Martin Marty was a monk belonging to the Benedictine order who was living so happily in his native Switzerland when his superior ordered him to move to the United States to put an end to the existing disorders in the monastery which the order owned in Saint Meinrad, Indiana. Martin was 26 years old at the time.
Sixteen years later and after his successful mission in Indiana, already in 1876, Martin accepted the difficult mission of entering the territory of the hostile Dakota natives, the fearsome Sioux . It just so happened that our man arrived in Sioux territory only a month after the Indians' victory at the famous battle of the Little Big Horn, to which we dedicated a blog post.
Martin earned the respect of the Sioux with his strong personal attitude; He came to travel to Canada, a place where the famous Oglala chieftain Sitting Bull had moved, and convinced him to return to the United States and accept that he and his faithful settle in the reservation that the United States government had arranged for it in Standing Rock.
Martin Marty's accomplishments prompted the Pope to appoint him to the position of bishop of Sioux Falls, making him the first person to hold the office of bishop in the Dakota Territory. Martin continued his evangelizing work among the Indians of the reservation and achieved a little-known but valuable achievement; in 1883 he convinced Sitting Bull and 2,000 members of the Sioux tribe on the reservation to agree to be baptized into the Christian faith. In honor of the truth, it must be said that it was more the magnetism of the personality and the personal ascendancy of Martin Marty than the personal conviction in Christianity that led Sitting Bull and his followers to accept his baptism. Q>
Marty spent the rest of his days writing a dictionary of the Sioux language and translating various Christian texts into the native language.
Source:«History of the United States as you have never been told before» Jorge Soley