TO CHANGE THEM FOREVER: SCHOOLING ON THE KIOWA-COMANCHE RESERVATION, 1869-1920 By RICHARD CLYDE ELLIS Bachelor of Arts Lenoir-Rhyne College Hickory, North Carolina 1980 Master of Arts University of North Carolina at Greensboro Greensboro, North Carolina 1986 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May, 1993 oKLAfIOMA STATE UNIVERSITY TO CHANGE THEM FOREVER: SCHOOLING ON THE KIOWA-COMANCHE RESERVATION, 1869-1920 Thesis Approved: Thesis Advisor Dean of the Graduate College ii PREFACE During the late nineteenth. century no solution to the so-called "Indian Problem" was mentioned more often than education. Policymakers believed that the attempt to transform Indians and bring them into American society could be most effectively achieved in the classroom .. Particular emphasis was given to reservation boarding schools where students could be separated from their families for as long as ten months a year and exposed to a wide variety of academic and practical lessons. In the ordered environment of the boarding school, discipline, habits of industry and hygiene, vocational training, and cultural reorientation would combine to produce a changed race. Armed with the skills and knowledge necessary to forge new lives, Indians would be able to take their place in the American mainstream. It was an ambitious but flawed plan. Indian education usually sounded better in theory than it was in fact. Despite the rhetorical flourishes of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in reality the program never really enjoyed the kind of success that reformers and policymakers envisioned. Although they depended on it to bring Indians into the American mainstream, government officials rarely gave . the Indian school system the support it needed. The failure to do so had enormous implications. It meant that the government's ambitious hopes for civilizing the tribes according to Angloamerican values would never be fully lll realized; worse, it made it possible for Indians to maintain their cultural identity in varying degree on reservations across the country. Given the importance attached to schools in the campaign to transform Indians, it is surprising that historians have given them relatively little attention. Major off-reservation schools such as Carlisle and Phoenix have attracted notice, but reservation schools have not. This is unfortunate, for reservation boarding schools were the critical link in the government's civilization program, yet we know little about them or the students who attended them. This study is an attempt to examine how education worked on the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation in western Oklahoma during critical period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth c~nturies. Created in 1869 by the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, the Kiowa­ Comanche Reservation was home to some of the most troublesome Indians on the Southern Plains. The Kiowas and Comanches were among the last of the region's tribes to accept reservation life, and even after agreeing to it, they proved to be a difficult, recalcitrant people. Determined to settle and civilize them according to Angloamerican notions of work and culture, the United States government promised a school and teacher for every thirty school-age Kiowa and Comanche children, of whom there were about 600. Convinced of the urgency of introducing those tribes to Christianity, farming, and private property, the government promised extensive support for such endeavors. Indeed, here was a laboratory in which to test the effectiveness of the forced assimilation campaign spearheaded by the schools. One of the reservation's three boarding schools was located at Rainy Mountain, about thirty miles west of the agency office at Anadarko. The school iv operated between the fall of 1893 and the spring of 1920 and in most respects was a typical reservation boarding school serving a typical collection of Indian children. By combining a vocational education program with limited academic instruction, the Rainy Mountain School sought simultaneously to educate and transform the children who enrolled there. Hailing such an approach as nothing less than an emancipation from a backward life, government officials regarded schools like Rainy Mountain as gateways to civilization. The sixth-grade education available there guaranteed an independent, self-sufficient future for a race of people elevated out of savagery by the lessons of discipline and hard work. At least that was how the Indian Office saw it. It was never that simple. Government negligence and Indian resistance combined to hamper the program from the very beginning. Understanding why the Indian Office proved reluctant to support the Indian schools offers insight into the nature of policy making during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it also reveals important limitations in the definitions that contemporaries attached to terms like· "civilized Indians" and assimilation. Knowing how Kiowa children fared at Rainy Mountain has important uses beyond an understanding of the facts of Indian education; it also addresses issues of cultural identity and survival that historians have been reluctant to discuss. Chapters one and two are a summary of the policy decisions and developments that created the Indian school system during the nineteenth century. Chapter three introduces the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation and examines the early history of schooling there by placing it in the wider context of the reservation's somewhat difficult circumstances. Chapter four turns to Rainy V Mountain School and is a discussion of it early years. Chapter five focuses on student life at the school and rests heavily on oral history. Interviews with former students from the, Rainy Mountain, Riverside, and Fort Sill boarding schools form the basis for exploring day-to-day life in the schools. Chapter six examines the changing attitudes inside the Indian Office during the Progressive era that marked a redirection of educational policy. Such changes eventually doomed Rainy Mountain. Chapters seven and eight assess the school's last ten years and its closing. Because this study employs terms that often resist objective definition, it seems well to clarify a number of them. Euroamerican refers to the western European ideas on race and culture that influenced Indian affairs in America from the sixteenth century forward. Anlgoamerican refers more specifically to the cultural milieu produced by the British colonial experience. The dangerously objective terms "civilization" and "civilizing" are used in the context of Euro and Angloamerican policy making based on ideas that government officials universally accepted. These included an emphasis on the revealed truths of Christian (usually Protestant) religion, the assumed superiority of Western culture, and the widely shared belief that elevating Indians from their savage state into something approximating the heritage of the West was justifiable and benevolent. "Assimilation" and "acculturation" are used as measurements of cultural change and adaptation. The former describes the total transformation of Indians envisioned by policymakers; the latter describes the accommodation that actually occurred. Historians have debts. I express my sincerest thanks to Dr. George Moses, vi who agreed to assume direction of this project from Dr. W. David Baird. Dr. Baird encouraged me to attend Oklahoma State and was instrumental in directing my training as a historian of American Indians and the American West. Although he was not able to see this project through to completion, Dr. Baird deserves my gratitude and much of the credit for my understanding of American Indian history. Dr. Moses has directed this dissertation with great thoughtfulness and encouragement. His sharp editorial skills and understanding of American Indian history have contributed more than he knows to this study. To Drs. Paul Bischoff, Donald Brown, Richard Rohrs, and Michael Smith of Oklahoma State University, I wish to extend my deepest gratitude for helping to direct my graduate education and for bringing their considerable intellectual acumen to this dissertation. I also take pleasure in acknowledging the cooperation of the staff at the Oklahoma Historical Society's Division of Indian Archives, particularly to William Welge, who first suggested Rainy Mountain as a topic, and to Judith Michener who was unstinting in her help at the archives. Without the help and support of many Kiowa people, this project would not have been possible. I am especially indebted to Parker McKenzie, whose knowledge of Rainy Mountain School gave me a rare insight into his life as a student there nearly ninety years ago. I cannot fully express my thanks to the members of the Harry Tofpi, Sr., family. Their willingness to make me and my wife part of their family has taught me about the richness and vitality of Kiowa life today. Finally, my wife Mary has endured the project longer than she should have had to endure it but has been unfailingly supportive during the months required to vii finish it (except when the muffler fell off of the car). Her editorial skills and sense of good history have helped to make this project worthwhile. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. "THE GRAND OBJECT:" THE FORMATIVE YEARS OF INDIAN EDUCATION . 1 IL "IT IS A REMEDY FOR BARBARISM:" THE CREATION OF AN INDIAN SCHOOL SYSTEM . 23 III. THE KIOWAS AND THEIR AGENCY . 63 IV. "THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS NEEDED:"