This book, by the eminent Indian scholar Francis La Flesche, was first published in 1900. It is his own story and the story of his boyhood friends in an Indian mission school 80 miles north of Omaha in the 1860s. La Flesche gives his purpose as that of revealing that the true nature and character of Indian boys is essentially like that of other boys. He has done a good deal more than this, without bitterness and with humor.

First of all, the book is a picture of what an Indian mission school was like a hundred years ago. We have the fear and wonder of the children as they entered the strange atmosphere of the four-story building with a cupola, and saw for the first time lamps, clocks, cupboards and white men’s furniture; heard an incomprehensible language; and were introduced to the peculiar customs and disciplines of their teacher, Graybeard. Some of the children arrived heartbroken, but with friendliness among themselves and the natural resilience of youth most of them soon proved themselves more than equal to their surroundings. Before long they were playing jokes on one another and sometimes on Graybeard. But there was also sorrow. The most affecting story of the book is of an old woman and her timid orphan grandson whom she gave to the school.

Graybeard was a man with a strong sense of mission and not on the whole an unkind man, but he knew very little of what was going on in the minds and hearts of the boys. The songs the children sang and the poetry they were taught to recite—"From Greenland’s icy mountains," "The boy stood on the burning deck," "The little brown church in the vale," "Laura, Laura, still we love thee though we see thy form no more"—were typical of other schools of the period, but they seem particularly inappropriate in the teaching of these children straight from Indian villages. When they knelt for prayers it seemed like playing at ambush, hiding in the grass; and what was the relationship of that to the sonorous voice that went on and on telling a meaningless story? La Flesche recounts how having repeated "Our Father who art in heaven" a hundred times, he suddenly began to wonder what the words meant.

But the book is more than a picture of boys’ life at school. It describes the instructions that parents gave their children in Indian homes, lessons in respect and courtesy to others and in brave and honorable conduct. Also made evident are the differences among Indians in courage, consideration, capacities for leadership and general quality of character. Parents were torn as to whether or not to send their children to the white men’s schools. La Flesche’s father, chief of his tribe, was a leader in trying to persuade them that the children would have to learn the white men’s ways in order to be able to deal with white men. His son was one of the first who learned.

--Elizabeth Hoyt