Children Taken From a Prison Camp
In late 1886, not long after the Chiricahua were sent to Florida as prisoners of war, a large group of their children was sent more than a thousand miles north to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. The families were already confined and divided between two forts, and now they were separated again. The decision was made by the Army and government officials, not by the parents.
Sources give slightly different numbers, but it was a large share of the school-age children among the prisoners, numbering in the range of a hundred or so. Girls and boys were included, and some were quite young. Details about individual children are best sought in the school and Army records and in family accounts, and this article keeps to the general outline.
What Carlisle Was
Carlisle was a federally run boarding school, opened in 1879 by Richard Henry Pratt, an Army officer. Its purpose was explicit: to remove Native children from their families and communities and to teach English, trades and Euro-American habits. Pratt’s often-quoted phrase about killing the Indian to save the man shows the thinking of the time. The school was one of the best-known examples of the federal assimilation policy, which treated Native languages, religions and family life as obstacles to be removed.
Pratt had earlier supervised Plains prisoners held at Fort Marion in the 1870s, which is part of why Carlisle and Fort Marion were linked in the minds of officials. The Chiricahua children, though, were arriving from a very different situation: their parents were prisoners, and the choice to resist was far narrower.
What Students Experienced
Student life at Carlisle followed the usual pattern of such schools. Children were given new clothes, hair was cut, names were often replaced with English ones, and speaking their own language could be punished. Days were split between classroom work and trades or farm labor. In the summers, some students were placed with farm families under what the school called an outing system.
Climate and disease were serious problems. Many children who arrived from the Southwest fell ill, and a significant number died while at the school or soon after returning, with lung disease among the causes frequently named. Some were buried at Carlisle, far from home. Exact counts differ by source, so it is more careful to say that the losses were heavy.
Families Apart
For parents, the separation added to the strain of captivity. Mothers and fathers who were themselves prisoners could not protect or visit their children, and letters were limited. Some children stayed at Carlisle for several years. Some were later sent to join their families after the prisoners were moved to Alabama, and others returned to Fort Sill after 1894.
The people who came back had been changed in different ways. Some had learned trades and English that helped them later in life, while also bearing the cost of lost years, lost language and sometimes lost relatives. Historians and descendants disagree about how to weigh these things, and it is not for an outsider to settle. What can be said plainly is that the experience was imposed, not chosen.
Later Accounts
A number of former students later spoke or wrote about the school, and some of these accounts are among the sources historians use for the imprisonment era. They differ from one another, as individual experiences did. One survivor of the period, Jason Betzinez, went to Carlisle and later wrote a memoir, which remains widely read. His account is one voice among many, and it should be read alongside other evidence, as discussed in the article on primary sources for the imprisonment.
Context in Boarding School History
The Chiricahua case is one part of a much larger story. For decades the federal government and churches ran boarding schools across the country, and the broader Apache boarding school history includes Western and Eastern Apache children sent to many different institutions. The lasting harms of those schools, including broken family ties and language loss, are now widely acknowledged and are discussed under the heading of Apache boarding school trauma. This article cannot cover that whole history, and it does not speak for any community’s present-day understanding.
For current information about how Apache nations remember and address this history, the nations’ own official websites are the best place to look.