Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux

In 1839, a young Presbyterian couple arrived at the edge of the Dakota world and stayed for forty years. Stephen Return Riggs and his wife Mary didn't come as soldiers or traders but as something rarer in that borderland: patient witnesses to a people facing extraordinary upheaval. Riggs chronicles their journey from first contact at Fort Snelling through decades of language study, translation work, and the slow building of relationships with the Dakota people. Mary's letters, woven throughout the narrative, provide an intimate counterpoint: her observations on faith, loneliness, childbirth on the frontier, and the small victories of connection. This is not a triumphalist missionary account. It's messier than that. Riggs writes honestly about the limits of cross-cultural understanding, the hardships, and the ways his own faith was tested and changed. The book captures a pivotal moment in Dakota history, just before the wars that would reshape everything, making it an invaluable primary source for understanding this transformative period.