Winning Indians and Other Contradictions: The Morris Indian School Baseball Team, 1898–1908

In turn-of-the-century Morris, Minnesota, newspaper headlines heralded the inevitable disappearance of American Indians. “Famous Indian Reservation to be Opened” proclaimed a 1904 Morris Times, tantalizing prospective emigrants with news that the “Red Lake Lands” were opening for white settlement. Throughout 1908, Calumet Baking Powder ran ads in the Morris Sun and Morris Tribune picturing a baking powder canister within an Indian headdress silhouette; readers of the ads were assured that association with a timeless Indian image guaranteed a product that was “Always The Same.” And although a 1905 Times report on the recent national census blared “Indians Not Dying Out,” the assumption underlying such a statement was hardly concealed. Whether advertising empty Native lands, recalling a static image of bygone times, or expressing astonishment at signs of indigenous continuance, Morris newspapers portrayed Native peoples as a vanishing race.¹

Yet nestled among the era’s less prominent stories, quieter headlines read “Indians Win.” Conspicuously out of place amidst Morris’s usual Indian articles, this 1908 story recounted Native exploits in a seemingly new public arena: the ballfield. As the article would recount, the baseball team from the local Morris Indian School had bested a high school club from nearby Wahpeton, North Dakota, 6–3, in “a very good exhibition of the national game.” In competing against whites on the diamond—something ballplayers from the Morris School had done at least thirty times over the past ten summers—this collection of indigenous teenagers had, perhaps unknowingly, presented a startling portrait of Indian peoples. Indeed, these Natives were not receding beneath frontier settlement, but rather were surfacing in a budding American city—and in the nation’s favorite pastime. Unlike the theme of Indian extinction emanating from town weeklies, then, this passing reference to baseball resounded with a new Native truth: by adapting to unconventional settings, these Indians were here to stay.²

Fig. 1.

Indian boarding schools proliferated across turn-of-the-century Minnesota; including Morris, at least three institutions sponsored baseball teams. Figure created by David J. Laliberte, July 2008.

How is it, then, that the Morris Indian ball team came to this place, beating a white high school team from a neighboring prairie town? How did these Indians manage to compete successfully against more thoroughly schooled white teams—something they did with increasing frequency throughout their institution’s existence? Moreover, what significance did baseball play in these Natives’ experiences with white “civilization”? These and related questions pique this investigation into an intriguing and unexpected chapter of baseball history—a chapter demonstrating both the adaptability of Native peoples and the continuity of pride and identity underlying this change.

The Morris Indian School originated with the dreams of Mother Mary Joseph Lynch and the Catholic Sisters of Mercy. Born in Cork, Ireland, and graced with the coarse personality of an Old Country farm woman, Mother Lynch and her missionary flock arrived in Morris in 1886 from Brooklyn, New York, immediately constructing a wooden schoolhouse for Native pupils on a hill just outside the frontier town. Intending to transform Indian children into American citizens through assimilation into white society—the “benevolent” aim of many late-nineteenth-century reformers—Lynch and the Sisters first enrolled a dozen Dakota girls from the nearby Sisseton Agency, and then added over a hundred Ojibwe children from North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain reservation to their expanding educational enterprise. Officially christened the Sacred Heart Indian Mission, Lynch’s school emerged alongside several other Indian boarding institutions in Minnesota, all of which emphasized English language acquisition, gender-based vocational training, and Christianization as a “civilized” alternative to inferior tribal pursuits.

Fig. 2.

Morris Indian School, 1897, shortly after federal control. Courtesy of Stevens County (MN) Historical Society.

Apparently, Native students responded well to the Sisters’ governance—which Morris School historian Wilbert Ahern describes as “emphasizing persuasion rather than coercion”—although incidents of corporal punishment and student runaways mar the records of most Indian boarding schools nationwide. When the Office...