Riggs, Stephen Return (1812–1883)

Stephen Return Riggs was a Christian missionary and linguist who spent forty years in the Minnesota River Valley, Nebraska, and Dakota Territory. In both these roles, he aimed to “Christianize and civilize” the Dakota people he believed were caught in the “bonds of heathenism.” To further his project, he compiled the first printed dictionary of the Dakota language. Riggs’s work as a government translator and interpreter helped the United States remove the Dakota from their Minnesota homeland during the 1850s and 1860s.

Riggs began his life’s work among the Dakota in 1837 at Thomas Williamson’s Lac Qui Parle Mission in the St. Peters (later Minnesota) River Valley. He established the Traverse des Sioux mission near present-day St. Peter in 1843. In 1850, he helped write the “Outlines of a Plan to Civilize the Dakota,” designed to break up the Dakota way of life and “community property system.” In 1856, he founded the Hazelwood Republic—a democratic community of Christian Dakota people who practiced Euro-American customs—near modern-day Granite Falls.

Riggs firmly believed that Christianity and what he called “civilized ways” could be taught using the Dakota language. He learned oral Dakota so he could preach the Christian gospel to mission residents. Over several years, using the written version developed in the 1830s by Samuel and Gideon Pond, he translated the Bible into Dakota. He argued that illiteracy in English should not be a bar to citizenship and urged the Minnesota legislature to grant citizenship to “civilized” Dakota—a cause that was unsuccessful. In 1852, the Smithsonian Institution published a Dakota Grammar and Lexicon (dictionary), compiled by Riggs.

Though he valued studying the Dakota language, Riggs did not work to preserve it and was deeply critical of Dakota culture in general. In 1850, he wrote a speech for the annual meeting of the Minnesota Historical Society that describes the language as “noble” but bound to disappear. In a letter accompanying the speech, he wrote that Dakota people had no future if they did not assimilate. The progress of “civilization,” he proclaimed, would either include and transform the Dakota or destroy them. By 1859, Riggs prohibited the Dakota children in the Hazelwood Community school from speaking their native language. He felt this would hasten their conversion to Christianity and break them from their “barbaric” way of life.

The U.S. government enlisted Riggs to help carry out its policy of removing the Dakota people from their ancestral homelands so that white immigrants could take the land for farms. In 1851, officials summoned Riggs to Traverse des Sioux to serve as interpreter during treaty negotiations. In this role, he translated the English version of the treaty into Dakota.

The accuracy of his work is disputed. Riggs left several provisions in the English copy untranslated in the Dakota version. The Dakota words he chose to describe the proposed “sale” of the Dakota homeland seem at odds with the Dakota view of the land as their relative—something that cannot be sold.

At the onset of the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, Riggs and his family fled from their Hazelwood home, never to return. Dakotas from the mission protected them en route to St. Anthony, where they resettled.

When the war ended in September 1862, Riggs gathered statements from captured Dakota fighters. A military commission used them as incriminating evidence in the trials that followed.

During the winter of 1862–1863, Riggs, Thomas Williamson, and other missionaries visited dozens of Dakota men in the Mankato prison and hundreds of non-combatant Dakota people in a concentration camp (a camp that confines people outside legal norms of arrest and often under harsh conditions) at Fort Snelling. During these visits, hundreds of Dakota people converted to Christianity. Riggs participated in some of the later religious services at the Fort Snelling camp and came to observe the result of the other missionaries’ work there. Though some doubted their sincerity, including Riggs himself, Riggs described these conversions as the fruit of the war and the many years of mission work in which he played a part.

In 1865, the Riggs family moved to Beloit, Wisconsin. Riggs continued his mission work for twelve more years, traveling to Dakota reservations in Nebraska and present-day South Dakota. He died in Beloit in 1883.