Excerpt: "In 1831 a gracious revival had occurred in their native village of Washington. It was so marked in its character, and permanent in its results, that it formed an epoch in the history of that region and is still spoken of as "the great revival''. For months, during the busiest season of the year, crowded sunrise prayer-meetings were held daily and were well attended by an agricultural population, busily engaged every day in the pressing toil of the harvest and the hay fields. Scores were converted and enrolled themselves as soldiers of the cross.
Among these were the two Pond brothers. This was, in reality with them, the beginning of a new life. From this point in their lives, the inspiring motive, with both these brothers, was a spirit of intense loyalty to their new Master and a burning love for the souls of their fellowmen. Picked by the Holy Spirit out of more than one hundred converts for special service for the Lord Jesus Christ, the Pond brothers resolutely determined to choose a field of very hard service, one to which no others desired to go. In the search for such a field, Samuel the elder brother, journeyed from New Haven to Galena, Illinois, and spent the autumn and winter of 1833-34 in his explorations. He visited Giicago, then a struggling village of a few hundred inhabitants and other embryo towns and cities. He also saw the Winnebago Indians and the Potta-watomies, but he was not led to choose a field of labor amongst any of these.
A strange Providence finally pointed the way to Mr. Pond. In his efforts to reform a rum-seller at Galena, he gained much information concerning the Sioux Indians, whose territory the rum-seller had traversed on his way from the Red River country from which he had come quite recently. He represented the Sioux Indians as vile, degraded, ignorant, superstitious and wholly given up to evil."
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