Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School (Montana)

History
Fort Shaw Industrial Indian Boarding School opened in 1891. It closed in 1910, due to declining enrollment.

In 1904, it had a famous girls' basketball team that won the World Championship at the World's Fair in Chicago.

Records
Some of the existing records of the school are at the Rocky Mountain Regional Archives of the National Archives and Records Administration in Denver. The records in that collection include:


 * Registers of pupils, 1892-1910
 * Sanitary Reports, 1894-1899
 * Roster of employees, 1891-1910

The 1900 federal census included population schedules for the Fort Shaw Indian Industrial School. The census includes the non-Indian employees of the school, as well as the pupils at the school. However, they are recorded on the general population schedules, not the Indian Population Schedules. They are recorded as District 215, Fort Shaw Indian Industrial School, in Cascade County, Montana.

Microfilm copies of ...Narrative and Statistical Reports... for the Fort Shaw Boarding School are included in National Archives Microcopy M1011, Roll 53, available in the National Archives system and in the collections of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City (their microfilm number 1724271).

A census for Fort Shaw School was taken in 1910 as part of the Annual Indian Census Rolls. This roll has been microfilmed by the National Archives as part of their Microcopy Number M595, roll 161. A copy of this record is also available at the National Archives, their Regional Archives, and at the Family History Library and its family history centers (their microfilm number 576850). These census rolls are also available online at Ancestry.com's subscription web site.