Article 12: Challenge and Conflict to Educate: The Brazos Agency Indian School

Indian education is an important, and occasionally neglected, aspect of our nation’s educational history. Although the Spanish and Mexicans made concerted efforts to educate Native Americans in what is now con- sidered the southwestern United States, the U.S. story mostly involves boarding schools that were established in the late 1800s to indoctrinate Indian children in “the ways of the white man” (Reyhner and Eder 2000). In the mid-1800s, the west was a treacherous place for both Indians and settlers. Violence commonly broke out over territorial disputes as well as issues surrounding the expansion of white settlers into the west. Under these circumstances, the U.S. government sponsored few educational efforts for Indians in the State of Texas, with the notable exception of those undertaken at a small fort in northern Texas. Established on a small agricultural reservation as a treaty provision with the Republic of Texas (and later with the United States), the Brazos Agency Indian School was unique in both its purpose and its very existence (Deloria and DeMallie 1999, 578-579, 582-585; Kappler 1904, 554-556). One of the only schools of its kinds to emerge in the 1850s, the Brazos Agency Indian School was open for nearly a year before closing in the wake of the government’s forced relocation of local Indians to present-day Oklahoma (Webb 1965, 29-34). Through his diary, Zachariah Ellis Coombes, Sr., schoolmaster of the Brazos Agency Indian School, provides a first-person account of the school’s curriculum and daily activities.