The Old Ball Game: Sherman Indian baseball, Est. 1903

 

On February 21, 1903, a warm and sunny Saturday, the baseball team of the nation’s newest Native American boarding school played its first game. The Sherman Institute was set among citrus groves outside Riverside, California, 60 miles east of Los Angeles. The Institute was the 25th and last major link in a federal Indian-school chain spanning the nation. The first school in the system, Carlisle in Pennsylvania, had opened in 1879. It had taken five years to string the chain westward to midcontinent Lawrence, Kansas, and Haskell.1 But it had taken almost 20 years more to cross the rugged Southwest and create the line’s Southern California terminus. Sherman’s basic mission, though, was the same as the first schools: prepare Indian students for assimilation into mainstream American life and culture, at the expense of tribal languages, customs, and even family. The approach was to nestle into a supportive community, impose a reassuring discipline model, and build college-town pride with sports as an entry point. On this Saturday, Sherman had been open barely five months. It had beaten a college team at football. Now its athletes were out to show they could play baseball.2

Sherman wasn’t exactly a new team. It had a strong core of mature ballplayers from a resource-challenged rural school serving the Mission tribes of Southern California. It also had a remarkable young point man. Joe Scholder (Diegueño, Mesa Grande) had flourished at an Indian school in the San Diego back country. His superintendent nominated him to transfer to Carlisle, spend a year studying its success, and come home to emulate it. Scholder turned out to be just the man for the job.3 He became a starter on Carlisle’s nationally recognized football team, played baseball, studied coaching, honed a natural flair for promotion and leadership, and even recruited his football mentor to return with him.4 This was a sensational coup. Bemus Pierce (Seneca, New York) was a famous Carlisle captain and All-American in the decade before Jim Thorpe. In California, Pierce became a celebrity football player-coach. Scholder would energetically fill many roles: athletic director, promoter, player-coach in both football and baseball. For this day’s inaugural baseball game on Sherman’s home grounds, he was playing second base.

Another notable athlete on the diamond for Sherman was Ben Neafus, a multisport star from Northern California (Round Valley confederation, Klamath). In November 1902 Neafus starred in Sherman’s 34-0 football victory over Occidental College. For the first baseball game, he was in center field.5

The opposition was Riverside’s fast town team. It had one name player: catcher Jack “Chief” Meyers (Cahuilla). Still six years away from the major leagues and stardom with John McGraw’s New York Giants, Meyers was a local role model for the Sherman players (and kinsman to several of them). The Riverside paper noted that “among the locals Jack Meyers is as sure with the bat as ever.” In this hastily arranged game, Sherman started an untested pitcher and lost, 14-8. But everybody noticed Ben Neafus. “He knocked the only three-bagger tapped out,” the Press reported, “and covers nearly the whole field from center. He never misses.” Neafus was also the pitcher Sherman should have started. He worked the last two innings, giving up just one run (likely unearned).6

By summer, Neafus’s baseball reputation was outgrowing Sherman. He was recruited to be “the regular ‘twirler’” in weekend games for the crack Santa Fe Railroad team in neighboring San Bernardino. His regular catcher with Santa Fe was Jack Meyers.7 Imagine: A marquee semipro team with a battery of two rising Native American stars. But it was not to be. Neafus’s first commitment was to Sherman football, and his burst speed and long kicks were key to Sherman’s game. He refocused. That fall, in quick succession Sherman beat Stanford, St. Vincent’s, USC, Occidental, and Pomona to claim bragging rights as Southern California college football champion (though Sherman did not even confer high-school diplomas).8 Yet by 1905, Ben Neafus was in his 20s and aging out of Sherman. There were responsibilities back home, there were absences, and by 1906 he was gone. A decade later, Los Angeles sportswriters were still recalling his gridiron exploits. But how good a baseball player might he have been? That can only be imagined.

What might have been: This is a theme that plays out over and over in the baseball stories from Sherman’s glory years. There were plenty of big baseball games, big exhibitions. Before the Golden Age of Native American sport began to play out – before the Thorpe Olympics controversy, the onset of World War I and the closure of Carlisle – Sherman would produce a steady stream of solid, even prospect-grade ballplayers. Yet in all that time, no prominent Sherman players ever got a foothold in either the major leagues or the Pacific Coast League (established the same year as Sherman baseball). What accounts for that? The back story.

In 1900 the sprawling Southwest was still an American frontier. Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma were sparsely populated territories, not states. For Native Americans, there were misbegotten federal Indian policies, broken treaties, conflicts, and reservation dispossessions. Most Native Americans were not citizens. California’s context was equally dark. In the rapacious chaos of the Gold Rush, native tribes were decimated by epidemic, violence, fraud, legal snares, and high-handed servitude. The state’s indigenous population, perhaps 150,000 before the Gold Rush, had shrunk to an estimated 25,000 by the turn of the twentieth century.9 And this was not in the past. On May 12, 1903, speculators with court authority evicted the Cupeño Indians from their ancestral lands at Warner Hot Springs. They were wagon-trained 35 miles west to Pala and left to start a new life from scratch. This was Sherman’s own Trail of Tears. Some students from these evicted families had played in Sherman’s inaugural baseball game less than three months earlier.10

But Sherman was putting fans in the stands. In May of 1905, Sherman recorded its first victory over a college baseball team. In Los Angeles, Sherman beat USC 7-4 in 10 innings. Barely two weeks later, Sherman was back in LA for a well-publicized contest with the touring team of Japan’s Waseda University. Waseda played the steadier game and won, 12-7, but Sherman prompted wild cheering with an explosive six-run sixth inning. With that, Sherman had hit a remarkable milestone. In its third year of baseball, the Indian school had won a populous fan base in Los Angeles as well as Riverside.11

July 1905: In this moment another Native American team passed through Riverside. “The famous Sioux Indian Baseball Club” had contrived to blend baseball, the ginned-up novelty of an Indian semipro team, and a flickering glimpse of the future, and it sold. The Sioux meandered the West by train (apparently with soldier chaperones). At each stop they set up with circus efficiency. They shrouded the ball field with a 12-foot-high canvas fence and played a twin bill against the locals. The promotional kicker was that they played a real nightcap under their own jury-rigged portable lights. “With the great lights burning at intervals over the entire field,” promoters promised, “the diamond and outfield is made as light as day.”12 The Sioux had been doing this for seven years, averaging about 190 games a year. In Riverside they played a town team and lost the first game by one run in extra innings. “As little will be said of the night game as possible,” the Riverside paper huffed. A big crowd had paid 50 cents a seat and the game was played with an oversized ball. “In reality, the field was very poorly lighted with some 25 or 30 gasoline lights, hung from five poles placed about the diamond. It was too dark to catch, too dark to hit and almost too dark to run the bases. But it was unique, don’t forget that.”13

 

As Sherman became a baseball success, its top players began to be noticed. One of the first was Lou Lockart (Sherwood Valley, Pomo), a right-hander with a surprising fastball. “Lockie” had a breakout year at Sherman in 1907 and played a while in the frenetic, all-season world of California semipro baseball. In 1911 he made spring camp with the Pacific Coast League Angels. This was his boyhood dream. “I used to read about Bender and Sockalexis in the papers and determined that I would be like them if I could,” he recalled.14 Lockart pitched decently in two games that spring but was let go with two other rookie pitchers. Manager Cap Dillon went with his veterans. Unhappy call. The Angels finished last, 39½ games out. Lockart would become a regular in circuits like LA’s Trolley League, pitching another seven years before his arm gave out.15

But Lockart was an exception at Sherman. A career on the endless professional road, away from family and culture, did not fit with baseball’s place in the cosmos of most Sherman athletes. It was true that some Sherman students, new to a jarringly regimented existence, endured wrenching cultural deprivation, homesickness, fear, anxiety. Imagine family separation.16 But Sherman also reflected a generation of change. Modern historians of the boarding school experience have recognized that many Sherman students learned to subtly adjust. In historian Clifford Trafzer’s phrase, students learned to “turn the power” of their own culture to live blended lives; they adapted to school and new possibilities even as they refused to abandon tradition and their people in a zero-sum exchange.17 Sherman Museum curator Lorene Sisquoc (Fort Sill Apache/Mountain Cahuilla) caught the sense of it. Remembering her own years in the multitribal mix of Sherman students, she observed that Sherman became “our reservation.”18 In that evolutionary pan-Indian environment, the diamond was common ground.

Sherman students could embrace baseball because in its component skills it was like their own ancient games of shinney or lacrosse.19 Students played baseball joyfully, for release. They played it hard, as a competitive outlet; in a telling phrase, they played to show what an Indian could do.20 At big games, student fans rocked the home stands like a cheer squad, with Sherman’s famous band booming a Sousa soundtrack. Sherman’s vocational teams played for intramural pennants. Back home, reservation teams played one another, and the game became an integral part of traditional cultural events like fiesta.

Sherman was in its element in those years. A free Sherman education started with English as a second language and up to eight grades of instruction. By 1908, 550 students were enrolled. By 1909, 48 tribes were represented. Academics were taught in the morning; in the afternoon there was vocational instruction; there were extracurricular offerings from music and literary societies to sports. Advancement was by exam, and students could persist into their early 20s. By today’s sensibilities, this may seem like a low educational bar. In its time, it was not. In 1900, according to the US Department of Education, only 6.4 of every 100 American 17-year-olds had a high-school diploma. And census data in this period found that 1.75 million American children were not in school at all but were working in mines, mills, and factories. Sherman’s educational model was destined to fall out of step with regulated high-school sports. But until then, Sherman had a steady flow of mature students in their physical prime. That was how it could play head-to-head with college teams, and show what an Indian could do.21

In 1909 Sherman had a young right fielder named Kenny Marmon (Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico). Marmon’s parents had been educated at Carlisle, but for his education, they looked west to Sherman. There was rising awareness that Sherman was more than the last Indian school. It also gave life to a larger pan-Indian institution – a transportation network that stretched common-ground accommodations from coast to coast. It started with Joe Scholder’s marriage to a Carlisle graduate. The Scholders would make their lifelong home in Riverside. Sylvas Lubo (Cahuilla), another early Sherman baseball star and career staffer, also married a Carlisle grad. So the ripples spread: Friends connected, there were marriages, families were begun. Carlisle sent out questionnaires to keep track of alumni, networking followed: jobs were sought and found, educational opportunities multiplied, students and alumni moved back and forth along this secure cultural line.

Sports recruiting followed, too, though 1909 also delivered an ominous sign: This was the year Carlisle’s Jim Thorpe was paid to play baseball for the Class-D Rocky Mount Railroaders. Carlisle actually eliminated its own baseball program in 1910. (Too many Carlisle ballplayers were being lured off to play for pay.)22 Thorpe was famously awarded his Olympic medals in 1912 and stripped of them in 1913. But traffic along the continental Native American highway was established. By 1918, a Seneca athlete from Oklahoma named Bert Jamison had become a multisport star at Haskell, in Kansas, had married a Sherman grad, and had come west to coach at a smaller Arizona Indian school. He was “discovered” there and came to the Pacific Coast League Los Angeles Angels spring camp as a pitching prospect. He was the last man cut, but things worked out. He took a long-term Sherman coaching job.23 And that was the year they closed Carlisle. By then, Carlisle had carried many former Sherman students on its rolls, including 75 from Southern California Mission tribes alone. But now, like Kenny Marmon, students sought other options up and down the line.24

The year of 1913 would be long remembered by baseball fans in Riverside. On March 25 the Chicago White Sox came to town to play a spring-training game against Sherman. This was the A team: Big Ed Walsh, Ray Schalk, Buck Weaver, Shano Collins, Joe Benz, and Harry Lord. The result was a real old-time baseball carnival. Town leaders hosted a ceremonial luncheon at the Mission Inn Hotel. Some of the White Sox got to teasing pitcher Joe Benz about something and he took umbrage and stalked out. Later, nobody wanted to take batting practice when Benz was throwing. But the giddy festivities were unaffected. The Sherman band marched and played at the head of an auto parade to the city park; downtown merchants all closed at noon and 3,000 fans filled seats and standing room while 280 Sherman students were infectiously noisy in reserved seating. The White Sox won 14-3. They scored five while Sherman’s players were still awestruck. With one out in the top of the first, there was a walk and a balk and a hit and Harry Lord came rounding third. But the throw to the plate beat him easily. He stopped and strolled up to the catcher, then suddenly sprang past him and scored. Later in the game, when Buck Weaver got a sharp grounder with nobody on, he sent it around the horn anyway, Weaver to Morrie Rath to Babe Borton at first. But the excitement was undiminished. Sherman’s players would remember it as the day they got to face Ed Walsh (he worked three innings, no hits), and Sherman did have its moments. Kenny Marmon, playing second this day, had two hits and stole two bases (here imagine Ray Schalk fuming); Saturnino Calac (Luiseño, Rincon) played airtight shortstop and had a booming triple. From the locals’ perspective, it was My Greatest Day in Baseball.25

In 1914 Emil Benson (Mono) emerged as both a notable student and arguably the finest pitcher to come out of Sherman in this Golden Era. This year, he threw a 13-strikeout no-hitter against the University of Redlands.26 He also edited the Sherman Bulletin, participated in the literary society, and was the only male in the small graduating class of ’14. He next pitched for Riverside High School. In the spring of 1917, when America entered World War I, Benson dropped out of school and enlisted in the US Army.27 Almost overnight, on a broad coastal plain north of San Diego, the Army built Camp Kearny for the urgent processing of Doughboys. The parade ground was laid out with space for 43 baseball diamonds. On October 30, 1917, Emil Benson made himself a star, pitching and winning both games of a doubleheader.28 In mid-1918 he was sent to France. In April 1919 he came back a sergeant, mustered out in San Diego and went directly to Sherman. That weekend Sherman happened to have a home baseball game with the University of Redlands. The Sherman Bulletin reported, “Emil Benson, a former student who has just returned from France, was here, and helped win the game.” Benson struck out seven in relief and Sherman collected a walk-off win, 8-7.29 Benson shortly took a staff position at Sherman. It was the beginning of a long career in the Bureau of Indian Affairs that would take him and his wife (a former Sherman staffer) to Keams Canyon Indian School in remote Hopi country east of the Grand Canyon. In 1934 (at age 39) Benson played shortstop and batted cleanup for a Keams Canyon team that went 19-2 and finished third in the Northern Arizona baseball tournament. The team was notable, the papers said, because the players all had been educated at Indian schools, including Sherman and Haskell.30

Postscript

On May 29, 1919, the Sherman Bulletin published a memorial list of Sherman students who had served and died in World War I. There were 10 names. There would be others. The list included an Olympic-class distance runner and four baseball players.32 (A University of Arkansas database lists 126 Native American World War I veterans with some connection to Sherman.33 )

By the 1920s, an alumni-varsity ballgame was a perennial feature of Sherman’s commencement week. In May of 1939, the “Sherman Institute All Stars” defeated the Soboba reservation nine (Luiseño), 10-2, to win the third annual Southwest Indian baseball tournament. The umpires were Jim Thorpe and Jack Meyers. The game was played on the home field at Sherman where Meyers had helped inaugurate baseball nearly four decades earlier.34

As for Kenny Marmon: At Sherman he won the shortstop job and established himself as a top student. He graduated from Sherman in 1911. In 1912 he helped Riverside High School win a championship and was, emphatically, all-league at shortstop. “There has never been an infielder in the Citrus Belt League who could approach the Indian,” the Riverside Enterprise declared.35 When World War I began, Marmon was at New Mexico State. He was another who left school, joined the Army, and served in France (as a sergeant).36 Like Emil Benson, he returned to Sherman, where he taught for a decade before leaving for promotion within the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By 1940 Marmon was one of just six Native American field agents on special assignment with the bureau to help tribes write constitutions, hold elections, and promote economic development. He was superintendent of the Seminole Indian Agency in Florida when he retired in 1958.37

And so to 2024. Sherman had survived through many iterations. Budgets were chronically tight. Its student population ballooned, then shrank back in the Great Depression. For some years it was a dedicated Navajo institution. Its baseball team remained in small-school competition. In time Sherman won accreditation. It struck a career-pathways partnership with the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. It persevered.

In June of 2024, US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland – the first Native American to attain Cabinet rank and, like Kenny Marmon, a Laguna Pueblo – reflected on the legacies of Native American character in a guest essay for Native News Online. A child of a military family, she remarked on how military service among Indians honored the tradition of defending lands that had been theirs long before the coming of the Mayflower. She recalled a grandfather who “galvanized his peers around pastimes like coaching an all-Indian baseball team, which he led to the state championship.”38

And on a sunny spring day in 2024, longtime coach Matt Townsend brought the Sherman Braves out for another home opener on the Sherman diamond. While ball fields may have shifted around the grounds across the decades, tradition was still at work here. On a part of this same spreading acreage where Jack Meyers and Joe Scholder and Ben Neafus played the first Sherman ballgame 121 years before, Sherman’s students were still playing baseball. Still celebrating their own Native American pastime.

TOM WILLMAN, a Southern California native, spent 35 years writing for newspapers, including two decades of editorial page work. His earliest ballpark souvenirs (with memories attached) are the last yearbook of the Pacific Coast League Angels and the first yearbook of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He first joined SABR in 1986 and has been an occasional contributor to its products.

 

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank to Lorene Sisquoc, curator of the Sherman Indian Museum, for her indispensable hospitality, guidance, and assistance to this project. As usual. The museum invites research inquiries. For more information, see https://www.facebook.com/shermanindianmuseum.

A growing archive of Sherman images and documents is now available on the web, through a partnership with the library of the University of California, Riverside. Visit Calisphere.org at https://calisphere.org/collections/27124/?start=912&q=&sort=a.

Thanks for all assistance, as well, to Richard Tritt, archives and library photograph curator of the Cumberland County (Pennsylvania) Historical Society. Among other collections, the Historical Society is the keeper of the rich historical archive and image collection of Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

For information on other boarding schools in the national chain, see https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teach/locations-reservation-indian-boarding-schools-us.

To access teaching and research guides on the history of Indian education, with links to the National Archives and Library of Congress, see https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teaching.

 

Notes

1 Haskell’s original title was the United States Indian Industrial Training School.

2 “Indians Defeated in a Good Game of Baseball,” Riverside (California) Daily Press, February 23, 1903.

3 “The Perris Indian Boys Downed Berdoo,” Riverside Enterprise, October 28, 1900.

4 “Ambitious Red Men: Indians Start Their Football Campaign With High Hopes,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 10, 1899.

5 “Indians on the Warpath,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1902.

6 “Indians Defeated in a Good Game of Baseball.”

7 “Neafus Will Twirl,” San Bernardino Sun, June 7, 1903; “Foul Tips,” San Bernardino County Sun, July 17, 1903.

8 “Analysis of Sherman Team,” Riverside Press and Horticulturalist, December 2, 1904.

9 Estimates vary. Contemporary ethnographer C. Hart Merriam thought low ebb was closer to 15,500. See “Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations,” exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. See https://americanindian.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/washington.

10 Phil Brigandi, “In the Name of the Law: The Cupeño Removal of 1903,” Journal of San Diego History, San Diego History Center Quarterly. Winter 2018, Volume 64, Number 1. Accessed at https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/2018/august/in-the-name-of-the-law-the-cupeno-removal-of-1903/.

11 “Jap Team Scalps Sherman Braves,” Los Angeles Herald, May 21, 1905.

12 “Sioux and Locals Break Even at Ball,” Riverside Enterprise, July 28, 1905.

13 “Sioux and Locals Break Even at Ball.”

14 “Berry’s New Indian Pitcher Is Making Good with the Angels,” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1911.

15 “At the Training Camps,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1918.

16 On August 4, 2023, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland took daylong testimony at Sherman as part of her “Road to Healing” Tour of Indian schools. The day’s full transcript is accessible at www.doi.gov/sites/default/files/rth-ca-sherman-indian-high-school-transcript.pdf.

17 Diana Meyers Bahr, The Students of Sherman Indian School: Education and Native Identity Since 1892 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 7.

18 Bahr, 61.

19 For shinney, imagine field hockey as it might have been approximated by joyful children at recess, or in a twin-ball variant, played more like lacrosse by women’s teams. “Games Bring Us Together,” 2024 exhibit, the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. Also 2024, Sherman Cultural Director Lorene Sisquoc included shinney instruction and play in “Native Toys & Games” summer workshops at the school. She first introduced the sport at Sherman in 1995, in competitive play with area reservations. Accessed at www.shermanindianmuseum.org.

20 John Bloom, To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sport at Native American Boarding Schools (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 64. Phrase turned by an unidentified Navajo boxer of the 1930s.

21 “The Subtle Evolution of Native American Education,” www.shermanindianmuseum.org; Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (National Center for Education Statistics, 1993), table 19, 55.

22 “Baseball Teams at the Carlisle Indian School,” Smithsonian Collections Blog, July 12, 2010. Accessed at https://si-siris.blogspot.com/2010/07/baseball-teams-at-carlisle-indian.html.

23 “Tigers Brace Up and Win,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 1918; Sherman Institute column, Riverside Daily Press, March 26, 1928.

24 “Records of the Carlisle Indian School at the National Archives and Records Administration,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, Archives & Special Collections, Waidner-Spahr Library, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Accessed online at https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/additional-resources/records-carlisle-indian-school-national-archives-and-records-administration.

25 “White Sox Defeat Red Skins 14 to 3,” Chicago Inter Ocean, March 26, 1913: 10; “Play Y.M.C.A. Benefit Ball Game: The Largest Crowd in the History of Riverside’s Big Ball Park See the Chicago White Sox Defeat Sherman,” Sherman Bulletin, March 26, 1913: 1.

26 “Riverside Wins in Three Games,” Riverside Enterprise, March 16, 1914.

27 “Sherman Institute Notes,” Riverside Daily Press, May 16, 1917: 14.

28 “Indian Benson Mainstay in Box,” San Diego Union, October 31, 1917: 6.

29 “Sherman Wins from Redlands,” Sherman Bulletin, April 24, 1919: 2.

30 “Twenty-Eight Entered in State Tournament,” Arizona Republic (Phoenix), July 26, 1934: 8.

31 John S. Dahlem, PhD, “History of the California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section (CIFSS): Sherman Indian High School.” https://cifss.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/CIFSS-History-31-Sherman-Indian-School.pdf.

32 “In Memoriam,” Sherman Bulletin, May 29, 1919: 6.

33 “Modern Warriors of World War I,” Sequoyah National Research Center (Little Rock: University of Arkansas, 2008). Database identifying 12,000 American Indian and Alaska Native veterans of World War I. Searchable at https://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/american-indians-in-ww1-modern-warriors-of-world-war-i/5565-american-indians-wwi-servicement.html.

34 “Soboba Nine Drops Titular Game to Sherman All-Stars,” Hemet (California) News, May 26, 1939: 12.

35 “All Star Team of Citrus Belt Picked,” Riverside Enterprise, June 7, 1912: 6.

36 US World War One Centennial Commission, database.

37 “Harrington to Take Over as Seminole Agency Superintendent,” press release, May 6, 1958, US Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs. https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/photograph-of-kenneth-marmon-who-was-a-pueblo-indian-and-bureau-of-indian-affairs-field-agent.

38 “Interior Secretary Deb Haaland: Native Americans Have Always Been Citizens,” Native News Online, June 2, 2024. https://nativenewsonline.net/opinion/interior-secretary-deb-haaland-deb-haaland-native-americans-have-always-been-citizens.