Dakota Wowapi Wakan Kin.... = The New Testament, in the Dakota Language, Translated from the Original Greek. [bound with:] Wicoicage Wowapi, Mowis Owa.... = The Books of Genesis and Proverbs, in the Dakota Language, Translated from the Original Hebrew by [Dakota Language]. Riggs, Stephen R., trans. Williamson, Thomas S., trans - 1866

New York: American Bible Society, 1866. Good plus.. 408,[4]; 115pp. 12mo. Contemporary calf, boards embossed, spine gilt lettered. Rear hinge cracked, edges and spine ends chipped. Scattered contemporary annotations in Dakota on endpapers. Faint dampstaining at upper corner; light tanning. A rare edition of the complete New Testament in Dakota, published by the American Bible Society. The present work constitutes the second printing, issued the year following the first, and is accompanied by a translation into Dakota, with its own title page, of the Books of Genesis and Proverbs. The principal translator of the New Testament, Stephen R. Riggs, immigrated to Minnesota from Ohio in the 1830s, where he began to work at a mission at Lac qui Parle with its founder, Joseph Renville, a fur trader who was instrumental in creating a written version of the Dakota language. While several portions of the Bible in Dakota were published during Renville's lifetime and by Riggs thereafter, no complete version of the New Testament appeared until the first edition of Riggs' effort in 1865. The translator of Genesis and Proverbs, Thomas Williamson, also arrived at Lac qui Parle from Ohio in the 1830s, and together with Riggs published translations of religious material in Dakota through the end of the Civil War. The first two editions of this work are quite scarce, and are located in only a handful of copies of by OCLC; only one copy of either edition has appeared at auction in the past fifty years. Ayer, Dakota 36. Darlow & Moule 3140, 3141 (ref). Pilling, Proof-sheets 3271. Pilling, Sioux, p.63. Sabin 71332.