All truth tends directly to its destruction. A little boy was one day-
listening to a missionary who was endeavoring to explain to him the
workings of the magnetic telegraph. The little half naked fellow
seemed to catch an idea of natural truth, and starting up, excitedly
exclaimed. "If that is true, then all our religion is false." A
glimpse of truth broke the spell that bound his mind, and shook their
whole system of superstition to its foundations. It never recovered
its hold on him. For more than thirty years, truth, in variety, has
been held to the Dakota mind With a keen and jealous eye, these
wakan men have watched its workings. It has mortified and pained
them to see their cords of error snapped by it, one after another,
and their hold on their blind victims loosened. Their " craft was in
danger." They have cried with voice and soul, these thirty years,
" Great is the Taku Wakan — the Taku- Wakan is wakan, and I am
their prophet."

They have done all they could and dare do, in the circumstances,
to oppose the progress of truth among their people, by slanders and
snares, gibes and abuse, and violence, and even murder. But in
spite of their vigilance and efibrts to oppose, truth advanced with
slow but steady step, a»d worked like "leaven in the meal." Old
men and young men, old women and young women, boys and girls,
left them, and by open profession of regard for truth, stood boldly up
in the face of their lies. The symbols of the gods, which the priests,
war prophets and doctors had painted, wreathed and paraded '""on



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MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 61

every hill/' were defiantly spurned from their places by the feet of
those who had been used to obey their caprices and erouch to their
authority. The feasts and dances were less fully attended, the med-
icine-sack cast away, while hundreds of their former dupes, emanci-
pated, read daily in their Bibles, sung the scng of Zion, and prayed,
in their houses, to their "Father in heaven ; " and on the Sabbath
assembled in the Christian church, erected by their own hands, and
seriously, reverently, joined in the holy worship of the God of heav-
en. At sight of this, the rage of these demons in human form boiled
over. 