1915

The school is the brainchild of Henry Roe Cloud, a Winnebago educator and Yale University graduate. Cloud will serve as the institute’s president for 16 years.

Mohawk steelworkers begin working in New York City.

Hired to work on the Hell’s Gate Bridge, John Diabo becomes New York City’s first Mohawk steelworker (see entry for 1886). Nicknamed “Indian Joe,” Diabo initially works with a team of Irish steelworkers but soon gathers his own crew of Mohawk workers from the Kahnawake Reserve. After several months, Diabo falls from a high beam and drowns in the river below. The rest of the crew returns to Kahnawake for good when they take his body back to the reserve. However, many other Mohawk, settling in Brooklyn, will become New York City steelworkers in the decades to come.

James Earle Fraser’s The End of the Trail symbolizes the demise of the Indian.

At the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, The End of the Trail, a sculpture by James Earle Fraser (see entry for 1913), creates a sensation and wins a gold medal in the art competition. The sculpture depicts a Plains Indian warrior, slumped in exhaustion, mounted on a weary old pony. The work’s popularity among non-Indians derives largely from its suggestion that the forces of “civilization” have finally subdued rebel Indian nations. Fraser himself explains, “It was [the] idea of a weaker race being steadily pushed to the wall by a stronger that I wanted to convey.”

Autumn

Henry Roe Cloud founds an Indian prep school.

The only Indian-run high school in the United States, the Roe Indian Institute (later renamed the American Indian Institute) is established in Wichita, Kansas, to offer young Indian men a college-preparatory education. Funded through private sources,