Board, to be associated with Dr. Marcus Whitman’s series of Indian Missions.  Here is an illustration of the wisdom of that policy, which has secured a highly successful management in all the secular, educational and religious affairs of the Agency, and one that has been continued on through the changes of governmental administration, and also one that has resulted in repeated promotions, until now Agent Eells has charge of five of the seven distinct Reservations in the State of Washington.  His present headquarters are at the Puyallup Agency, near Tacoma, where he has just completed an eight thousand dollar building to displace an old one, for the Government Boarding School.  In all these five reservations, lands have been secured in severalty to the Indians, and largely through his persistent devotion to their welfare.  For two or three years his father had care of the S’kokomish Mission under the American Missionary Association, and in 1874, his brother, Rev. Myron Eells, was appointed to the same work, in which he still abides.  Besides the preaching, the care of the Sunday-school and the prayer meetings and the pastoral work, in which he gets around among his people as often as once in a month, he has also the charge of the Indian Church among the Clallams, near New Dunginess, the brethren of that station, in the pastor’s absence, maintaining stated worship.  The people at S’kokomish have gotten beyond Government payments; they live on their own allotted lands, in cabins or frame houses, wearing citizens’ dress, and doing business as white men do it.  One of Pastor Eells’s first Sundays at the mission was noted for the celebration of Christian marriage on the part of seven or eight couples who had been living together under their heathen way of taking up.  So they have been shuffling off their polygamy.  While we were there, a man of middle life came to the pastor’s house with his first wife, to be married to her after the Christian form, having made a satisfactory pecuniary arrangement with the second, who was a sister of the first.  In this case there were no children to complicate settlement.  After I had addressed the church upon their duty of doing more for the support of their pastor, even as I had betimes had to do before in white home missionary churches, the several responses were as decorous and assuring as could be desired.

As another advantage of this Grant plan, the Government School and the Mission are found to be in entire harmony, the principal, Mr. Foster, and his assistants and the industrial teacher all being Christians and caring for the moral advancement of their pupils.  Nor does the missionary administration come in any way to overlie the governmental.  From the herd of cows kept for the service of the boarding school, neither is one set aside for the pastor’s family, nor is he allowed to buy their milk.  He gets his supply from outside.  Nor does the preacher use from Uncle Sam’s wood pile.  He buys from the Indians.