Richard Henry Pratt papers

Richard Henry Pratt (1840-1924) was a soldier in the American Civil War and later fought in armed conflicts against Native Americans on the Great Plains. In 1879, Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first Native American boarding school in the United States. These schools removed Native American children from their homes and forced them to assimilate into white American society under the guise of providing education. Carlisle created the template for similar state and religious institutions in the United States.

Pratt was born in Rushford, New York in 1840, and his family moved to Logansport, Indiana in 1847. As a child, he contracted a case of smallpox, which left him with facial scars for the remainder of his life. Pratt’s father was killed when Pratt was an adolescent, leading him to leave school and work to support his family until he joined the military.

Pratt's military career began in 1861, when he enlisted as a Union soldier during the American Civil War. He mustered out at the rank of captain in 1865 but found civilian life did not suit him. Pratt rejoined the army in 1867 at the rank of second lieutenant. He was assigned the command of the 10th US Cavalry, a regiment of Black soldiers that served on the Great Plains. While armed conflicts in the American west had been ongoing since before the American Civil War began in 1861, the war’s conclusion in 1865 meant that the government of the United States had more capacity to focus on conflicts between white settlers and Native Americans over land west of the Mississippi River. The United States government used a combination of treaties and armed response to seize land and force Native Americans onto smaller and smaller parcels, destroying their traditional ways of life and ties to their ancestral lands. Impacted tribes resisted this displacement through battles and through smaller raids and skirmishes. The 10th US Cavalry under Pratt was one of many United States Army units sent west to fight in these conflicts.

In response to raids on border settlements in 1874 following the Red River War, General Phillip Sheriden ordered that thirty-four Cheyenne, twenty-seven Kiowa, nine Comanche, two Arapahoe, and one Caddo be held as prisoners of war out east at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. When he heard the plan, Pratt expressed a desire to be a part of the military detail. In a letter to General Sheridan that he reproduced in his autobiography Battlefield and Classroom, Pratt stated that he already had familiarity with a number of imprisoned Native Americans at Fort Sill, and a belief that "much can and should be done to reform these young men" during their imprisonment. Pratt carried out his conception of reform during the three years the prisoners were held at Fort Marion. He requested that he be given leeway to direct and adjust the conditions of the prison as he saw fit, which meant implementing military protocols and standards, including military haircuts and uniforms, drills, English language education, and a guard system where Native men monitored each other. St. Augustine residents were invited to come to the fort and see the work of "civilizing" the Native men there, and some local women, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, assisted in English language education. Work at the fort included maintaining the building and living quarters and polishing seashells for the tourist trade. Outings were also arranged to encourage socialization and acclimation to white culture.

Pratt's work was in contrast to the prevailing white American opinions at the time, which saw Native Americans as irredeemable savages. This view was a reaction to the wars on the Great Plains where Native American nations strove to defend their ancestral lands and waterways from annexation by the United States government. Pratt’s observations and experiences at Fort Marion led him to believe that an educational system based on military tenets of strict conformity and discipline would allow Native Americans to effectively assimilate into white American culture. Pratt’s experience at Fort Marion allowed him to convince officials in the United States Army and government that similar strategies could be used on Native American children. The Department of the Interior gave Pratt the Carlisle Barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania for this purpose, and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879.

Pratt served as superintendent of Carlisle from 1879 to 1904. In the summer of 1879, he journeyed to western reservations and removed eighty-two children from their homes and families for the inaugural cohort. Pratt instituted a zero tolerance policy for any aspect of Native American traditions and culture. At Carlisle, children lived an extremely disciplined life, performing drills and following a bell system throughout the day. Children were forbidden from wearing traditional Native American clothing and were instead given garments similar to what their white peers would wear. Even with Pratt’s vigorous defense of the boarding school system, the number of children who graduated from Carlisle remained low throughout his superintendency, with only thirty to forty degrees granted in a given year. Throughout the years that Carlisle existed, many students aged out without graduating, ran away, or died. More than one hundred children are known to have died while at Carlisle, mostly of infectious diseases. At present at least 186 people are known to be interred in the Carlisle Indian School cemetery. These numbers will likely increase from the total known in 2023 as research continues.

In 1888, Pratt headed a commission created by Secretary of the Interior William F. Vilas to convince representatives from Teton Lakota tribes to agree to the Sioux Bill, in which tribal members would be forced off their ancestral land -- designated by the United States government as the Great Sioux Reservation -- in exchange for goods and services provided by the United States government. The commission failed in its aims, as Pratt’s presence only generated further resentment because of his role separating children from their families at Carlisle, and the commission had to be reformed later without him. The commission was one example of many of the United States government's drive for more land, and the accompanying sense of displacement, frustration, and loss felt by the Lakota tribes in the area. These feelings contributed to the Wounded Knee Massacre on December 29, 1890.

During his superintendency of the Carlisle School, Pratt became an outspoken opponent of tribal segregation on reservations. He believed that this system as administered and encouraged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) hindered the education and civilization of Native Americans and created helpless wards of the state. Commissioner of Indian Affairs T.J. Morgan believed children should remain on the reservation for school, following the United State’s public school model. Longstanding animosities came to a head in May of 1904 when Pratt strongly denounced the BIA and the separatism of reservations as a hindrance to the assimilation of Native Americans in a speech given at the 1904 Baptist Ministers’ Conference, held in New York City. This controversy, coupled with earlier disputes with the government over civil service reform, led to Pratt's forced retirement as superintendent of the Carlisle School in 1904. After his retirement, Pratt continued to write and speak on his viewpoints.

Richard Henry Pratt married his wife Anna Laura Mason on April 12, 1864. Together they had four children: Mason, Marian, Nana, and Richenda. Pratt died on March 15, 1924 in San Francisco, California, and is interred at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

The information in this biographical note is taken from Pratt, Richard Henry, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964); Fear-Segal, Jacqueline, White Man's Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); and Greene, Jerome A., "The Sioux Land Commission of 1889: Prelude to Wounded Knee." South Dakota History 1, no. 1 (1970): 41-72.