call to larger service and offered also the entire change of climate and mode of life which physicians had already counseled him to seek. In the winter of 1871 his new work began. The duties of the position were those of an intermediary between the chiurch at home and its representatives in the foreign fields of missionary work. It was necessary both to make known tibeir deeds and needs through frequent speaking and writing, and, through correspondence with them, to give them that stimulus which the knowledge of sympatjjiy and support could afford. In the performance of his duties a native gift of persuasive and telling speedi received constant cultivation. At the same time his power to stimulate generosity on the part of the supporters of missions won him an enviable name for efficiency in an important branch of the work before him. One innovation in the daily work of the missions office was introduced under his regime — ^the pause at noon for the "Midday Prayer for Missions/' a practice which has since spread far and wide. For himself there could hardly have been a better school than in his new emplojmtient for the all-round development of the missionary spirit. "So there seemed," said Bishop Tuttle in a memorial sermon at Sioux Falls in 1910, "in the early days . holy dmstening of him to his special work.

Name this person, might have been asked of his sponsors then; and you could have ahnost heard the answer clear and unhesitating, — ^A Missionary Bishop/'

The personal records of this period are scanty. A letter from Mr. Hare, while traveling with a party of prominent representatives of the clergy and laity, sent as delegates to a missionary meeting in San Francisco, wiU serve, however, to give its impression both of the writer and of his glimpse at Mormon conditions in 1871 :

"About 550 Miles East op San Fbancisco,

"April 26, 1871. '^My Dear Mary:

"I have written three letters (to dignify them hy that name) since I have heen on the cars, two to Mother and one to my dear boy.

"It is marvelous how accustomed one becomes to life on a railway. I have hardly known what ennui is and have slept almost as well as at home. So say the rest of the party. But I dread the return, for the novelty will have passed away, and I fear that none of the party will return in time to accompany me.

"The weather has been charming. They have no rain here for several months and our umbrellas are altogether useless baggage. We readbed

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Salt Lake City on Saturday evening at about nine o'clock.

"The journey until Saturday afternoon was entirely uninteresting. Though we had ascended the Rocky Mountains we had seen nothing but barren desolate plateaus and all that was mountidnous in appearance was far in the distance. But as we descended towards the Salt Lake Valley the land became more precipitous, and the scenery very imposing.

""The Salt Lake VaUey is most charming. On each side is a range of mountains covered with snow rising up right out of the plain to a height of seven thousand feet. The great Salt Lake lies in the midst of the Valley. It is ninety miles long by thirty to forty wide. Out of it rises a long ridge of mountain. The snow-covered mountains, the water, and the highly cultivated plain make a scene of charming beauty.

"Our visit to Salt Lake City was full of intense interest. The Mormons showed on all hands a great desire to show us what is to be seen. They have certainly done wonders here. This Valley was a desert from want of water. They have divided the stream from the mountains into a thousand rills and introduced a perfect system of irrigation. The desert has been converted into a garden.

"They are a most thrifty and industrious peopie. Indeed they teach that labor is religion. They have organized their Society so thoroughly and they have been so shut out from the world until lately and so compacted together by a common faith and absolute submission to their leader, whom they believe to be inspired, that the community is more like a school than a city.

^'Their religious system is Christianity, grossly understood, for they are a gross, ignorant people; and they maintain that Revelation is continued among them and that they can add what they like.

''They have in this way introduced polygamy, and this foul blot produces a sense of disgust even in the midst of the delights of their charming abode.

''We attended their services at noon on Simday, and desired to do so as unnoticed as possible; but they were on the look-out for us and as the party appeared at the door in squads they were singled out from the crowd who were waiting to get seats and assigned seats in a place that had been reserved. There must have been twenty-five hundred people present. Brigham Young and his counselors were seated on a platform, some of them engaged in breaking bread into large silver baskets, like a good-sized cake basket. This we found was for the Sacrament.

"The first address was by the celebrated apostle

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of the Mormons, Orson Pratt. He has a great reputation. His sermon was an apology for their religion, but not very conclusive. He was followed by George A. Smith, a very prominent dignitary, who took the ninth commandment for his text and pleaded that the Grentiles present would not tell lies about them when they went to their homes.

"To our amazement, the Rev. Mr.

• • . was then introduced. He is an Episcopal clergyman, one, however, to whom Bishop Alonzo Potter refused orders for cause, and whose record has not been very good. ... I was mortified to see him get up, and when I heard his address, which was altogether in the Mormon vein (though he made no allusion to polygamy) I was both indignant and disgusted. So were all the party. • . . Brigham Young himself closed with a very insinuating address.

"In the midst of the proceedings the bread was consecrated and then the water (which they use instead of wine) and handed about through the audience. A Mormon behind me told me that I might partake, but I preferred to refrain. There was something revolting in the mixing up words and phrases and acts we prize with f oUies.

"The sight of the congregation was one not easily forgotten. It was a larger audience than I had ever beheld. There was not one cultivated.

ftS LIFE AND LABORS OF BISHOP HARE

refined face to be seen. The women were the most unattractive, vulgar and dull-looking I ever saw. And throughout the whole proceeding there was not the least appearance of devotion. The audience throughout wore the air of a gathering waiting for a concert to begin.

*'I do not mean to say that there is no devotion among them. Everything leads me to think that many of them, though deluded, are thoroughly earnest.

"'On Sunday the delegation was called upon by two of the apostles, George A. Smith and another; and it was represented that the call was on behalf of Young, for whom it is not etiquette to call in person. None of the party were at the hotel. The next day two or three of the laymen returned the call, but for some reason or other Brigham, who is generaUy very affable, was taciturn and reserved. Perhaps it was that a reporter of the Herald got in with the party. Perhaps he thought that he was slighted by the clergy absenting themselves. The landlord, a Mormon, who guided the party, was very much provoked that the President did not show to greater advantage and swore not a little on coming out." . . .

It was in the year following the missionary journey to San Francisco that the House of

Bishops, brought especially by the vigorous and unselfish efforts of Mr. William Welsh of Philadelphia to recognize the needs of the Indians and to consider the wisdom of sendmg a Bishop inta their country, created the Missionary Jurisdiction of Niobrara and elected Mr. Hare its Sishop. Their course in this matter and the bearing of it upon his personal fortunes are set forth so clearly by Bishop Hare himself in the ^^Reminiscences" which he deUvered as an Address on the fifteenth anniversary of his consecration that it is best to give the facts in his own words:

"On All Saints' Day (November 1), 1872, I was waited upon by two members of the Commission then charged with the care of the Indian Mission work of our Church, and informed that the House of Bishops had elected me to be Missionary Bishop of Niobrara.

"Niobrara was the name of a river running along the border line between Nebraska and Dakota, and had been chosen as a convenient term in ecclesiastical nomenclature for the large tract of country of which then little was known, save that it stretched northward from the river Niobrara, and was roamed over by the Poncas and different tribes of Sioux or Dakota Indians.

"The jurisdiction proper of the Missionary

Bishop of Niobrara was originally a tract of country bounded 'on the east by the Missouri River; on the south by the State of Nebraska; on the west by the 104th meridian, the Territory of Wyoming, and Nebraska; on the north by the 46th degree of north latitude ; including also the several Indian Reservations on the left bank of the Missouri, north and east of said river.' In order, however, to give unity and compactness to the effort of the Church for the Indian tribes, the Missionary Bishop of Niobrara was also authorized to take charge of such missionary work among Indians east of the Rocky Moimtains as might be transferred to his oversight by the Bishops within whose jurisdiction such work might lie.

"The news of my election was utterly unexpected, and fell upon me like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. The honor was almost too much for my small stock of virtue. I was at the time Secretary and General Agent of the Foreign Mission Work of this Church, and deeply immersed, body, mind and heart, in the work of making known the Gospel among the heathen in distant lands. I had but a year before been elected by the House of Bishops to the Missionary Episcopate of Cape Palmas and parts adjacent in Africa, but this action of the Bishops had not been allowed to come before me. The House

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of Deputies, in language complimentary to me, which I may not quote, represented to the House of Bishops, that injury would be done to the Foreign Missionary Work of the Church by my withdrawal from the office of Foreign Secretary, and the House of Bishops reconsidered their appointment. (See Journal of General Con* vention, 1871, pp. 227-228.)

"'I fell into the habit of considering that this action virtually determined that my vocation should be for many years that of Secretary and General Agent for the Foreign Work. My sense of the practical worth of that enterprise had strengthened every month I was connected Tdth it; 1^ my con^ction deepened that ti»t department of the Church's enterprises can never be either relinquished or disparaged so long as 'neighbor' means any one near or far off to whom we may do good, nor so long as the Church believes that her creation and her mission are not of man, but of God, and that her resources are not merely an aggregate of human agencies nor an aggregate of money collections only, but *the powers of the world to come.* My heart had become knit in, too, with the brave standardbearers of the Church in heathen lands, and tears filled my eyes as I thought of even seeming to desert the army in the field, and leave it uncertain about its base of supplies. Moreover, m domestic tie of tender sacredness bound me to my home.

''My first thought was to decline; and I informed my visitors that it would take me but a few hours to decide, and if the House of Bishops would remain in session, they should have my answer without delay. But the House had done its duty and adjourned, and left me to decide what was mine. The call was most solemn. It was from an authority that was next to that of the Head of the Church Himself. It came to one who held the opinion that the opposition of the individual judgment and will to the summons of the Church is almost fatal to her prompt and efficient conduct of her missionary campaign, and should never be ventured except for reasons of paramount importance.

''As I afterward came to see, I had been led through a course of preparation for such a summons. Though bom and bred at the East, I had spent six months in Michigan and Minnesota, in 1868, and there seen something of the Indian problem. • . • I had returned to the East the Indian's advocate, and ... I had become convinced of this: that the Indian's claim upon the Church of Christ was most sacred. . • •

"The issue of all my cogitating was — I accepted the appointment."

Quite different from this cool account of the "cogitating," written fifteen years after its end was attained, are the two following letters to a trusted friend and the "Considerations" sent to her with the second letter. They add to the "Reminiscences" a vivid sense of the struggle which the dedsion cost, and of the motives that brought it to pass.

[To Miss E. N. Biddle.]

"Ohange, N. J., November 8, 1872. '^My Dear Friend:

"I must acknowledge your telegram if only in a few lines.

''I am undergoing mentally the agony which many an early disciple was caUed upon to endure in his body ^hile the two chariots to which he was fastened were driven violently in different directions and he was torn limb from limb. My conviction of duty to the work in which I have been enj^aged has beeti supreme. It now binds me to it with a band of iron. My conviction that when a man is called to be himself a wanderer like His Master that he may the better bring the wanderers home, he cannot easily refuse, is gaining strength every hoiur. Behold then with what conflicting emotions I am tom« 'O my God, I am but a child. I know not how to go out or how to come int* Unable to guide my boat, not able to see the way, I feel that if ever the little boat is to reach port it must be by the breathing of the prayers of my friends. These I want. If you see any that love me, tell them so.