In January of 1883, an eleven-year-old boy from the Laguna pueblo in New Mexico Territory wrote a letter from the Carlisle Indian School to someone back home. Here is the letter:
Carlisle Barracks, Pa. Jan. 29, 1883
My dear father-:-
I like to tell you how I am getting along. I am well. I have been in school all the time and I am trying to speak English All the time because Capt. Pratt want us to. Some of the boys and girls don't try I think because they don't care. That is not the way to do. I am trying very hard to learn the English language. I never talk Indian since Capt. Pratt told us to stop talk. Capt. Pratt is very kind to the Indian. I think because he used to fight them. Now we have very large school[.] Dear father I have been thinking about you, because I never see you for along, long time. I like to hear from you how you are getting along. Tell me what you are doing this Winter and tell all of my friend. I am very well and learning to talk English, read and write. I think that is good for me and for you. I think because you send me to learn these good things, when I come home I shall be able to tell you a great many things that I learning at Carlisle School, and what I saw there, and what a great many thing they do the White people.
Dear father-I wish you would send my sister to school I shall be very glad because that a good thing to do.
From you affectionate Son,
Benj. M. Thomas
I found the letter in the Benjamin Thomas Collection of the Chavez Historical Library of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. When he received it, this Benjamin Thomas was the Indian Agent for New Mexico's nineteen Pueblo tribes and the Jicarilla Apaches. Mter some research and the first of several e- mail conversations with Barbara Landis, the Indian School expert at the Cumberland County Historical Society, I found that students at the Indian School commonly took "American" names, often the names of sponsors or patrons at home. Although there are no records of other contacts between the two Benjamin Thomases, I assume that the agent had recruited young Bennie Thomas-as he was known at the school and as I shall call him from now on-to come to Carlisle, where he arrived in July of 1880 and joined the school's second class. Since Bennie had had no previous education, the letter demonstrates a remarkable advance in his use of English after only two years and a few months.
Benjamin M. Thomas, the Indian agent, had been born in Indiana in 1843, so he was a young man of 37 when he met Bennie. He had attended Wabash College and then studied dentistry. In 1870, his poor health sent him west, where he secured positions with the Office of Indian Mfairs, first near Fort Reliance and then near Fort Wingate, both in Navajo country. In 1872, he became the Indian Agent for the southern Apaches at Tularosa, NM. Two years later, he moved to Santa Fe to head the bureau there.
Linda Witmer's chronicle of the Carlisle Indian School makes one feel that he was really there and knew some of the students personally. The story begins with the journey of seventy-two shackled Indian prisoners to St. Augustine, Florida in 1875 under Richard Henry Pratt, the transfer of most of them three years later to Hampton, Virginia, and the establishment of the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle in 1879.