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Episode 13: Beginning to mine the correspondence files | Carlisle Indian School Research Podcast (zencast.website)

In this episode we begin to explore the correspondence available on microfilm (now digitized) in this series: M234 - Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881 (archives.gov). Today we’re focusing specifically on the difficulties Richard Henry Pratt had in getting supplies and support from the Bureau of the Indian Affairs as the school was opening.

The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center team has gone through these records and begun to cull out the Carlisle-related items, which you can find on the site here, in the Documents section: Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (dickinson.edu). As I say in the episode, I mention some documents which as of this recording are not yet up, but they will be shortly. Also, Jim and I discuss that we also need to explore the other sections of this series to locate correspondence from the agents to the Bureau about students being sent to Carlisle. Jim just did a quick search this morning and found one such example, so I’ll report back as we learn more about that side of the correspondence. And as mentioned in Episode 10, in which we gave an overview of the documentation, the incoming and outgoing correspondence are organized into different series, so until things open up again and we’re able to get a scanning team back down to DC, we will be limited to just this incoming material.

Here are a couple of examples of the documents we discuss:

And