On the Borders:Towns, Mobility, and Public Health in Mojave History
On March 22, 1916, an Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway passenger train clanked west across the bridge spanning the lower Colorado River.1 When it reached the El Garces Depot in Needles, California, a Mojave woman and her ailing teenage brother stepped off.2 It had been a tiring journey from East Farm, the Phoenix Indian School's tuberculosis sanatorium where George M. had been a patient for the past ten months.3 The doctors at East Farm did not think that George M. was well enough for the three-hundred-mile trek to his sister's house in Needles.4 But it had cost [End Page 511] Alice B. days and precious dollars to retrieve her brother from Phoenix and so she took him with her. Although George M. survived the train ride home, he needed immediate medical attention upon arriving home. Since Alice B.'s home in Needles was off-reservation, according to the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA), the siblings had limited options for medical care. Officially, they could travel the ninety miles downriver to Colorado River Agency headquarters to see the agency physician, or they could wait and hope that the physician from Fort Mojave School twenty miles to the north would make his weekly rounds in the Mojave villages in and around Needles. Unofficially, they could cross the river to Mojave healers, or they could hire a private physician in town. Due to her brother's rapidly declining condition, Alice B. opted to call on a local physician named Arthur Boland to care for her brother. Despite medical attention, and just a week after returning home, George M., age sixteen, passed away on March 29, 1916, at 10 o'clock at night.5
In the aftermath of her brother's death, Alice B. asked the Colorado River Agency to pay Boland's fees because she could not afford them. Alice B. could not save her brother nor upend the structures within which he contracted tuberculosis, but she did convince the agency's superintendent to pay the six-dollar physician's bill.6 Just as Alice B. defied East Farm's officials to take her brother home, she also defied governmental healthcare regulations to act in her family's best interests: she chose to stay in Needles and, in doing so, asserted her family's and tribe's medical autonomy and claims to that land.7 [End Page 512]
Map of the lower Colorado River region. Created by the author.
In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Arizona (as elsewhere), disease, and human responses to it, revealed a web of social, cultural, and economic worlds. Historians of medicine have illuminated the ways public health policies and practices of the day tended to reinforce difference, to lay bare what in non-epidemic times was often implied: that only some people were included in "the public."8 What was true at the turn of the century is just as true [End Page 513] in 2020: germs have a way of exposing the fantasies of the elite and the structural violence enacted on their behalf, but also the autonomies of everyday people and the sovereignties of tribal nations who continue to make their own medical choices.9
A growing literature has begun to show that mobility and movement are critical to understanding how American Indians' bodily and tribal autonomy were formed, negotiated, and contested.10 [End Page 514] Public health is another arena in which mobility figures broadly. Moving bodies and the germs they carried were always coming and going, following newly forged train lines and ancient trails alike. But assimilation practices like child removal, boarding schools, and the breaking up of reservations into individual allotments wreaked havoc on Native American life. Meanwhile, the haphazard, segregated healthcare system that the OIA cobbled together demonstrated that Native people were not fully-fledged members of the public health communities in which they lived.11 In response, many Indigenous people sought medical care both near and far, inside and outside of the OIA's ad hoc system. They asserted their bodily autonomy through these choices and in doing so, asserted tribal sovereignty as well. Their movements connected places—Phoenix and Needles, for instance—to build up the edges and nodes of a public health community. Using archival documents from the Colorado River Indian Agency, under whose jurisdiction Mojaves residing in Needles lived, I argue Mojave people's own health seeking defined a "public" that was far more expansive and inclusive than the local and national settler governments endorsed.
Settler health-seekers also helped to define and redefine the public health communities of the Southwest. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, they introduced infectious diseases, primarily tuberculosis but also measles, whooping cough, and typhoid fever, among others, in unprecedented volume. In doing so, settlers exacerbated Mojaves' and other Indigenous groups' health crises, and revealed that federal officials' racial assimilation logic, in which settlers would "civilize" Native Americans, was violently flawed. Indian Service employees were preoccupied with the biological results of intermingling settlers and Indigenous people particularly in border towns. From their records, we see their ink-stained frustrations with the rhetorically and materially complex situation of Euro-American settlement near reservations. In the case of Needles and [End Page 515] many towns like it, its messy public health community ultimately failed to support the federal ideology of assimilation. But sick settlers were also a convenient scapegoat for the OIA whose policies and practices had created the health crises in Indian Country in the first place. The public health communities that developed and morphed around towns like Needles provide an illustrative case study of these entangled phenomena.
Needles sits on the California-Arizona border, its residents regularly traversing the river that separates the states. It is also a settler-reservation border town: just across the river from Fort Mojave Reservation (Arizona, California, and Nevada) and upriver from the Chemehuevi Reservation (California) and Colorado River Reservation (Arizona and California).12 In the early twentieth century, all three Indigenous spaces were under the jurisdiction of the Colorado River Agency.13 Furthermore, reservation border towns like Needles were (and are) places where race, colonial administration, labor, and disease converged in ways the historiography is beginning to tease apart. Like third spaces and transits of empire, public health communities in southwestern towns help us capture the social, political, cultural, and economic experiences of Indigenous sovereignty on the border.14 [End Page 516]
Birdseye view of Needles, California, with the Colorado River in the distance. Postcard from Detroit Publishing Co.
Alice B. and George M. traversed and occupied an array of spaces and places in their quest for medical care. Their home was in the center of Mojave Country: on the banks of the Colorado River, just downriver from the Mojaves' sacred mountain of creation, Avi'kwame. The Mojaves call themselves Pipa Aha Macavs, People by the River, but they also ventured far from it.15 For centuries, they were renowned as runners, traders, and raiders. As early as the sixteenth century, Mojave traders ran along the gravel Mojave Trail (through the Mojave Desert), exchanging deer skins, [End Page 517] dried fish, acorns, seeds, tobacco, woven textiles, and the coveted Chumash and Tongva shell beads (pook) between the Colorado River Valley and the Pacific Coast.16 They could make a one-way trip (~300 miles) in as little as four days.17
Mojaves' intimate knowledge of trails was necessary for spiritual as well as secular endeavors. Mojave healers sometimes walked between patients and certain sacred places as part of their treatments. In doing so, they interceded on behalf of the patient, preventing the spirit who resided in the sacred place from taking the patient's soul, or matkwísa.18 Once the settler town of Needles began to draw Mojaves across the river for work, their doctors remained nearby. Both in traditional medical frameworks and in Mojaves' choices to seek out different practitioners and types of healing, Mojaves' mobility was central to their health.
In Alice B.'s and George M.'s lifetimes, Needles was a busy railroad town.19 Founded in 1883 on the lower Colorado River, the town, named for the nearby Needles Mountains, connected the Atlantic & Pacific Railway (later Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe) to California.20 Needles was the second settler outpost built on Mojave homelands.21 As a result of sustained colonial incursions since the 1850s, Mojave families stitched together new and old ways of living, wage work and floodplains agriculture, adapting to the deluge of settlers as best they could. Many Mojaves lived in Needles for at least part of the year where they worked for the railroad and various other town businesses or sold beadwork to [End Page 518]
The Santa Fe Limited train outside the El Garces Hotel in Needles, California. This early-twentieth-century scene shows Native people selling their beadwork to Anglo tourists. Postcard from Detroit Publishing Co.
tourists at El Garces Station.22 They often visited their families in the Mohave Valley (to the north, near Fort Mojave) or on the Colorado River Reservation downriver. But while in Needles, they were legally defined as squatters.23 Since the establishment of the [End Page 519] Colorado River Agency in 1865, the United States had determined that all Indigenous people in the area who chose not to move to the reservation would be illegal residents in their homelands.24 The tangible result of this legal policy was that the OIA offered very little financial or material support to Mojaves in town, which in turn affected the reservation.25 An 1898 U.S. Indian Service inspector excoriated the Colorado River Agency for creating "a tribe of vagabonds and mendicants." He continued, "I am told that there is [sic] from 1200 to 1500 of them [Native people] living about and near the town of Needles and other places in that vicinity along the railroad. They live as they can by begging, pilfering and gathering in the off-fall and waste from the houses of the whites."26 The illustration was likely partially true and partially an exaggeration of the situation, one that was meant to highlight Native people's inability to live without their government guardians, not to provide evidence of the violence Natives suffered at their hands. On the Colorado River Reservation, physician Mary Israel often [End Page 520] denigrated Mojaves' supposedly immature and unsanitary behaviors. In 1911, she described reservation health conditions almost entirely in terms of Mojave failures: "There are about seven million flies to each camp … and then the Indians wonder why the white doctor doesn't cure their sick."27 She never mentioned why Mojaves were forced to live in such conditions. Being underpaid for their wage work in town, in close contact with sick settlers, and all but abandoned by a federal government that chose to blame their culture for their illnesses exacerbated Mojaves' health crisis in town and on the reservation.
The irony was that, in theory, the federal government encouraged American Indians to live off-reservation. In the early twentieth century, federal, state, and local governments, though particularly federal, were convinced that assimilationist policies aimed at American Indians were the most efficient ways to transform Indigenous people into Americans and thereby refashion Indigenous lands into American ones. As the rich historiography on Indian assimilation tells us, the term assimilation was laden with unspoken (and changing) assumptions about what it meant for Native people to join the mainstream settler culture and political economy. Assimilation was filled with officials' unrealistic and violent hopes that Native people would quickly, quietly, and seamlessly disappear into the mainstream populace.28 Of course, Indigenous people of North America had already joined, challenged, and contributed to the French, Dutch, Spanish, British, and American empires that had planted flags on Native shores.29 But following [End Page 521] the Civil War and Reconstruction, questions of belonging—an always present feature of American life—boiled over the sides of the melting pot.30 For those in power, controlling immigrants from Europe, Asia, Mexico, and elsewhere; recently emancipated African Americans; and the First Peoples of North America required their surrender to settler values, culture, language, and political economy. Along with the elimination of differences that could threaten settler authority, elites needed them to accept a subordinate position in the day's social order.31
The boarding school was the premier assimilationist institution.32 In boarding schools, cultural assimilation went hand-in-hand [End Page 522] with bodily assimilation. Children's hair was cut short, their bodies shoved into scratchy Anglo clothes, and military drills became all too familiar to their muscles.33 Their taste buds and stomachs had to adjust to unfamiliar foods.34 Native children's bodies also came into contact with foreign germs with deadly consequences.35 The harsh reality of boarding school health came into focus in 1908 when physician and anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička visited and reported on conditions at Phoenix Indian School and the five reservations—including the Colorado River Reservation—with the highest recorded TB rates. Tuberculosis was a common feature of federally run Native schools in the early twentieth century, often resulting from a fatal combination of malnutrition, exhaustion, unhygienic and overcrowded living quarters, and neglect.36 When [End Page 523] Hrdlička visited Phoenix in the summer of 1908, he learned that during the previous November, twenty-eight new Tohono O'odham students had arrived at the school. By July, five had been sent home with suspected tuberculosis and two of them had died.37 At the Colorado River Agency, a 1900 epidemic of whooping cough at the reservation boarding school was similarly deadly. The outbreak began in May, just before school let out, and very quickly, the school superintendent reported, "this disease is now prevalent in the camps and several infants have died of it."38 The disease spread only a few miles, but it had fatal consequences.
School diseases could travel home with students, but they could also reinforce child removal by requiring children's transfer to hospitals, as happened to George M. In late 1914 or early 1915, Dr. A. P. Meriwether, government physician at Fort Mojave Indian School, diagnosed then-student George M. with acute (or active) tuberculosis. Under pressure from Colorado River Agency authorities to send him to East Farm Sanatorium for treatment, George M.'s family weighed the risks of tuberculosis against the risks of sending him away from home. Within a few months they did consent, but the following year Alice B. would ride east to bring him home.39
By the time George M. arrived in Phoenix, East Farm had been in existence for only five years, itself an outgrowth of the boarding school health crisis.40 Circulating microbes and harsh school [End Page 524]
The Phoenix Indian School Sanatorium, 1914. The Red Man (Carlisle), May, 1914, opposite p.372.
environments too visibly belied the tacit ideologies behind federal Indian policy. If American Indians died from epidemics away from the public eye, it reawakened political leaders' hopes that the First Peoples were vanishing. But to have children fall ill and die while in the hands of the OIA was too damning an indictment of the United States' neglect and incompetence, and its leaders' claims to cultural and racial superiority.
Like Indian officials, physicians and public health officers were similarly embroiled in the remaking of the American hierarchy.41 Many cities in the West, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Tucson, grew in large part thanks to newly built railroad lines and a reputation for salubriousness and low population density.42 [End Page 525] Faster transportation made it possible for health seekers to travel quickly as rail lines began to incorporate the United States into a nation.43 Railways and telegraph lines tattooed the southwestern landscape, ushering new settlers and information to the Pacific Coast.44 In Arizona, the Southern Pacific railroad reached Yuma in September 1877. By 1880, 349 miles of track had been staked into the territory's soil. By 1900, that number rose to 1,512 miles.45 The territory-cum-state's boosters advertised its dry, sunny mesas as the perfect location to recover from the dreaded disease.46 Besides the potential revenue newcomers promised to boosters, for federal and local officials health boosterism was a convenient strategy for colonizing the region. And it worked: in 1913, over half the residents of Tucson reported that either they or their parent or grandparent had moved to the area because they had tuberculosis.47 By the mid-1920s, however, Arizona had the highest death rate from [End Page 526]
A tuberculosis camp outside Phoenix in 1903. Because of its dry, warm climate, Arizona was home to many "lunger" camps like this. Portrait-Holme, Frank, #15209, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
tuberculosis in the United States.48
As a result, the same cities that had advertised treatment to ailing U.S. Americans soon tried to close their borders to the very same people, citing the burdens they placed on the public coffers.49 For example, Arizona journalist Sharlot Hall reported that the city [End Page 527] of Phoenix and Maricopa County had spent over $25,000 on public assistance for the sick during the winter of 1905–1906.50 City officials blamed settler TB sufferers for their illnesses and tried to expel them from their public health communities. Thus, "lunger" camps developed on the outskirts of many western towns.51 In Phoenix, Aleš Hrdlička warned of the threat of lunger camps to children at Phoenix Indian School in his 1908 survey. When the school opened in 1891 it was located three and a half miles outside the city. But Phoenix and its consumptive population grew noticeably between 1891 and 1908.52 By the time Hrdlička visited the city in 1908, settlers, including many health seekers, surrounded the boarding school. "In fact," Hrdlička noted in his report, "the district in which the school is situated is, as a whole, a Mecca for consumptives, particularly in winter, when the number of such patients in the valley reaches into the thousands."53
The truth about white health seekers' effect on the health of Indigenous communities was unavoidable by 1928. That year's Meriam Report estimated the total death rate for Arizona's Native population to be 38.9 per 1,000. This rate was over three times higher than the U.S. general population's death rate.54 The federal [End Page 528] government had been well aware of the problem for some time. In 1913, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) estimated that the incidence of tuberculosis among American Indians was three times higher than among whites.55 The USPHS also reported that, as a national average, the Native mortality rate from TB (5.06 per 1,000) was also significantly higher than that of white Americans (1.73 per 1,000).56 In Arizona, every tribe that USPHS inspectors visited in 1912–1913 had higher-than-average rates of tuberculosis, with the highest concentrations among the state's northern communities, especially the Navajos (8.3 percent of those examined) and Hualapais (14.6 percent).57
Like tuberculosis, USPHS inspectors found that trachoma rates in Native Arizona were also well above the national average (24.9 percent vs. 1.4 percent).58 Of the highly contagious and potentially blinding eye disease, inspectors wrote, "the trachoma situation among the Arizona Indians is extremely grave because of the enormous infection among them and its rapid spread from year to [End Page 529] year, and because the tribes with the highest infections are in closest contact with the whites, the Hopis being the only exception."59 Some of the highest rates were found among the Hualapais, Mojaves' neighbors to the west, whose southern homelands were now scarred by railroad tracks, settlers, and cattle that dried up the available wells and pastures.60
Within a few years of each other, Hrdlička, USPHS officials, and the Meriam Report staff stated the obvious but unfortunate fact that colonization, and assimilation, often brought disease and death with them. High concentrations of infectious disease among settlers, especially those pushed to the outskirts of U.S. settlements, had a visible effect on Indigenous health. In 1908, Sharlot Hall deduced that "the outbreak of tuberculosis among [Arizona's American Indians] is clearly due to contact with invalid whites."61 This was particularly true near regions where lungers tended to congregate. But health seekers also traveled along railroads and wagon trails, passing through many towns and settlements, and stopping when funds ran low. It is very likely that many health seekers passed through or stayed in border towns like Needles where they camped near Mojaves and other Native people.
The combination of border town health seekers and Mojave mobility created a problem for officials, but also a solution. Like many American Indians who lived off-reservation whether in cities or rural areas, Needles Mojaves had close connections to the reservation and visited often, potentially returning with settler germs. In his 1910 annual report, Superintendent M. F. Holland noted, "the Indians here work on the railroad, which brings them in contact with a low White and Mexican element, to their detriment physically. … We cannot reach those that go out to work and they bring considerable sickness, especial [sic] venereal and pulmonary."62 Holland's implied argument was that sick settlers [End Page 530] and overly mobile Mojaves had created the health crisis, obscuring the principal role that the OIA had played in constructing the public health nightmare.
While it is clear that settler health seekers had a negative influence on Indigenous health, the reality is that their presence would not have been so deadly had the OIA and Congress fulfilled their obligations. The underfunded OIA sponsored only two physicians for the Colorado River Agency, one stationed at Colorado River Reservation and the other at Fort Mojave Boarding School.63 In Needles, an assortment of skilled and semi-skilled providers offered some degree of medical care. They included Fort Mojave School's physician, who visited roughly once a week, as well as occasionally a Presbyterian missionary, railroad medical staff, and private practice physicians, whom the OIA was usually reticent to pay for their services. In 1918, the OIA hired a field matron to work full-time in Needles. The field matron was hired first and foremost to take control of the sanitary conditions in Needles. Due to their legal status as squatters, the OIA refused to help Mojaves gain access to clean water or build new homes.64 The Colorado River Agency often relied on private physicians like the one who had cared for George M., Dr. Boland, both in Needles and downriver in Parker, Arizona, the border town attached to the Colorado River Reservation. Often they relied on contracts with private physicians when the physician's post at Fort Mojave School was empty. For example, in 1916, Dr. Meriwether left Fort Mojave School and the physician's post was vacant for much of the year. During this time, the agency contracted with Dr. Boland to provide all medical care for Needles and the school, a job whose [End Page 531] duties exceeded what any single person could hope to accomplish.65 And even if Mojaves had been provided with adequate medical staff, in Needles and on the reservation, there were no hospitals and few adequate spaces to care for the sick until 1930.
Needles Mojaves, like Alice B., took advantage of the town's multiple physicians. For instance, in 1912, Superintendent Omar Babcock complained that, "In several cases, when the treatment prescribed by the Government physician did not give prompt relief, the Indians employed one of the resident physicians at Needles."66 In 1924, Needles field matron Sarah Chapin wrote that "the Indians are scattered and change their homes often, [and] are all ways [sic] complaining of getting no help from the Govt … while in many cases of sickness they will start in with me then without notice go to Dr. Charleston and then to Dr. Marten and then wind up by going across the river to the Indian Doctors."67 Similarly, Mojaves living on the reservation often sought out healthcare practitioners in the nearby town of Parker, in addition to the agency physician.68 In May 1914, Babcock reported in the agency physician's efficiency report that while Dr. Mary Israel provided excellent in-home care, "many [Mojaves] go to the physician in Parker for medical advice." He concluded that "this is probably more from a childish desire to try some new plan and further because the physician in Parker does not call at their homes and insist upon his directions being carried out, than any other cause."69 While Babcock and many Mojaves appreciated Israel's energy and diligence in following up with her patients—she was lauded repeatedly for knowing the family histories of everyone on the reservation—some preferred a [End Page 532] less-invasive type of medical care and sought out physicians known to provide it.70 As Babcock's note reveals Mojaves' medical autonomy in action, it also shows how incomprehensible it was to the OIA for Indigenous people to make informed—not "childish"—decisions about their healthcare.
Mojave people's actions to secure better healthcare made visible a world of contradictions. And the microbes their bodies encountered provide a window into the disjuncture between the rhetoric boosters, federal officials, and other settlers crafted and the material experiences of life in an off-reservation town. Close contact between American Indians and U.S. settlers should have been a boon to assimilationist goals, which were based on the rationale that settlers would "civilize" their Indigenous neighbors.71 But the throngs of desperate, sick settlers signaled that the United States did not take care of its own, let alone the Indigenous people it tried to bring under its flag. And so, the biological consequences of health colonization were as severe as the geographical ones. The result was a prolonged biological assault on Native communities, one that forced authorities to reckon with—or at least to justify—the disconnect between the language of Indian assimilation that was common at the time and the stark reality of Indigenous death. But settlers, many of whom were themselves vulnerable, were an easy target for federal officials looking to escape blame for their violent insistence on, and then mismanagement of, Native healthcare.
In short, this is the analytical power of the history of public health. Moreover, the history of health seeking and the creation of new public health communities through mobility supports many of [End Page 533] the arguments around race, colonization, and medicine scholars have already made and opens up new avenues for research. Poor settler and Indigenous health seekers showed that local and national governments could not hide their unwillingness to care for outsiders. By continuing to travel for their health, even if sometimes it was to the outskirts of cities and not their sanatoria, sick people of all backgrounds refused to accept what these settler governments were telling them. Likewise, Mojaves expressed bodily autonomy and tribal sovereignty while they forged new public health communities and insisted on their ancestral rights to occupy their home-lands. More research in collaboration with tribal communities is needed to understand the links between mobility, healing, and public health that these examples from Mojave history illustrate. More research is also needed into the fractal experiences of being white in a settler nation. Did local, state, and national governments expect the poor and sick, if white, to be part of their "publics"? And, as I argue here, if they did not, the impact on Indigenous communities, who were certainly not desired members of the U.S. public, was tremendous and deadly.
Still, in the face of a sustained biological assault, Mojave people and their Indigenous neighbors continued (and continue) to assert their right to quality healthcare from a diverse range of sources. They called upon local physicians, traditional doctors, field matrons and nurses, and government hospitals across the region with such force that the officials charged with their care were forced to fall back on lazy stereotypes of Native people as "dirty" and "childish" to avoid embarrassment. Yet Mojaves moved through their homelands with ease, adapting to a new public health community that had been thrust upon them with more flexibility than the Office of Indian Affairs was ever capable of showing. In light of the current pandemic and the backdrop of continually inadequate healthcare for Indigenous people in the United States, I hope this case study shows what is possible when scholars and officials make space to understand public health history and to trust Native people to be medically autonomous and full members of their public health communities. [End Page 534]
JULIET LARKIN-GILMORE is a Chancellor's Fellow in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Footnotes
1. The author thanks David Turpie, Katherine Morrissey, Rhiannon Koehler, Lindsay S. Marshall, and the UIUC AIS Works-in-Progress group for their feedback on various drafts of this article. She also recognizes and thanks the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations on whose homelands she lived while writing this piece and the Colorado River Indian Tribes and Ft. Mojave Indian Tribe whose ancestors are the focus of it.
2. Alice B. to August F. Duclos, March 25, 1916, Folder: Health, Correspondence, 1916–18, Box 201, Subject Files, Colorado River Agency (hereinafter CRA), Record Group 75, National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Branch (hereinafter NARA-[branch]). The Fort Mojave Reservation uses "Mojave" while the Colorado River Indian Tribes (formerly Colorado River Reservation) use "Mohave." Since this article is mostly about people who lived in Needles/Fort Mojave, I use Mojave. Any errors made regarding Mohave/Mojave usage are accidental and entirely my own. For more on Mojave tribal names, see Lorraine M. Sherer, "The Name Mojave, Mohave: A History of Its Origin and Meaning," Southern California Quarterly 49 (March 1967): 1–36; Lorraine M. Sherer, "The Name Mojave, Mohave: An Addendum," Southern California Quarterly 49 (Dec. 1967): 455–58.
3. To protect the privacy of the Indigenous actors in this story, I refer to them by first name and first letter of last name. I borrow this practice from Sarah A. Whitt, "False Promises: Race, Power, and the Chimera of Indian Assimilation, 1879–1934" (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2020), 5 n10.
4. August F. Duclos to Alice B., March 27, 1916, Folder: Health, Correspondence, 1916–18, Box 201, Subject Files, CRA, RG 75, NARA-Pacific.
5. Charles B. to August F. Duclos, March 30, 1916, Folder: Health, Correspondence, 1916–18, Box 201, Subject Files, CRA, RG 75, NARA-Pacific.
6. Alice B. to August F. Duclos, March 25, 1916, Folder: Health, Correspondence, 1916–18, Box 201, Subject Files, CRA, RG 75, NARA-Pacific.
7. Alice B.'s choices are but one example of medical pluralism in Indigenous history. Examples of medical pluralism in other southwestern and southern Californian contexts include Clifford E. Trafzer, "Medicine Circles Defeating Tuberculosis in Southern California," Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 23 (Fall 2006): 477–98; Clifford E. Trafzer, Fighting Invisible Enemies: Health and Medical Transitions among Southern California Indians (Norman, Okla., 2019). Historical, anthropological, and autobiographical studies of Navajo medical pluralism are particularly robust: Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, "I Choose Life": Contemporary Medical and Religious Practices in the Navajo World (Norman, Okla., 2008); Lori Arviso Alvord and Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing (New York, 1999); Wade Davies, Healing Ways: Navajo Health Care in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque, 2001); Robert A. Trennert, White Man's Medicine: Government Doctors and the Navajo, 1863–1955 (Albuquerque, 1998); Arlene W. Keeling, "Nursing the Navajo: Dust Storms and Gully Washouts," in Nursing Rural America: Perspectives from the Early 20th Century, ed. John C. Kirchgessner and Arlene W. Keeling (New York, 2015). On medical pluralism in other North and South American settings: Clifford E. Trafzer and Diane Weiner, eds., Medicine Ways: Disease, Health, and Survival among Native Americans (Walnut Creek, Calif., 2001); Lisa J. Lefler, Under the Rattlesnake: Cherokee Health and Resiliency (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2009); Paul Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation's Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 (Norman, Okla., 2015); Brett Hendrickson, Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo (New York, 2014); Martha Few, For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (Tucson, 2015); Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2017).
8. The historiography of public health and race is best exemplified in these urban histories: Susan Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis, 2000); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Berkeley, Calif., 2001); Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley, Calif., 2006); Emily K. Abel, Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative (New Brunswick, N.J., 2006); Emily Abel, Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (New Brunswick, N.J., 2007); Samuel Roberts, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009); Jennifer Koslow, Cultivating Health: Los Angeles Women and Public Health Reform (New Brunswick, N.J., 2009). On U.S.–Mexican borderlands, race, and health, see: Alexandra Minna Stern, "Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.–Mexico Border, 1910–1930," Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (Feb. 1999): 41–81; Natalia Molina, "Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early-Twentieth-Century United States," Radical History Review (Winter 2006): 22–37; Natalia Molina, "Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Practices in the 20th Century," American Journal of Public Health 101 (June 2011): 1024–31; John Mckiernan-González, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham, N.C., 2012); Mark Allan Goldberg, Conquering Sickness: Race, Health, and Colonization in the Texas Borderlands (Lincoln, Neb., 2017).
9. There is a small but growing collection of scholarship on Native health in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century United States and Canada. On the former: Diane T. Putney, "Fighting the Scourge: American Indian Morbidity and Federal Policy, 1897–1928" (PhD diss., Marquette University, 1980); Stephen J. Kunitz, Disease Change and the Role of Medicine: The Navajo Experience (Berkeley, Calif., 1983); Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols., unabridged ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 1995), ch. 33; Trennert, White Man's Medicine; Trafzer and Weiner, Medicine Ways; David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Christian W. McMillen, "'The Red Man and the White Plague': Rethinking Race, Tuberculosis, and American Indians, ca. 1890–1950," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (Fall 2008): 608–45; David H. DeJong, "If You Knew the Conditions": A Chronicle of the Indian Medical Service and American Indian Health Care, 1908–1955 (Lanham, Md., 2010); David H. DeJong, Plagues, Politics, and Policy: A Chronicle of the Indian Health Service, 1955–2008 (Lanham, Md., 2011); Elizabeth James, "'Hardly a Family Is Free from the Disease:' Tuberculosis, Healthcare, and Assimilation Policy on the Nez Perce Reservation, 1908–1942," Oregon Historical Quarterly 112 (Summer 2011): 142–69; Trafzer, Fighting Invisible Enemies. On Canada: Maureen K. Lux, Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880–1940 (Toronto, 2001); Mary-Ellen Kelm, "Diagnosing the Discursive Indian: Medicine, Gender, and the 'Dying Race,'" Ethnohistory 52 (Spring 2005): 392–406; James Waldram, D. Ann Herring, and T. Kue Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives (Toronto, 2006); Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–50 (Vancouver, 2011); James William Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina, Sask., 2013); Laurie Meijer Drees, Healing Histories: Stories from Canada's Indian Hospitals (Edmonton, 2013); Maureen K. Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s–1980s (Toronto, 2016); Gary Geddes, Medicine Unbundled: A Journey through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care (Victoria, 2017).
10. The Native labor historiography has robustly argued as such for the pre-Termination Era (before World War II): Robert A. Trennert, "From Carlisle to Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of the Indian Outing System, 1878–1930," Pacific Historical Review 52 (Aug. 1983): 267–291; Eric V. Meeks, "The Tohono O'odham, Wage Labor, and Resistant Adaptation, 1900–1930," Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Winter 2003): 468–89; Brian C. Hosmer and Colleen M. O'Neill, eds., Native Pathways: American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century (Boulder, Colo., 2004); Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin, Tex., 2007); William J. Bauer, We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California's Round Valley Reservation, 1850–1941 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009); Kevin Whalen, Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute's Outing Program, 1900–1945 (Seattle, 2016). Gilbert, Goeman, Greenwald, and Cruikshank offer excellent examples of Native spatial discourses and strategies: Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain between Indian and American (Lawrence, Kans., 2018); Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (Minneapolis, 2013); Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act (Albuquerque, 2002); Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories (Vancouver, 1998), ch.1.
11. I am indebted to Daniel H. Usner Jr.'s theorizing of "Indian work" as existing on both material and rhetorical planes. Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).
12. As well as the Quechan Nation reservation at Fort Yuma, California. The Colorado River Reservation is now the Colorado River Indian Tribes. In focusing on the Mojaves, the intention is not to erase Chemehuevis from this history. However, most of the documentation refers specifically to Mojave families. Chemehuevis tended to live in between the reservation and Needles and were less often surveilled. However, some Chemehuevi children did attend the Colorado River Indian School and others took up allotments on the reservation in the 1910s. I have also chosen to acknowledge but not focus on the Chemehuevis because their history, while overlapping, is distinct and I do not want to do it a disservice. For an introduction to Chemehuevi history, see Clifford E. Trafzer, A Chemehuevi Song: The Resilience of a Southern Paiute Tribe (Seattle, 2015).
13. A March 3, 1865, act of Congress created the Colorado River Reservation, which split the Mojave Nation in two. Some removed to Colorado River and the majority remained behind in the Mohave Valley around Fort Mojave. The United States granted the Fort Mojave tribe reservation lands in 1870, 1903, and 1911, but they remained a "subagency" under the OIA jurisdiction of the Colorado River Agency (and from the early 1930s on, the Phoenix Area Office). Fort Mojave Nation adopted its constitution and by-laws on May 6, 1957. The Chemehuevi Reservation was established in 1907.
14. Here I benefit from Philip J. Deloria's, Kevin Bruyneel's, and Jodi A. Byrd's (among others) scholarship on temporal, political, and spatial borders occupied by Indigenous people in North America. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, Kans., 2004); Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis, 2007); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, 2011). I also benefit from historians of public health and space, especially Susan Craddock's study of San Francisco, geography, and pathologization and her use of the term "border anxiety" (the fear that people and diseases could cross socially constructed borders). Craddock, City of Plagues, 9. This phrase has been used in other contexts, notably by Iris Marion Young in regards to homosexuality. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 146. For border control and public health, see Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace (Baltimore, 1995); Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore, 1997); Stern, "Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood"; Amy Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, 2003); Emily K. Abel, "'Only the Best Class of Immigration': Public Health Policy Toward Mexicans and Filipinos in Los Angeles, 1910–1940," American Journal of Public Health 94 (June 2004): 932–39; Howard Markel, When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed (New York, 2004); Mckiernan-González, Fevered Measures; Ji-hye Shin, "The 'Oriental' Problem: Trachoma and Asian Immigrants in the United States," Korean Journal of Medical History 23 (Dec. 2014): 573–606.
15. Frances L. O'Neil and Paul W. Wittmer, eds., Dreamers of the Colorado: The Mojave Indians: Part I: Their Land and Religion (Farmington, Conn., 2013).
16. Natale A. Zappia, Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014), 49–51.
17. Zappia, Traders and Raiders, 50.
18. For example, Achyora Hanyava's story in A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 78 (Washington, D.C., 1925), 776.
19. Alice B. passed away in 1927, eleven years after her brother. Session Minutes, p. 120, Mohave Presbyterian Church (Needles, Calif.), 1913–1941, Vault Box 9211.C22363 M61, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
20. The bridge was not completed until July 29, 1884. "Local Matters," Arizona Sentinel (Yuma), August 2, 1884, p. 3; "Correspondence of the Sentinel: The Needles, Jun. 9 '83," Arizona Sentinel (Yuma), June 23, 1883, p. 1. The article warned "any sanguine people" against settling in Needles just yet. When Route 66 opened in 1926, Needles continued to be an important waystation for travelers.
21. The first was Fort Mojave, twenty miles north of Needles, established at the end of the U.S.–Mojave War (1858–1859) to suppress Mojave sovereignty and allow passage for overland settlers following the Thirty-Fifth Parallel North. In 1891, the federal government retrofitted the fort as a boarding school. Lorraine M. Sherer and Frances Stillman, Bitterness Road: The Mojave, 1604 to 1860, ed. Sylvia Brakke Vane and Lowell John Bean (Menlo Park, Calif., 1994), ch. 8.
22. El Garces was a Fred Harvey Company hotel and restaurant. Fred Harvey contracted with the AT&SF in 1876 (formally in 1878) to promote tourism in the Southwest as well as a particular image of the Indigenous people who lived there. The original Harvey House in Needles was destroyed in a 1906 fire. It was rebuilt in the mission style and named El Garces, for Father Francisco Garcés (of San Xavier del Bac, Tucson), whose 1770s visits to the lower Colorado River mark the beginning of sustained settler-Mojave contact. See Folder: Education, The Railroad Town and White Neighbors, Box 65, MS1225, Lorraine M. Sherer Papers, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. For more on Fred Harvey hotels and Indian tourism, see Marta Weigle, "From Desert to Disney World: The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company Display the Indian Southwest," Journal of Anthropological Research 45 (April 1989): 115–37; Elizabeth Lloyd Oliphant, "Marketing the Southwest: Modernism, the Fred Harvey Company, and the Indian Detour," American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 89 (March 2017): 91–119; Rosa Walston Latimer, Harvey Houses of Arizona: Historic Hospitality from Winslow to the Grand Canyon (Charleston, S.C., 2019).
23. Attempts by the OIA to remove Mojaves from Needles to allotments at either Fort Mojave or Colorado River Reservation generally failed; flooding made Fort Mojave allotments untenable for western-style agriculture in addition to Mojaves' own desire to stay in Needles. Many who did accept allotments still remained in Needles for at least part of the year. August F. Duclos to COIA, September 8, 1915, Folder: Chron Corr. 7/1/15–10/30/15, Box 1, Corr. of Supt. August F. Duclos, 1908–1916, CRA, RG 75, NARA-Pacific. Duclos also mentioned this problem in his 1911–1916 annual reports. See Reel 23, Microfilm 1011, RG 75, NARA-Washington, D.C.
24. Sherer and Stillman, Bitterness Road, 6n12; August F. Duclos to COIA, September 8, 1915, Folder: Chron Corr. 7/1/15–10/30/15, Box 1, Corr. of Supt. August F. Duclos, CRA, RG 75, NARA-Pacific. The Colorado River Agency briefly hosted a group of Hualapais in 1873–1874, although they quickly returned to their homelands where a reservation was established in 1883. Colorado River Agency was also meant to contain the Quechans, traditional Mojave allies who lived ninety miles to the south near Yuma, Arizona. The Quechans refused to be moved and successfully negotiated for their own reservation in 1884. Their neighbors, the Cocopahs, would receive reservation lands in 1917. For Hualapai history, see Christian W. McMillen, Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory (New Haven, Conn., 2007). For Quechan history, see Clifford E. Trafzer, Yuma: Frontier Crossings of the Far Southwest (Wichita, Kans., 1980); Clifford E. Trafzer, "Invisible Enemies: Ranching, Farming, and Quechan Indian Deaths at the Fort Yuma Agency, California, 1915–1925," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21 (1997): 83–117; Lee Emerson and Patrick Miguel, Quechan Voices, ed. Clifford E. Trafzer (Riverside, Calif., 2012); Robert L. Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado: The Impact of Government Policy on the Quechan Indians (Tucson, 1981); Jack D. Forbes, Warriors of the Colorado: The Yumas of the Quechan Nation and Their Neighbors (Norman, Okla., 1965).
25. By the 1910s, house improvement became one of the OIA's primary responses to the growing health crises in Indian Country, yet, due to their legal status, no funds were expended to help the Mojaves in Needles. For more on home improvement and settler domesticity, see Rebecca S. Wingo, "Picturing Indian Health: Dr. Ferdinand Shoemaker's Traveling Photographs from the Crow Reservation, 1910–1918," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 66 (Winter 2016): 24–45; Jane E. Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1919 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln, Neb., 2009); Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011).
26. Walter H. Graves, U.S. Indian Inspector, December 15, 1898, "Report of Colorado River, 1898," p. 13, Folder: Report on Colorado River, 1898, Box 1, Entry 627: Irrigation, Reports and Related Records, 1891–1946, RG 75, NARA-Washington, D.C.
27. [Mary] Anna Israel-Nettle, "Special Report on Health, 1913–1914, Colorado River Reservation," in Otis Goodall, "Inspection Report on Colorado River Reservation," July 18, 1914, Folder: 700, 105855-14, Box 80, CCF Entry 121, CRA, RG 75, NARA-Washington, D.C.
28. Frederick Hoxie and Tom Holm best exemplify this important turn in the scholarship. Hoxie highlights the changing, and increasingly narrow, definition of assimilation. In the new century, he writes, "optimism and a desire for rapid incorporation were pushed aside by racism, nostalgia, and disinterest." Hoxie also argues that as part of this larger "modification" of settler expectations and strategies, guardianship of Native lands became a method for tempering American Indians' citizenship rights. Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln, Neb., 1985), 105–13, 214–16. Tom Holm meanwhile contends that the period 1900 to 1920 is best characterized as a series of "stop gap," and pessimistic, federal Indian policies which lacked a clear vision for the future. Tom Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin, Tex., 2005), 182. Elizabeth James does an excellent job of revealing these contradictions through the lens of health. James, "'Hardly a Family.'"
29. The Early Native America literature is extensive. Two useful historiographical essays on the field are James H. Merrell, "Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians," William and Mary Quarterly 69 (July 2012): 451–512; Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, "Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn," William and Mary Quarterly 75 (April 2018): 207–36.
30. The intersections between federal Indian and immigrant assimilation policies in this time period are many. One particularly useful avenue is the literature on European immigrants who successfully adopted white identities (by mainstream standards): Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York, 2001); Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (Oxford, U.K., 2004); T. J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York, 2009).
31. By the turn of the century, with European and American colonization and increasing visibility of nonwhites pressuring for equal rights, colonial leaders attempted to establish a global "color line" to mitigate the ensuing "whiteness crisis." See Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, U.K., 2008). The term "color line" comes from W. E. B. Du Bois, most notably in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 2016). See also Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993): 1707–91; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K., 2008); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1999).
32. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence, Kans., 1995), 29–30. On Arizona and southern California boarding schools, see Robert A. Trennert, The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891–1935 (Norman, Okla., 1988); Jean A. Keller, Empty Beds: Indian Student Health at Sherman Institute, 1902–1922 (East Lansing, Mich., 2002); Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, Education Beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute, 1902–1929 (Lincoln, Neb., 2010); Clifford E. Trafzer, Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, and Lorene Sisquoc, eds., The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue: Voices and Images from Sherman Institute (Corvallis, Ore., 2012); Bonnie Thompson, "The Student Body: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890–1940" (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2013); Whalen, Native Students at Work; Clifford Trafzer, Jeffrey Smith, and Lorene Sisquoc, Shadows of the Sherman Institute: A Photographic History of the Indian School on Magnolia Avenue (Temecula, Calif., 2017); Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, "Revisiting the Hopi Boarding School Experience at Sherman Institute and the Process of Making Research Meaningful to Community," Journal of American Indian Education 57 (Spring 2018): 101–21; Nicole J. Williams, "'Broken Threads of Varying Colors and Tones': A Souvenir Album of the Phoenix Indian School (1904)," Photography and Culture 12 (2019): 81–107.
33. Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880–1920 (Chicago, 2005), ch. 2; Andrae M. Marak and Laura Tuennerman, At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O'odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 (Tucson, 2013). Sarah A. Whitt maps out cross-institutional incarceration and punishment of Indigenous people in boarding schools and asylums in her dissertation: Whitt, "False Promises."
34. Progressive leaders adopted culinary assimilation for immigrants as well. Across racial and ethnic groups, they viewed Anglo foods as a way to transform foreign consumption habits and bodies. Social workers often discouraged immigrants from eating foods that reflected immigrants' home countries, such as spicy foods and non-meat dishes (like pasta), instead emphasizing American food culture, which was heavy on meat and dairy. E. Melanie DuPuis, Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink (New York, 2002), 117; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (Oxford, U.K., 1993), 203–4. For American Indians, one of the hardest transitions was to dairy. The emphasis on dairy in particular reflected the supposed superiority of Euro-American bodies and culture based on their ability to drink milk. Many U.S. Americans of northern European descent celebrated milk drinking as a symbol of a race's "fitness." DuPuis, Nature's Perfect Food, 117–18.
35. For example, only four months into Carlisle Industrial School's first term in 1879, it needed to build a cemetery. By spring 1901, there were 163 graves. Original Cemetery Plot Map of Carlisle Indian School, 1901, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections, available online at https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/cemetery-information/resources (last accessed August 18, 2020). This map only accounts for those known to be buried at Carlisle. Preston S. McBride's research highlights Carlisle's strategy for sending sick children home in order to improve health statistics and to ensure the boarding school model expanded to the western United States. He has also found evidence of these practices at Haskell Institute, Sherman Institute, and Chemawa Indian School. Preston S. McBride, "A Lethal Education: Institutionalized Negligence, Epidemiology, and Death in American Indian Boarding Schools, 1879–1934" (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2020).
36. These same abuses were prevalent in Catholic-run schools. See Mark St. Pierre and Madonna Swan, Madonna Swan: A Lakota Woman's Story (Norman, Okla., 1991). For more on boarding school health in Arizona and southern California, see Trennert, The Phoenix Indian School; Robert A. Trennert, "The Federal Government and Indian Health in the Southwest: Tuberculosis and the Phoenix East Farm Sanatorium, 1909–1955," Pacific Historical Review 65 (Feb. 1996): 61–84; Keller, Empty Beds. For non-southwestern boarding school histories that touch on health, see Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln, Neb., 1998); K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln, Neb., 1994); Adams, Education for Extinction; Michael C. Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 1850–1930 (Jackson, Miss., 1993); Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose, eds., Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (Lincoln, Neb., 2016).
37. The Bureau of American Ethnology and OIA had jointly commissioned Hrdlička's research trip. He was accompanied by bacteriologist Paul Johnson. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Tuberculosis Among Certain Indian Tribes of the United States by Aleš Hrdlička, Bulletin 42 (Washington, D.C., 1909), 25–26. The 1909 International Tuberculosis Conference (September 1908) and tuberculosis prevention and care were featured at Phoenix's Returned Students Conference and on the front page of the school newspaper, the Native American, in January 1909. The Native American (Phoenix Indian School), January 23, 1909. Tuberculosis was again the main feature of the newspaper in 1913. The Native American (Phoenix Indian School), May 10, 1913.
38. Francis Neel, "Colorado River Reservation, Report on School" in Annual Reports of Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs by United States Department of the Interior (Washington, D.C., 1900), 187.
39. East Farm Sanatorium Application for George M., May 24, 1915, Folder: George M., Box 67, Student Case Files, Phoenix Indian School, RG 75, NARA-Pacific.
40. One other option for TB treatment was Fort Yuma's hospital, although the hospital's capacity was much smaller. It is unclear exactly when Fort Yuma's hospital became known for its TB treatment, but the records become clear on this matter in the 1910s. I consulted with Clifford Trafzer who made a similar conclusion. Personal correspondence with author, June 25, 2020.
41. Like science and medicine more generally, public health practices inherited the prejudices of their creators. This argument figures broadly in Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Craddock, City of Plagues; Shah, Contagious Divides; Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?; Abel, Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion; Koslow, Cultivating Health; Roberts, Infectious Fear.
42. Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York, 1994), 132. On allergies and health seeking, see Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven, Conn., 2007). For more on the history of tuberculosis, see René Dubos and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society (Boston, 1952); Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia, 1992); Georgina D. Feldberg, Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995); Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Abel, Suffering in the Land of Sunshine; Christian W. McMillen, Discovering Tuberculosis: A Global History, 1900 to the Present (New Haven, Conn., 2015).
43. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1870–1920 (New York, 1967); Ian Tyrrell, "Robert Wiebe's The Search for Order, Fifty Years On," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17 (April 2018): 397–411.
44. For a synopsis of the backdoor railroad drama at Needles, see Thomas E. Sheridan, Arizona: A History (Tucson, 1995), 120–22.
45. By 1920, total track miles reached 2,478 (the state's peak). John F. Stover, American Railroads, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1997), 204.
46. Tuberculosis long reigned as the top cause of death in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. In 1900, pulmonary tuberculosis killed on average 180.4 people per 100,000 of the population. The Census Bureau also concluded that from 1900 to 1904, pulmonary TB made up approximately 88.5 percent of all TB cases. When we add causes of death from non-pulmonary TB, tuberculosis out-ranked pneumonia as the top cause of death. Over the period 1880 to 1930, TB rates did decline, although they remained abnormally high in health-seeking areas, as the Census Bureau noted in its 1900–1904 report. These mortality calculations were based on a select group of "registration states," almost all of which were on the eastern seaboard. But the Census Bureau also included cities across the country whose rates give us a sense of the abnormally high rates in western cities. For instance, over the period 1900–1904, Denver had the highest death rates from TB out of all U.S. cities at 410.1 out of 100,000. The Bureau noted "the excessive mortality is due largely to deaths of non-residents who resort to this locality in the later stages of the disease, hoping to be benefited or cured by the favorable climatic conditions. The same statement applies to some of the other principal and minor cities in the West and South visited in large numbers by persons afflicted with pulmonary diseases." United States Department of Labor and Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Special Reports: Mortality Statistics, 1900 to 1904 (Washington, D.C., 1906), xxxv.
47. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 132.
48. Sara E. Grineski, Bob Bolin, and Victor Agadjanian, "Tuberculosis and Urban Growth: Class, Race and Disease in Early Phoenix, Arizona, USA," Health & Place 12 (Dec. 2006): 606.
49. While TB death rates declined steadily in the first half of the twentieth century, Arizona frequently had the highest rates. Health seekers in Arizona resulted in the state having the highest death rate from TB (out of the forty-eight states) in the mid-1920s. Grineski, Bolin, and Agadjanian, "Tuberculosis and Urban Growth," 606. Emily Abel explains that, in Los Angeles, public health officials were some of the first critics of the city's boosters. Abel, Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion, 29. This was certainly the case in most major cities, but not necessarily true in smaller towns. One short-lived, but important, counter-example was the Steward House in Oracle, Arizona. During the 1920s, the house was a Masonic convalescent home. See Geoffrey N. Gilbert and Catherine H. Ellis, "'What Will You Do to Save a Consumptive Brother?': Freemasonry, the Oracle Sanatorium, and the Anti-Tuberculosis Movement in the Southwest," Journal of Arizona History 52 (Autumn 2011): 213–44. Fraternal and ethnic organizations also provided help in larger cities like Tucson and Los Angeles. See Dick Hall, "Ointment of Love: Oliver E. Comstock and Tucson's Tent City," Journal of Arizona History 19 (Summer 1978): 111–30; Abel, Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion, 36–37. For information on health seeking in New Mexico, see Nancy Owen Lewis, Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health (Santa Fe, 2016).
50. Sharlot M. Hall, "The Burden of the Southwest," Out West, January 1908, p. 12.
51. In Tucson, the area now known as Feldman's was then known as Tent City for consumptives who could not afford one of the city's private sanatoria. Dick Hall provides a first-hand account of life in Tent City in Hall, "Ointment of Love." Health seeking intensified in Tucson into the 1920s. For more on Tucson and tuberculosis, see Jennifer Levstik and Tyler Theriot, "National Register of Historic Places Application: Tucson Health Seekers: Design, Planning, and Architecture in Tucson for the Treatment of Tuberculosis, Pima County, Arizona" (Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation, August 2012).
52. For more on Phoenix boosterism and health seeking, see Grineski, Bolin, and Agadjanian, "Tuberculosis and Urban Growth."
53. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Tuberculosis, 22. Hrdlička's report and others about the state of Phoenix Indian students' health—especially the high rates of trachoma—resulted in some of the first health-specific appropriations ($12,000) from Congress. H.R. Doc. 28164, Ch. 167, "An Act for the Investigation, Treatment, and Prevention of Trachoma among the Indians," 60th Cong., 2nd Sess., approved February 20, 1909. The following year, the school also established a small school sanatorium for tuberculous students. It was called East Farm Sanatorium because it was located east of main campus (and on the school's farmlands). An excellent history of East Farm can be found in Trennert, "The Federal Government and Indian Health in the Southwest."
54. In 1925, Arizona's Native death rate from TB was 15.1 per 1,000 while infant mortality accounted for 27.6 percent of all Native deaths in the state. Lewis Meriam et al., The Problem of Indian Administration (Baltimore, 1928), 200 (hereinafter Meriam Report). Data on the general population death rate in Arizona was unavailable because Arizona was excluded from the 1925 Census Bureau "death registration area." This number is most certainly an estimate because, as the Meriam team stressed, OIA data on Indian morbidity and mortality was incredibly faulty. For an interesting reassessment of this problem during the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, see Benjamin R. Brady and Howard M. Bahr, "The Influenza Epidemic of 1918–1920 among the Navajos: Marginality, Mortality, and the Implications of Some Neglected Eyewitness Accounts," American Indian Quarterly 38 (Fall 2014): 459–91.
55. Internal inspectors (most notably William J. McConnell) raised the alarm beginning in the 1890s. Putney, "Fighting the Scourge," 8–22; S. Doc. No. 1038, "The Prevalence of Contagious and Infectious Diseases among the Indians of the United States," 62nd Cong., 3rd Sess. (1913), 40. Incidence rate for whites was 12.1 per 1,000 and for Indians was 35.4 per 1,000. Incidence among the Black population in the United States was 33.9 per 1,000. All of this data should be taken with a grain of salt, as the USPHS even stated in their report. Health statistics at the turn of the century, especially within the Indian Service, were often inaccurate and undercounted morbidity and mortality rates. This criticism was repeated in the Meriam Report.
56. "The Prevalence of Contagious and Infectious Diseases among the Indians of the United States," 40. Black consumptives' mortality rates were only slightly less than American Indians' at 4.85 per 1,000.
57. "The Prevalence of Contagious and Infectious Diseases among the Indians of the United States," 41. The USPHS was also interested in rates of trachoma across the United States. Nineteenth-century public health officials had believed it to be an "imported" disease and were thus shocked to learn that it had made significant inroads among two of the most "American" (in different senses of the word) populations: Anglo-Saxon/Scots-Irish descendants in Appalachia and American Indians. In Arizona, the USPHS recorded that 24.9 percent of those examined (1,459) had trachoma. John McMullen, "Trachoma in Kentucky: A Report of an Investigation of the Prevalence of Trachoma in the Mountains of Eastern Kentucky," Public Health Reports (1896–1970) 27 (November 18, 1912): 1815–22.
58. "The Prevalence of Contagious and Infectious Diseases among the Indians of the United States," 20. That rate was generated out of 5,873 examinations. California's rate was 15.3 percent, although only 1,555 Native people were examined. The total number of American Indians inspected for trachoma across the United States was 39,231. The general population rate is for 1912–1914. See Taliaferro Clark, "The Cause and Prevalence of Trachoma," in Transactions of Forty-Fifth Annual Session of the Medical Society of Virginia, 27–30 October 1914 (Richmond, Va., 1915), 93.
59. "The Prevalence of Contagious and Infectious Diseases among the Indians of the United States," 24.
60. McMillen, Making Indian Law, 12–14.
61. Hall, "The Burden of the Southwest," 16. While "outbreak" is a bit misleading when discussing an endemic disease like tuberculosis, in Indian Country the disease did spread quickly among unhealthy reservation and boarding school conditions. Christian McMillen traces changing understandings of TB among American Indians in McMillen, "'The Red Man and the White Plague.'" Samuel Roberts describes high rates of "galloping consumption" amongst African Americans in Roberts, Infectious Fear, 60.
62. M. F. Holland, July 26, 1910, Annual Narrative 1910, pp. 10, 12, CRA, Reel 23, Microfilm 1011, RG 75, NARA-Washington, D.C.
63. Beginning in 1910, the OIA relied on a field matron and missionary, along with the physician, to provide medical aid to the Mojaves.
64. While often field matrons were forced to focus on health crises in their jurisdictions (despite lacking medical education), the first field matron in Needles was explicitly sent there to improve sanitary conditions among Mojave homes. Lisa Emmerich, "'To Respect and Love and Seek the Ways of White Women': Field Matrons, the Office of Indian Affairs, and Civilization Policy, 1890–1938" (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1987), 184–85; August F. Duclos to Andrews, October 11, 1918, Folder: Physician, Box 209, Subject Files, CRA, RG 75, NARA-Pacific. The first Needles field matron, Edna Fowler (1918–1922) was commended for her sanitary work by the Indian Rights Association (Philadelphia, Penn.). Indian Rights Association, The Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Indian Rights Association, vol. 39 (Philadelphia, 1921), 16. What was intended to be a public health position quickly expanded to encompass a whole host of responsibilities in social work, advocacy, and general supervision, thereby remaking the field matrons into surrogate Indian agents. In the 1930s, skilled field nurses replaced field matrons, a process that began in the early 1920s with Red Cross nurses Florence Patterson and Elinor Gregg. Emmerich, "To Respect and Love," ch. 7.
65. August F. Duclos to Arthur Boland, November 1, 1916, Folder: Health, Correspondence, 1916–18, Box 201, Subject Files, CRA, RG 75, NARA-Pacific.
66. Babcock, June 30, 1912, Annual Narrative 1912, Folder: 055-Annual Report, 1912, Box 5, CCF, CRA, RG 75, NARA-Pacific.
67. Chapin to Crane, June 26, 1924, Folder: 970 Domestic Employment, 971 Field Matron Needles 1924, Box 179, Central Classified Files (CCF), Colorado River Reservation (CRR), RG 75, NARA-Pacific.
68. The town of Parker was/is inside the northern tip of the reservation. It was originally established as a post office for the agency in January 1871, and it remained isolated and limited in size until the early twentieth century when prospecting, ranching, and farming in the lower Colorado River region brought the railroad to this outpost on the Colorado River. Charles A. Lamb, "Brief Partial History of the Colorado River Reservation (Draft Copy)," 1985, 1, CRIT Tribal Museum and Cultural Center, Parker, Ariz.
69. Babcock to COIA, May 1, 1914, Efficiency Report, Mary A. Israel Nettle, Federal Employee Personnel File, Box: Nelson-Stanley, Department of Interior 2172, National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), NARA-St. Louis.
70. Israel also served the residents of Parker, as northern Yuma County's health officer, and the AT&SF surgeon for the region. On Israel's knowledge of CRA's residents: Hay-good to COIA, May 1, 1922, Efficiency Report, Mary A. Israel Nettle, Federal Employee Personnel File, NPRC, NARA-St. Louis.
71. This was particularly true for the allotment policy wherein alternating plots would be given to settlers or railroad companies (a process known as checkerboarding). Checkerboarding served the dual goals of breaking up tribal power and integrating white and Indian neighbors. For more on checkerboarding and allotment, see Leonard A. Carlson, Indians, Bureaucrats, and Land: The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming (Westport, Conn., 1981); Janet A. McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887–1934 (Bloomington, Ind., 1991); Melissa L. Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920 (Lincoln, Neb., 1999); Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation; Nicole Tonkovich, The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance (Lincoln, Neb., 2012). In 1911, the Mohave Valley and Fort Mojave subagency experienced intensive checkerboarding, which has interspersed tribal and settler lands to this day. Lorraine M. Sherer, "The Clan System of the Fort Mojave Indians: A Contemporary Survey," Southern California Quarterly 47 (March 1965): 6n11.
