ssionary societies, which were to nominate their
respective agents. This was one of those which were assigned to the
American Missionary Association. In 1871 the Association nominated to
this Agency Edwin Eells, Esq., the eldest son of Rev. Gushing Eells,
D.D., who was one of the mission band that crossed the Rocky Mountains
in 1838, under commission of the American 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
ch