Background
He was born on December 6, 1840 at Rushford, New York, United States, the son of Richard Smalley and Mary (Herrick) Pratt, both of English ancestry.
( General Richard Henry Pratt, best known as the founder ...)
General Richard Henry Pratt, best known as the founder and longtime superintendent of the influential Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, profoundly shaped Indian education and federal Indian policy at the turn of the twentieth century. Pratt’s long and active military career included eight years of service as an army field officer on the western frontier. During that time he participated in some of the signal conflicts with Indians of the southern plains, including the Washita campaign of 1868-1869 and the Red River War of 1874-1875. He then served as jailor for many of the Indians who surrendered. His experiences led him to dedicate himself to Indian education, and from 1879 to 1904, still on active military duty, he directed the Carlisle school, believing that the only way to save Indians from extinction was to remove Indian youth to nonreservation settings and there inculcate in them what he considered civilized ways. Pratt’s memoirs, edited by Robert M. Utley and with a new foreword by David Wallace Adams, offer insight into and understanding of what are now highly controversial turn-of-the-century Indian education policies.
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He was born on December 6, 1840 at Rushford, New York, United States, the son of Richard Smalley and Mary (Herrick) Pratt, both of English ancestry.
His education in the village school at Logansport, to which his parents removed in 1846, ended when he was thirteen.
After his father was robbed and murdered while returning from the California gold fields, the lad became an apprentice tinsmith. At the outbreak of the Civil War he joined Company A of the 9th Indiana Infantry, in which he became corporal, saw service in skirmishes in West Virginia, and was mustered out in July 1861. He became sergeant in the 2nd Indiana Cavalry, was commissioned first lieutenant, and assigned to the 11th Indiana Cavalry, with which he served until the end of the war. He became a captain on September 1, 1864, and left the service on May 29, 1865. Though he had two horses shot under him, he was never wounded.
During the difficult financial days that followed the Civil War he entered the hardware business, but in 1867 he returned to the army as second lieutenant of cavalry. He was assigned to the 10th Cavalry, a colored regiment then newly organized, and was promoted to first lieutenant in the regular establishment the same year.
He participated in the winter campaigns against the Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa in 1868-69 and again in 1874-75. At the close of the latter campaign he took a detail of about seventy Indian prisoners in irons to Fort Marion at St. Augustine, Florida. While in charge of these prisoners during the next three years he carried on his first experiments in the methods of Indian education that were to be his lifework. Owing to his remarkable success, he was transferred in 1878 to Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, where he remained for a year organizing its Indian branch.
Becoming doubtful of the wisdom of educating Indians and negroes together, he requested the use of Carlisle Barracks at Carlisle, in which to begin the first non-reservation federal Indian school. The first party of students arrived on October 6, 1879, under his personal care. The school was formally authorized by Congress in 1882. After the Spanish-American War, Porto-Rican students were added.
He was made colonel on January 24, 1903, was retired on February 17, 1903, and was advanced to rank of brigadier-general on the retired list by act of Congress on April 23, 1904. On July 1, 1904, he was relieved of the superintendency of the school.
After his retirement, he devoted himself to discussions of Indian policy and advocacy of citizenship for Indians. In 1908 he published a pamphlet, The Indian Industrial School, that told a good deal of the history of the school at Carlisle and of his own attitude toward his work.
He died in the army hospital at San Francisco.
( General Richard Henry Pratt, best known as the founder ...)
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
He believed that the solution of the Indian problem did not lie in any attempt to preserve and develop a distinctively Indian culture but lay rather in teaching the individual Indian to make a place for himself in the white man's world. To achieve this, he endeavored to separate young Indians from tribal influences, give them sound elementary educations, and bring them into contact with the better elements in white society.
He was naturally a severe critic of many aspects of the official Indian policy and had many conflicts with bureaucrats. Such a course aroused the opposition of those who disagreed with his underlying philosophy, of certain western communities that disliked having Indian appropriations spent in the East, and of those who resented his methods and his criticism.
He was married on April 12, 1864, while on leave from the front, to Anna Laura Mason, the daughter of B. B. Mason. They had four children.