Rapid City Indian School

The Rapid City Indian School was created in 1898 for Indian children from the Northern plains, including those from the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Shoshone, Arapaho, Crow, and Flathead tribes. It was one of the off-reservation Indian Boarding Schools established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and was sometimes called "School of the Hills." It closed its doors as a school in 1933 and became a Sanitorium for the treatment of tuberculosis for the Sioux.

Administrative records are available at the Central Plains Regional Archives of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and have been microfilmed. Copies are available at the South Dakota Archives. The inventory of these microfilmed records is available on the South Dakota Archives website. No pupil files are listed in this collection.

Microfilm copies of “Narrative and Statistical Reports” for Rapid City are included in National Archives Microcopy M1011, available in the National Archives system and in the collections of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, beginning with their film number 1724219.