July 10, 2021 • 29 mins
Part two of our Fort Shaw classic covers the four months the Fort Shaw Indian School women's basketball team spent at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The team performed mandolin recitals, literary recitations, demonstrations of gymnastics and calisthenics, and became World Champions.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's Classic is the second part of our
two parter on the Fort Shaw Indian School girls basketball team,
which originally came out November. Part one was last week's
Saturday Classic. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
(00:29):
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
We are concluding a two part episode today. In part
one of this show, we gave some background about the
Fort Shaw Indian School, which was part of the federally
run system of off reservation boarding schools that were meant
to assimilate in sort of scare quotes native students, it's
(00:51):
a white culture, or at least to get Native students
to conform with white culture. It didn't actually assimilate. There
was still a lot of racism and discrimination after people
went through these programs. We also talked a bit about
the history of basketball and how girls basketball at Fort
Shaw quickly became the best basketball team in Montana. Today,
(01:13):
we are picking up with the St. Louis World's Fair,
where the team spent about four months in nineteen o
four becoming the world champions there, As was the case
in the previous episode. We are still getting into some
pretty abhorrent racism here, and there is also a brief
mention of animal cruelty. In nineteen o three, Fort Shaw
Indian School was, as we mentioned at the end of
(01:35):
the previous episode, invited to participate in the nineteen o
four St. Louis World's Fair, also known as the Louisiana
Purchase Exposition, so named because it was meant to start
a year earlier and mark the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase.
This was, of course also the subject of the nineteen
forty four film starring Judy Garland, which is spectacular. It's
(01:58):
also totally not surprising that forty years later Metro Goldwyn
Mayor made a musical out of this. This fare was huge.
The nineteen o four World's Fair ran from April thirtie
December one, during which time more than twenty million people
attended it. The fair site, which was the largest ever
for a World's fare, covered twelve hundred acres that was
(02:20):
dotted with about nine hundred buildings, including fifteen exhibit palaces.
The exhibitors included sixty two nations and forty three of
the then forty five United States States. A mile long
avenue called the Pike was full of vendors and amusements.
It seems like every ubiquitous American food, from hot dogs
(02:42):
to ice cream cones, was supposedly introduced at the nineteen
o four World's Fair, but most of those stories just
f y I are apocryphal. Uh. There were carnival rides,
the massive ferris wheel, boer War reenactments, Award of Babies,
and incubators. It just goes on and on and on.
A running theme for this fair, as was often the
(03:03):
case in these kinds of expositions, was progress. Some of
this progress was related to science and industry. The incubators
are actually one example. There were meteorological balloon experiments. There
was a demonstration of the first ground to air wireless telegraph.
New technologies from X rays to electric typewriters got their
(03:24):
first public display. Some things that were still pretty novel
to the world at the time got their time to
shine to including all kinds of other electrical appliances, gasoline engines,
and automobiles. But some of it was also about cultural progress.
The general idea was that the United States culture was
superior and that the nation was having a civilizing influence
(03:48):
on the rest of the world as well as within
its own borders. This cultural progress was displayed through large
pavilions of living exhibits of thousands of people from around
the world. These living exhibits were a common element of
the world's fairs and expositions of the era. They functioned
almost like temporary human zoos. People actually lived in these
(04:11):
where the duration of the fair and living exhibits were
frequently arranged to suggest a progression from the least to
the most civilized people's One example in St. Louis was
the Philippine Village, which covered forty seven acres and housed
more than a thousand people from at least ten different
Filipino ethnic groups. Often, the cultural practices that were considered
(04:34):
the most taboo from a white Christian American perspective, uh
were the biggest draw. In the case of the Philippine Village,
this was the eager wrote who occasionally consumed dog for
ceremonial purposes, and during the fair, organizers gave them dog
to eat every day so that spectators could watch. Fort
(04:56):
Shaw's invitation was to participate in the Model Indian School.
This was a mock boarding school where students would demonstrate
the academic, domestic, and vocational skills that they were taught
at school. The Fort Shaw School was not the only
Indian school to participate. The Model Indian School was to
house about a hundred and fifty students selected from all
(05:17):
across the nation's network of Indian boarding schools, specifically schools
that were located within what had been Louisiana Purchased territory.
The school was part of a section of the fair
that came to be known as Indian Hill. We're about
five hundred fifty Native Americans, mainly from tribes within the
Louisiana Purchased territory, were on display at this so called
(05:40):
Indian Reservation. Fourteen different tribes had individual areas that demonstrated
their traditional housing and living arrangements, clothing, food, and cultural practices.
This simultaneously illustrated the diversity among the nation's indigenous peoples
while also sending a message that they were, at least
the organizer's view, primitive. The Model Indian School was in
(06:04):
the middle of Indian Hill. It was a three story
building that faced an open plaza when it was surrounded
by these fourteen miniature communities. School was in session from
nine am to five pm, and visitors could observe a
kindergarten class from Pima Indian School in Arizona Territory, a
seventh grade class from Chillico Indian School, and what's now
Oklahoma but was an Indian Territory, and a wide array
(06:28):
of domestic and vocational courses. These classes and workshops were
arranged along one side of a wide hallway, and on
the other side were open stalls where Native Americans sold baskets, pots,
and other indigenous art and handiwork. This contrast was part
of the point of the Model Indian Schools existence. It
(06:48):
sent a message. Without these schools, the students would grow
up to be selling so called primitive crafts from a
blanket on the ground. The school also had a chapel,
and that was where the students gave performances and recitations
in the afternoons. As the fare war on, this actually
became a really popular attraction. The crowds got a lot
(07:09):
too big to fit inside the chapel, so whenever the
weather allowed, these performances were moved outdoors. When S. M
McCowen contacted Fred Campbell to ask fort Shaw Indian School
to participate in the Model Indian School. It was up
to Campbell to choose which students should attend, and for him,
this was an incredibly easy decision. The basketball team was
(07:32):
famous all across the state of Montana. They were all
exemplary students, as well as being very responsible and mature.
Remember they're all traveling together all the time and seemed
to have no problems. Uh So, upon receiving this invitation,
Campbell told them that if they continued to do so
well in their academic and vocational work, and if they
kept playing as well as they had been until it
(07:54):
was time to travel to St. Louis, they would be
the ones to go. This is a strategic move on
Campbell's part. The team had become well known enough in
Montana that they could easily arrange games as they traveled
to the state to help raise money for the trip,
and as the word spread, he thought crowds would probably
follow them if they as they got farther and farther
(08:15):
away from home. Knowing that there was a chance they
would pass through towns that didn't yet have a basketball team,
Campbell also expanded the size of the team's roster so
that if there was no local team, or if the
local team didn't think it could make a respectable showing
against Fort Shot team, they'd have enough players on hand
for scrimmage games. This would also let them play five
(08:38):
on five exhibitions at the World's Fair if there was
no team to play against there. And we're going to
talk about who the players were and how they got
ready after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
When building out the team that would travel to the
(09:00):
World's Fair, Fred Campbell, who was coach, kept the trio
who had performed so well in earlier games. Nettie Worth
remained center, and Minnie Burton and Emma Sansavor were both
still forwards. Nettie's older sister, Lizzie, who was twenty three,
had recently graduated from Carlisle Indian School, and she came
on board as a chaperone and a substitute player. So
(09:21):
Sephine Langley, who had been with the team from the
beginning and had previously taken on a similar role, was
at this point engaged to be married, and she left
the team to take a full time job at the school.
Also remaining from the nineteen o two team was Belle Johnson,
who had been friends with Josie Langley when they were
both living on the Blackfeet Reservation. Bell's mother sent her
(09:44):
and her siblings to Fort Shaw on Josie's encouragement, and
Josie took them under her wing when they were orphaned
after their mother's death in nineteen hundred. Rounding out the
nineteen o four team where Katie Snell, Jenny Butch Rose LaRose,
Flora Lucero, Sarah Mitchell, and Genevieve Healey. He was known
as Jen. Katie, Jenny, and Sarah were all as Sina Boin. Rose.
(10:07):
LaRose was Shoshone and Chippewa and her father's side, and
Bannock on her mother's. Jen Healy was Grovant and Flora
was Chippewa. Most of them had been substitute players in
their previous season. Part of the agreement for their getting
to go to St. Louis was continuing to play as
well as they had been, but they didn't exactly get
(10:27):
that opportunity. The state had not developed a formal structure
for pairing teams against one another. There was no statewide
association or organization setting standards for games, playoffs, and championships.
It was the responsibility of individual schools to work out
game schedules, and Fort Shaw did not get that done.
(10:48):
The reasons for not getting that done are not entirely clear,
and it could have been a product of several factors,
like the general difficulties of scheduling games all across the
state when there was not an organ ased way to
do it, reluctance by other teams to play against Fort Shaw,
which by this point had proven itself to be a powerhouse,
and just being more focused on preparing for a multi
(11:11):
month trip to St. Louis. According to the Anaconda Standard,
it was because quote, there is no girls team in
the state that can give them anything like a tussle.
They stand alone and unrivaled. Whatever the reason, Fort Shaw
just didn't get much of a competitive schedule together for
the nineteen or three season, so instead of playing against
(11:31):
other teams, Fort Shaw spent most of the season playing
scrimmage games. This gave the new players more opportunities to
play and practice performing in front of a crowd. Meanwhile,
the school's vocational classes made new uniforms, still with long
sleeve tops with sailor collars and bloomer like pants with
red and white trim to distinguish between the two scrimmage teams.
(11:54):
In addition to all their scrimmage exhibitions, the young women
had a lot of other skills to to brush up
on before going to the World's Fair. In addition to
doing their academic and vocational work in front of an
audience at the Model Indian School, they would be performing
in mandolin recitals, doing literary recitations, and giving demonstrations of
(12:15):
gymnastics and calisthenics. Lizzie Worth acted as choreographer for their demonstrations,
and Fort Shaw's music teacher, Fern Evans set the program
and trained them for their musical recitals. Lily B. Crawford
trained them in their literary recitations, which was the one
aspect of their preparation that the girls struggled with. Most
(12:37):
of the girls have been playing team games together since childhood,
and they had been studying music since they entered Fort Shaw.
The school's music program was also highly regarded, with the
band accompanying the basketball team and holding performances at halftime
and after the game, but almost none of them really
had any experience speaking in front of a crowd or
(12:57):
reciting a literary piece for crowds. And jointment. A should
make it clear that they likely all had experience with
music from before they entered the school, but the school
was really really where they had formal education and music.
The piece they prepared for their literary recitation was from
Henry Wadsworth Longfellows, the Song of Hiawatha, in particular, it
(13:18):
was part twenty the Famine. They also did an interpretive
performance called Song of the Mystic, which was a dance
that they performed in white robes. And this whole dance
and the robe that they were wearing was described as
just dazzlingly beautiful to watch. For their recitation, UH, they
were to wear ceremonial buckskin dresses, which was a challenge.
(13:40):
At Fort Shaw, the girls were only allowed to wear
uniforms and back Home Indian Agents, which were government appointees
that sort of served as liaisons with UH native people's,
had strongly discouraged the wearing of traditional native garments, so
finding enough buckskin dresses and beaded breastplates for this recitation
actually proved to be very difficult. As they prepared to
(14:03):
go to St. Louis, the basketball team added these recitations,
dances and recitals to their schedules so they would follow
up their exhibition games with concerts afterward, and the cost
of admission went towards their funds for the trip. Through
the early spring of nineteen o four, the Fort Shaw team,
the band, and a few other students who had a
particular knack for performance traveled to Anaconda Butte and Missoula,
(14:27):
playing what was billed as a farewell game and performance,
the public's last chance to see them before they left
for St. Louis. After the scrimmage game, they change out
of their uniforms and into their traditional attire for an
evening of music, recitation and dance. The Model Indian School
at the St. Louis World's Fair was scheduled to open
(14:47):
on June first, nineteen o four, and the Fort Shaw
team had to join a little later because of their
school commitments. They weren't actually able to leave until the
start of June. They traveled by wagon and then train,
doing something of a whistle stop tour through Montana, North Dakota,
and Minnesota before turning south towards Missouri. They arrived on
(15:08):
the fairs Montana Dame that was June fourteenth, four and
they played a mandolin recital not long after they got
off the train. I'm just gonna say that sounds exhausting
to me. I can barely get off the airplane and
come right to the office and start working. And they
had been in transit on a train for a couple
of weeks, got off the train and played amandaland recital.
(15:28):
All of this sounds exhausted. Go play a basketball game
and then change clothes and you're gonna dance for a while,
and you're gonna play some music and you're gonna do recitation. Yes,
that's exhausting. It is. And we're gonna talk about the
time that they spent doing this in St. Louis after
another quick sponsor break. As we alluded to before the break,
(15:54):
it had taken the Fort Shaw basketball team and their
coach and chaperons about two weeks to travel from school
to St. Louis. Once they got there, they kept up
a busy schedule. In addition to their demonstration classes at
the Model Indian School, they had regularly scheduled performances of
their Hiawatha recitation, Song of the Mystic and their mandolin concertos.
(16:15):
Twice a week, weather permitting, they held basketball exhibitions in
the courtyard outside of the model School. The players had downtime,
they usually spent it down at the Pike, which became
a favorite place to wander and watch and try out
new foods. Most of their games on the fairgrounds were scrimmages,
but they did actually leave the fairgrounds to play against
(16:37):
several local high school teams. Even though they never had
a home court advantage and they did not have the
welcoming crowd that they had grown used to back in Montana,
they still won every single time. If you've listened to
our live show from Dallas on Pierre de Freddy in
the Modern Olympic Games, you'll know that in nineteen o four,
(16:57):
the Olympic Games were held in St. Louis at the
same time at the as the World Spare. Unsurprisingly, this
led to some problems, but it also meant there were
a lot of athletic activities to take in in St. Louis,
including basketball games. But the Fort Shop basketball team was
really the only opportunity to see women's sports. Women weren't
(17:20):
officially allowed to participate in the Olympic Games yet, and
women's basketball would not be an Olympic sport for another
seventy plus years. The team did, however, get the honor
of playing an exhibition game at the Olympics. Yeah, if
you'll recall, these two events happening abutted right against each
other caused so much confusion. Some people didn't even know
(17:42):
they that the Olympics were happening. Some of them that
were actually in the Olympics thought they were playing at
the World Fair. Aside from those couple of early games
in their first season of competitive play, at this point,
the Fort Shaw Indians School girls basketball team was undefeated.
News coverage of their games suggested that they were unstoppable, speedier,
(18:02):
and more agile than the other teams, and adept at
feints and strategies that their opponents just could not match.
So Philip Strummel of Missouri decided it was time for
somebody to rise to this challenge. He put together an
all star team to play against Fort Shaw in a
three game match to determine who would be champion of
(18:22):
the World's fare. He hands selected past members of St.
Louis's Central High School team, taking the best of the
best from the years that Central had been state champions.
This alumna team trained together with the specific goal exclusively
of defeating Fort Shaw. The games were to take place
over three Saturdays. The first game was held on September three,
(18:47):
and Fort Shaw one twenty four to two. Still not
the colossal scores that happened today, but that's a big disparity,
and they did it even though Emma Sansovor was only
recently back on the court, having sprained her ankle in
one of their games against the local high school. And
the words of the St. Louis Dispatch quote, to the
(19:08):
great surprise of several hundred spectators, the girls from Fort
Shaw were more active, more accurate, and cooler than their opponents.
At the next scheduled Saturday, Strommle and the St. Louis
alumna team didn't even show up, forfeiting the entire series. Apparently,
though the team was not actually content to lose the
(19:30):
series by forfeit, they asked for a second match, which
took place on October eight, this time in front of
the Model Indian School. So many people came to watch
the security had to be called to clear the playing
field and keep the crowd held back. Fort Shaw one
again seventeen to six, this time making them the undisputed
(19:51):
champions of the nineteen o four Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and
even though there was no official governing body for a
World Basketball League, the public consensus was that they were
world champions as well, even though the World's Fair was
to run until December. The Model Indian School was really
only built as a summer building. It was just not
(20:12):
equipped to withstand cold temperatures or wintry weather. So not
long after that October eighth championship, the Fort Shaw students,
together with the rest of the Model School student body,
helped dismantle it. And then they packed up and went
home and their journals and their letters. The players unsurprisingly
described this as being both a sorrow and a relief,
(20:32):
Like they had they had seemed to have a really
good time in St. Louis, but they were also eager
to get back home to the rest of their classmates
and eventually to their families. Maybe not to be working
an incredibly grueling sports and performance schedule. It is a
crueling It surprises me that they that they were able
(20:53):
to spend as much time on the pike as they did,
like that was really their favorite place to go anytime
they did not have something on or scheduled to do yeah.
The fot Shaw girls basketball team continued its undefeated streak
through nineteen o six, as its members became adults and
either left school or graduated, though they were invited to
the Lewis and Clark Exposition of nineteen o five. By
(21:16):
that point, their reputation as a team was so formidable
that no one wanted to play against them. Only a
couple of world champion team members were still enrolled in
the school by nineteen o seven, which is the year
that Fred Campbell left a school superintendent to take a
job at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation as an allotting agent. Today,
there is a monuments to the team at the former
(21:37):
site of Fort Shaw Indian School. It's shaped like an
arch that reads nineteen o four World Champions Fort Shaw
Indian School. There's an inscribed stone with a picture of
the team and the players names on it beneath the arch.
It's not actually clear what happened to all of the
nineteen o four Fort Shaw players after the end of
the season. Most of them went on to finish school
(22:00):
mary and have families. Some later worked as seamstresses, teachers, nurses, aids,
and interpreters. Several died at sadly early ages, including Minnie Burton,
who died in childbirth at thirty three, and Emma Sansavor,
who died of septicemia after the birth of her ninth
child when she was thirty nine. Jenny Butch died in
(22:21):
nineteen o nine of a lethal dose of salts, with
foul play actually suspected in her death. Flora Lucero died
of diabetes in ninety eight. Jim Healy outlived the rest
of her team, dying in nineteen eighty one at the
age of nineties three. Apart from their physical talent and
skill on the court, the girls basketball team at Fort
(22:43):
Shaw's an amazing example of resilience in the face of adversity.
In addition to the general experience of growing up in
a boarding school that was a meant to erase their
own culture and replace it with another one, several of
the girls experienced personal tragedies in their your life or
while at school. Many had lost immediate family members before
(23:05):
being enrolled, or learned of the deaths of parents, siblings,
and other family members back at home while they were studying,
or actually lived through those deaths. When illnesses like typhoid
and smallpox struck the school. This was not limited to
their time at Fort Shaw. A five year old died
of unknown causes during an outbreak of fever that coincided
(23:26):
with a heat wave at the Model Indian School in
July of nineteen four, leading the Pima Indian School kindergarten
to go back to Arizona Territory early yeah. The unknown
causes was the officially recorded cause of death, but it
was pretty apparent that the child was sick and the
school was fastly overheated. Some of these tragedies took place
(23:49):
during the playing season. Emma Sansofor's mother struggled with alcoholism
and she had become involved with an abusive man. Emma
learned from a newspaper report that her mother had disappeared
and was suspected to have been murdered just before a
game in nineteen o three during the team's tour. In
the early spring of nineteen o four, Katie Snill's little
(24:11):
brother George and their cousin Fred Cunahan both ran away
from school and they were caught in a blizzard. George
survived but had severe frostbite, and Fred died. The two boys,
who were both just seven had apparently been inspired by
the successful escape of four older boys who had sneaked
away before the storm and successfully hopped a train back
(24:33):
home before the storm hit. That last tragedy really highlights
one of the disparities of this story. We spent a
lot of time in Part one talking about the system
of Indian boarding schools in the United States and how
the conditions there were often miserable and even abusive for
the students. The girls basketball team had a lot of privileges.
(24:53):
They wrote about their time on the team and at
the fair as a joyful one. They made a remarkable
name for themselves and for the school, but this doesn't
erase the experience of their classmates, who are not so
comparatively fortunate. Although their enrollments started to decline in the
nineteen teens, federal off reservation boarding schools have continued to
(25:13):
operate in the decades since then. Fort Shaw closed in
nineteen ten and Carlisle Indian Industrial School closed in nineteen eighteen.
Until the nineteen sixties, the boarding schools that continued to
operate still had a goal of westernizing and americanizing their
students and erasing Native cultures. By nineteen seventy three, about
(25:35):
sixty thousand Native students were enrolled in boarding schools on
and off reservations. The focus of these schools started to
change in the nineteen seventies, largely through Native activism, and
today there are still a handful of federal boarding schools
in operation, run by the Bureau of Indian Education at
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is part of the
(25:56):
United States Department of the Interior. Now, these schools are
generally focused on students who were at risk for drug abuse, suicide,
and other serious issues. Rather than teaching only in English
and discouraging Native practices, the schools today actively teach Native
languages and cultural practices in addition to other academic subjects.
(26:19):
But these boarding schools continue to be the subject of controversy,
everything from government budget cuts to low graduation rates and
achievement scores, and a general question of whether the federal
government should be running boarding schools for Native students at all.
There's an ongoing movement for tribes and nations to assume
control over those schools themselves. To circle back to basketball
(26:41):
as we close out, It is a hugely popular sport
today in many Native American communities with a really fast
paced style of play that's come to be known as
res ball. Even so, it was only in twenty eleven
that Tony Robinson became the first Native American woman drafted
into the w n b A basketball. We did a
sports episode, Tracy, I know, I didn't you did research
(27:05):
on sports things. I know. I did a two part
podcast on sports ball, which is uh still kind of
astounding to me. I said in part one that I
would be really hard pressed to like sit all the
way through a football game, which is a thing that
I did in high school as part of the color
guard in the marching band. But I could not tell
(27:28):
you what was going on on the field at any point.
I just I yelled when people yelled, and then I
went out onto the field during halftime and did my
flag routine. Yeah. I never really got into football. Hockey
and baseball. I have both watched, uh with some fervor,
(27:49):
but football has never been my my sport. Either has basketball,
for that matter, But lots of people love them and
get great enjoyment from him. My best friend is a
football fanatic, so I hear a lot about it during
the season. Yeah. When I, um, we made that reference
in part one to the Carlisle Indian Schools football team,
and I was listening. I was doing some research about
(28:10):
that because I felt like we should acknowledge it. It
would be weird not to say something about it, since
you know, it has parallels to these two episodes in
so many different ways. But I was listening to this
explanation about how the football rules at the time differed
from the football rules now, and it got into this
whole thing about the first down line, and I was like,
(28:31):
I'm out. I don't know. It's good. Uh, you know
where I do. It's It's one of those things where
I have an almost visceral inability to understand it. So
many times in my life I have I have read
what the first down line is, and it's just it
(28:53):
won't stay in my brain. It falls directly out the
other side. You got other stuff in your brain. Thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar over the course of the show, that could be
(29:13):
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
I Heart radio dot com. Our old Health Stuff Works
email address No longer works, and you can find us
all over social media at Missed in History and you
can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
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(29:34):
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heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
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Happy Saturday. Today's Classic is the second part of our
two parter on the Fort Shaw Indian School girls basketball team,
which originally came out November. Part one was last week's
Saturday Classic. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
(00:29):
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
We are concluding a two part episode today. In part
one of this show, we gave some background about the
Fort Shaw Indian School, which was part of the federally
run system of off reservation boarding schools that were meant
to assimilate in sort of scare quotes native students, it's
(00:51):
a white culture, or at least to get Native students
to conform with white culture. It didn't actually assimilate. There
was still a lot of racism and discrimination after people
went through these programs. We also talked a bit about
the history of basketball and how girls basketball at Fort
Shaw quickly became the best basketball team in Montana. Today,
(01:13):
we are picking up with the St. Louis World's Fair,
where the team spent about four months in nineteen o
four becoming the world champions there, As was the case
in the previous episode. We are still getting into some
pretty abhorrent racism here, and there is also a brief
mention of animal cruelty. In nineteen o three, Fort Shaw
Indian School was, as we mentioned at the end of
(01:35):
the previous episode, invited to participate in the nineteen o
four St. Louis World's Fair, also known as the Louisiana
Purchase Exposition, so named because it was meant to start
a year earlier and mark the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase.
This was, of course also the subject of the nineteen
forty four film starring Judy Garland, which is spectacular. It's
(01:58):
also totally not surprising that forty years later Metro Goldwyn
Mayor made a musical out of this. This fare was huge.
The nineteen o four World's Fair ran from April thirtie
December one, during which time more than twenty million people
attended it. The fair site, which was the largest ever
for a World's fare, covered twelve hundred acres that was
(02:20):
dotted with about nine hundred buildings, including fifteen exhibit palaces.
The exhibitors included sixty two nations and forty three of
the then forty five United States States. A mile long
avenue called the Pike was full of vendors and amusements.
It seems like every ubiquitous American food, from hot dogs
(02:42):
to ice cream cones, was supposedly introduced at the nineteen
o four World's Fair, but most of those stories just
f y I are apocryphal. Uh. There were carnival rides,
the massive ferris wheel, boer War reenactments, Award of Babies,
and incubators. It just goes on and on and on.
A running theme for this fair, as was often the
(03:03):
case in these kinds of expositions, was progress. Some of
this progress was related to science and industry. The incubators
are actually one example. There were meteorological balloon experiments. There
was a demonstration of the first ground to air wireless telegraph.
New technologies from X rays to electric typewriters got their
(03:24):
first public display. Some things that were still pretty novel
to the world at the time got their time to
shine to including all kinds of other electrical appliances, gasoline engines,
and automobiles. But some of it was also about cultural progress.
The general idea was that the United States culture was
superior and that the nation was having a civilizing influence
(03:48):
on the rest of the world as well as within
its own borders. This cultural progress was displayed through large
pavilions of living exhibits of thousands of people from around
the world. These living exhibits were a common element of
the world's fairs and expositions of the era. They functioned
almost like temporary human zoos. People actually lived in these
(04:11):
where the duration of the fair and living exhibits were
frequently arranged to suggest a progression from the least to
the most civilized people's One example in St. Louis was
the Philippine Village, which covered forty seven acres and housed
more than a thousand people from at least ten different
Filipino ethnic groups. Often, the cultural practices that were considered
(04:34):
the most taboo from a white Christian American perspective, uh
were the biggest draw. In the case of the Philippine Village,
this was the eager wrote who occasionally consumed dog for
ceremonial purposes, and during the fair, organizers gave them dog
to eat every day so that spectators could watch. Fort
(04:56):
Shaw's invitation was to participate in the Model Indian School.
This was a mock boarding school where students would demonstrate
the academic, domestic, and vocational skills that they were taught
at school. The Fort Shaw School was not the only
Indian school to participate. The Model Indian School was to
house about a hundred and fifty students selected from all
(05:17):
across the nation's network of Indian boarding schools, specifically schools
that were located within what had been Louisiana Purchased territory.
The school was part of a section of the fair
that came to be known as Indian Hill. We're about
five hundred fifty Native Americans, mainly from tribes within the
Louisiana Purchased territory, were on display at this so called
(05:40):
Indian Reservation. Fourteen different tribes had individual areas that demonstrated
their traditional housing and living arrangements, clothing, food, and cultural practices.
This simultaneously illustrated the diversity among the nation's indigenous peoples
while also sending a message that they were, at least
the organizer's view, primitive. The Model Indian School was in
(06:04):
the middle of Indian Hill. It was a three story
building that faced an open plaza when it was surrounded
by these fourteen miniature communities. School was in session from
nine am to five pm, and visitors could observe a
kindergarten class from Pima Indian School in Arizona Territory, a
seventh grade class from Chillico Indian School, and what's now
Oklahoma but was an Indian Territory, and a wide array
(06:28):
of domestic and vocational courses. These classes and workshops were
arranged along one side of a wide hallway, and on
the other side were open stalls where Native Americans sold baskets, pots,
and other indigenous art and handiwork. This contrast was part
of the point of the Model Indian Schools existence. It
(06:48):
sent a message. Without these schools, the students would grow
up to be selling so called primitive crafts from a
blanket on the ground. The school also had a chapel,
and that was where the students gave performances and recitations
in the afternoons. As the fare war on, this actually
became a really popular attraction. The crowds got a lot
(07:09):
too big to fit inside the chapel, so whenever the
weather allowed, these performances were moved outdoors. When S. M
McCowen contacted Fred Campbell to ask fort Shaw Indian School
to participate in the Model Indian School. It was up
to Campbell to choose which students should attend, and for him,
this was an incredibly easy decision. The basketball team was
(07:32):
famous all across the state of Montana. They were all
exemplary students, as well as being very responsible and mature.
Remember they're all traveling together all the time and seemed
to have no problems. Uh So, upon receiving this invitation,
Campbell told them that if they continued to do so
well in their academic and vocational work, and if they
kept playing as well as they had been until it
(07:54):
was time to travel to St. Louis, they would be
the ones to go. This is a strategic move on
Campbell's part. The team had become well known enough in
Montana that they could easily arrange games as they traveled
to the state to help raise money for the trip,
and as the word spread, he thought crowds would probably
follow them if they as they got farther and farther
(08:15):
away from home. Knowing that there was a chance they
would pass through towns that didn't yet have a basketball team,
Campbell also expanded the size of the team's roster so
that if there was no local team, or if the
local team didn't think it could make a respectable showing
against Fort Shot team, they'd have enough players on hand
for scrimmage games. This would also let them play five
(08:38):
on five exhibitions at the World's Fair if there was
no team to play against there. And we're going to
talk about who the players were and how they got
ready after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
When building out the team that would travel to the
(09:00):
World's Fair, Fred Campbell, who was coach, kept the trio
who had performed so well in earlier games. Nettie Worth
remained center, and Minnie Burton and Emma Sansavor were both
still forwards. Nettie's older sister, Lizzie, who was twenty three,
had recently graduated from Carlisle Indian School, and she came
on board as a chaperone and a substitute player. So
(09:21):
Sephine Langley, who had been with the team from the
beginning and had previously taken on a similar role, was
at this point engaged to be married, and she left
the team to take a full time job at the school.
Also remaining from the nineteen o two team was Belle Johnson,
who had been friends with Josie Langley when they were
both living on the Blackfeet Reservation. Bell's mother sent her
(09:44):
and her siblings to Fort Shaw on Josie's encouragement, and
Josie took them under her wing when they were orphaned
after their mother's death in nineteen hundred. Rounding out the
nineteen o four team where Katie Snell, Jenny Butch Rose LaRose,
Flora Lucero, Sarah Mitchell, and Genevieve Healey. He was known
as Jen. Katie, Jenny, and Sarah were all as Sina Boin. Rose.
(10:07):
LaRose was Shoshone and Chippewa and her father's side, and
Bannock on her mother's. Jen Healy was Grovant and Flora
was Chippewa. Most of them had been substitute players in
their previous season. Part of the agreement for their getting
to go to St. Louis was continuing to play as
well as they had been, but they didn't exactly get
(10:27):
that opportunity. The state had not developed a formal structure
for pairing teams against one another. There was no statewide
association or organization setting standards for games, playoffs, and championships.
It was the responsibility of individual schools to work out
game schedules, and Fort Shaw did not get that done.
(10:48):
The reasons for not getting that done are not entirely clear,
and it could have been a product of several factors,
like the general difficulties of scheduling games all across the
state when there was not an organ ased way to
do it, reluctance by other teams to play against Fort Shaw,
which by this point had proven itself to be a powerhouse,
and just being more focused on preparing for a multi
(11:11):
month trip to St. Louis. According to the Anaconda Standard,
it was because quote, there is no girls team in
the state that can give them anything like a tussle.
They stand alone and unrivaled. Whatever the reason, Fort Shaw
just didn't get much of a competitive schedule together for
the nineteen or three season, so instead of playing against
(11:31):
other teams, Fort Shaw spent most of the season playing
scrimmage games. This gave the new players more opportunities to
play and practice performing in front of a crowd. Meanwhile,
the school's vocational classes made new uniforms, still with long
sleeve tops with sailor collars and bloomer like pants with
red and white trim to distinguish between the two scrimmage teams.
(11:54):
In addition to all their scrimmage exhibitions, the young women
had a lot of other skills to to brush up
on before going to the World's Fair. In addition to
doing their academic and vocational work in front of an
audience at the Model Indian School, they would be performing
in mandolin recitals, doing literary recitations, and giving demonstrations of
(12:15):
gymnastics and calisthenics. Lizzie Worth acted as choreographer for their demonstrations,
and Fort Shaw's music teacher, Fern Evans set the program
and trained them for their musical recitals. Lily B. Crawford
trained them in their literary recitations, which was the one
aspect of their preparation that the girls struggled with. Most
(12:37):
of the girls have been playing team games together since childhood,
and they had been studying music since they entered Fort Shaw.
The school's music program was also highly regarded, with the
band accompanying the basketball team and holding performances at halftime
and after the game, but almost none of them really
had any experience speaking in front of a crowd or
(12:57):
reciting a literary piece for crowds. And jointment. A should
make it clear that they likely all had experience with
music from before they entered the school, but the school
was really really where they had formal education and music.
The piece they prepared for their literary recitation was from
Henry Wadsworth Longfellows, the Song of Hiawatha, in particular, it
(13:18):
was part twenty the Famine. They also did an interpretive
performance called Song of the Mystic, which was a dance
that they performed in white robes. And this whole dance
and the robe that they were wearing was described as
just dazzlingly beautiful to watch. For their recitation, UH, they
were to wear ceremonial buckskin dresses, which was a challenge.
(13:40):
At Fort Shaw, the girls were only allowed to wear
uniforms and back Home Indian Agents, which were government appointees
that sort of served as liaisons with UH native people's,
had strongly discouraged the wearing of traditional native garments, so
finding enough buckskin dresses and beaded breastplates for this recitation
actually proved to be very difficult. As they prepared to
(14:03):
go to St. Louis, the basketball team added these recitations,
dances and recitals to their schedules so they would follow
up their exhibition games with concerts afterward, and the cost
of admission went towards their funds for the trip. Through
the early spring of nineteen o four, the Fort Shaw team,
the band, and a few other students who had a
particular knack for performance traveled to Anaconda Butte and Missoula,
(14:27):
playing what was billed as a farewell game and performance,
the public's last chance to see them before they left
for St. Louis. After the scrimmage game, they change out
of their uniforms and into their traditional attire for an
evening of music, recitation and dance. The Model Indian School
at the St. Louis World's Fair was scheduled to open
(14:47):
on June first, nineteen o four, and the Fort Shaw
team had to join a little later because of their
school commitments. They weren't actually able to leave until the
start of June. They traveled by wagon and then train,
doing something of a whistle stop tour through Montana, North Dakota,
and Minnesota before turning south towards Missouri. They arrived on
(15:08):
the fairs Montana Dame that was June fourteenth, four and
they played a mandolin recital not long after they got
off the train. I'm just gonna say that sounds exhausting
to me. I can barely get off the airplane and
come right to the office and start working. And they
had been in transit on a train for a couple
of weeks, got off the train and played amandaland recital.
(15:28):
All of this sounds exhausted. Go play a basketball game
and then change clothes and you're gonna dance for a while,
and you're gonna play some music and you're gonna do recitation. Yes,
that's exhausting. It is. And we're gonna talk about the
time that they spent doing this in St. Louis after
another quick sponsor break. As we alluded to before the break,
(15:54):
it had taken the Fort Shaw basketball team and their
coach and chaperons about two weeks to travel from school
to St. Louis. Once they got there, they kept up
a busy schedule. In addition to their demonstration classes at
the Model Indian School, they had regularly scheduled performances of
their Hiawatha recitation, Song of the Mystic and their mandolin concertos.
(16:15):
Twice a week, weather permitting, they held basketball exhibitions in
the courtyard outside of the model School. The players had downtime,
they usually spent it down at the Pike, which became
a favorite place to wander and watch and try out
new foods. Most of their games on the fairgrounds were scrimmages,
but they did actually leave the fairgrounds to play against
(16:37):
several local high school teams. Even though they never had
a home court advantage and they did not have the
welcoming crowd that they had grown used to back in Montana,
they still won every single time. If you've listened to
our live show from Dallas on Pierre de Freddy in
the Modern Olympic Games, you'll know that in nineteen o four,
(16:57):
the Olympic Games were held in St. Louis at the
same time at the as the World Spare. Unsurprisingly, this
led to some problems, but it also meant there were
a lot of athletic activities to take in in St. Louis,
including basketball games. But the Fort Shop basketball team was
really the only opportunity to see women's sports. Women weren't
(17:20):
officially allowed to participate in the Olympic Games yet, and
women's basketball would not be an Olympic sport for another
seventy plus years. The team did, however, get the honor
of playing an exhibition game at the Olympics. Yeah, if
you'll recall, these two events happening abutted right against each
other caused so much confusion. Some people didn't even know
(17:42):
they that the Olympics were happening. Some of them that
were actually in the Olympics thought they were playing at
the World Fair. Aside from those couple of early games
in their first season of competitive play, at this point,
the Fort Shaw Indians School girls basketball team was undefeated.
News coverage of their games suggested that they were unstoppable, speedier,
(18:02):
and more agile than the other teams, and adept at
feints and strategies that their opponents just could not match.
So Philip Strummel of Missouri decided it was time for
somebody to rise to this challenge. He put together an
all star team to play against Fort Shaw in a
three game match to determine who would be champion of
(18:22):
the World's fare. He hands selected past members of St.
Louis's Central High School team, taking the best of the
best from the years that Central had been state champions.
This alumna team trained together with the specific goal exclusively
of defeating Fort Shaw. The games were to take place
over three Saturdays. The first game was held on September three,
(18:47):
and Fort Shaw one twenty four to two. Still not
the colossal scores that happened today, but that's a big disparity,
and they did it even though Emma Sansovor was only
recently back on the court, having sprained her ankle in
one of their games against the local high school. And
the words of the St. Louis Dispatch quote, to the
(19:08):
great surprise of several hundred spectators, the girls from Fort
Shaw were more active, more accurate, and cooler than their opponents.
At the next scheduled Saturday, Strommle and the St. Louis
alumna team didn't even show up, forfeiting the entire series. Apparently,
though the team was not actually content to lose the
(19:30):
series by forfeit, they asked for a second match, which
took place on October eight, this time in front of
the Model Indian School. So many people came to watch
the security had to be called to clear the playing
field and keep the crowd held back. Fort Shaw one
again seventeen to six, this time making them the undisputed
(19:51):
champions of the nineteen o four Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and
even though there was no official governing body for a
World Basketball League, the public consensus was that they were
world champions as well, even though the World's Fair was
to run until December. The Model Indian School was really
only built as a summer building. It was just not
(20:12):
equipped to withstand cold temperatures or wintry weather. So not
long after that October eighth championship, the Fort Shaw students,
together with the rest of the Model School student body,
helped dismantle it. And then they packed up and went
home and their journals and their letters. The players unsurprisingly
described this as being both a sorrow and a relief,
(20:32):
Like they had they had seemed to have a really
good time in St. Louis, but they were also eager
to get back home to the rest of their classmates
and eventually to their families. Maybe not to be working
an incredibly grueling sports and performance schedule. It is a
crueling It surprises me that they that they were able
(20:53):
to spend as much time on the pike as they did,
like that was really their favorite place to go anytime
they did not have something on or scheduled to do yeah.
The fot Shaw girls basketball team continued its undefeated streak
through nineteen o six, as its members became adults and
either left school or graduated, though they were invited to
the Lewis and Clark Exposition of nineteen o five. By
(21:16):
that point, their reputation as a team was so formidable
that no one wanted to play against them. Only a
couple of world champion team members were still enrolled in
the school by nineteen o seven, which is the year
that Fred Campbell left a school superintendent to take a
job at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation as an allotting agent. Today,
there is a monuments to the team at the former
(21:37):
site of Fort Shaw Indian School. It's shaped like an
arch that reads nineteen o four World Champions Fort Shaw
Indian School. There's an inscribed stone with a picture of
the team and the players names on it beneath the arch.
It's not actually clear what happened to all of the
nineteen o four Fort Shaw players after the end of
the season. Most of them went on to finish school
(22:00):
mary and have families. Some later worked as seamstresses, teachers, nurses, aids,
and interpreters. Several died at sadly early ages, including Minnie Burton,
who died in childbirth at thirty three, and Emma Sansavor,
who died of septicemia after the birth of her ninth
child when she was thirty nine. Jenny Butch died in
(22:21):
nineteen o nine of a lethal dose of salts, with
foul play actually suspected in her death. Flora Lucero died
of diabetes in ninety eight. Jim Healy outlived the rest
of her team, dying in nineteen eighty one at the
age of nineties three. Apart from their physical talent and
skill on the court, the girls basketball team at Fort
(22:43):
Shaw's an amazing example of resilience in the face of adversity.
In addition to the general experience of growing up in
a boarding school that was a meant to erase their
own culture and replace it with another one, several of
the girls experienced personal tragedies in their your life or
while at school. Many had lost immediate family members before
(23:05):
being enrolled, or learned of the deaths of parents, siblings,
and other family members back at home while they were studying,
or actually lived through those deaths. When illnesses like typhoid
and smallpox struck the school. This was not limited to
their time at Fort Shaw. A five year old died
of unknown causes during an outbreak of fever that coincided
(23:26):
with a heat wave at the Model Indian School in
July of nineteen four, leading the Pima Indian School kindergarten
to go back to Arizona Territory early yeah. The unknown
causes was the officially recorded cause of death, but it
was pretty apparent that the child was sick and the
school was fastly overheated. Some of these tragedies took place
(23:49):
during the playing season. Emma Sansofor's mother struggled with alcoholism
and she had become involved with an abusive man. Emma
learned from a newspaper report that her mother had disappeared
and was suspected to have been murdered just before a
game in nineteen o three during the team's tour. In
the early spring of nineteen o four, Katie Snill's little
(24:11):
brother George and their cousin Fred Cunahan both ran away
from school and they were caught in a blizzard. George
survived but had severe frostbite, and Fred died. The two boys,
who were both just seven had apparently been inspired by
the successful escape of four older boys who had sneaked
away before the storm and successfully hopped a train back
(24:33):
home before the storm hit. That last tragedy really highlights
one of the disparities of this story. We spent a
lot of time in Part one talking about the system
of Indian boarding schools in the United States and how
the conditions there were often miserable and even abusive for
the students. The girls basketball team had a lot of privileges.
(24:53):
They wrote about their time on the team and at
the fair as a joyful one. They made a remarkable
name for themselves and for the school, but this doesn't
erase the experience of their classmates, who are not so
comparatively fortunate. Although their enrollments started to decline in the
nineteen teens, federal off reservation boarding schools have continued to
(25:13):
operate in the decades since then. Fort Shaw closed in
nineteen ten and Carlisle Indian Industrial School closed in nineteen eighteen.
Until the nineteen sixties, the boarding schools that continued to
operate still had a goal of westernizing and americanizing their
students and erasing Native cultures. By nineteen seventy three, about
(25:35):
sixty thousand Native students were enrolled in boarding schools on
and off reservations. The focus of these schools started to
change in the nineteen seventies, largely through Native activism, and
today there are still a handful of federal boarding schools
in operation, run by the Bureau of Indian Education at
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is part of the
(25:56):
United States Department of the Interior. Now, these schools are
generally focused on students who were at risk for drug abuse, suicide,
and other serious issues. Rather than teaching only in English
and discouraging Native practices, the schools today actively teach Native
languages and cultural practices in addition to other academic subjects.
(26:19):
But these boarding schools continue to be the subject of controversy,
everything from government budget cuts to low graduation rates and
achievement scores, and a general question of whether the federal
government should be running boarding schools for Native students at all.
There's an ongoing movement for tribes and nations to assume
control over those schools themselves. To circle back to basketball
(26:41):
as we close out, It is a hugely popular sport
today in many Native American communities with a really fast
paced style of play that's come to be known as
res ball. Even so, it was only in twenty eleven
that Tony Robinson became the first Native American woman drafted
into the w n b A basketball. We did a
sports episode, Tracy, I know, I didn't you did research
(27:05):
on sports things. I know. I did a two part
podcast on sports ball, which is uh still kind of
astounding to me. I said in part one that I
would be really hard pressed to like sit all the
way through a football game, which is a thing that
I did in high school as part of the color
guard in the marching band. But I could not tell
(27:28):
you what was going on on the field at any point.
I just I yelled when people yelled, and then I
went out onto the field during halftime and did my
flag routine. Yeah. I never really got into football. Hockey
and baseball. I have both watched, uh with some fervor,
(27:49):
but football has never been my my sport. Either has basketball,
for that matter, But lots of people love them and
get great enjoyment from him. My best friend is a
football fanatic, so I hear a lot about it during
the season. Yeah. When I, um, we made that reference
in part one to the Carlisle Indian Schools football team,
and I was listening. I was doing some research about
(28:10):
that because I felt like we should acknowledge it. It
would be weird not to say something about it, since
you know, it has parallels to these two episodes in
so many different ways. But I was listening to this
explanation about how the football rules at the time differed
from the football rules now, and it got into this
whole thing about the first down line, and I was like,
(28:31):
I'm out. I don't know. It's good. Uh, you know
where I do. It's It's one of those things where
I have an almost visceral inability to understand it. So
many times in my life I have I have read
what the first down line is, and it's just it
(28:53):
won't stay in my brain. It falls directly out the
other side. You got other stuff in your brain. Thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar over the course of the show, that could be
(29:13):
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
I Heart radio dot com. Our old Health Stuff Works
email address No longer works, and you can find us
all over social media at Missed in History and you
can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
(29:34):
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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