Sarah Maddox (1890-1911) - Lovelorn Schoolgirl

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In 1911, Sarah Maddox was a student at the Phoenix Indian School.  She was probably a member of the Hoopa tribe of northern California.   According to her newspaper obituary, she was one of the school’s brightest students and had an interest in the dramatic arts.  Although the sentimental newspaper article portrays her as being sixteen, other sources suggest that she was in fact about 21.

She may have been the daughter of John Wesley Maddux, a white man who owned a saloon in Happy Camp, California, and his first wife, a local Native American woman.  John Wesley Maddux did have a daughter named Sarah, but little else is known about her.

While at school, Sarah apparently fell in love with a young man who was a member of the school’s baseball team.  Being shy, she hoped to attract his attention by appearing on stage in the school’s dramatic productions.  One such performance took place late in February, 1911, and all confirmed that she did an outstanding job.  However, Sarah was bereft to learn that the object of her affections had not even been present to witness her triumph.

Feeling rejected, Sarah swallowed a caustic compound—possibly lye or mercury—and died about two weeks later from the painful effects.  She was buried in Rosedale Cemetery.

It is not known whether the young baseball player ever knew of her interest in him.

- by Donna Carr

 

 

 

Alfred Scott (1881-1906) - Phoenix Indian School Student

 

PCA Archives

Alfred Scott was born about 1881 in California.  His records at Phoenix Indian School list him as a ‘Mission’ Indian, probably Luiseño.

Opened in 1890, the Phoenix Indian School was intended to function as a residential industrial school and to teach Native American teens and young adults useful occupations such as carpentry, animal husbandry and the domestic arts--sewing, cooking, nursing.  In time, its dormitories housed a total of about 700 pupils from 35 different tribes, including some advanced students from other Western states.

The school was designed to be a self-sufficient as possible.  Vegetables were raised in the gardens.  Male students tended the cows in the dairy and made the furniture used in the classrooms and dormitories.  Female students sewed school uniforms and practiced some native crafts such as basket-weaving.

In addition to classes in occupational skills, the school had an academic curriculum similar to that taught in the average high school of the time.  Many of the teachers were themselves Native Americans from tribes elsewhere in the United States, on the theory that they would serve as relatable role models. The school newspaper was produced in the campus print shop, and the school’s military drill team, marching band and football and baseball teams were highly regarded.  Each fall, students participated in the annual territorial fair, exhibiting handicrafts and taking part in horse races and foot races.

Alfred Scott played left outfield on the school’s baseball team in 1901.  In 1904, he gave a declamation entitled “The Road to Placerville”, from Mark Twain’s book Roughing it, at a literary night performance.

On 1905, Alfred married an Anglo schoolteacher, Mae Glase, in Los Angeles, California.  They had met while Miss Glase was teaching at the Phoenix Indian School.  After the wedding, the young couple moved to Fort McDowell, where Mae taught elementary school.

Tragically, Alfred was already suffering from tuberculosis and died less than a year later on 10 April 1906.  He was buried in Rosedale Cemetery, and his widow had a red sandstone monument placed on his grave.

Mae Glase Scott eventually moved to Murray, Utah, where she was employed for 33 years as a schoolteacher and principal.  She died in Seattle in 1951.

-by Donna Carr

Laura Long Cochran (1871-1899) - Matron at Phoenix Indian School

 

Arizona Memory Project - Main Building Behind School, 1900

Laura Long was born on September 11, 1871, in Kansas.  She was the daughter of Isaac Zane Long, a prominent member of the Wyandotte Nation, and Catherine McConnell.  Her father Isaac is thought to have been a descendant of the famous frontiersman Isaac Zane and his wife of the Wyandotte Nation, Myeerah. Born in Zanesfield, Ohio, Isaac went west when the remnants of the Wyandotte tribe were removed to reservations in Kansas around 1843.

Even though school records list Laura as being only one-sixteenth Wyandotte, she seems to have been regarded as Native American throughout her life.  In 1891, she was working and going to school at the Quapaw-Wyandotte Indian School in Seneca, Kansas.  Thereafter, she attended Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, from which she graduated in 1895.  By 1896, she was employed as a matron at the Phoenix Indian School.

Opened in 1891, the Phoenix Indian School was intended to function as a residential industrial school, training Native American teens and young adults in useful occupations such as carpentry, animal husbandry and the domestic art, such as sewing, cooking, nursing.  In time, its dormitories housed a total of about 700 pupils from 35 different tribes, including advanced students from other Western states.  Like Laura, many of the teachers were themselves Native Americans from tribes elsewhere in the United States, on the theory that they would serve as relatable teachers. 

On February 22, 1897, Laura Long married John Piper Cochran, a blacksmith at the Phoenix Indian School. Laura and John had one son, John D. Cochran, born March 30, 1898, in Phoenix.

Laura died on January 8, 1899, of inflammation of the bowels and peritonitis (possibly a ruptured appendix).  After a Methodist funeral service attended by almost all the Indian School students, she was laid to rest in Rosedale North, Lot 43. 

Weeks later, her husband’s parents, William C. and Mary Cochran, came to Phoenix to take nine-month-old John back to Kansas with them.  Following John P. Cochran’s remarriage in 1901, young John went to live with his father and his new stepmother.

- by Donna Carr