Ute Indian boarding schools saw nearly 60 student deaths

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Utes believed children “would sicken and die” at Randlett boarding school, an agent wrote in 1897. “Their superstition has been increased during the past year ... by three deaths in the school.”

Here are the student deaths at the Uinta Basin boarding schools documented by The Tribune.Although the Uintah Boarding School opened in Whiterocks in 1881, Indian agents and superintendents didn’t record any deaths in their reports until 10 years later.

One death was unexplained in the reports; Ouray School Superintendent Charles A. Walker blamed the other two students’ deaths on inherited tuberculosis.Since January, Superintendent G. V. Goshorn said in his 1898 report, “8 of the school children have died and 3 others are sick at present.” In one story, The Tribune reported the Ute boy’s father had been persuaded to enroll his son. But in an interview in Salt Lake City, Indian Agent H.P. Myton said he had taken the child away.

First, “one patient, suffering also with tonsillitis, died,” he wrote. “Doubtless this deplorable accident would have been avoided had the employee in charge of this patient exercised ordinary good judgment and obeyed orders. At the Ouray school, Superintendent John M. Commons first complained in his 1901 report that the measles outbreak at his school had interfered with work. He then noted five students had died.

There was “an effort being made” to get Myton removed as agent, The Tribune reported, and McLaughlin would conduct a “thorough investigation into all conditions.”he had gone “out among the tepees at the White Rocks agency, and visited them in their homes. It was six hours before I could make any headway, but finally made a friend of old Sowawick, and finally forty of the leading Indians dropped into the tepee to talk.

Six students had died at the Ouray School, wrote Superintendent John F. Mackey, adding in his report below that “considerable sickness prevailed among the pupils during the winter months.” Episcopalian missionary Lucy Carter is shown with two Ute boys she adopted, Wabun and Ruben, in Whiterocks in the early 1900s.

“It is evident,” Jorgenson continued, “that the government education system was having little of its intended effects on most Utes. For years, before the water system was installed, school leaders had been reporting the grounds were becoming saturated with waste.After 1906, the federal government reduced what it published from Indian agents to, generally, statistics and employee lists, which leaves it unclear how many deaths occurred at the school from that point on.“It was wicked. A lot of them died up at Whiterocks,” he said. “No disease took them as fast as that old flu,” he added."… I had it, 1920.

 

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