Riggs, Stephen Return (1812-1883)

Missionary to the Dakota Indians

Educated at Jefferson College, Pennsylvania (1834; LL.D., 1873), and Western Theological Seminary, he was ordained in 1837 to the Presbyterian ministry, married Mary A.C. Longley, and joined the Dakota Mission (to the Sioux Indians) of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Minnesota, serving at Lac qui Parle and Traverse des Sioux until 1854. Riggs then moved to New Hope, where several families of Christian Indians organized the “Hazelwood Republic” with a democratic constitution. Narrowly escaping death in the Sioux outbreak of 1862, Riggs ministered among the hundreds of captive Indians. After Mary Riggs died in 1869, he married Annie B. Ackley. Riggs prepared a writing system for the Dakota language and produced more than fifty volumes in that tongue, literary and religious, translated and original, including textbooks, catechisms, hymns, Pilgrim’s Progress, and The Constitution of Minnesota. He translated nearly the entire Bible (published in 1880). He also wrote in English a grammar and a 16,000-word dictionary of the Dakota language, published for the Smithsonian Institute in 1852, and many articles. Four of his nine children became missionaries, and at least a dozen other descendants through four generations.

David M. Stowe, “Riggs, Stephen Return,” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), 571.

This article is reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, Macmillan Reference USA, copyright © 1998. Gerald H. Anderson, by permission of Macmillan Reference USA, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Bibliography

Rigg’s papers are at the Minnesota Historical Society and in the ABCFM collection in the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Digital Primary

Dakota wowapi wakan kin. The New Testament in the Dakota Language. Translated by Stephen Return Riggs. New York: American Bible Society, 1871.

Riggs, Stephen Return. Dakota odowan: Hymns in the Dakota Language. New York: American Tract Society, 1868.

_____. The Dakota Mission. S.I: s.i., 1880.

_____. Mary and I. Forty Years with the Sioux. Chicago: W.G. Holmes, 1880.

Riggs, Stephen Return and James Owen Dorsey. A Dakota-English Dictionary. Washington: Govt. Print. Off, 1890.

Primary

Riggs, Stephen Return and James Owen Dorsey. Dakota Grammar, Texts, and Ethnography. Washington: G.P.O., 1893.

Riggs, Stephen Return, and Selah B. Treat. Tah-Koo Wah-Kan Or, the Gospel Among the Dakotas. Boston: Congregational Pub. Society, 1869.

Secondary

Maxfield, Charles A. “The Presbyterian and Congregational Churches among the Dakotas.” M.Th., diss., Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, 1891.

Links

The Minnesota Historical Society has extensive archival material.

The Presbyterian Historical Society has some archival material, especially correspondence with family members and two church histories that Riggs wrote.