Path lit by lightning, p.6
Path Lit by Lightning, page 6
Jim and his classmates sat cross-legged on the gym floor, with parents and guests in chairs on the sides. The two main guest speakers at the commencement reflected the crosscurrents of the school and the times, revealing the competing strands of racial violence and reconciliation that coiled and frayed through American history. The first speaker was O. O. Howard, a retired Union general who led troops at Antietam and Gettysburg and served as the right flank on General William Sherman’s March to the Sea. Howard was known as “the Christian general,” a soldier of piety who commanded respect despite occasional battlefield errors that earned him a second sarcastic nickname—Oh-oh Howard. He was a supporter of black freedom, and after the Civil War was appointed commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, playing a vital role during Reconstruction in helping former slaves gain jobs, land, and the right to vote. His combination of evangelism and sympathy for African Americans led him to push for the establishment of a seminary to train black preachers, which resulted in what eventually became Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, D.C., named in his honor.
But what brought O. O. Howard to Carlisle that February day in 1904 was his role as an Indian fighter with the U.S. Army in the West, ending with the campaign against the Nez Perce tribe led by Chief Joseph in 1877. The man who fought to free enslaved blacks and worked to make space for them in the American family was the same man who led an army tracking down and killing Indians. Land was at the center of the Nez Perce War, as with all wars against the Indians, as Chief Joseph’s band tried to resist when Howard’s army pushed them out of their ancestral home in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon and chased them into Canada before they surrendered and were taken to a smaller reservation in Idaho Territory. Now here stood Howard at age seventy-four, white-haired and only somewhat repentant, addressing an auditorium of American Indians, including twenty-one sons and daughters of the Nez Perce tribe. He told Thorpe and his classmates that he was “just doing my duty” fighting Indians. “There come times when a fight is a good thing and when it is over let’s lay down all our feelings and look up to God and see if we cannot get a better basis on which to live and work together.”
When Howard sat down, Pratt introduced the next guest. “I present to you Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces in Washington,” the superintendent said. Men from a different time, different century. The two old antagonists brought together at Carlisle. “General Howard and Joseph fought each other in ’77, two years before Carlisle began,” Pratt continued. “Their line of battle was fourteen hundred miles long. We think Gettysburg a big battlefield and we are proud of it. Joseph would not go on his reservation and had his way for a time…. I have always regarded Chief Joseph as one of our great Indians. He kept ahead of General Howard for fourteen hundred miles.”
The essential contradiction of how white America viewed Indians was evident in that brief introduction, a peculiar combination of a relentless effort to destroy a people followed by mythmaking reverence of those same people. The Indian was made noble in retrospect, after he was no longer a threat. Chief Joseph had a different perspective. As two students later remembered the scene, when the old chief entered the crowded gymnasium, he walked slowly among the students and gently patted them one by one on the head, blessing them with a whisper. “You are the original red, white, and blue.”
Time and circumstance having worn down his resistance, he gracefully handled the face-to-face meeting with his old adversary. “I meet here my friend General Howard. I used to be so anxious to meet him. I wanted to kill him in war,” Joseph said. He was talking history to these students, who were toddlers or not yet born when the last of the government wars against their people were waged. “I am glad to meet him and glad to meet everybody here and to be friends with General Howard. We are both old men. Still we live and I am glad. We both fought in many wars and we are both alive. Ever since the war I have made up my mind to be friendly to whites and to everybody. I wish you, my friends, would believe me as I believe myself in my heart in what I say when my friend General Howard and I fought together I had no idea that we would ever all sit down to a meal together as today, but we have and I am glad.”
Then Chief Joseph turned to the subject of Indian education. His message could not have been more harmonious to Pratt’s ears. “I understand of course that the learning of books is a fine thing, and I have some children here from my tribe that are… struggling to learn the white man’s ways and his books. I wish my children would learn more and more every day so they can mingle with the white people and do business with them as well as anybody else. I shall try to get Indians to send their children to school. That is all I can say tonight.”
It was one of Chief Joseph’s last public speeches. He died that September at age sixty-four on the Colville reservation in northern Washington state. The 1904 commencement was also the last hurrah at Carlisle for Richard Henry Pratt. Three months later, he was forced into retirement by officials at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. Jim Thorpe’s rise at the school took place under Pratt’s successors, but even as Carlisle entered an era of athletic renewal and ethical decline, the founder’s influence would be felt at Carlisle to its final days.
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PRATT WAS A long-limbed crane of a man, so lanky at six foot four they had to install larger bathtubs in the superintendent’s house. His students called him Father. One commencement speaker praised him as the “Moses of the red man.” He was known as a leader “with rough edges”—blunt, harsh, stubborn, arbitrary, and undiplomatic in responding to his enemies, of whom there were many, including not only Indian bureau officials but also religious missionaries and academic ethnologists who dared to challenge his opinions about what was best for Indians. He was also an Old Testament–style idealist and thinker who considered himself a champion of black Americans and Native Americans and fought against racial bigotry. Like John Newton, the former slave trader who saw the light and became the abolitionist Anglican minister who penned “Amazing Grace,” Pratt came to regret the Indian killer mentality instilled by the U.S. Army in the West and devoted his life to trying to save Indians through his own definition of amazing grace. He thought he was doing good. In the words of Suzan Shown Harjo, a lifelong Indian rights advocate and cultural archivist, Pratt considered himself “a civilizationist alternative to the exterminationists”—the military leaders who had waged war against Indians in the post–Civil War West, men like George Armstrong Custer and Philip H. Sheridan.
If Sheridan became known for once saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” or more likely a less evocative variation of that phrase, Pratt became known for turning that thought around. “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Pratt countered. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” He also used a religious analogy to describe this philosophy: “I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”
Pratt’s transformation began in Indian Territory after the Civil War when he served as a lieutenant in the Tenth Cavalry Regiment, a unit comprising black men recently freed from enslavement, known as Buffalo Soldiers, and Indian scouts, mostly Cherokee and Choctaw. It was because of that experience, Pratt said, that he came to appreciate both groups for their intelligence and fearlessness and lamented their subordinate status in American life. His admiration for Indians intensified under unlikely circumstances in 1875 when he was assigned to be the military warden at Fort Marion in northeast Florida of a band of seventy Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Caddo, and Comanche warriors who had resisted the U.S. Army along the Red River in the Texas Panhandle. Pratt thought it wiser to try to acculturate them rather than punish them. He freed them from chains, let them monitor themselves, encouraged their skills as artists and craftsmen, and taught them English. The Indian prisoners of Fort Marion became a tourist attraction. White visitors flocked to admire their artwork and capture them on stereopticon cameras. Pratt became a local celebrity.
The Indians themselves were torn between two worlds, a variation of what Jim Thorpe faced a generation later. A Kiowa warrior, Wolf Robe, captured their ambivalence in a self-portrait he drew that showed a buffalo, tepee, and forest to one side of his face and a cow, building, and farm to the other side. But watching his Indian prisoners adapt to Western ways led Pratt to a civilizationist revelation, the concept of a non-reservation Indian school, and he persuaded the War Department to let him start one on the site of the old and mostly abandoned Carlisle Barracks.
ARRIVED SAFELY AT MIDNIGHT PARTY IN GOOD CONDITION, Pratt notified the Indian bureau in Washington by Western Union telegram on October 6, 1879. He had just reached Carlisle with his first recruits, eighty-two Sioux boys and girls from the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations in the Dakota Territory, many of them children and grandchildren of prominent chiefs, including American Horse, White Thunder, Two Strike, Red Cloud, Standing Bear, and Spotted Tail. Pratt had hoped his inaugural class would be from tribes in Indian Territory, with which he was more familiar, not Sioux, but the government considered the Sioux troublesome dissidents and thought Pratt might be useful in the effort to temper their hostility.
It was not an easy sell. When he met with Spotted Tail and a council of elders at Rosebud, Pratt discovered that they had already decided among themselves to reject the request. “The white people are all thieves and liars,” Spotted Tail told Pratt through an interpreter. “We refuse to send our children because we do not want them to learn such things. The government deceived us on the Black Hills treaty. The government knew that gold was there and it took the land from us without giving us its value, and so the white people get rich and the Indians are cheated and become poor. The government let us keep this plains country and it agreed that the lines should be away out and we should have a large district. Your men are out there now running the lines and they run the lines a long ways inside of where we agreed they should be. Some of our people who lived outside of these lines have been compelled to move inside. The government has always cheated us and we do not want our children to learn to do that way.”
The mention of gold had a disturbing meaning to Pratt that Spotted Tail could not know. Pratt’s father, who had once been a contractor on the construction of the Erie Canal, had gone to California and got lucky panning for gold on the Feather River during the 1849 gold rush but was robbed and murdered on his way home. Richard was left fatherless at age ten because of gold. Now, in his negotiations with the Sioux, he countered Spotted Tail’s irrefutable argument by accepting it and praising him. “Spotted Tail, you are a very distinguished man. Your name has gone all over the United States. It has even gone across the ocean to other countries,” Pratt said. “You are the head of these people because you have a strong mind, but Spotted Tail, you cannot read or write. You sign papers and you do not know what you sign.” The reason the Sioux felt manipulated and deceived about the gold and the reservation boundaries was that the tribe’s leaders could not read the treaties, Pratt said. If the chiefs had been literate, he argued, they would have been able to understand the traps in the treaties and would still have the Black Hills. Spotted Tail relented, as did Red Cloud.
From Spotted Tail’s Rosebud band came sixty-six students, with sixteen more from Red Cloud’s band at Pine Ridge. Their departure for the east was haunting. Large crowds of parents and relatives camped on the banks of the Missouri River for two days in anticipation of the leave-taking. Wails of sorrow and prayerful chants echoed across the water when the steamer pushed off for Yankton and disappeared around the bend. At Yankton, Pratt had arranged for two special train cars for the trip through Chicago to Carlisle. Three years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho’s annihilation of Custer’s cavalry, the journey became a tourist attraction—much like Black Hawk’s trip east in 1833, except these Indians were not in chains. Thousands of curious Chicagoans turned out to see the Sioux youths when the train reached the station there, and hundreds more were waiting at midnight when they reached the Gettysburg Junction station at Carlisle. Pratt thought he could avoid the crowds by slipping his charges into town at a secondary trunk depot in the middle of the night, but it made no difference once word spread that “the Indians are coming.” The “noble savages” again provided a spectacle for white society, and as sympathetic as he was to the Indians’ plight and as much as he disparaged their mistreatment, Pratt became an impresario of that spectacle.
In an interview with an eastern newspaper, he described these Indian youths as an exotic species that needed to be tamed: “The first eighty-two came from tepees, there was not an exception. In 1879 the buffalo was still plentiful. The Sioux lived mostly in Buffalo tepees. They were dirty. They were the regular blanket Indians. Some of the young men had buffalo robes. Most of them had deerskin leggings worked with beads. Their hair was braided with beaver skin or red flannel and they wore earrings. They were absolutely wild Indians.”
Among the boys he took east on the train was Chief Standing Bear’s eleven-year-old son, Luther Standing Bear. “When I went east to Carlisle school, I thought I was going there to die,” Luther wrote decades later. “I could think of white people wanting little Lakota people there for no other reason than to kill them, but I thought here is my chance to prove that I can die bravely. So I went east to show my father and my people that I was brave and willing to die for them.”
The conditions the young Sioux encountered upon arrival at Carlisle only reinforced their fears. They knew no English. As interpreters, Pratt had brought up several Indians who had been his prisoners at Fort Marion. The interpreters pointed to a two-story building and told them to go there to sleep. The boys were exhausted, looking forward to sleeping on “nice little beds like those the white people had.” But the first room they entered was empty, no beds, no bedding, nothing but a coal-oil lamp. The next room was the same. “We had to make the best of the situation so took off our leggins and rolled them up for pillows,” Luther Standing Bear wrote. The only coverings were the blankets they had brought with them. They were accustomed to sleeping on the ground, but the floor was rock hard and colder than anything they had experienced. Pratt discovered that the Indian bureau in Washington had neglected to supply his school while he was gone. Not only were there no beds, but there were also no civilian clothes or uniforms, and barely any food. The first meal the students ate consisted of bread and water. When the first crate arrived, it turned out to be an organ for the chapel. A month passed before the first clothing reached the school, and Pratt described it as “the shoddiest of the shoddy.”
One day after classwork had started, some men entered the building carrying large chairs; the boys asked their interpreter what they had come for and he said the men had come to cut the Indians’ long hair. The boys were called out of the classroom one at a time and came back looking sheepish, hair shorn. Luther Standing Bear said he began to cry when his turn came. “None of us slept well that night, we felt so queer,” he recalled. “I wanted to feel my head all the time.” The ostensible reason for the hair-cutting was to make it easier to control head lice. Luther Standing Bear thought there was a more sinister reason having to do with the philosophy of culturally killing them to save them. “The fact is we were to be transformed, and short hair being the mark of gentility with the white man, he put his mark upon us.”
A smaller group of students arrived later that month from Indian Territory and the Southwest—Apache, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Pawnee—to fill out the class. The total that first year was 147. One tenet of Pratt’s philosophy was that the more he could blend the many tribes to create a pan-Indian sensibility among his students, the more effective his assimilation process would be. From the arrival of those new tribes onward Pratt separated members of the same tribe as much as possible, eventually reaching a point where the barracks rooms, which could hold three or four students each, would have no more than one from any tribe.
When the one-year anniversary came, Pratt held “a little impromptu gathering” of students, teachers, and outside supporters, including sympathetic women from the Young Ladies’ Seminary in St. Augustine, Florida, who had helped him with the Indian prisoners at Fort Marion. He asked for a show of hands from his charges: How many wanted the school to continue? “Every hand went up in favor of continuing, and some boys even stood up and held up both hands,” Pratt recounted. “Speeches were in order. Everybody was happy and many reminiscences were brought out and [there was] much incentive to continued effort.”
The Indian perspective on Carlisle was far more complicated than that, as it would be from that first year to the last. One might ask what choice the young students had that day when they were instructed to vote with their hands in front of their superintendent and teachers. They were certainly less likely to vote honestly with their hands than with their feet, by trying to run away, which by one calculation more than fourteen hundred boy students did during the school’s lifetime, about twenty a year at first but increasing exponentially later. It was enough of a problem for Pratt that he set up a sophisticated alert network within a fifty-mile radius of campus for citizens to contact the school as soon as they spotted a possible Indian truant.
Two of the original group were not alive to participate in that one-year anniversary vote. Amos LaFramboise, age thirteen, had died the day before Thanksgiving, seven weeks after he arrived on that train from Yankton. Cause, unlisted. Pratt sought to bury him in the nearby Ashland cemetery, but it was for white people only. Two months later, a Cheyenne boy who took the name Abe Lincoln at Carlisle died of spinal meningitis. Carlisle in its first three years became a death chamber, especially for young students from the Rosebud reservation. Eighteen of the first 101 youths Rosebud sent east died at the school or were sent home to die, a horrific rate of nearly one in five. “A strange fatality seems to hang over our Rosebud pupils,” Pratt wrote in a letter to the Indian bureau, but he took no blame for this tragedy, attributing the death rate to chronic poor health conditions among the Sioux. One of those who died was Chief Spotted Tail’s own daughter, Gertrude Spotted Tail, who succumbed to pneumonia while in Philadelphia. She had been at Carlisle less than a year, dead at only fourteen. Pratt asked the Indian bureau to cover his expenses for sending a doctor to attend to Gertrude before her death. The bill was for $65.94.
