Eight inches of bottom soil on the mesa

On October 8, 1890, the United States opened the Fort Mojave Industrial School on a mesa on the east bank of the Colorado. Samuel M. McCowan was superintendent. Maribel Estrada Calderón's essay for Intermountain Histories, written at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, follows what he did with the ground, not with a parade. He had about 1,200 acres of rich alluvial soil half a mile below the buildings. Mojave on a nearby reservation planted that kind of soil once a year, after the spring overflow. McCowan knew it. He would not do it. He wanted two hundred acres in crop year-round, which meant water on a schedule the river does not keep.

That refusal is the story. The school sat above a farming system that had fed the valley since before Oñate, and its first superintendent treated the system as an obstacle to the institution he wanted. Estrada Calderón's point is blunt. Labor-based boarding schools were an assimilation program. They taught trades and a sedentary life, and they measured success by whether children could be turned into a particular kind of American farmer. A missing pump did not make the program gentle. It made the program fail at its own narrow goal.

Two acres, then a trench a boy could stand in

In 1890 he fenced two acres on the mesa and covered them with fertilizer and bottom soil eight inches deep. Lettuce, radish, beets, turnips, and potatoes went in for the kitchen. No river ditch. The next year he ordered schoolboys and employees to dig trenches four feet deep and four feet wide, long enough for a thousand trees, vines, and roots, each set sixteen feet apart, on mesa that had been gravel and sand. The children balked. Boys complained, stayed away from school to avoid the farm, and said they should be paid. More than eighty percent of the plantings survived anyway. Estrada Calderón is careful with that survival. It is not evidence that the boys consented. It is evidence that the holes got dug.

The pay demand is the sentence to keep. A superintendent running an industrial school could call the digging instruction. The boys called it labor. The essay does not print a pay scale, and this page will not invent one. It will not invent a punishment for speaking Mojave either. The short history on this site says children at the school were punished for speaking their language. That sentence is part of the published history of these schools and of this site's account. It is not a quotation Estrada Calderón's agriculture essay supplies. Different claims, different documents. The trenches and the refusal are hers.

March 16, 1892

The pump arrived on March 16, 1892. Estrada Calderón describes the station as a pipe, a boiler, and two compound duplex engines, each able to pull up to 1,300 gallons a minute out of the Colorado. By the time the engineers finished, many crops on the twenty-acre school farm had already matured. She is pointing at the absurdity of the calendar. The machine that was supposed to make a year-round farm possible showed up after a season had already happened without it.

McCowan's two hundred acres were a plan, not a harvest. The ground he actually had in hand, on Estrada Calderón's numbers, was two acres in 1890 and about twenty when the pump arrived. The Mojave practice he refused, planting the alluvial soil once after the spring overflow, is the same practice Ives described in 1858 and Kroeber described for the years before that. The superintendent was not ignorant of it. The essay says he knew the nearby Mojave planted that way and still would not use it, because a single planting after the flood would not make the year-round industrial farm he had promised the school could be. The boys' trenches were the workaround: haul the river bottom up onto the mesa, eight inches of it in 1890, four feet of hole in 1891, and hope the gravel would behave like a floodplain. It grew kitchen vegetables. It did not become the two hundred acres.

The yields she prints, from the records she cites, are specific enough to repeat and too specific to round off. For 1892: about fourteen tons of hay, one hundred bushels of potatoes, two thousand melons, and one thousand pumpkins, among other vegetables. For 1893: thirty-five tons of hay, ten bushels of onions, five thousand watermelons, three thousand pumpkins, and other small vegetables. Those are school-farm numbers. They are not a comparison with the Mojave harvest on the bottomland half a mile below, which she does not tabulate. A reader who wants to say the pump "saved" Mojave agriculture has changed the subject. The pump served a mesa garden inside an institution. The overflow still served the people who planted after it.

How long the buildings were a school

Bean and Vane write that by 1890 a fort in the valley was no longer needed, and that the buildings became a boarding school for Mojave children, including children from the Colorado River reservation. They date the school from 1890 to 1931. They describe a persistent effort to replace Mojave traditions with American ones, the policy of government schools generally, and they add that advocates who wanted Indians protected often did not want the culture protected with them. That policy sentence matches the frame Estrada Calderón uses for the farm.

They also write that from 1890 until 1931 all Mojave children between 6 and 18, including those from the Colorado River reservation, were required to live at the school. The sentence has no footnote in the overview. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs reports Estrada Calderón cites were not opened for this essay, so the age rule is not repeated here as a checked fact. Cutting it is not a claim that attendance was voluntary. Estrada Calderón calls the schools an attempt at forced assimilation, and the boys' resistance to unpaid digging is already evidence of compulsion on the farm. A precise age bracket, applied to every child for forty-one years, needs the order that said so. It was not on the desk.

The overview does document a different administrative pressure from the same office, and it footnotes Sherer for it. After the turn of the century the Indian Office insisted that everyone in a family share a surname and that children take the father's name, instead of the Mojave pattern in which clan names were carried in a different way. After 1903 the school superintendent also acted as agent for Indians within thirty miles, and allotment made English surnames convenient for the paperwork. Sherer, as cited, says a clan might end up with as many as eighteen surnames, and that people used the English names with outsiders and Mojave names among themselves. That is a record of renaming, with a citation. It is a different fact from the unfootnoted age rule, and it belongs in the history because the school and the agency were the same desk.

What this page will not sentimentalize

A hay figure can look like a success story if you stop at the pumpkin count. Estrada Calderón does not stop there. She argues that the missing irrigation slowed a program whose purpose was to push children off their own farming knowledge and onto another. The two acres of lettuce in 1890 are real. So is the reason the superintendent would not wait for the river. The novel is not about this school. The school is what the fort became after the war the novel tells. Readers who only know the 1859 flag should know the mesa. The pump dates, the trench, the yields, and the boys who wanted wages are the part of that later history that has been checked against a published essay and left in that essay's words.

Sources

These are the documents and studies this essay actually uses. Spellings of Mojave names follow the source being quoted.

• Maribel Estrada Calderón, "Agriculture at Fort Mohave Industrial School, 1890-1893," Intermountain Histories, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. intermountainhistories.org. She cites the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1890 and 1891, and letters in UNLV Special Collections, MS-00034, Fort Mojave Industrial School Records. Those reports and letters were not opened separately for this essay.
• Bean and Vane (2002), Mojave chapter, for the use of the fort buildings as a boarding school from 1890 to 1931, including children from the Colorado River reservation, and for the assimilation policy. Their statement that every Mojave child from 6 to 18 was required to live at the school is not repeated as established fact. The sentence in the overview carries no footnote, and the Indian Affairs reports were not opened to test it. NPS history copy.

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