The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-06-05

I good people a decade or two ago to b, 1 utterly intractable, have planned to buy
 a mower and reaper like the one at tht ! school and to use it as community | property For ages past the Pima:
 have harvested their wheat and barley | by picking the heads one at time ant | rubbing the grain out with their hands | Of course one machine will not go very l far among fifty-fve hundred Indians | but it is step in the right direction anC
 shows the influence of their civilized
 children.
 There are other Indians busy in thC workshops and brickyards. Brick buildings are most generally built ir
 this land of long, hot summers. There
 are evidences all about of the skill and l industry of these aboriginal sons of Ar
 izona. The big two-story brick build l ing occupied as a boys bath-house | band headquarters and assembly rooms
 is the sole work of the boys. The artis- | tic band-stand in the piazza is also th5
 work of the boys, and there are fences | highly ornamented gates, chairs, tables and interior woodwork about the insti- 1 tuition wrought by Indian hands The
 Indian boys have eighty thousand bricks 1 made, burned and ready for use in the
 new dormitory soon to be built from the l congressional appropriation.
 The girls are taught, besides their dai- | ly routine in the class-rooms, to sew, | knit, bake, to make clothes for them
 selves and the boys, and perform the | duties of an American wife who has to
 make her own way. The government | has furnished sewing machines for these
 Indian girls. The are of weaving is
 taught in a dozen forms. The fancy
 work made by the Indian girls, especial ly those from the Pima tribe, is surpri- singly dextrous. A young woman of Maricopa birth, graduate of the
 school in 1897, is superintend of this
 branch of the girls industrial educa- ton, and she has won fame among the
 dealers in curiOs and aboriginal work
 manship throughout the southwest for
 her unique designs and her skill in imi-
 tating designs in altar cloths, prestly
 vestments and linen from the old world
 Eight years ago this young woman
 now seemingly of fine breeding soft
 modest manners, claar-cut English, im-
 maculate personal habits and good
 sensible ideas-was brought from a mis-
 erable Indian hovel built of cornstalks
 and grass, where the parents and seven
 children dwelt together in the sand
 three-fourths naked; where they cooked
 their mesquite beans and tortillas over smoking bonfire in the middle of the
 hut. But this is only one of the mar
 vicious changes in the life and habits of
 Indian children that. this school at
 Phoenix is effecting.
 A visit by a Sun reporter to the school was full of pleasant surprises
 Imagine, for instance, having a chat
 about the partition of China with an eighteen-year-o Apache who could not speak an English word in 1888 and was
 brought up by his savage parents to plan the extermination of the pale faces. The various classes were reel ting in the morning when he arrived. The reporter with the superintendent, s. M. McCowan, went from classroom to classroom It was all interesting
 and the surprises never wore away. It is an uncommon experience to go through building and at each opening of q door see score or more of smart faced boys and girls each looking seri- ously at you with coal black eyes from beneath a shock of straight hair as black as the ravens wing. There were Kindergarten classes in the lower rooms, where little Indian boys and girls sat at tiny tables and got their first lessons in color and the meaning of things in the great world outside their tribal reserva- tions. The teacher in one room was telling in English about the sea as it was pictured in chart on the wall The big, black-eyed children who had never seen a body of water more impor- tant than an Arizona irrigating ditch looked on with incredulous amazement that there could be body of water so great. In another room older boys and girls were wrestling with q story in large type about the rat aad the dog. The teacher herself was q graduate of the Indian school and was born a Pue- bio Indian in New Mexico There were many classes reeiting in arithmetic and geography. One Pima Indian girl was explaining on a wall map the course of Magellan in circumnavigating the world. In another room a big Hualipi Indian girl, with tattooed chin Ca fact that makes her heartsck since she has come to have an education), was ex- plaining intellgently why the lines of longitude and parallels of latitude were adopted for the use of mariners.
 The young men and women who will finish their course next June were in the midst of a history recitation when the reporter entered their classroom. The | class was at that moment discussing the | Norman invasion and the events lead | ing up to the battle of Hastings One | Pima youth, Robert Thunder by name, | gave in modest, hesitating speech a | brief description of Magma Charta, He | said King John was "a lazy man who | wanted everybody to work all the time and let him be a rich man" Then he | told how everybody but the rich bar ons got mad and said they would kill 1 the rich unless the rights were given in black and white, which paper was the Magma Charta' One girl said she thought the Magma Charta looked like a school diploma A Pima girl said, with never change in her serious face, that the Normans made war on the Anglo SaXons just as the white people did | later on the Indians, to get land cheap.
 The class in music was in the midst of learning some college songs. The h. dian voices are not smooth and musical as the white peoples So their songs were in a shril guttural The earnest
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