American Indian Barnstorming Teams

 

To understand why America’s first peoples joined exhibition baseball teams that toured the country from the 1890s through the 1930s, it helps to review the US government’s boarding schools for native children. The stories of these exhibition teams and the federal boarding schools are closely intertwined. The boarding schools offered baseball, among other sports, as a means of assimilating native children into American culture.

The so-called Progressive era of American history continued the federal government’s legacy of violence against native peoples. This violent legacy, recognized by generations of scholars, has been documented officially now through the Federal Indian Boarding Schools Initiative, commissioned by former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and conducted by Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland.1 Newland’s study cited extensively the US Senate’s subcommittee report on Indian Education in 1969, known as the Kennedy report, which stated: “Beginning with President Washington, the stated policy of the Federal Government was to replace the Indian’s culture with our own.”2 That forced separation of American Indians from their lands, families, languages, and cultures and forced assimilation into Anglo culture was the goal of the government from the founding, but it was implemented systematically starting in 1878 with the federal boarding school system. In 1879, Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt founded Carlisle Indian Industrial, the first such federal residential boarding school, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with his often-quoted slogan, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”3 The first native inhabitants of the school were principally Chiricahua Apache children, whose parents were imprisoned after the surrender of Goyaalé (Geronimo), although Pratt’s boarding school soon took on hundreds of children forcibly separated from their families from many native nations. At least in Pratt’s eyes, Carlisle became the Bureau of Indian Affairs model for more federal boarding schools that removed children from their families as well as from their indigenous languages and cultures.4

As detailed in The American Indian Integration of Baseball and as this volume makes clear, native athletes were successful as major-league, minor-league, semipro, and college players, starting with baseball games on federal boarding school fields. The semiprofessional part of the story connects the trauma of the boarding schools with other exploitation of native athletes especially on native barnstorming or exhibition teams. The most famous of these teams, the Nebraska Indians, was inspired by the popularity of the Genoa (Nebraska) Indian Industrial School’s baseball team.9 Guy W. Green, as the manager of the Stromberg baseball team in 1895, witnessed the crowds that the Genoa team drew, and like other Progressive era entrepreneurs, he was eager to exploit the spectacle of native athletes. Green wrote, “When I counted my money after that game [Stromberg vs. Genoa Indian School], the idea of the Nebraska Indians was born.”10 He reasoned, “If an Indian base ball team was a good drawing card in Nebraska, it ought to do wonders further east if properly managed. I accordingly determined to organize ‘The Nebraska Indians.”11

The Nebraska Indians, which began touring in 1897 and continued, with an ownership change, into the 1920s, were not the first or last such team – in fact, their success led to many imitations. Because Green wrote two short books about the team and because it was often featured in newspaper stories, features, and postcards, it was certainly one of the best-documented such teams. And almost all these teams depended on federal boarding schools and local reservation schools for recruiting athletes. In their heyday, these exhibition teams played across the United States and Canada, and they featured talented native athletes who later signed minor-league and major-league contracts. These teams included Green’s Nebraska Indians (c. 1897-1912), James and Oren Beltzer’s Nebraska Indians (1912-1918), the Nebraska Indians of the 1920s (c. 1921-1928), Harry Homewood’s Sioux Indians Baseball Team (c. 1896-1906), John Olson’s Cherokee All Stars of Watervliet Michigan (c. 1904-1912), Gus Whitewing’s “All-Indian Baseball Team” (c. 1907), the Oxford (Nebraska), Indians (c. 1910), the Indian Ball Team of Bradley, Michigan (c. 1910), the All-Indian Baseball Team of Guthrie (Oklahoma, c. 1912), Kate J. Becker’s Carlisle Indian Baseball Club, not affiliated with the boarding school (1916), the Mayetta (Kansas) Indian Baseball Team (c. 1925), Moses Poolaw’s Indian Baseball Team (c. 1933), the Dakota Eagles of Flandreau (South Dakota, c. 1933), and Ben Harjo’s Oklahoma Indians or All-Indian Baseball Club (1932-1933), which included Jim Thorpe in 1933. Some of these teams played only for a partial season, but the longest tenured teams, the Nebraska Indians, the Sioux Indian Baseball Team, and Cherokee All-Stars, drew large crowds across the country for years.12

 

 

In many ways, the native barnstorming teams, like the Wild West shows of the era, thrived on popular fascination with and exploitation of native stereotypes. This fact is clear in Green’s account of the formation of the team as well as in photos and postcards of the team as well as the illustrations of Green’s books. His The Nebraska Indians: A Complete History and Fun and Frolic with an Indian Ball Team were illustrated with grotesque cartoons of the native players in headdresses and loincloths lofting bats like spears. Ensuing illustrations show native figures in leather riding horses, pointing long rifles, and performing carnival tricks.13 Similarly, press coverage of the games in many local newspapers usually included frequent mentions of “red men,” “Poor Lo,” “redskins,” “braves,” scalps and scalping, tomahawks, bows and arrows, braves, blows, bloodshed, and war chants – the sensational imagery of Western novels and Wild West shows. Baseball team owners like Guy Green and Harry Homewood trucked in these stereotypes to sell tickets, and obliging local newspapers promoted the games with all the grotesqueries.

Green’s anecdotes of his players are replete with Western stereotypes. One clear example is his portrait of Juzicanea, a Pascua Yaqui man, apparently from Arizona. Green wrote:

In all my experience, I have had but one Yaqui ball player. The Yaquis are a savage tribe living in the extreme southwestern part of the United States, and I hesitated a long time before I added Juzicanea to my team. He was the meanest looking Indian I have ever seen. He wore his hair long, surveying everything suspiciously with piercing black eyes, and when he came down the street people moved to the edge of the sidewalk and apprehensively watched him pass. Juzicanea would not sleep in a bed. He could rest comfortably on the floor or the ground. …

Another of Juzicanea’s peculiarities was his craving for raw meat; he demanded one to two pounds of this delicacy each day, and unless he obtained it, he was surly as a caged tiger. I used to fill my pockets with raw meat when we went out to the grounds, and after Juzicanea made a particularly brilliant catch or a long hit, I fed him a liberal chunk of the succulent delicacy, which invariably caused him intense delight and greatly amused the natives who watched him perform. I was compelled to line my pockets [with] oilcloth in order to provide suitable receptacles for Juzicanea’s gory lunches. …

At Burlington, Kentucky … the savage tossed his tangled hair out of his eyes, growled ominously, and in broken English cried, “Bring me a pound of raw meat.”14

Here, Juzicanea’s long hair and “broken English” are associated with his character as a “savage,” his lunches are “gory,” and he is described as a “caged tiger” and is fed treats like an animal, inspiring both popular fear and fascination. That combination of native stereotypes and intense emotions was gist for the coverage of the Nebraska Indians, Sioux Indians, Cherokee All-Stars, and other exhibition teams of the era.

Guy Wilder Green (1873-1947) was the founder and most successful owner of the Nebraska Indians, although later owners included James Beltzer, Oren “Buck” Beltzer (James‘s brother and a Nebraska Cornhusker legend), Pat Kelsey, and Ed Hamman.15 As the most successful promoter of the team, Green also provided the most extensive documentation of American Indian exhibition teams in his two books and many newspaper interviews from 1897 to 1912, when he sold the team to the Beltzer brothers. In the team’s first season, 1897, the season was short, the team was ill equipped to succeed, and the travelling arrangements were rugged at best. In “Experiences with an Indian Ball Team,” a feature that Green wrote for the Nebraska State Journal in 1908, he recalled:

We took to the rocky trails of public amusement in wagons. I had two lumber trucks, six horses, a bale of hay and a dog as my traveling outfit. Four of the horses were hitched side-by-side to one wagon.16

In its first season, the team was hastily recruited from Genoa Indian School, the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska, and Sioux reservations in South Dakota, and Green recalled that the team lost its first game against the town baseball team in Wahoo, Nebraska, in late June by a score of 10-5. He noted: “Our disastrous experience at Wahoo is easily explained. Most of my players had come directly from their reservations to the place of opening. They were stiff from travel, were out of condition and lacking in practice. I was surprised to see them make as good a showing as they did.”17 And the going did not get easier in 1897 for the first team, as the team travelled and slept in wagons, as they ventured from town to town in Nebraska and Iowa, and as Green sent letters and telegrams to arrange games and drum up crowds. Green reflected that the first season “was only moderately successful whether surveyed from an artistic or from a financial standpoint,” as the team disbanded on August 14, having won 21 games and lost 28. He observed that “[t]he boys were literally worn out” by the travel conditions.18

Starting in 1898, Green made several changes that contributed to greater success for the team. First, he abandoned the horse-and-wagon travel and began taking the team by train from town to town, followed by a livery wagon. That season the team also brought tents, to sleep on baseball fields at night. Green also worked relentlessly to recruit more players and to promote the team with photos, postcards, and the team’s frequent monikers, “Green’s Nebraska Indians: Greatest Aggregation of Its Kind,” and “Green’s Nebraska Indians: Only Ones on Earth” The team’s season expanded to four states (Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois), and its record improved markedly to 81-22.19 Green remarked that “the Indians were nervous and ill-at-ease while cooped up in hotels. But the minute they were furnished with tents they felt at home and gave me their best efforts.”20 The tent dwelling was also characterized by local press according to the stereotypes. The Headlight (Stromsburg, Nebraska) commented: “They camp right on the grounds where they play and live in true savage style.”21

In fact, ironically, while the native barnstorming businesses thrived on the use of anti-Indian stereotypes, Green also expressed considerable sympathy for the mistreatment his players suffered. This mistreatment included his players being barred from hotels, accused by local citizens of crimes, ridden by local constables and shopkeepers, and constantly mocked by crowds. Some typical allegations leveled against players included fraternization with White women, thefts of clothes, food, watches, and baseball equipment, and accounts of a holdup and even a kidnapping.22 While Green defended his players against such bogus charges, he also expressed a weary acquaintance with the rough treatment: “Strangers are always safe objects of suspicion.”23

The raucous crowds that hooted at players were a constant fixture of the games played by the Nebraska Indians, Cherokee All-Stars, and other exhibition teams of their time. In an interview with the Sioux City Journal in 1909, Green described the typical treatment endured by his Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) pitcher George Howard Johnson (who would later pitch in the major leagues). Green stated:

He has never stepped to the mound to pitch a game anywhere on earth that three things have not happened. Numerous local humorists have started what they imagine to be Indian war cries, others have yelled ‘Back to the reservation,’ and a third variety of town pump jester has shrieked, ‘Dog soup! Dog soup!24

Of course, Green’s three examples were not the only barbs and epithets hurled at the native players. They were also typically called “Chief (Johnson was one of many in the major and minor leagues), “Heap Big-Injun,” “Poor Lo,” “Redskin,” “Savage,” and so on.25

In keeping with the practices of owners of native exhibition teams, Green often recruited players from the leading federal boarding schools, Carlisle and Haskell, as well as smaller schools nearby such as Genoa. Some of his boarding-school recruits included Jean Baptiste, a Winnebago from Nebraska, who pitched for Carlisle in 1891-92; Jacob Buckheart (or Buckhardt), a powerful Shawnee from Oklahoma, who caught for both Carlisle and the Nebraska Indians; George Green, a Sac and Fox pitcher and speedy infielder for Carlisle, who also pitched for the Nebraska Indians; George Howard Johnson, the talented Winnebago pitcher from Walthill, Nebraska, who briefly attended Carlisle, Haskell, and Flandreau, before starring as a pitcher with the Nebraska Indians; Walter Nevitt, a Delaware who pitched at Haskell before joining Green’s team as a third baseman; Thomas Reed, an Ojibwe, who played second base at Haskell before joining the Nebraska Indians as an infielder; White Boy, a Winnebago of Nebraska, who pitched for Genoa before joining Green’s team; and Jessee Youngdeer, an Eastern Cherokee, who played center field for Carlisle before joining Green’s team for its 1911 season.26 This preference of the exhibition team owners for boarding-school players was practical, as these talented athletes had been trained by experienced coaches and tested against college-level competition. However, it was also in keeping with the Progressive era agenda of assimilating native youth into American culture.

While Green’s preference for boarding-school athletes was clear, the most emphatic champion of the assimilationist model was Harry Homewood, owner and manager of the Sioux Indian Baseball Team, which toured the United States and Canada from 1896 to 1906. A feature story on the team appeared in the Marysville Daily Appeal in 1905, when the team was touring California, and it specified Homewood’s enthusiasm for the assimilation of indigenous youth. The terms used in the feature are strikingly like the vision of Carlisle Superintendent Pratt. According to M.T. Clark, a contracting agent for the team interviewed for the article:

To educate the Indian in the ways of civilized life, therefore, is to preserve him from extinction, not as an Indian, but as a human being.

Mr. Homewood says there seems to be only two phases of the Indian question. One, that the American Indian should remain in the country as a survival of the aboriginal inhabitants, a study for the ethnologist, a toy for the tourist, a vagrant at the mercy of the State, and a continual pensioner upon the bounty of the people, the other that he shall be educated to work, live, and act as a reputable, moral citizen, and thus become a self-supporting member of society.

The latter is the policy of the management of the Sioux Indian baseball club, and if it would be followed out by those in direct charge of the Indians, he will then pass out of our national life as a painted, feather-crowned hero of the novelist to add the current of his free American blood to the hearts of this great nation.

Manager Homewood will not allow any Indian literature on the sleeper in which they travel, and each week gives a prize to the Indian writing the best article on What I would do if I were President and other subjects which will have a tendency to educate and elevate the Indian.27

This emphasis on eliminating native culture to “educate and elevate the Indian” could have been written by Pratt himself. The essays that Homewood asked his players to write were like Carlisle and Haskell lessons, and the forbidding of native languages and cultures (“any Indian literature”) were standard practices at the boarding schools.

 

 

Homewood’s Sioux Indian Baseball Team included some Sioux players, but was constituted of players from many indigenous nations, and was well-funded, traveling by train across the US and Canada. The team boasted a roster of 17 players from 1904 to 1906, two Pullman cars with showers, and extensive equipment. Like the Nebraska Indians, they maintained team records and boasted a record of 1,263 wins vs. 304 losses (an astounding .810 winning percentage) from 1898 to 1905.28 To draw larger crowds, the team was an early innovator of night baseball games. Accounts of the Sioux Indians team noted that they played day games and night games differently, with the team often erecting a large canvas circus tent along with a portable grandstand for the night games. The team carried its own electric generator, which powered a circuit of incandescent bulbs at the top of the tent, and players used a larger, softer ball (more like a modern softball) and narrower bats for the evening games. The double novelties of native players and night games proved popular with the crowds. The night games also made for frequent newspaper accounts, and the native players’ familiarity with baseball in semi-darkness also provided them with a competitive advantage. A few quotations from the press accounts in 1905 and 1906, intended to draw interested spectators to the games, suffice to explain the novelty:

In a novel, exciting, and interesting baseball game here by electric light at night the Exeter Clippers defeated the Sioux Indians. This was the first game ever played here at night. It was enjoyed by a large crowd.29

This will be a baseball game at night. The game will be played with a team of Sioux Indians who are touring the state. They carry a generator and all the paraphernalia for lighting up the grounds as light as day and from papers where the Indians have played it describes the bleachers as being in twilight while the grounds are illumined with 50,000 candle power arc lights.30

The ball used at night is about twice the size of the regular baseball. It is soft and bouncy, and it sounds like a pumpkin when it hits the bat. The bat is as small as the ball is large, and this combination prevents the ball being batted too far beyond the circle of electric lights. The electric lights look like a lot of railroad lanterns, and they hang so low that if the ball is thrown or batted very high it is very difficult to see it.31

While the idea of night baseball came soon after Thomas Edison’s invention of the lightbulb in 1880, the attempts in the nineteenth century were few and halting.32 The development of new arc lights early in the twentieth century led entrepreneurs like Homewood to develop the concept, but night baseball as we know it now would wait until the 1920s, when General Electric developed more powerful floodlights, which were adopted first by minor-league teams, before they came to the major leagues on May 24, 1935, at Crosley Field. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt switched on the stadium lights from the White House, affirming the importance of electrification for sports and entertainment in the United States.33

Although baseball was included in the athletic programs of the federal boarding schools as part of their assimilation efforts, there is another chapter of the story worth telling. The success of native students as athletes in football, track, baseball, and other sports gave opportunities that exceeded the manual and vocational labor available to the students through the boarding schools’ “summer outings.” Those summer outings were manual labor employment (e.g., farm work, ditch digging, lumbering, livestock and dairy work, sewing, carpentry, cooking, etc.) intended to provide vocational training to the students while supporting the boarding schools financially. The Federal Boarding School Initiative Report found that manual child labor was an entrenched feature of the schools, which “[predominantly] utilized manual labor of [the students] to compensate for the poor conditions of school facilities and lack of financial support from the Federal Government.”34 The talented young athletes at boarding schools, like Jim Thorpe, Louis Leroy, Charles Bender, Joe Libby, Jesse Youngdeer, and George Howard Johnson, found better paying and more enjoyable opportunities playing summer baseball for minor-league and exhibition teams, often playing under pseudonyms. Some of them also, including Thorpe, nursed dreams of major-league careers, and all of them found playing baseball in the summer preferable to the work they would do on summer outing programs.35 As scholar Wade Davies observed: “Native people gravitated to … Indian school sports, not only because it allowed them to express their indigenous athleticism, but also because they could exert some personal and collective control over this activity in otherwise authoritarian environments.”36

Likewise, Alan J. Caldwell, the director of the Menominee Cultural Center in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the son of James J. Caldwell, who played third base for the Cherokee All-Stars in 1912, described his father’s baseball career with pride. Caldwell wrote about his father’s stint with Olson’s Cherokee All-Stars:

My father was not the type of person to talk much about his past. What little he told us about his baseball playing days was about the part of the country he traveled to such as the southeastern region. He didn’t say anything that I recall about how they were treated or received in the towns that they played in. I think my father played for the pleasure of playing baseball and as a source of income. I think he may have also joined the team as a way to satisfy his sense of adventure. I envied my father. Though he only played semi-pro baseball he was a terrific player based on stories I heard from his peers.37

Evident in this account and other interviews done with other native players from the 1930s and 1940s was joy in playing baseball and pride in athletic accomplishment. This pride was also expressed by Lumbee athlete and scholar Joseph Oxendine, who wrote in his foreword to The American Indian Integration of Baseball: “Baseball is a noble game, a game of tradition, of allegiance and camaraderie. … The character of baseball is consistent with traditional American Indian traits and attitudes toward sport. Consequently, young Indians ‘took’ to the game as soon as it was introduced to them in boarding schools.”38 While Oxendine was under no illusions about the injuries done by federal boarding schools, he also spent a career celebrating the athletic heritage that native players created in the twentieth century.

A related part of this athletic heritage was the teams of native players organized by the players themselves. While relatively few native players had the financial and social support to launch exhibition teams on extended tours, there were certainly native teams that deserve recognition. The most famous Oklahoma example of a native baseball team under native ownership was Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club of 1932-1933. Harjo founded the team in Wewoka, Oklahoma, equipped it for long tours and signed some major-league and minor-league players including Ike Kahdot, Bill Wano, Lee Daney, Williston Bohannon, Israel “Izzy” Wilson, Ben Tincup, and Harry “Rip” Collins. The team was financed generously by Ben and his wife, Susey Walker Harjo, who had inherited lucrative Seminole oil fields in Oklahoma. The team had its own customized touring bus, and after tryouts and practice in Holdenville, it began a well-publicized tour in May of 1922 from Oklahoma into Texas and Louisiana.39

Starting auspiciously, the team achieved its first major victory, a 4-1 win against the Muskogee Tigers of the Western Association, and it continued to win in Texas (playing at Temple, Killeen, Bartlett, Taylor, and Austin) and in Louisiana (Lakes Charles, Deridder, Arcadia).40 Led by the strong pitching of Collins, by late June the team had recorded 41 wins against only 4 losses and was invited to the Denver Post Tournament, known by some as the Western World Series.41 The team continued its torrid pace in Denver. On July 28, the Denver Post reported:

With 6,000 palefaces chanting the call to victory, the All-Indians of Holdenville, Oklahoma reached baseball’s happy hunting grounds Wednesday night when they defeated the Sioux Falls Canaries, 6 to 5, in a great 12-inning game to win the championship of the Denver Post tournament.42

And with this success at Denver, the All-Indians received a championship check of $4,167. The team would finally disband for 1932 with an impressive record, but a debt of $1,800 from touring. In cases like this, Ben and Susey Harjo depended on the superintendent of the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma (A.J. Landman) to release Susey’s funds to pay the debts.43

In 1933 the Harjos’ All-Indians planned a much larger tour, up to 140 games, from Oklahoma through the Midwest to New York City, and they also recruited new players for the team, including Earl Huckleberry, Rudy Jones, and, most famously, Jim Thorpe. When Thorpe joined the team, Ben Harjo’s announcement of his hiring made newspaper headlines and led to a Jim Thorpe Day celebration and parade in Holdenville on May 11.44 As in 1932, the team played well against local and Western League competition and determined to find larger crowds and fiercer competition in the East. As they traveled to Kansas City, they faced some of the strongest competition possible against the Kansas City Monarchs. That tough competition would continue as they faced strong teams in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia before reaching New York. Thorpe, who served as a player-manager for much of the season, occasionally played the field and often pinch-hit. A. Grant Carrow, a young fan who watched Thorpe play against the Lowell Lauriers, a Massachusetts minor-league team, admired his “beautifully executed fade-away slide” for a double, accentuated by Thorpe’s wide grin at second base.45 The Holdenville Daily News reported on September 14 that the team had played 128 games in 15 states, amassing a record of 87-41, with Thorpe leading the team in batting with a .341 average in 93 games.46 However, by the end of the tough 1933 season, Ben and Susey Harjo were over $6,000 in debt, and Susey requested the agent of the Five Nations to release $10,000 to pay the players and also to pay debts related to the death of the Harjos’ young daughter. The agent refused, leading Thorpe to send a telegram to Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier and a letter to California Senator William Gibbs McAdoo. Susey Harjo was only able to pay Jim Thorpe $500 of the $2,050 owed to him for the 1933 tour, and other players, such as Huckleberry, had to return their uniforms to the Muskogee agent before receiving partial payments. As in so many other cases, despite the athletic prowess on which they prided themselves, native managers and players were at the mercy of a federal system that treated them with condescension.47

Another outstanding example of a native touring team is Moses Edward (Mose) Poolaw’s All-American Indian Baseball Team of 1933, which toured from Texas into Mexico, from September through December of 1933. Mose Poolaw (whose name also appears as Poolah) was a Kiowa from Mountain View, Oklahoma. He apparently attended Haskell Indian Industrial School and may have played for Beltzer’s Nebraska Indians in 1917 before serving with the US Army in World War I, reaching the rank of sergeant.48 Soon after his Army service, he joined Chickasha in the Western Association, playing infield. His greatest strength was as a pitcher, and he amassed a record of 60-53 in the Western Association, including a 20-win season in 1924.49 Poolaw was listed as the manager, pitcher, and booking agent for the All-American Indian Baseball Team, and its itinerary included Houston, Monterey, Laredo, and Mexico City. Other players listed on the team included Tommy Cussens, Spencer Thomas, Woodrow Arketa, and Bill Collins.50 Most of these players lived in Oklahoma, giving the team a local character, and some press accounts refer to the club as the Harjoche All-American Indian Baseball Team. Perhaps Poolaw saw the team as a fitting sequel to Harjo’s team, given the team’s Southern tour (like Harjo’s in 1932), or perhaps he hoped to capitalize on the excitement recently generated by Harjo’s team.

The story of native baseball players on touring exhibition teams begins with the boarding schools and agency schools that taught baseball as a means of assimilation, a history imbued with trauma. While that trauma persisted in the experiences of native youth from the 1890s through the 1930s, the athletic successes those players enjoyed were savored by them and their communities. For both the record of the trauma the native players endured and the record of athletic triumph they achieved, the stories of these barnstorming teams are worth preserving.

JEFFREY P. BECK is the author of The American Indian Integration of Baseball (University of Nebraska Press) among other works. He currently serves as Director of the School of Humanities at Penn State Harrisburg. He is a member of the Mathewson-Plank chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research. He lives with his wife Marjorie and daughter Maddie in Palmyra, Pennsylvania.

 

Notes

1 Bryan Newland, Federal Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, May 2022, volume 1, https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/inline-files/bsi_investigative_report_may_2022_508.pdf.

2 Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Indian Education: A National Tragedy – A National Challenge, United State Senate Report (1969), 143.

3 Henry Louis Pratt quoted in Matthew Bentley and John Bloom, The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 1.

4 Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose, eds., Introduction, Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, & Reclamations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 2-3.

5 Bentley and Bloom, 2.

6 Kate Buford, Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 41.

7 Buford, Native American Son, 159-168; James Ring Adams, “The Jim Thorpe Backlash: The Olympic Medals Debacle and the Demise of Carlisle,” in American Indian: The Magazine of Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, 13.2 (2012). Online. Accessed Dec. 23, 2024. https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/jim-thorpe-backlash-olympic-medals-debacle-and-demise-carlisle.

8 Mary Annette Pember, Shondiin Mayo, and Mark Trahant, “Historic Apology: Boarding School History ‘a Sin on Our Souls.’” ICT News, October 25, 2024. https://ictnews.org/news/historic-apology-boarding-school-history-a-sin-on-our-soul.

9 Guy W. Green, The Nebraska Indians and Fun and Frolic with an Indian Ball Team, ed. Jeffrey P. Beck (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2010), 9-10.

10 Green, “Experiences with an Indian Baseball Team,” Nebraska State Journal, December 20, 1908: C6.

11 Green, The Nebraska Indians, 10.

12 Jeffrey P. Beck, aka Jeffrey Powers-Beck, “‘A Role New to the Race,’: A New History of the Nebraska Indians,” Nebraska History 85 (2004): 186-203, 198; Buford, 283-284.

13 Green, The Nebraska Indians, 9, 10, 33, 53, 66, 118.

14 Green, The Nebraska Indians, 117-118.

15 Jeffrey P. Beck, “Introduction,” The Nebraska Indians, xii, xliii.

16 Guy Green, “Experiences with an Indian Baseball Team,” C6.

17 Green, The Nebraska Indians, 11.

18 Green, The Nebraska Indians, 15.

19 Green, The Nebraska Indians, 145.

20 Green, The Nebraska Indians, 27.

21 “Other Locals,” Stromsburg (Nebraska) Headlight, April 25, 1901: 4.

22 Beck, “‘A Role New to the Race,’” 193.

23 Green, The Nebraska Indians, 115.

24 “Raps Bleacher Jokesters,” Sioux City (Iowa) Journal, June 3, 1909: 9.

25 Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball, 125.

26 Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball, 182, 209-212.

27 “Not All Sioux Indians,” Marysville (California) Daily Appeal, August 26, 1905: 3.

28 “Indian Team May Come,” Vancouver (British Columbia) Daily News Advertiser, August 5, 1906: 6.

29 “Games at Night,” Boston Globe, quoted in the San Luis Obispo (California) Morning Tribune, July 26, 1905: 3.

30 “Baseball at Night,” Salinas (California) Daily Index, August 4, 1906: 3.

31 “Sioux Indians Scalped Local Players Again,” Bakersfield (California) Morning Echo, August 26, 1906: 5.

32 Tim Wiles, “Night Games Gave Access to Baseball to Millions,” National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York. Accessed Oct. 24, 2024. https://baseballhall.org/discover/night-games-gave-access-to-baseball-to-millions.

33 Peter Morris, A Game of Inches: The Story Behind the Innovations that Shaped Baseball (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010), 378-379; General Electric Company, The Light That Started Sports at Night (Schenectady, New York: GE, 1930), 4-10. Thanks to Cassidy Lent, library director of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, for providing information on the history of night baseball.

34 Newland, Federal Boarding School Initiative Report, 92.

35 Buford, Native American Son, 92; Fear and Seagal, eds., Carlistle Indian Industrial School, 2, 97-98.

36 Wade Davies, Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2020), 29.

37 Caldwell quoted in Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball, 61.

38 Oxendine, Foreword, The American Indian Integration of Baseball, ix.

39 Buford, Native American Son, 290-293.

40 Royse Parr, “Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club,” Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, 17.2 (2009): 90-91.

41 Parr, “Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club”: 92.

42 Quoted in Parr, “Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club”: 93.

43 Parr, “Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club”: 93.

44 Parr, “Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club”: 94.

45 Lauriers quoted in Buford, Native American Son, 285.

46 Parr, “Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club”: 98.

47 Buford, Native American Son, 284-285.

48 Bob Lemke, “Photos Evoke Minor League Time Travel,” blog, August 21, 2014, https://boblemke.blogspot.com/2014/08/photos-evoke-minor-league-time-travel.html. “Sgt. Moses Edward ‘Mose’ Poolaw,” Find a Grave. Website. Accessed December 1, 2024. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/25013152/moses-edward-poolaw.

49 “Mose Poolaw,” Baseball Reference. Website. Accessed December 1, 2024. https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=poolaw001mos.

50 “Indian Ball Players to Visit Old Mexico,” Anadarko (Oklahoma) American Democrat, September 28, 1933: 1.