Listen to the episode here: https://carlisle-indian-school-research.zencast.website/episodes/4.

This started with a question someone asked me on the Facebook page: how young were the students? To which I replied, do you mean the youngest ever or generally, how young were they? She wisely answered: both. I confidently replied that one answer would be easy and the other hard. As usual, I was partly right, but mostly wrong. Here’s some useful info to supplement the episode:

In case you need them and didn’t have note-taking implements handy, here are the stats for students under the age of eight:

7 year olds: 24 students, entering throughout the history, from 1879 to 1917

6 year olds: 14 students entering from 1886 to 1907

6.5 year olds: one in 1884

5 year olds: Five students, entering from 1884 to 1906

4 year olds: one in 1907 (there’s a story behind him, but that will have to wait for another day)

3 year olds: one in 1886. Lydia Biddle Eagle Feather.

In trying to find documentation of the government’s age-related policies, I found this dissertation useful: Everett Arthur Gilcreast, “Richard Henry Pratt and American Indian Policy, 1877-1906: A Study of the Assimilation Movement,” Yale University, 1967.

And, here are my stats on the ages of students in general:

According to my math, the youngest annual average age for entering students was in 1880: 13.25 years old for males and 11.76 for females. The highest annual averages for male students was 18.46 in 1907; for females, it was 17.02 years old in 1915. An average age for all the students over all the years is 16.7 for males and 15.2 for females

Here’s Lydia’s enrollment card:

Here are Ralph Iron Eagle Feather’s enrollment cards and Julia Good Voice’s first enrollment card on the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center site. To find more information, click on the links in the People section of these pages

Here’s the image of Ralph Iron Eagle Feather and other students working on the roof of a school building:

And here’s the one of Julia shortly after arrival. Since she was 17, she’s the person seated at left.

I’m not going to link out to all the newspaper articles I quoted, but here’s an image of one of them as an example.

I mention the photos of the “Apache babies”-here’s an example. And the Laura mentioned here is student Laura Doanmoe and her son Richard Doanmoe (note that he doesn’t have an enrollment card—well, he does, but not until he’s five years old in 1891 when he and his family return to the school).

If you want to get lost in searching the student newspapers, which I highly recommend, here’s the link for the Publications section of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. If you’re having trouble, let me know and I may be able to give you some guidance.

And, in case you haven’t bought it yet, here’s a link to my Arline Custer Memorial Award-winning book, “A Very Correct Idea of Our School”: A Photographic History of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Again, thanks for listening and please let me know if you have any questions or feedback. I feel like I’m kind of getting the hang of this. There’s so much more to talk about! Looking forward to bringing you episodes on a more regular basis.