The ABCFM

Founded in 1810, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions established the Dakota Mission in Minnesota in 1835, after earlier missions in India and among the Cherokee in Tennessee and after the Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the closing of its southern Indian missions as those nations were forcibly removed from their homelands. The selection of the eastern bands of the Dakota Nation was strategic, as the organization envisioned a chain of missions to the Dakota people of the Seven Council Fires stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, with Lac qui Parle seen as a gateway to the plains. On July 9, 1835, Dr. Thomas S. Williamson, his wife Margaret, their baby Elizabeth, Sarah Poage, and Alexander and Lydia Huggins with their children Amos and Jane arrived at Lac qui Parle at the invitation of Joseph Renville, an influential Dakota and French-Canadian trader who operated the fur post and, after failing to secure a Catholic mission, sought Protestant Christianity and Euro-American ways for his Dakota relatives. At that time this was still Mni Sota Makoçe, unceded Dakota land, where the few non-Native residents, including fur traders and missionaries, remained only by Dakota goodwill and with permission from the U.S. government. When the Lac qui Parle station closed in 1854, it ended the first chapter of the organization’s longest-lived mission in North America.

Minnesota · United States