Archdiocese ran rural Indian boarding school from 1884-1892

“Parents want him badly” is among handwritten notations in an arrivals and departure record from 1889-1890 from the Catholic Industrial School in Clontarf.

From 1884 to 1892, the then-Archdiocese of St. Paul contracted with the U.S. government for the school’s use as an Indian boarding school, drawing students from more than a dozen different tribal nations, particularly in the Dakotas.

Located in west-central Minnesota, Clontarf is now in the Diocese of New Ulm, which was established from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ territory in 1957. Some of the school’s records are held by the archdiocese as part of the personal papers of Msgr. Anatole Oster, the school’s superintendent while it served as an Indian boarding school. The archdiocese and other Minnesota dioceses are currently working with tribal leaders to share archival material related to known boarding schools.

As former Bishop James Shannon recounted in a September 1956 story for Minnesota History magazine, Archbishop John Ireland founded the Catholic Industrial School near St. Paul in 1874 with the goal of training immigrant children in farming and industrial arts. Enrollment was low, so, with the expansion of the railroad, he moved the school across the state to Clontarf in 1877. Franciscans from Brooklyn, New York, came to staff the boys-only school, but it drew no pupils. In 1884, Archbishop Ireland contracted with the U.S. government to board and educate boys from Indian tribes.

According to a school register kept from 1884 to 1891, the school drew students from tribes in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Records show that students’ enrollment was federally funded for three years. The school enrolled around 60 Indian boys a year, as well as some white students, primarily from the Catholic Orphan Asylum in Minneapolis. Most of the students are listed as “half-breeds.” Most of the students are identified as Catholic, with notations on which sacraments they had received.

The Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions in Washington, D.C., served as an intermediary between the school and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Catholic Church stopped operating the school in 1892, when the U.S. government stopped contracting with third parties, such as churches, for the operation of non-reservation boarding schools. Archbishop Ireland sold the school to the federal government, which continued to run the school for six more years, until 1898.

According to an 1888 account of the school from Msgr. Oster, under the terms of the school’s contract, it could enroll students ages 6 to 18 to teach them agriculture, stock raising and “the elementary branches of education.” Some students also learned a trade, he said. (See sidebar “Contemporary accounts.”)

The school was to furnish clothing, board, books, stationery, tools for farm and garden work, teachers and medical care. Msgr. Oster said that the school was run by four Franciscan brothers, two male lay teachers, and four other staff members. In August 1888, Msgr. Oster noted 106 boys at the school, with 69 of them Indians. The government paid the school $100 per Indian student.

Documents held by the archdiocese include students’ names, ages, tribes, father’s name, date of arrival and departure, and sometimes some other notes. They also note if a boy ran away or died.

The register lists 18 boys as having died between 1884 and 1891. Several of them note consumption, or tuberculosis, as the cause of death.

With the heading “St. Paul Diocese Industrial School of Clontarf,” a stone monument at St. Malachy Cemetery in Clontarf erected during the town’s centennial celebration in 1978 notes the graves of 14 “Sioux and Chippewa Indian youths who died while attending the school.”

Allison Spies, the archdiocese’s archives program manager, said she hopes to work with affected American Indian tribes to answer the question of how many boys died while attending the school and where they might be buried.

Documents in the archives also contain letters between the school and agents for the Bureau of Indian Affairs about the boys and the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. Some of them are about boys who are sick, or whose parents want them to return. The letters request permission to send boys home and indicate the school required government funding to pay for those trips.

Spies is currently working on behalf of the Minnesota Catholic Conference to help the state’s dioceses identify and share records related to Indian boarding schools with the state’s 11 tribal nations. She is also working to identify and contact other tribes whose children were enrolled at the Catholic Industrial School at Clontarf and other Catholic-affiliated boarding schools in Minnesota, as well as the religious orders that are known to have run or staffed them.

Contemporary accounts: A window into the Catholic Industrial School at Clontarf

In September 1885, the Northwestern Chronicle, a Minnesota Catholic journal, wrote a description of the Catholic Industrial School, calling it “an interesting institution — educating Catholic boys.” The somewhat idyllic description noted that the 2,000-acre campus included two large buildings — one with dormitories, classrooms and a reception hall, the other with a kitchen, chapel, refectory, more classrooms and work rooms. The curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar and agriculture, carpentry, shoemaking, tailoring, and other trades.

The boys raised vegetables in a 20-acre garden, grew wheat and oats, and cared for nearly 100 head of stock, 50 hogs and “a well-stocked chicken house.” The author noted plans for cheese and butter-making “on a large scale,” thanks to the gift of a thoroughbred bull to the school by James J. Hill, president of the Manitoba railroad and a frequent collaborator of Archbishop John Ireland. The bakery oven, the Northwestern Chronicle said, could bake 150 loaves at a time.

According to the Chronicle, there were 102 boys at the Catholic Industrial School in September 1885: “a number of white boys and Indians and half-breeds placed at the school by the United States Government.” The article listed boys as being between ages 9 and 20.

The author of the Chronicle report noted that the boys were taught by the Franciscan brothers “who have charge of the institution” and lay teachers. The author commented on the students’ language skills and academic abilities, noting “the Indians all speak some Indian dialect, many of them are well conversant with French, and a majority speak English fluently, which even the youngest seem to learn easily. … They read, those who have been to school for some time, with ease and accuracy. Their pronunciation is good, though the French half-breeds have a slight French accent. Their penmanship is excellent, putting to shame many of the scholars in our public and parochial schools(,) and during a recent examination they performed a number of difficult problems in weights and measures.”

The Chronicle went on to report that the boys also enjoyed and performed well the “duties of farm life … and seem thoroughly at home and contented. The extensive grounds of the institution admit a wide range for the boys, and when not occupied with their studies or work, can be seen scattered all over the prairie, without distinction of race or color, playing marbles, shooting bows and arrows, playing ball and amusing themselves with a number of other games.”

The writer remarked that the Indian students “are irreproachable in their morals. The school, be it understood, is not a reformatory, but, occupying a position between the ordinary school and every day (sic) life, is designed to prepare the boys for earning an honest livelihood.”

The boys (“every boy except one, an Indian, who is a Pagan”) went to confession and Communion monthly, the writer stated, “and from neither the whites or Indians was a single oath or immoral expression heard in the course of several visits made to the institution by the writer.”

The story concluded with a note that the school aimed to increase enrollment, “although the expenses are necessarily large and there is no tuition fee except what is paid by the government for the Indians and half-breeds.” He noted that the school needed a library, and readers were welcome to donate for that cause.
Two other competing accounts of the school ran in the summer of 1888 in the St. Paul Pioneer Express. The first was printed in late July by the paper’s editor, A. Gerardin, and a lengthy rebuttal came in early August from the school’s superintendent, Msgr. Anatole Oster.

Gerardin’s piece, titled “A trip to Clontarf,” called into question the care of the boys, especially in food and cleanliness. He said he was approaching the school when he encountered three children herding sheep. “I asked them how they liked to stay here at school. They answered, ‘Not at all.’ I asked, ‘Why?’ ‘Because we do not get food as we do at home.’ ‘Would you prefer being at home?’ Their answer was short and in the affirmative, while tears stood in their eyes.”

Gerardin went on to say that about 20 boys had recently run away from the school and he indicated he talked with three of them “and their stories agree with those left behind.” He went on to say that the school gets government support, “and it would seem that funds should be sufficient to give the children a better bill of fare than bread and syrup twice a day, with soup for dinner and meat but once a week” especially considering the boys’ farm work. “It is a matter which the heads of the church and other proper authorities should investigate.”

In response, Msgr. Oster stated that Gerardin had gone to Clontarf looking for fault and that he “took good care not to find me.” After calling into question Gerardin’s report based on its faulty geography alone, he also said that 11 boys had run away since the winter, and one was sent home for “unruly conduct and bad language.” Of those who ran away, he said, “five Sioux ran away on account of a death occurring in the house, and I understand that it is according to a superstition in their race.”

As for the others, Msgr. Oster said, “Seven more were demanded home by their parents, and after permission had been obtained from the Indian department, they were sent home well clad, their passage paid and with money in pocket for meals on the road. Four more … were taken home by their fathers who would not wait for the permission from the department which I had asked, but which had not yet arrived; had they waited, the boys would have been sent home without expense to the parents. There are a few whose time has expired” — presumably the students’ three-year limit of government-funded tuition — “and for whom I am daily expecting permission from the government to let them go honorably and comfortably.”

Msgr. Oster said the students eat well — meat once a day — and he provided a list of food and supplies, including 400 pounds of soap, used between April 1 and June 30. As for the boys with dirty and ragged clothes — a description he disagreed with — he wrote, “I suppose your own son never came home but with a clean face, and your good wife was never called upon to mend his clothes after a rough play such as all boys are apt to indulge at times.”

He added, presumably with sarcasm, “In the four years that the school has been in existence our death rate has been 1 and 6-10 percent, a convincing proof that the children are starved, unwashed, miserably clad, etc. Let the unprejudiced reader judge.”