Samuel Pond and Gideon Pond, brothers from Connecticut, became among the most influential non-Native people interacting with the Dakota on the nineteenth-century Minnesota frontier. Spiritually awakened in the early eighteen thirties, they traveled to Fort Snelling in 1834, taught Euro-American farming at Chief Cloud Man's village by Lake Calhoun, and created the Pond-Dakota alphabet. They joined mission work at Lake Harriet, helped found the Church of St. Peters at Fort Snelling, assisted with the Lac Qui Parle Mission, and worked to translate the Bible into Dakota. After the Mdewakanton Dakota ceded lands east of the Mississippi in 1837, the brothers and their families later reunited at Lake Harriet, then moved near Fort Snelling as itinerant missionaries and government-paid farming instructors after Cloud Man's people were forced into the Minnesota River Valley. In 1843 they established the Oak Grove Mission near Cloud Man's relocated village, and Samuel later accepted Chief Shakpe's invitation to build a mission at Shakopee. Gideon was ordained, served in Minnesota's first territorial legislature, published the bilingual newspaper The Dakota Friend, and acted as interpreter and signer for the Mendota Treaty. Concluding that annuity policies undermined Dakota self-sufficiency, the brothers left the Dakota Mission and formed churches for white settlers while also publishing A Grammar and Dictionary of the Dakota Language. During Minnesota's rapid territorial and state growth, Gideon organized the First Presbyterian Church of Oak Grove and Samuel founded the First Presbyterian Church of Shakopee. In 1862, broken treaty promises, delayed annuities, conflict within Dakota communities, and killings near Acton helped trigger the Dakota-U.S. War, which killed more than 500 white settlers and an unknown number of Dakota, led to the imprisonment and execution of Dakota warriors, and confined about 1600 Dakota prisoners near Fort Snelling, where many died before exile to Crow Creek. In 1863 Gideon and Dr. Thomas S. Williamson baptized nearly 300 Dakota prisoners at Mankato before their transfer to Iowa. Gideon later served Bloomington Township in local offices, retired from the Oak Grove church, and died in 1878, when many Dakota mourned him as one of their best friends. Samuel spent his later years in Shakopee, wrote The Dakota or Sioux in Minnesota as They Were in 1834 in the eighteen eighties, and died in 1891 as the United States and Minnesota had been transformed by expansion, immigration, industrialization, war, and the confinement of Native people to reservations.