The Carlisle Indian School: Baseball as a ‘Civilizing’ Influence

1885 Carlisle student baseball team (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)

 

Children played baseball at the United States Training and Industrial School at Carlisle Barracks. On one level, they were children like any others, playing a game, having fun running about. But to the children, their teachers and coaches, school administration, the federal government, and even the nation, that same baseball was also so much more, as was every activity these children undertook. To understand the impact of their baseball we must understand the nature and significance of the school; we must know the children themselves: who they were, where they came from, and what the school meant to them and their families. We must also understand its founder, Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Jim Thorpe, “Chief” Albert Bender, and Glenn “Pop” Warner may be the names most commonly associated with the school, but there is much more to the story.

The United States Training and Industrial School at Carlisle Barracks, more often referred to as the Carlisle Indian School, was not the first boarding school for Native American children. It was, however, intentionally the first one to be well removed from the children’s homes and families. In 1879, when the school was founded, the US government was still in the process of relocating Native nations onto reservations, but south-central Pennsylvania, where Carlisle is located, is nowhere near any of those reservations. The chronological context is important here; in 1879, George Armstrong Custer’s “Last Stand” was only three years in the past, and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee was still to come. Warring between the US military and various Indian Nations was not history, but very current events.1 The Civil War had not yet been over for 20 years, and it was during that conflict that Richard Henry Pratt began the set of experiences that would culminate in his idea of a different kind of boarding school for Native American children.

Today, Pratt is perhaps most infamous for being the originator of the phrase “Kill the Indian, save the man,” but to use that phrase as the only lens through which to view the man is a drastic simplification. Historian Robert Utley wrote that “Carlisle [Indian School] was the institutional embodiment of Richard H. Pratt, as he was its personification.”2

So, who was Richard Henry Pratt? A native Indianan, he tried his hand at the trades of printing and tinsmithing. He was 21 when the Civil War broke out and he enlisted in a volunteer regiment. Achieving some success in the Army, he rose to the rank of first lieutenant of cavalry by the time the war ended. Having acquired a bride, he and his bride opened a hardware store in Indiana, but an unsuccessful business made him yearn for Army life. He applied for a commission in the regular Army and was appointed a second lieutenant in the 10th US Cavalry. The 10th was a unit of “Buffalo Soldiers,” made up of African American enlisted men but led by White officers.

Assigned to Fort Gibson in Indian Territory [now Oklahoma], Pratt worked well with the enlisted men and with the “Indian Scouts” and found himself attached to the scout units with greater frequency. Pratt described himself (writing in the third person) as looking “upon them as men and brothers, lacking in attainment only, and that through no fault of theirs. His contention … was that the Indians were entitled to a full, fair chance for development in every way, and until they had that, our people had no right to form adverse opinions of them, or to condemn them as incorrigibly savage.”3

In the mid- through late 1870s Pratt had further encounters with Native Peoples being held as prisoners of war at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. He found “three years of imprisonment resulted in English speaking, in the adoption of civilized dress and habits and in a hungering on their part for a career in the larger life of the nation.”4

This combination of experiences caused Pratt to conclude: “In Indian civilization I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”6 That meant removing them from reservations so they could be immersed in the culture of which they were to become a part. And what better way to achieve a complete cultural conversion than to start with the young? Pratt got permission and private funding for 17 of “his” young Indian men to attend the Hampton Normal and Industrial School, but it was a school intended for Black Americans; Pratt felt the Native American students should have one of their very own.7

What we now refer to as the Progressive Era was just getting underway by the time Pratt founded the school. Changes in social attitudes that accompany the period are inherent in the philosophy underlying not only Pratt’s desire to found the school, but the support it received from the government and certain public sectors. Not that late nineteenth-century racial views mirrored our own; Europeans and Euro-Americans believed deeply in their own superiority, whether it was socioculturally, politically, or religiously. But they had come to believe that at least some of the non-White peoples could (and should) be taught to live/act/function “like whites did.” In urban centers along the East Coast, this attitude was increasingly apparent when it came to views on Native Americans living within the country.8

Physical distance from sites of violence between the military and Native communities or settlers and Native communities allowed Easterners the freedom to sympathize with those Native communities, usually in a paternalistic way. That colonial paternalism was important to the success of the school, which was funded in part by the federal government; however, the funding never seemed sufficient. Pratt and his successors made tours to raise funds, entertained wealthy visitors who could be appealed to for donations. They also employed the students themselves whenever possible to save money, and earned income for the school by renting out student labor to farms and businesses across Pennsylvania.9 The program was not referred to as “renting”; it was called “putting out” and was intended to provide the students with the opportunity to use and grow their vocational skills in real environments such as shops, offices, and farms.

The space that became the school’s campus had inadequate facilities when the students arrived in the fall of 1879, so while local businesses and labor were employed to get things started, the school always relied on student labor. Permission and cooperation from the federal government – specifically the Bureau of Indian Affairs, then under the War Department – had come with the stipulation that girls be educated at the new school as well as boys.10 Newspapers and newsletters to donors were printed in the school’s print shop; girls were taught laundering by washing their schoolmates’ clothing, but also worked in the print shop. The girls were taught how to “keep house” as defined by Euro-American standards, which saved the school more money since the girls could then also clean and cook.

Pratt seems to have been the one to suggest the Carlisle Barracks as the location for his school when he proposed the idea to the secretaries of the interior and war, with whom he met in person for that purpose. He liked it in part because it was far from any reservations, meaning the children would be removed from their homes and families and those influences. Additionally, it was good farming country, and the current generations of residents had never personally experienced perceived threats to their homes by regional Native communities, and so were “long free from the universal border prejudice against the Indians.”11

Over the life of the school, children were brought from dozens of Indian nations from across what we know as the United States: as near to Carlisle as upstate New York, and as far away as Alaska and the Southwest. They carried with them an equal array of languages and customs, and varying degrees of previous exposure to the English language, Euro-Americans, and Christianity. The journey alone exposed them to a whirlwind of new experiences, such as train or steamship travel, and complete isolation from family and loved ones.

Once the children arrived at the school, they were forbidden to use their own languages or practice their traditions. Play became one of the universal languages; there is evidence that the children played with local Carlisle children sometimes. Pickup teams formed in open areas on the school grounds during free time after supper. Baseball may not have been entirely new to at least some of the children, depending on where they had lived prior to their arrival at the school. Baseball was played at most, if not all, US military facilities across the West; we know of teams consisting of Native American scouts and POWs at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, playing teams made up of various cavalry units, from the 1880s through the end of the century.12 It was, apparently, quite popular with the children themselves: “Ball, back of the hospital; ball, back of the schoolhouse; ball, in front of the Girls Quarters; ball, all around, has been the order of the hour after supper, this week.”13

Teams were formed from the trades’ schools and residence halls, and some of the most enthusiastic students were on more than one team. There were both boys’ and girls’ teams, though they didn’t mix (it was the Victorian era), and it wasn’t long before there were varsity and junior varsity teams as well as intramural teams with such societally approved names as the “Unions,” “Young Americans,” “Union Reserves,” and “Unions Carlisle.”

Pratt was not a sportsman or athlete by nature, but anything that could be seen as an “Americanizing force” was worth trying. By June of 1886, Pratt provided official recognition of a baseball program by authorizing the purchase of uniforms. Baseball was seen to be making citizens of the students, and uniforms were emblazoned with “C.I.T.S” for Carlisle Indian Training School. “Citizenship” was considered equivalent to assimilation into the broader culture. As the superintendent pointed out in a speech for the 1890 Decoration Day game with the team from the Educational Home (of) Philadelphia, “See how near that (C.I.T.S.) comes to being an abbreviation of ‘citizens,’ which they are all aspiring to become?”14

By 1888 Carlisle had a baseball coach, in the model of later coaches whose main responsibilities were elsewhere; Fisk “Tim” Goodyear was a teacher and also doubled as a clerk, overseeing the students who were part of the school’s summer outing program. He was the 19-year-old eldest son of a local merchant and sheriff and left the school after six years, in 1893, when his father turned the family business over to Tim and his brother. Lacking the background or prestige of later coaches like Glenn “Pop” Warner, he was described as well-liked by the boys.15 In the early days of his tenure in the spring of 1888 his teams played a mostly intramural schedule and also played nearby town teams and the Dickinson College freshman squad. As of 1890, they played a wider schedule that included the Dickinson College varsity in Carlisle, as well as Bucknell, Gettysburg, the University of Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania State.

Carlisle had a highly esteemed coach in Warner as well as coaching from some major-league players – Charlie Bender, Harry L. Taylor, and Charlie Pittinger.16 Eugene Bassford had no major-league coaching experience but was an experienced college coach. The team’s record never rose much above the .500 level and for the period from 1895 till the end of the program in 1909, their overall record was 124-142-5 (.466). Bassford had the distinction of being Carlisle’s final baseball coach but, curiously, was described in a New York Times report of January 31, 1909, as the first.

“The athletic officials of the Carlisle Indian School have engaged for the first time a baseball coach. He is Eugene E. Bassford, who coached Fordham College at baseball for the last four years. The Carlisle baseball schedule will contain nearly thirty games. Practice will begin about the middle of February.”17

Whatever hair-splitting criteria were used to name Bassford the “first” baseball coach, he was definitely the last. Pop Warner preferred to concentrate on the more famous football program in the fall and on track and field in the spring. After an 11-16 baseball season in 1909, that was it: The baseball program was ended.

 

While baseball was the unwanted stepchild in Warner’s athletic program, the school turned out seven major leaguers in its 23 years of competition with college, semipro, and town teams. Jim Thorpe was Carlisle’s most famous athletic product, and Hall of Famer Charlie Bender was the best-known alumnus in baseball, but there were five others who matriculated at Carlisle and went on to play in the major leagues. (The SABR BioProject includes biographies of all seven.) The lives and careers of Thorpe and Bender are well documented, so we’ll focus on George Johnson, Louis LeRoy, Mike Balenti, Frank Jude, and Charlie Roy.

Three of the five – Johnson, LeRoy, and Roy – were pitchers, and Robert Charles Roy had a background quite similar to that of Charles Albert Bender. Both were from northern Minnesota, and they are known to have been childhood friends. Roy’s career was also the shortest, consisting of seven games with the Phillies in 1906. He also pitched for Newark of the Class-A Eastern League in 1906. In 1907 he was back at Newark, but he was released in June and had subsequent trials at Class-B Wilmington, Delaware, and Class-D Steubenville, Ohio. Charlie Roy is described as a deeply religious man, and he decided to quit baseball at the age of 23 to become a Christian evangelist.

Louis LeRoy’s career in the major leagues wasn’t much longer. He pitched three games for the New York Highlanders in 1905, 11 games for them in 1906, and one game for the Boston Red Sox in 1910. However, his minor-league career was extensive; only Hall of Famer Charlie Bender, with 4,292 innings across all levels, pitched more innings than LeRoy did with 3,621. Beginning in Buffalo in 1902, LeRoy’s career took him literally from coast to coast, Boston to Seattle, across the border to Montreal, and to St. Paul, Indianapolis, and Salt Lake City before he finished up in Mitchell, South Dakota, in 1920.

George Johnson pitched 10 years at all levels and carried a heavy workload in his three years in the majors, at Cincinnati in 1913 and 1914. During the 1914 season he jumped to Kansas City of the Federal League, for which he also pitched in 1915. Relying mostly on a fastball and a spitball, Johnson went 14-16 in 269 innings with the Reds in 1913. In 1914 he was idled for three months while courts worked out whether he was to pitch for the Reds or the Federal League’s Kansas City Packers, but turned in a 9-10 record in 138 innings. With Kansas City in 1915, Johnson went 17-17 while pitching 281⅓ innings.

Johnson pitched 200 innings for Vernon of the Pacific Coast League in 1916 and an astonishing 398⅔ dividing his time between Vernon and San Francisco of the Pacific Coast Lague in 1917. Described as “rotund” in the press of the time, George Johnson failed to show up for a game on June 16. 1918, and was “fired” by San Francisco Seals President Charles Strub. He played some semipro ball over the next few years and his life ended abruptly when he was shot to death after a dice game. He was 36.

There were two stars in the backfield of the Carlisle Indians in 1908. One was Jim Thorpe; the other wasn’t.18 Mike Balenti was the quarterback at Carlisle when Jim Thorpe was the running back. Balenti was also captain of the baseball team in 1908 and ’09 and went on to play 10 years in professional baseball.

Balenti signed with the Philadelphia Athletics and reported to them after Carlisle’s 1909 season. The A’s assigned him to the Milwaukee Brewers and the Brewers optioned him to Dayton of the Class-B Central League. He was released in July but caught on with El Reno of the Class-C Western League. Balenti spent 1910 with Savannah of the South Atlantic League, and a .326 season at Macon in 1911 resulted in his being purchased by the Cincinnati Reds in July. He appeared in only eight games for the Reds and spent 1912 having a good season batting .288 for Chattanooga of the Class-A Southern Association, who sold his contract to the St. Louis Browns in September.

Balenti played in 70 games for the Browns in 1913, hitting only .180, and St. Louis sent him back to Chattanooga after the 1913 season. Another year at Class-A Chattanooga in 1914, when he hit only .157, meant he spent 1915, 1916, and part of 1917 with San Antonio of the Class-B Texas League before drifting down to Tulsa of the Class-D Western Association. He made appearances again in 1923 and 1926 with lower-classification clubs before calling it a career.

Frank Jude’s SABR biography tells that he caught the attention of Cincinnati Reds owner Garry Herrmann and Boston Americans manager Jimmy Collins with his play at Carlisle. He signed with Toledo of the Class-A American Association and began his professional career there, forgoing his senior year at the Indian Industrial School.

According to Baseball-Reference.com, Jude began the 1906 season with the Toledo Mudhens and was hitting .315 after 72 games when the Reds traded two major leaguers to Toledo to acquire the speedy outfielder. In 80 games with the Reds, he managed only a .208 batting average. It was to be his only opportunity in the majors. After the season he was sold to Columbus of the American Association. His minor-league odyssey from 1907 to 1923 included stops from Columbus, Ohio, to Albany, New York, and from Mobile, Alabama, to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Jude hit .261 for Lincoln of the Class-A Western Association in 1910 when he played in 167 games. He hit .335 for his best season while with Saskatoon of the Class-B Western Canada Association; that was in 1921, when he was 36 and after he had taken five years away from professional baseball. The numbers are incomplete but with what we know, he is computed to have hit .275 in 1,329 minor-league games.

Regardless of who was coaching, a few factors impacted how the Indian School’s teams fared against their collegiate rivals. While educational structures were different in the nineteenth century than they were before educational standardization became the norm in the twentieth, the boys on the Indian School teams may well have been several years younger than the opposing players.19 Further, a majority of the opposition came from the middle and upper-middle classes and had time to dedicate to athletics as a hobby or leisure pastime. The Indian School boys were still required to fulfill the vocational aspects of their education, despite their roster spots. It seems unlikely that Bucknell or Yale students also learned and spent time on bricklaying or masonry for school buildings the way the Carlisle boys did.

Those requirements didn’t mean the school community, or the larger community, was any less interested in how the teams did. Both the Indian Helper and the Red Man, newspapers put out by the school’s own printing office (one of the few vocations taught to both boys and girls), often included mentions of and stories about the teams and how they fared. The Indian Helper even included results of games played by other Indian schools from across the country. The Philadelphia Times covered the 1901 Carlisle season in some depth, including the hiring of former major leaguer Harry Taylor to coach the team as well as box scores and analysis of the games.20

The conscious use of organized athletics as a tool to Americanize children was implemented across the country with Native American children, as well as immigrant children in overcrowded urban slums. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw an improved understanding of the health benefits of athletic play for children, especially as increasing numbers of them were slowly taken out of industrial environments and provided with educations.

There are indicators that Carlisle students who were athletes may have had a better or easier time at school than those who were not. Letters sent to the school after a student had left, alumni questionnaires, and attendance at reunions, provide evidence that some students retained good memories of their time at the school, and valued the education and training they received there.21 Charlie Bender chose to stay in Pennsylvania even after retiring from baseball, although he certainly could have gone back to Minnesota.

And yet Jim Thorpe and others ran away from the school and from their assigned “putting out” work locations. The school’s guardhouse doubled as “jail,” in which such students were sometimes held when they were returned to the school. Countless miles from everyone they knew and loved, forbidden to speak the language of their very thoughts, forced into clothing completely foreign – and often associated with an “enemy” – made to participate in classes, activities, and religious observation in a language they didn’t know or understand: These experiences can only have been bewildering and frightening. Some children arrived at the school as young as 3 or 4 years old. Boarding school was an individual experience as well as a collective one, and some children fared better than others, depending on countless factors.

The same was true after the children left the school; some got the few federal jobs available on their home reservations or neighboring ones, some taught at the Indian schools proliferating across the country. Most, however, went home to their communities and tried to fit in again. The duration of their absence could contribute to that success or failure; if you no longer speak the language or know the customs, how will you fit in? Your food ways, speech, dress, appearance (especially for boys) have all changed – how will you fit in? Returning students had to learn all over again, just as they had when they went off to school in the first place. Some were able to support themselves with the skills they had been taught at the school, such as building trades like masonry, carpentry, and bricklaying. For others, there was no market for those skills if they went back to the reservation.

As this article was completed in 2024, there were small red plastic flags at a dozen or so of the markers in the graveyard at the Carlisle Indian School, now the Army War College, indicating this year’s group to be disinterred and taken home to their relations and communities. Native families and communities still battle with bureaucracy, the courts, and the Army’s Office of Army Cemeteries to be permitted to receive their ancestors’ remains from the school grounds.22 Those battles symbolize the extent to which the damage done by boarding schools is a factor for families and communities to this day. The loss of the family members who died at the school, and the impact of the separation and education to the ones who returned, permanently changed the shape of Native lives and communities across the continent.

Fannie Charging Shield, Oglala Lakota, was 16 when she arrived at the Carlisle Indian School. It was early in 1891, only a couple of months after the December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. It must have disconcerting, if not terrifying, to arrive at a place run by the very same agency that had so recently killed people you knew. In June 1891 she was sent to a work assignment with a family near the Delaware border and did not return to school until January 1892, by which time she had probably already contracted tuberculosis. Not long after, the school sent for her father, which was unusual. Chief Charging Shield arrived with his good friend Chief American Horse, who may have visited the campus previously. Chief Charging Shield was able to be with his daughter when she died but was dismayed to learn that because the school had funded his trip to be with her, there was no money to allow him to take her body home with him. He returned home without her and Fannie was buried at the school, but he always hoped that someday her body could be returned to her home. Fannie Charging Shield was one of the students disinterred in the late summer of 2024. Her remains and those of two other Lakota children were taken back to their lands for reburial.23

Perhaps it is naïve, but it would be nice to hope that watching or playing baseball while at school, or teaching it to others after school ended, was a small bright spot for the children at the Carlisle Indian School.

Postscript

On October 25, 2024, President Joe Biden formally apologized for the federal government’s role in operating or promoting the operation of boarding schools for Native American children. During the speech in which he made the apology, the President called for a moment of silence for the children and the generations traumatized by the boarding school abuses.24 In December Biden took another significant step in promoting generational healing in Native communities by declaring the grounds of what was the Carlisle Indian School a National Monument. Just over 24 acres are protected by this new status, including buildings and gateposts built by the students learning their trades at the school.25 Together, these steps will hopefully help ensure that the boarding school experiences of the Native children and their families and communities will not be forgotten or swept aside.

ROGER and DEENA PARMELEE live in south-central Pennsylvania, only a few miles from the former campus of the Carlisle Indian School. Roger is retired and spends his days reading about or watching baseball and meticulously recording SkeeterSoft replays of entire seasons of historic games. He has been a SABR member for many years, and a Red Sox fan since Ted Williams, Jimmy Piersall and Jackie Jensen roamed the outfield at Fenway Park. Deena has a PhD in US history, formerly taught US history at the college level, and currently works for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Roger taught Deena to appreciate baseball 40 years ago by telling her stories about Germany Schaefer and Bobo Newsom.

 

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the authors also consulted

Print Sources:

Boston Post. “Indians Played a Weak Game,” June 16, 1901.

Callow, Colin, ed. First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, Second Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.

“Indian Education at Hampton and Carlisle,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 62, no. 320 (April 1881): 659-675.

Iverson, Peter. “We Are Still Here,” American Indians in the Twentieth Century. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc. 1998.

Maraniss, David. Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Standing Bear, Luther. My People, The Sioux. Kindle Edition. Hegne Publishing, August 2017.

Weeks, Philip. Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States in the Nineteenth Century. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc, 2001.

Weeks, Philip, ed. “They Made Us Many Promises,”: The American Indian Experience 1524 to the Present. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2002.

Digital Sources:

Rubinkama, Michael. “Native Children’s Remains to be Moved from Army Cemetery,” in The Hill, June 14, 2022. https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-u-s-news/native-childrens-remains-to-be-moved-from-army-cemetery/.

Virtual tour of Carlisle Indian School video: Barbara Landis, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL8pa1ZDSGY.

History of the Carlisle Indian School: Dickinson College, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfOKRglt8e8.

Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/.

Yu, Jane. “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” Spring, 2009, Pennsylvania Center for the Book, https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/feature-articles/kill-indian-save-man.

PBS Newshour broadcast segment June 23, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRNcCCgnauI.

Hedgpeth, Dana, “‘12 Years of Hell’: Indian Boarding School Survivors Share their Stories,” Washington Post, August 7, 2023.

 

Notes

1 On at least one documented occasion, teenage prisoners of war captured by the US military in ongoing conflicts with Native nations were sent as students to the school. The Indian Helper (Carlisle, Pennsylvania), Vol. 3, No. 47, July 6, 1888, 3.

2 Robert M. Utley, introduction to The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, by Brig. Gen. R.H. Pratt, 1979 reprint of the 1908 text, Cumberland County Historical Society Publications, Volume 10, No. 3, 3.

3 Richard Henry Pratt, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1979 reprint of the 1908 text, Cumberland County Historical Society Publications, Volume 10, No. 3, 10.

4 Pratt, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 11.

5 Pratt, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 11.

6 Pratt, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 5.

7 Richard Henry Pratt. Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 190. In 1868, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong founded the Hampton Normal and Industrial School in Hampton, Virginia, for the express purpose of educating freed slaves.

8 The April 1881 issue of the popular Harper’s Magazine, for example, included a lengthy, illustrated article on “Indian Education at Hampton and Carlisle.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 62, no. 320 (April 1881): 659-675.

9 There are buildings on the campus today that were built by school students as they learned construction trades.

10 Pratt, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 15.

11 Pratt. Battlefield and Classroom, 216.

12 https://klaw.com/events-lawton/historic-base-ball-game-set-at-fort-sill/23-july-2011/, accessed August 19, 2024.

13 Indian Helper. Volume 3, No. 36, April 20, 1888: 3.

14 Indian Helper, Volume 3, No. 36, April 20, 1888: 39.

15 Jeffrey Powers-Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 40.

16 Jack Morris, “Charlie Pittinger,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/charlie-pittinger/.

17 “Carlisle Baseball Coach,” New York Times. January 31, 1909, Section 4, 3.

18 Think of Mike Balenti as Carlisle’s Lou Gehrig to Jim Thorpe’s Babe Ruth.

19 For example, during the 1901 season, Charlie Bender was only 17. Many of the players on the opposing college and town teams would have been well older – although it is also true that in the nineteenth century boys often went to college at a much younger age than is common today.

20 “Indians Won Opening Game,” Philadelphia Times, April 13, 1901: 8.

21 Dickinson College is the principal digital repository for Carlisle Indian School records, including student records: https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/

22 https://ictnews.org/news/obscure-government-agency-at-center-of-carlisle-repatriation-dispute accessed September 1 and 2, 2024. Families of children who died at Carlisle Indian School have a particularly complicated maze to navigate for the return of their kin’s remains because the property remains an active military facility.

23 Charles Fox, “Home From Carlisle: A Father’s Wish Fulfilled After More Than 130 Years,” Indian Country Today, September 18, 2024. https://ictnews.org/news/home-from-carlisle-a-fathers-wish-fulfilled-after-more-than-130-years.

24 Gabriel Pietrorazio, “Biden Apologizes for Government’s Role in Running Native American Boarding Schools,” NPR.org, October 26, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/26/nx-s1-5165427/biden-apologizes-for-governments-role-in-running-native-american-boarding-schools.

25 Cecily Hilleary, “Biden Designates National Monument at site of Carlisle Indian School,” VOANews, December 10, 2024. https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-designates-national-monument-at-site-of-carlisle-indian-school/7896427.html