The survey staff finds itself obliged to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate.
Milk at Uintah Boarding School was frequently sour. Meat was sometimes rotten, or tainted by being stored up against pine boards after butchering. Bread was often undercooked; students would make marbles of the inedible dough and shoot them around the mess hall.
Sheila R. McCann
The Salt Lake Tribune
There wasn’t enough food; staffer Fred Bruce tried to save meat for the bigger boys who were required to get up before 6 a.m. to milk cows. The school doctor suggested serving the cream to students who were the most underweight.
There weren’t enough pajamas, so the children slept in underwear. There weren’t enough shoes, so they were forced to wear tattered ones that exposed their feet in the cold. There weren’t enough beds, so two boys crowded onto each single mattress to sleep.
This was life for children in the 1920s at the overcrowded Whiterocks school — as described by witnesses who testified in 1928 to a U.S. Senate subcommittee.
The hearing in Salt Lake City was part of a national investigation that began in 1928 into conditions at boarding schools and reservations, including the Uintah and Ouray reservation in eastern Utah. The testimony included allegations of misspent funds, violations of water rights and other misconduct.
Ute parents, former Uintah Boarding School physician Dr. George McClellan Hamilton, Episcopalian Rev. Sterling J. Talbot and others charged the boarding school with abuse and neglect — including the failure to remove an improperly secured swing that fell to the ground when a boy climbed on it, fracturing his skull and killing him.
“I have heard it from the school children themselves that they have whipped them with a stick; throw them down and whip them,” parent Eugene Perank told senators through an interpreter at the November hearing. Perank had pulled his children out. “That’s the reason why I don’t place my children in school.”
The students “are not well cared for,” testified another parent, Sapaneese, who had children living at the boarding school. The interpreter told senators: “He don’t think the clothes they have is what they ought to have for winter. He says from the littlest to the biggest they have to work. He says they are hungry.”
The scathing Meriam Report had been published earlier that year, documenting “real suffering,” serious illness and poverty among Native Americans across the country. Of boarding schools, it reported: “The survey staff finds itself obliged to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate.”
Nationwide, schools were overcrowded, their teaching was outdated and often ineffective, and food was “deficient in quantity, quality, and variety,” the researchers found. Children living “routinized” lives were “required to do the washing, ironing, baking, cooking, sewing; to care for the dairy, farm, garden, grounds, buildings, etc.” — labor that helped make up for the schools’ inadequate funding.
The swing at the Uintah boarding school had long been broken and considered unsafe.
But it was left in place, and on a late October afternoon in 1927, a small group of students were playing on it. As Tilford Denver climbed up a rope, the structure fell.
The other children scattered, unhurt. But Tilford’s skull was struck by a falling bar, the school doctor reported, and the 11-year-old died within the hour without gaining consciousness.
Ute Tribe member Roy Smith saw Tilford fall, picked the boy up “and took him upstairs and tried to make his life come back,” he testified, “but it failed.”
After an inquest, Smith added, “I destroyed the rest of that swing myself.”
According to regulations, the swing should have been “cemented to be solid,” Smith told the committee, “instead of that, it was stuck in a hole about a foot deep without any protection.” The defective swing had been reported by a school staffer, but “they paid no attention to his complaint,” Smith said.
Dr. Hamilton wrote that he had examined the swing with Smith and others. “One joint especially must have been very defective, for it shows that had been wired where it was broken before it was bolted together,” the doctor reported. That section, he added, was the one that fell on the boy.
During the subcommittee hearing, he was asked, “You think the death of this pupil was caused through the negligence of some of the Indian Bureau officials, do you not?”
“Some of the officials of the reservation; yes, sir,” Dr. Hamilton answered. “Because this swing never had been secured.”
The committee also asked whether Tilford’s parents had been compensated for the death of their son. “The father of this boy could not be reached when he was buried,” the doctor testified. “The mother, so far as I know, never received a penny compensation.”
Reporters wrote that Tilford’s mother, Dulcia Denver, was there listening to the testimony, “with tear-filled eyes.”
The subcommittee also learned about Swanson Mowachean, who was seriously injured at the boarding school. Swanson was about 10 years old when his father died and the orphaned boy was enrolled.
And there, apparently unsupervised and with older boys encouraging him, he one day touched an exposed live electric wire.
“The resulting shock may have caused him to fall and strike on the concrete floor, injuring his skull,” some of his relatives later wrote to Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles Burke. “In any case, he was not normal, mentally, after this incident as he was previously.”
At first, Swanson stayed at school, where “he was subjected to teasing,” which “seemed to make his condition worse, and he made very little progress in his studies.” He eventually lived instead with families who took him in. When he seemed to be “somewhat improved in health” after a stay in Fort Duchesne Hospital in 1927, he applied for readmission to the school, but was refused.
Later that year, he developed an ulcer on his lower lip — setting off a fight for medical care that other witnesses also described. Dr. Hamilton, his relatives said, “said the boy ought to go to the hospital, but he did not take him to the hospital. When we saw the doctor again he said he had a letter from the agency superintendent saying that the superintendent did not think this boy needed to go to the hospital.”
Swanson became worse, “generally being weak and eating very little.” His lower lip, they said, “is pretty well eaten away.” Their Feb. 17, 1928, letter to Burke pleaded: “We fear that if we wait for the superintendent to act it will be too late and the boy will die. Please do what you can and as soon as possible.”
Superintendent H.M. Tidwell allowed Swanson to return to the hospital later in February, but it was too late, Dr. Hamilton said. The boy died March 6, 1928.
The doctor also detailed his efforts — which he said were ignored or delayed by Tidwell — to get care and food for other children, including a girl at the boarding school. Two hungry children he described died.
Sen. William B. Pine, R- Oklahoma, asked him, “In your opinion, have Indians died because of this failure on the part of the superintendent to cooperate?” The doctor answered: “Well, in my opinion we have had Indians die there for a lack of attention and lack of proper food; more than once.”
Dr. Hamilton, who said he had been transferred without explanation a month earlier to Owyhee, Nevada, described sobering conditions he had seen at the boarding school, including spoiled food. The subcommittee took into evidence a series of letters the doctor wrote to Principal George N. Shafer, including:
November 1927: The mess hall and kitchen had “too many flies; tables not always as clean as they should be, which is true of dishes as well.”
April 1928: “...The children are not taking their milk, because it is sour,” he wrote, describing how it was being stored improperly and needed to be kept packed with ice.
There were children at the school who were “rather poor and some that are under weight,” he noted. “Suggest,” he continued, “as has been suggested before on numerous occasions, that these children who are poorly nourished all be placed at the same table and the top of the milk taken for their table.”
Repeatedly, in April and May 1928, he complained about improperly stored meat and refuse that was not being disposed of correctly.
In other letters, he objected that children were not receiving the treatments they needed for trachoma, an eye infection, or were not being quarantined when they should.
In other testimony, Rev. Sterling Talbot — who had become the priest in charge of the Episcopal St. Elizabeth’s Mission in Whiterocks Oct. 1, 1926 — offered insight behind the typical photos of students lined up in uniforms.
The boys “look very well when they are dressed up in these semimilitary uniforms,” he said, then revealed: “During working hours they are not so well dressed. At nighttime they sleep in their underwear and apparently they have difficulty in getting enough underwear and proper underwear.”
“Those conditions you couldn't help but notice, seeing these boys getting ready for bed, sleeping two in a bed and in their underwear,” he testified. He had spoken to the boys' matron, he said, “and asked if they had pajamas, and the boys' matron said, ‘We are really years behind in our sewing. There may be some material to make pajamas for the boys, but we haven't had any in a long time.’"
Talbot told the subcommittee he had seen temperatures drop to 30 degrees below zero. “Do you think that the clothing furnished the Indians is sufficient to keep them perfectly warm?” he was asked. Talbot answered: “Positively and absolutely not sufficient to keep them warm all the time.”
Fred Bruce, a member of the Chippewa tribe, had started working as disciplinarian — a role similar to a director of boys' activities — at the school in January 1928. He had previously worked at Indian schools around the country and served in the military during the World War.
At Whiterocks, he testified, the boys’ clothing was “insufficient all the way through.” Some of the boys would have “part of their feet sticking out” of their shoes in winter, he said. “Most of their sickness was caused by getting their feet wet, and stuff like that, in the spring of the year.”
Besides their Sunday uniforms, he said, the boys had “corduroy clothes, and not very good; they kept tearing.”
He complained about the food, he added: “They fed the children sour milk and sour bread, and some of that bread was just dough; the kids would roll it in marbles and shoot it all over the room; couldn’t eat it.”
Meat was rotten, at times. There often wasn’t enough, he said. “I tried to leave a little bit more meat for the boys that was working out than the little fellows.”
He was asked: “Did the boys who were working out have to do very heavy work?” And he answered: “Yes; somewhat heavy; and they are little fellows, and they have to be out at 10 minutes to 6 in the morning; go down and milk the cows.”
Chairman Sen. Lynn J. Frazier, R-North Dakota, asked, “You mean they were working for some one outside of the reservation?”
Bruce explained: “No, sir; they were working right at school, doing Government work.”
Bruce had been fired after about six months; a letter from Burke claimed he had bad manners and a fiery temper, and also accused him of disloyalty and not being efficient. But Bruce suspected he had been fired, at least in part, for refusing to whip the boys.
“They wanted me to whip the boys, and I told them I didn't believe in the policy of whipping; I told Mr. Shafer that if he had a little brother and he put him in there and you put him in my charge, would you want me to whip him every time he done a little something, something that was not exactly right?
“‘Well,’ he says, ‘some of these Indians you have got to pound it into them; that is the only way they will learn anything,’ but I refused to follow his orders and instructions on whipping and I told him finally to put it down in writing and he said he would, but it went on for a week or two and I called his attention to it, and he said, ‘You are supposed to be disciplinarian; you are supposed to know your business; and I ain't supposed to write it down.’"
Sen. Pine asked him, “Do you understand that the former disciplinarian whipped them?”
“Yes, sir,” Bruce answered. “I think he did.”