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Teaching Native American History

We Live on Stolen Lands, Part IV: The Machinations of the Ogden Land Company

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No organization played so energetic a role in the efforts to remove and dispossess the New York Indians as the Ogden Land Company. The Ogden Company’s determination to remove the Seneca Indians would develop into a broader movement to effect the relocation of all the Iroquois from the state, and open their lands to settlement and development. Even as it called for Indian removal, however, the representatives of the Ogden Company recognized that they must pay attention to the requirements of federal law as embodied in the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts.

David A. Ogden

I find it troubling that students in New York schools learn about the “Cherokee Removal” in their American history classes, but they hear nothing about efforts to drive the Indigenous people of New York to new homes somewhere in the west. New York’s Indian removals began long before Andrew Jackson became President and continued after he left.  It is the story of a conspiracy of interests, as Laurence Hauptman put it, that brought together wealthy businessmen, avaricious politicians, and corruptible federal agents.  It is a truly sordid story, and some of it played out in Geneseo where I teach. The Wadsworth family, after whom an important building on campus was named, has mansions on both ends of Main Street. Their money came from Seneca land, and they were in at the ground floor in as Ogden Company investors.

David A. Ogden, the company’s founder and president, purchased from the Holland Land Company in 1810 the pre-emptive rights to the Seneca reservations remaining to the tribe after the Big Tree Treaty of 1797, nearly 200,000 acres for fifty cents an acre.  To pay his debt, Ogden created an association of extraordinarily well-connected investors. They moved quickly to exercise that right. They would clear the Senecas out of western New York, gobble up their reservations, and sell the lands to settlers.

Ogden and his associates, it is essential to point out, thoroughly understood the requirements of the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, even if they wished the laws were not around to hinder their efforts. This is an important point: determined to drive out the Indians, the Ogden Company officials understood nonetheless that they must comply with federal laws. Robert Troup, one of the Company’s most active members, told the interpreter and federal agent Jasper Parrish in 1810 that the Company, in its attempt to acquire Seneca lands, would “leave everything in the hands of the Agents of the General Government, in full confidence that the Agents will do everything in their power, according to their instructions from the Government, to induce the Indians to accept of a grant of land to the west.” Nothing like friends in high places.

            The state of New York provided the Ogden Company with important assistance. In April of 1812, Governor Daniel Tompkins asked Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts “to cause a Superintendent to be appointed” for “holding a treaty with the native Indians for the purchase of their right in a part of the said [Holland Purchase] lands.” Two years later, Tompkins wrote to Secretary of War James Monroe, informing him that the Ogden Company requested the appointment of a federal commissioner. Tompkins told Monroe that “you will perceive that the State of New York is to have no agency in the contemplated treaty, & that the agent or Commissioner requested to be appointed by the United States is wanted for the purpose” of allowing the Ogden Company “to make a legal convention with the Seneca nation of Indians.”

            In March of 1818, Ogden told Governor DeWitt Clinton that Seneca opposition to removal resulted from the machinations of “designing men” who opposed his plan. Busy-body missionaries were getting in the way.  “The importance of obtaining a seat for our Indians to the west, and to which they may gradually retire,” Ogden wrote, “cannot be doubted.” If Clinton wondered why Ogden was contacting him, the land speculator pointed out “that the interest of the state of New York, in my opinion, is more deeply implicated in the removal of these Indians, than that of any individual interested in the preemption of their lands.” Might as well admit it, Ogden suggested: we all want to drive the Senecas from New York State.

            The Ogden Company wanted to remove the Senecas to some location in the west. Troup thought some spot west of the Mississippi, like Arkansas, would be best, but failing that someplace in the northwest, like the Michigan Territory “in the neighborhood of Green Bay,” would do. The Company called upon its allies for help.  With Company support, Parrish began the long trip to Washington early in 1817. Once there, he attempted to persuade the new Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, that removal was in the Indians’ best interest.  The Six Nations reservations in the state, Parrish said,

are more or less surrounded by Settlements of whites, in consequence of which there are frequent depredations, petty thefts, and trespasses committed between whites and Indians.  Most frequently on the part of the former. It causes the agents considerable time and trouble to settle with and  satisfy the injured person, so as to preserve our peace and friendship unbroken. Under these circumstances I think it would be for the interest of the United States, and also for the wellfare and the happiness of the Six Nations could they be persuaded to concentrate themselves.

It is an old story. Local settlers pressed upon Indians and their lands in defiance of the law. Parrish saw removal as a means to protect the Indians from the citizens of the state of New York, who encroached upon their lands, stole their possessions, and threatened the safety of all concerned. We needed to remove the Indians to save them. 

            The Company’s directors also called upon Lewis Cass, the territorial governor of Michigan, to help remove the Senecas.  Cass, in letters to federal agent Erastus Granger and Ogden, expressed a willingness to help, but suggested that if the Company were to succeed, it would need the support of federal officials in Washington.  Ogden, as well, asked Peter B. Porter, “one of the greatest promoters of the rise of western New York,” and an associate of the Company, to eliminate the problems caused by two unnamed white men who lived in the vicinity of Buffalo and who counseled the Senecas not to sell their lands.  If these men have influence, Ogden suggested, “it might possibly be advisable, to take means to quiet them.”

Ogden painted a bleak picture of the Senecas’ future.  The Senecas, Ogden reported, were unwilling to part with any of their lands, and this created a variety of problems.  “It has been the wise and constant policy of Government,” Ogden wrote in 1819,

to restrain the Indians from selling or leasing their lands to unauthorized individuals, and hence their reserved tracts remain principally uncleared.  The extensive forests operate as a barrier to the progress of improvement.  They are not subject to taxation and are made to contribute neither towards the expenses of roads or any other object of public utility. In proportion therefore as they can be withdrawn by proper means from the unprofitable occupation of the Natives and rendered acceptable to cultivation and settlement, they must add to the general prosperity and resources of the State.

The Senecas, he continued, based their resistance on the Canandaigua Treaty, a sophisticated notion that Ogden believed simple-minded Indians could not possibly have arrived at on their own.  The Senecas, he believed, incapable of thinking for themselves, had been duped by the deceptions of “designing” white men and those “intent on evangelizing this savage people.”

            An appeal to benevolence followed.  Removal of the Indians, Ogden argued, certainly would benefit the “Proprietors,” but it also would benefit the Indians.  “The History of every Indian tribe on the Atlantic Coast,” Ogden wrote, “proves that they cannot long exist in their savage character in the Neighborhood of civilized Society, that becoming partly Christian, partly Pagan, partly civilized, and partly savage, they are rendered more and more debased and degenerate and finally become extinct, without having rendered themselves capable of any national enjoyment, or having contributed in any degree, to the stock of the public good.”  Wiping away his crocodile tears, Ogden’s tone became increasingly urgent, and he hoped that the President would get his point: “The Savage,” Ogden said, “must and ought to yield to the civilized state, and that this change cannot be effected otherwise than by the Agency of the Government.” 

            Ogden found kindred spirits as well in the New York State Legislature.   Indeed, a committee of the New York State legislature reported early in 1819 that concentration was a desirable goal.  Alcohol ravaged the Indians, and squatters overran their lands, a problem “highly injurious to the interests of the State.” The conclusion was obvious: it was time for a change in policy. Regarding the Indians, the committee reported

 that their independence as a nation ought to cease, that they ought to yield to the public interest, and by a proper application of power they ought to be brought within the pale of civilization and law and if left to themselves will never reach that condition; that such bodies retaining such savage traits ought not to be in an independent condition and that our laws and manners ought to succeed theirs; suitable quantities of lands to be reserved for them.

The State Senate, shortly afterwards, requested that the governor “cooperate with the Government of the United States in such measures . . . to induce the several Indian tribes within this State to concentrate themselves in some suitable situation.”  The Senate, however, in a statement that aptly characterized the state’s approach to dealing with its Indians, insisted that the Governor take these actions “either with or without the cooperation of the government of the United States.”

            Rhetoric such as this from the New York State Legislature mirrored the arguments occurring at the same time in the southern states, where a states’ rights variant of constitutionalism developed and was nourished in disputes over federal Indian policy. As the federal government and its agents among the Creeks and Cherokees sought to protect the Indians from the aggression of their neighbors, and as missionaries and philanthropists sought their “civilization” and “improvement,” southern state legislatures and southern state courts argued that all who resided within a state, including Indians, must conform to its laws.  The Marshall Court, later, would reject this limited federalism, but southerners had the power to largely ignore officials of the national government. The resolution of 1819 shows that New York’s political leaders were developing a similar states’ rights ideology.

            After laying all the groundwork, Ogden requested of Secretary of War Calhoun “that a commissioner may be appointed to hold a treaty with all or any of the Tribes composing the Six Nations of Indians residing in this State.”  Calhoun appointed Morris Miller to serve as federal agent “in a treaty which the Proprietors of the Seneca Reservation in the State of New York wish to hold with that nation.”

John C. Calhoun

            Calhoun believed whole-heartedly in the philanthropic justifications for removal, but at the same time he believed that the practice of treating with Indians was a flawed and dated practice. The national government protected the Indians, Calhoun believed, and “is their best friend.” The Indians depended on the United States like a child relied upon its parents.  Calhoun believed that the Indians had not flourished in their homelands, and that they had picked up the vices, but none of the virtues, of the surrounding white population.  In this sense, removal seemed to Calhoun a logical solution to the new nation’s “Indian Problem.”  If Indians relocated to the western side of the Mississippi River they would distance themselves from the unsavory influence of frontier whites, and gain additional time to become “civilized.” He believed that the United States, rather than the tribes themselves, should decide what was in the Indians’ best interest.  He hoped that they would see the value of removal; at the same time, Calhoun believed strongly that removal could not be forced and that under law, the United States must oversee the process of Indian land sales. At least as long as it was convenient to do so.

            Aware that they had the support of the federal government, the Ogden associates played their cards carefully.  The object was limited: concentrate the Senecas at Allegany, and open their other lands to white settlement.  The best thing the Company could do, William Troup told Jasper Parrish, is “to be perfectly still, and to make no appearance whatever” at the Council, and “to leave everything entirely in the hands of the Commissioners of the General Government, in full confidence that the Agents will do every thing in their power, according to their instructions from the government, to induce the Indians to accept of a grant of land to the West.”

            Morris Miller, the United States agent, did try to persuade the Senecas to remove. He claimed to have the best interests of the Indians at heart. He told the Senecas that “I am not in any way instructed, pledged or interested to promote the views of the white men, where these views are prejudiciall to the rights of the red men.” Nonetheless, Morris’s boss, the Indians’ “Great Father,”

sees you scattered here and there, in small parcels everywhere, surrounded by white people. He sees that you are fast losing your national character, and are daily more and more exposed to the bad examples of your white Brothers, without the restraint of their laws  and religion. He sees that this frequent and uncontrolled intercourse, instead of doing good is doing injury to you and to them. Your great Father sees all these things, with grief and concern. He lays them much to heart; and thinks it impossible for you, under such circumstances, to retain the character of an independent nation.

The Great Father looked after his white children as well, Morris continued, and from them he heard of their dissatisfaction

at seeing the lands in your occupation remain wild and uncultivated; neither paying taxes, nor assisting to make roads and other improvements; nor in any way contributing to the public burthens, as white peoples’ lands do. Your Great Father has been further informed that you occupy more land  than you can advantageously till, or use for any valuable purpose; whilst at this same time the scarcity of game         prevents your engaging in those pursuits, to which your fathers were accustomed.

The solution was simple. The President, Morris told the Senecas, desires “that you should live at a greater distance from white people, so that you may be more secure in the enjoyment of your property. And that he can with greater convenience, and less expense cause you to be instructed in agriculture, and the useful arts; and your children to be taught to read and write, and that your nation may thus be rendered an industrious and happy people.”

            The Senecas, divided among traditionalists and those more willing to selectively adopt elements of white culture, rallied together to oppose cessions of Seneca land.  Quaker missionaries, too, supported the Senecas.  The Quakers argued that concentration at Allegheny would undermine the Friends’ efforts to Christianize and civilize the Senecas at Buffalo Creek, and that there was not an adequate supply of land at Allegheny to support all the Senecas.  The Quakers, in fact, long had opposed the Ogden Company’s agenda.  In 1817, for instance, the Society of Friends delivered a message “to the Chiefs and other Indians on the Allegany Reservation,” advising them that “the land on which you live is your own—and you know it to be good and some of it well-improved . . . It cannot be taken from you without your consent.”

            Timothy Pickering advised the Quakers on methods to help the Senecas hang on to their lands. “Knowing as I do,” he wrote,

the rapacity of some men among the Whites, I am not surprised at the attempts to seduce the Chiefs to sell the seats from under themselves, and their people. It is in the power of the government to defeat these attempts.  But artful men may apply to it for the  appointment of a commissioner to hold a treaty, and by false but plausible representations, and perhaps, too, aided by certificates of men apparently disinterested, obtain this request.

Pickering suggested to the Quakers that they have “the chiefs and all their people assemble in council, and enter into an agreement, never to sell their lands, or any part of them, without the assent of the warriors or grown men, as well as of the chiefs.” Further, Pickering reminded the Quakers that “by laws enacted from the year 1790 to 1802, no purchase of Indians’ land are valid, unless made at a treaty held under the authority of the United States.” Pickering’s statement shows that he understood that the federal government had a responsibility to protect Indian land from territorially aggressive interests in the states, and that stopping these forces, even with the support of the laws of the national government, would not be an easy task.

            Led by Red Jacket, the Senecas refused to sell to the Ogden Company in 1819, and their rejection “was so unqualified and so peremptory, as to forbid all reasonable expectation that any good purpose could be effected by adjourning the council,” Miller wrote, and so “it was therefore finally closed.”

            There can be no question that the United States gave aid and encouragement to the Ogden Land Company, those “artful men” so determined to acquire Seneca land in western New York.  The important point for our purposes, however, is that however reprehensible the practices of the Company, it recognized the rules of the game as spelled out in the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, and actively requested the involvement of the United States to ensure the legality of its purchases.  It is unfortunate that New York State did not exercise the same due diligence.

Current Events, Uncategorized

Yet Another Threat to Haudenosaunee Land, Lives, and Liberties

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I am deeply disturbed, as a historian, by the proposed STAMP development project bordering the Tonawanda Seneca Nation territory.  STAMP stands for the Science and Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park which will be built on the margins of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. It’s another “Buffalo Billion boondoggle,” one journalist pointed out, a manufacturing facility boosted by the Genesee County Center for Economic Development that will, when built, damage wildlife habitat and the ways of living of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. Millions have been spent, but not much has been accomplished yet. A hearing will be held tonight, Thursday, May 11th, at the Fire Hall in the Town of Alabama, New York.

I will leave it to those with expertise in the field to describe the significant ecological and environmental consequences of the project, though they seem quite significant and have not been persuasively addressed by the developer. What I would like to describe to you is the history of this state, and its long history of interactions with Native American Nations. New York could not have taken its current shape without a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that at times explicitly violated the laws of the United States, and always basic standards of justice, honesty, and equity.

It is history in which the State of New York has consistently attempted to skim the cream off of whatever prosperity develops on Indigenous land; has aided and abetted in the environmental devastation of Indigenous homelands, and pursued on or around Native American communities projects that their NIMBY white constituents refuse to countenance in their own neck of the woods. It is a history of despoliation, devastation, and avarice, that is appalling even without reference to state boarding schools, military campaigns, and dishonesty in its dealing with the Indigenous Nations. Will the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation participate, once again, in this long and, frankly racist history? I hope that they will turn the page, write a new chapter, and look to a better future.

              I am not optimistic.  Governor Hochul has been no friend to the State’s Indigenous peoples. She presides over a state built on stolen land. One thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on is that there shall never be a meaningful accounting. New York became the Empire State through a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession. That’s a fact. Though the Supreme Court declined to do anything about the process, arguing disingenuously that the injuries occurred too long ago to offer a workable remedy, most of the so-called treaties the state negotiated clearly violated federal law.           

Short Eared Owl, one of several species threatened by the development.

Not only were many of these transactions unambiguously illegal, but they were, as the kids say, as shady as hell. The Onondagas and Oneidas, for instance, entered into agreements in 1788 in which they were led to believe they would lease their lands to the State of New York.  Turns out that when the treaty was written by New York officials, those leases had magically been transformed into sales. Dispossession through literacy in English.  Other transactions took place with small number of Indians present, few of whom were the proper people to sign treaties.  And the United States, especially with regard to the Senecas, hardly kept its hands clean.  The 1838 treaty of Buffalo Creek, a transaction designed to expel the Six Nations from New York State, is the most crooked treaty in the history of this country.  That is saying something. Signatories were coerced or threatened, signatures were forged, and alcohol flowed freely.  Meanwhile, both federal and state authorities in New York have ignored the treaty provisions that protect Indigenous rights.  For example, clauses guaranteeing the Senecas and their Iroquois neighbors the right to the “free use and enjoyment of their lands” in the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua have been consistently ignored.  They have ignored provisions in treaties guaranteeing Indigenous peoples the right to hunt and fish on the land they ceded to the state. The state has even tried to tax the “per capita” payments the Seneca Nation made to its members from the Nation’s gaming proceeds. It is just one assault after another. 

Northern Harrier, another bird species threatened by the development.

It is worth keeping in mind that the Seneca Nation has never asked for special privileges.  It asked merely that the state of New York follow the rules to which it had agreed. Contracts are sacred, Governor Hochul suggested when she extorted the funding she needed to secure a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills, unless they somehow limit her ability to funnel many millions of public dollars to private hands.There is a principle that is very important to Iroquois people.  The People who made up the Iroquois League conducted their lives in accordance with this principle over the centuries. It is called “Guswenta,” and today it is represented by a very specific wampum belt known as the Two-Row, which depicts two parallel lines on a field of white.  The lines represent the Iroquois and their non-native neighbors. They shared the same land, they occupy the same country, but they remain independent and autonomous.  The lines do not cross, and neither natives nor newcomers should interfere in the affairs of the other. Indigenous peoples in this state have kept their part of the bargain.  They have had little choice.  The state, and its colonial predecessors, have not. 

The Indigenous people of this state have faced epidemic diseases, military invasions, the carrying away of their children to boarding schools, and systematic and deliberate attempts to wipe out their culture and take their land. Yet here they remain, developing their communities, looking forward, in a state that has been a steady and relentless adversary.  They hoped the state would play by its own rules.  Governor Hochul always has said no.  She will support the elimination of Native American mascots–that costs her nothing–but when the rubber hits the road she is as Anti-Indian as they get.

So when a developer hopes to gain state support for an exchange of 665 acres of habitat linked by forests and wetlands to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation for fifty-eight acres of non-contiguous land and claims that it is an equivalent property and that the exchange will actually benefit the ecosystem, and when the developer ignores completely impacts on the Nation and its people, it is hard not to be skeptical. What is easy to see is yet another chapter in the State’s long, brutal, and exploitative history towards Indigenous peoples.  The proposed swap is about so much more than economics. It makes a mockery of “consultation,” endangers endangered species, and is so patently inequitable that it is impossible to take seriously.  

              But all of this is very serious.  Industrial development at STAMP will disrupt the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s ability to engage in the free exercise of their traditional beliefs. By damaging the Big Woods, where medicines are harvested and subsistence hunting and fishing takes place, it threatens directly the health and welfare of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation and the Haudenosaunee, who with Tonawanda’s permission hunt, fish, and gather there too. A long time ago, New York Indians were told to give up their lands in New York for a sliver of desiccated earth in Kansas. The land out there in the west, American officials, New York businessmen, and white racists argued, is just as good as what you have in New York. It’s the same, these promoters of ethnic cleansing optimistically point out. Except that it was not alike at all, just like 58 non-contiguous acres is not at all the same as 665 acres of culturally significant and environmentally and ecologically sensitive land.         

              The Tonawanda Seneca Nation always has resisted the calls of wealthy New York developers, from Robert Morris in the 1790s to today, that they leave their homelands. In the 1838 Treaty of Buffalo Creek, the Tonawandas were surprised to learn their reservation had been given up, even though they were not parties to the treaty.  Two decades later they were able to purchase back a portion of the reservation they never had consented to sell. They were ripped off, but they hung on, preserving their culture and their political system within a state that has historically respected that culture not at all. If any number of white people had their way, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation would no longer exist—their language, their religion, the land, their people—all would have been absorbed by the ceaseless State of New York.      

              The DEC will support the state’s long-standing racism towards Indigenous peoples if it supports this habitat destruction. Tonawanda Senecas, you see, want nothing more than for the State of New York to keep its word and leave them alone. This is the case for other Haudenosaunee peoples. But here we go again, the relentless drumbeat of exploitation, avarice, and racism.  Tonawanda claims to the significance of the land and the species that live there are dismissed and shown no real respect.             

              I have been to hearings like the one that will be held this evening in the Alabama Fire Hall in the town of Alabama, New York. There is no meaningful “consultation” at meetings like this: the DEC officials sit at a table, fidget with their phones, as they listen uncomfortably to Indigenous peoples describe yet another assault on who they are and what they hope to become. I hope that this time, the members of the DEC in attendance will listen to what the Tonawandas say, and try to hear the sentiment beside it. I hope that they will put a stop to this ill-conceived and poorly thought-out industrial manufacturing development. I hope that they will break with a horrible history and, in the spirit of trust and reconciliation, seek pardon for the unresolved crimes of New York’s past.

Boarding Schools

Nora Printup and Mrs. Jacobs’ Girls

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            There was a story that appeared in Indian Country Today a while back authored by Louellyn White, an Akwesasne scholar who teaches at Concordia University in Canada. White is descended from former Carlisle school students, and she is at work in an enterprise to recover information about “more than forty children and young adults who died on outings from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.”  White asks her readers to “help us find their families.”

            One of the names on that list was Nora Printup, a seventeen-year-old Tonawanda Seneca girl.  I have put a fair amount of time into investigating the histories of those Onondaga young people who attended Carlisle and other boarding schools.  I have written about some of them on this blog (here and here). Printup’s appearance on that list sparked my curiosity, so I decided to look into her story.

According to White, Nora was buried at Seaside Cemetery in Ocean City, New Jersey. Nora died during her outing placement in Ocean City in 1905. The “outing system” was fundamental to the educational program at Carlisle. Carlisle placed students in the households and “under the influence of good, moral, economical, painstaking, and consecrated white people.” Indigenous young people who attended Carlisle thus interacted frequently with non-natives, and learned much about the mores and values of the American middle class.  They knew much more about white people than white people knew about them.  Effectively isolated from their classmates, the students lived and worked in white households where they could apply the lessons learned in school and, Carlisle’s promoter hoped, absorb as their own the values of the white middle class.  While outing, according to Carlisle’s promoters, aided the students, the patrons who hosted gained the benefit of the help the student might provide that family.  And the school did not have to pay to feed students who were not staying at Carlisle.

            A student’s file from Carlisle contains the places where they did outings, and the name of their patrons. Sometimes, a student’s file contains write-ups describing the outing placement—a description of the household, the student’s quarters, and a brief description of the patron.  Carlisle sent out agents to visit the outing locations, though they do not appear in the files for each student or for each outing placement.

            At the time of her death, Nora stayed in the home of Mrs. C. H. Jacobs, of Ocean City.  Nora was nineteen at the time, not seventeen.  Mrs. Jacobs had an abundance of experience serving as a host for Carlisle students. Between April of 1901 and September of 1915, she housed twenty-one young women from the school.  She often had more than one student at a time.  Dora LaBelle from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation was in her home in 1901 with Eunice Baird, an Oneida, and Francis Halftown, a Seneca from Cattaraugus.  Esther Reed, from Siletz, and Ester Daniels, a Ute, were together at Mrs. Jacobs’ place in 1908; Annie Dibo from Akwesasne, and Susie Porter from White Earth were there in 1909; Grace Burnett and Helen Kimmel, both from Rosebud, lived at Mrs. Jacobs’ house together in 1910; Julia Peña, a Mission Indian from Agua Caliente in California and Margaret Pickett, a Crow from Montana, were there in 1913; and Della John, a Seneca, and Ella Israel, a Cherokee, stayed there in 1915.  Carlisle closed a couple of years later, and Mrs. Jacobs did not house any Carlisle kids after 1915.

Annie Dibo

            We do know that both Nora and her sister Lily attended the state’s Thomas Indian School for a year beginning in 1891. Nora is not entirely visible in the record, but Lilly made the Buffalo News. The paper ran a story about the violent abuse and excessive punishments meted out by the Thomas School’s superintendent John Van Valkenburg, who was put on trial for impregnating a student, physically abusing others, and mismanaging state finances.  The Reverend M. F. Trippe of Salamanca, in his testimony, said that “it was in the fall of 1882,” he thought, “that I noticed a girl by the name of Lily Printup, whose ears and necks were black and blue.” Lily told Rev. Trippe that she had been punished by Mr. and Mrs. Van Valkenburg on a Tuesday. On the following Sunday, Trippe said, the girl’s injuries still looked fresh.

            Lily did not go to Carlisle, but Nora did.  She arrived at Carlisle in 1897. She spent much of the period from November of 1899 to September of 1902 at outing placements in Gettysburg. She learned laundering and sewing and was well behaved. She arrived at Mrs. Jacob’s place in June of 1905. She went to the beach one day, a couple of weeks after she arrived. It would not have been far from where she lived to the water’s edge. The Carlisle school superintendent sent a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. “It is my sad duty to report the drowning at Ocean City, NJ, of Nora Printup, an Indian girl from the Seneca tribe,” he wrote. Details were sketchy, but it seemed “that she remained in the water until she became exhausted, got out beyond her depth, and was drowned before she could be rescued.” He reported that “persistent efforts were made to resuscitate her but without success,” and that her father, John Printup, had been notified.

            The Indian Country Today story said that Nora was buried at Seaside Cemetery, but that does not appear to have been the case.  Nora’s student file states that her body was sent home to the Tonawanda Reservation. The superintendent of Carlisle sought reimbursement from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for $26.00, the cost of sending Nora’s body home to Alabama, NY.  That business proved more complicated and costly than the officials at Carlisle anticipated. “As to the express charges,” he wrote, “I wish to state that the railroad company not only refused to give the Indian school rate for transportation of the remains on a ticket, but also declined to transport the same unless accompanied by some representative of the school.” Under these difficult circumstances, he wrote, “it was deemed best to have the remains shipped by express.”

            Professor White, in the Indian Country Today story said that Nora was buried in the Seaside Cemetery in Ocean City.  That conflicts with the information in her file.  A phone call to the cemetery last week confirmed, after a thorough check of the records, that no one named Nora Printup was every buried there. The existing evidence says that Nora’s body was returned to Tonawanda.

            I can only imagine how hard it must have been for John Printup to lose a child, especially one who died far from home.  Whatever its effects on him, however, Nora’s death seems not to have soured John on Carlisle. He sent three more of his children to Carlisle after Nora’s death.  Bessie Printup attended from 1908 until 1909.  Mary, who arrived in 1903, stayed until 1907, even after her sister’s death.  And young Cody Printup arrived in 1906.  He was eleven.  His father, according to the school’s superintendent, expressed in a letter that he had some “anxiety …on account of the boy’s welfare.” Mr. Printup specifically did not want Cody placed in an outing assignment.  He wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis Leupp.  “I do not approve of such a little boy working out,” he wrote.  “Will you kindly authorize me to bring him home if [the superintendent] does not take him back to school.”  The Superintendent wrote to John to assuage his fears.  “Cody asked to go out, and there is nothing we can do for the pupils better than to have them spend the summer in a good family.”  These kids, he continued, “get excellent food, like the change from the routine work here and are very anxious to be out.” Cody was working as an errand boy, “in-doors and out,” and was “doing no hard work and is getting good care.” Cody remained at Carlisle. 

            John Printup did not object to his children staying at Carlisle. His concern was whether his son could handle the work he might be assigned while out on assignment.  He would have preferred for his son to be at Carlisle rather than out on placement.  If one looks through the files of the other women who lodged with Mrs. Jacobs, you see a similar refrain.  Several years after she returned home, Esther Reed wrote for copies of the school newspaper, The Arrow, and hoped to have her younger brother attend Carlisle “because it is a fine school.”  Esther Daniels also asked for copies of the newspaper.  Grace Burnett left Carlisle because her mother died.  In 1911, the year after her departure, she wrote that her grandmother had died, too.  She was now without female relatives, and that despite doing well on her farm, she wished to return to Carlisle to complete her schooling. Julia Peña said of Carlisle that “I miss it very much.”  Ella Israel, who attended Carlisle because she was “too far advanced to continue to attend rural district school and there is no high school near,” upon her return home began recruiting children from her community to attend Carlisle.

            The story of Nora Printup, her sister, and the young women who stayed in the home of Mrs. Jacobs, highlights the ambivalent history of Carlisle.  The school’s stated intent was to eradicate the indigenous culture of the students who attended.  In its early years, Carlisle’s leaders boasted of their ability to “civilize” “savages,” to “kill the Indian and save the man.”  That was always a lie. The students who came to Carlisle overwhelmingly were fluent in English.  Many of them wrote the language with grace and style.  Many of them were members of Christian congregations, and came from families where they farmed much like the white people in neighboring communities. Carlisle was funded and fueled by propaganda that boasted of the school’s achievements.

            The Carlisle experience was an important part of these young people’s lives.  While there was undoubtedly suffering solitude, sickness and, as in Nora’s case, an occasional death, many former students looked back fondly on their time at Carlisle.  They, and their parents, valued the institution and what it did for them. The stories of Nora Printup and her contemporaries gets at the complexities of Carlisle.  Occasionally children at the school died. They succumbed to illness.  Some of them were buried on the school grounds, or in municipal and churchyard cemeteries near their outing placements.  And some were sent home, which appears to have been the case with Nora Printup.  The young women who attended Carlisle, and made it home afterwards, were so much more powerful, as individuals and as members of Indigenous nations, than the forces that aimed at their destruction.