Following the Civil War, leading abolitionists broadened their fight for equality to include Native Americans. These middle class reformers promoted a synthetic belief system based on the New Testament, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. Foremost, they argued that Indians could be saved from extinction only by ending their paternalistic relationship with the government; by stopping abuses perpetrated by the army and its greedy agents; and by providing Indians with the same rights and protections afforded to other Americans. These activists were not opposed to cultural conquest, only to violent and unscrupulous means of achieving it.

President Grant and liberal Congressmen were receptive to the reformers’ supplications as both were worried about the Army’s inability to pacify the Plains Indians, as well as the mounting costs of Indian wars. Those who accepted reform methods of Indian management justified their support by arguing that peaceful strategies would be both more humane and cost efficient. Thus under Grant, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began to consolidate Indian tribes onto large reservations where they could be protected, Christianized, and provided with cultural and vocational education.

Adhering to the widely held belief in a linear progression of cultural evolution that measured the worth of foreign social forms against middle class American standards, reformers regarded education as the best means for assisting “backward” ethnic groups in attaining a higher degree of civilization. Utilizing this theory, Indian education proponents stressed the need for teaching Indian children individualism, industry, and Christian doctrine as well as instilling in them the tools for becoming responsible citizens. To achieve these objectives reformers advocated for the opening of reservation day schools. However, by the end of the 1870s it was obvious that children immersed in their own culture were poor candidates for successful assimilation, and the reservation boarding school began to replace day schools as the preferred method of Indian education. Unlike their predecessors, the academies were located away from family members and provided greater institutional control over children’s lives. It was not long though before similar weaknesses appeared in the boarding schools method as reservation agents complained about the demoralizing effects of parents’ constant efforts to visit their offspring.

In 1879, former army officer Richard Henry Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and his establishment soon became the prototype for off-reservation industrial boarding schools. Asserting that Indians could only be rapidly assimilated if they were removed from their tribal culture, he argued for native children being placed in schools located in or near “civilized” communities. Adding their support for off-reservations schools, in 1882, Christian advocates of Indian education formed the Indian Rights Association under Herbert Welsh and aggressively argued that off-reservation schools would correct Indian inferiority derived from their deficient reservation environment.

In 1889, President Harrison selected Thomas J. Morgan to oversee the reformulation of Indian education policy as his new Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Morgan, a former Brigadier General in the Union Army, ordained Baptist minister, and principal of a number of schools, believed that the American public school system had succeeded in absorbing foreign immigrants into the mainstream of American life and saw no reason why the same approach would not work for Native Americans.

Under Morgan Congress allocated funds to establish the Fort Mohave Industrial School in 1890 to serve the Walapai and Mohave Indians. “Situated on a granite bluff on the east bank of the Colorado River near the head of the Mojave Valley…,” the fort had been established in 1859 near present-day Kingman, Arizona, to protect California-bound emigrants. Soldiers occupied the fort for two years and then abandoned it, but as growing numbers of prospectors clashed with local Indians it was re-garrisoned in 1863. On August 22, 1890, the commanding officer formally turned the fort over to Morgan’s choice for school superintendent, Samuel M. McCowan. An active Republican and experienced educator, McCowan oversaw the opening of the school and remained its supervisor for six years until he moved to the nearby Phoenix Indian School. In 1891, McCowan lobbied for and was successful in having the school’s name changed to the Herbert Welsh Institute.

While at Fort Mohave, McCowan set about fashioning his establishment according to guidelines already in use in nearby schools in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Grand Junction, Colorado. Following precedent, McCowan hired teachers to instruct his students in rudimentary English, mathematics, geography, and American history. He received funding to hire a farmer, blacksmith, and carpenter to teach males vocational skills, and a matron to guide females in domestic tasks such as sewing and cooking. Only allotted $168 per student per year, McCowan, as school superintendents elsewhere, found himself placing more emphasis on the vocational curriculum in an effort to maintain the institution and provide students with necessities such as food and clothing. During the first year, 1890-1891, McCowan recruited 82 students, and then for his remaining years kept enrollment at approximately 100 pupils.

In the mid-1890s problems associated with the removal of impressionable children from their homes were becoming evident as runaways became a major problem at all schools and as new scientific minded Progressive reformers highlighted the hardships placed on both Indian children and their families. These new reformers revealed that the reality of off-reservation boarding schools was far from ideal. As happened regularly at the Fort Mohave Industrial School, they found parents who had been threatened with having their treaty-guaranteed food rations discontinued if they refused to send their children to boarding schools, and traumatized children who had been forcibly separated from their parents, thrown into an alien environment, and stripped of the physical markers of tribal identity. While at school, these small victims’ ordeals continued as administrators regulate their daily existence with military-like regimentation and humiliating punishments.

Examining former students’ lives, Progressive critics discovered that contrary to the educational goals of funneling Indian youths into wage labor positions in nearby cities, due to prejudice, few students found jobs and most ended up back on their reservations. Having spent their formative years in boarding schools, these tribal repatriates held skills and values that were often useless and alien in their communal, rural environment. Caught between two cultures, many of these Indians became prime candidates for alcoholism and delinquency. Fort Mohave students were no exception to these findings.

The last 25 off-reservation boarding schools opened in 1902 and almost immediately thereafter officials began addressing Progressive criticisms. Momentum to reform educational policy began with Francis Ellington Leupp. Leupp had been a highly respected journalist who visited several reservations in the late 1890s to witness the impact of government Indian policy. In 1895 Herbert Walsh appointed Leupp as Washington agent for the Indian Rights Association and in 1896 he joined the Board of Indian Commissioners. In 1905 Theodore Roosevelt named him Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Leupp seized the opportunity to reorient the government’s policy of rapid assimilation to a more gradual process of acculturation.

Between 1905 and 1920, Leupp worked to build a case against off-reservation boarding skills as unjustifiably cruel. Through his office Progressives gained a public forum to argue that such institutions served only to foster long-term government dependency and that native cultures could provide perfectly adequate foundations for educational growth. As such, these advocates successfully convinced Congress to close seven off-reservation schools.

As the 1920s progressed, a new type of reform movement began to emerge that not only protested against the government’s treatment of Indians, but also the underpinnings of official Indian policy. Influenced by this growing trend, in 1923 government critic John Collier founded the American Indian Defense Association to protest against policies designed to divest Indians of their land and destroy native cultures. Eventually bowing to pressure from these reformers, in 1926 Secretary of the Interior Herbert Work commissioned the Institute of Government Research to complete a thorough study of reservation conditions throughout the country. Presented to Congress in 1928, the report, titled The Problem of Indian Administration, but known as the Meriam Report, found U.S. Indian policy a dismal failure and was especially critical of education efforts.

To implement the Meriam Report’s recommendations, the Hoover Administration appointed long-term members of the Indian Rights Association Charles J. Rhoads as Commissioner of Indian Affairs and J. Henry Scattergood as Assistant Commissioner. These men then installed W. Carson Ryan Jr., a professor at Swarthmore, as director of Indian education. Utilizing the social momentum of the Meriam Report, these men shifted Indian policy back toward the expansion of day and reservation boarding schools and worked to close the remaining off-reservation institutions. It was under their authority that the Fort Mohave Industrial School closed in 1931.