Guide to the Mary Ann Clark Longley and Stephen Return Riggs Papers

Stephen Return Riggs was born in Steubenville, Ohio on March 23, 1812, to Stephen and Anna Riggs. After studying Latin at Jefferson College in Ripley, Ohio, Stephen Return attended Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny (Pittsburgh Borough, Pennsylvania). He obtained his D.D. from Beloit College in Wisconsin. He was ordained by Chillicothe Presbytery in Ohio in 1836, then preached for one year in Hawley, Massachusetts.

Mary Ann Clark Longley was born on November 10, 1813, in Hawley, Massachusetts to Thomas and Martha Arms Longley. Mary attended Ipswich Female Seminary in Massachusetts and then left for Indiana to become a schoolteacher near Bethlehem.

Mary and Stephen married on February 16, 1837. They were commissioned that same year as missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM)’s Dakota Mission to convert and culturally assimilate American Indian/Indigenous peoples of the northern Great Plains, specifically the Dakota people (called “Sioux” by settler colonists). In February 1837, the Riggses left Hawley for the Territory of Wisconsin, which encompassed the Dakota homeland. They arrived at Fort Snelling in June 1837, where they met other ABCFM missionaries, including Margaret and Thomas S. Williamson, Samuel W. and Gideon H. Pond, and the Stevens family (Jedidah Dwight, Julia Sarah, and Lucy C.). The Riggses temporarily stayed in the school building at the Lake Harriet mission station, and they began to study the Dakota language.

In September 1837, the Riggses relocated to the Lac qui Parle Mission (called Mde Iyedan in the Dakota language), where they stayed until 1843. The mission was organized in the area of the Wahpeton band of the Dakota tribe and included a school, with the first missionaries there being the Williamsons and the Hugginses (Alexander and Lydia). Joseph Renville, a fur trader and interpreter of mixed French and Dakota descent, did translation work with the Williamsons, Ponds, and Riggses to prepare sermons, church services, and texts (including translations of the Bible and hymns into the Dakota language and a Dakota language dictionary). The Riggses had three children during this time: Alfred Longley (born 1837), Isabella Burgess (born 1840), and Martha Taylor (born 1842). In March 1839, the Riggses temporarily adopted a Dakota girl named Anpetnakitoninwin (variant name spellings exist in this collection’s correspondence). Stephen confirmed that she “was taken into” the Riggs family in a manuscript volume in the Stephen R. Riggs and Family Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society and lists her name in that volume as Anna Wamdiokiya¹. She lived with the Riggses for about three months before returning home to her mother and father (who is referred to in this collection’s letters as Wamdiokiya, with variant name spellings; he was a Dakota chief/leader who learned to write and read the Romanized transcriptions of the Dakota language; Stephen refers to him as Eagle Help in the autobiography Mary and I ...²). In her book Unrepentant Dakota Woman ... about Joseph Renville’s granddaughter Angelique Renville, whom the Riggses adopted in 1851, Professor Linda M. Clemmons describes these adoptions by missionaries or home/boarding programs as “a much smaller precursor to the federal boarding schools. Both programs attempted to strip Indian children of their culture, religion, and language.”³ She further explains that “Dakota girls also would aid the missionary women with their never-ending domestic tasks ... Dakota girls provided another set of hands to help with the women’s daily tasks.”⁴

After visiting family in Hawley in 1842, the Riggses moved to Traverse des Sioux in 1843 and established another mission station there amongst the Sisseton band of the Dakota tribe. Mary’s brother, Thomas Lawrence Longley, was with the Riggses at the time. In July 1843, Thomas drowned in the St. Peter’s River. In 1844, Robert and Agnes Hopkins joined the Riggses at the mission station. The Riggses’ fourth child, Anna Jane, was born in 1845.

In 1846, the Riggses were called back to work at the Lac qui Parle Mission. In 1847, the Riggses’ fifth child, Thomas Lawrence, was born. In 1848, missionaries Moses and Nancy Adams joined the Riggses at the mission. In 1849, the Riggses’ sixth child, Henry Martyn, was born. After the Lac qui Parle Mission was destroyed by fire in March 1854, the Riggses went to Yellow Medicine where a mission named Hazelwood was being established. While at Hazelwood the Riggses’ seventh child, Robert Baird, was born in 1855, and their eighth child, Mary Cornelia Octavia, was born in 1859.

The United States-Dakota War of 1862 ended when U.S. federal forces defeated the Dakota on September 23, 1862. Hostilities involved only a portion of the Dakota Santee people–mostly the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands. Nevertheless, white settler colonists demanded vengeance against all the Dakota peoples. Those who did not escape to the northeastern plains were imprisoned in Mankato, Minnesota and later transferred by steamboat to Camp McClellan (renamed Camp Kearney in 1863).

The Williamsons and the Riggses fled their mission stations to escape the U.S.-Dakota War and later reorganized their missionary activity (along with Gideon Pond) to convert Dakota prisoners and their families at Mankato, Fort Snelling, and Camp McClellan to Christianity.

Mary died in 1869 in Beloit, Wisconsin. Stephen established the Good Will (Goodwill) Mission under the auspices of the Dry Wood Church in South Dakota (within the Sisseton Agency). The mission expanded to include the Good Will Training School, an industrial and training school for Dakota boys and girls in 1882. Stephen eventually remarried Anna (“Annie”) Baker Ackley, and they had one child together, Edna Browning (or Baker), in 1872. Stephen died in August 1883.

Stephen translated the Old Testament and New Testament into the Dakota language, in association with Thomas S. Williamson. Stephen also translated Pilgrim's Progress into the Dakota language. He wrote two books, Tah-koo wah-kań, or The Gospel Among the Dakotas and Mary and I, which detail his and Mary’s lives as missionaries.

Mary and Stephen's son Alfred Longley went on to found the Santee Normal Training School on the Santee Sioux Reservation, Nebraska. Established to train Indigenous teachers, the school enrolled members of the Santee Sioux Tribe who had been forcibly removed from their ancestral homes in Minnesota following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Although the school was notable for educating students in their native Dakota language before introducing reading and writing in English, it nevertheless operated within a broader system of forced assimilationist Indigenous education.

Bibliography/Works Cited

1. Stephen R. Riggs and Family Papers. Minnesota History Society. A Tableau of the families, and single persons, connected with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission in the Dakota Mission, during the quarter of a century 1835-1860, with the boarding scholars. PDF page 58.

2. Riggs, Stephen Return. Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux. (Chicago : W.G. Holmes, 1880). Page 53. Call number: E 99 .D1 R5. Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS).

3. Clemmons, Linda M. Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville and the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876. (Pierre : South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023). Page 38.

4. Ibid. Page 47.