52 THE CARLISLE SCHOOL FOR INDIAN PUPILS.

How did the school begin? In 1875, some
Indian prisoners were sent for various misdemean-

 

CAPT, R. H. PRATT.

ors from the Indian Territory as prisoners to
Florida. By order of General Sheridan, the War
Depariment placed R. H. Pratt,
rst Lieutenant Tenth U. 5.
Cavalry over them as superin-
tendent. They located in the
sleepy Spanish town St. Augus-
fine. Lieutenant Pratt, with
the Christian energy that all
of us who know him recognize
as one grand element of his
success in this chosen life-work,
immediately set to work with
a zeal unparalleled, on this
most difficult problem, “How
furnish mental knowledge and
industrial training at one and
the same time, to these down-
trodden creatures?”

A record of this part of the
work would be intensely inter-

esting; how he enlisted the sympathy and aid

of several ladies wintering in St. Augustine,

who volunteered to help teach the Indians;
how he seized the. meagre opportunities afforded
to train them industrially, by setting them to
pick oranges, grub the land, to boat pine logs
and construct out of them log huts, that they
might learn how to replace their skin tepes; how
every chance to teach them practical methods of
selfsupport was most eagerly grasped. But the
space is short, and Carlisle beckonsus on. Suffice
it to say that a marked success was his, resulting
in the sending to General Armstrong, at Hampton
Institute, first seventeen pupils, then fifty-two more,
including girls. Then Lieutenant Pratt proposed
to the Interior and War Departments to undertake
the education of two hundred and fifty to three
hundred children at the old military Barracks at
Carlisle, Pa., which was accepted.

This was the beginning of the Carlisle School
which opened on the first of November, 1879, with
one hundred and forty-seven students.

Now, then, what and where were “ the Old Bar-
racks?”

The Old Barracks were first erected and occupied
as a prison for. the Hessian troops captured by
Washington at Trenton in 1776. The old Guard
House built at the time by these Hessian prison-
ers still remains. Other buildings, in the shape

of those now standing, were erected during the.
Florida War, 1835-36, remaining until 1863, when

   

THE DINING-ROOM.

they were burnt by Fitz Hugh Lee, who then
shelled the town of Carlisle. In 1864-65 they