 Sarah Maddox, 1890-1911 Lovelorn Schoolgirl Buried in Rosedale Cemetery, exact location unknown (Generic image created using Bing AI) In 1911, Sarah Maddox was a student at the Phoenix Indian School. She was probably a member of the Hoopa tribe of northern California. According to her newspaper obituary, she was one of the school’s brightest students and had an interest in the dramatic arts. Although the sentimental newspaper article portrays her as being sixteen, other sources suggest that she was in fact about 21.
She may have been the daughter of John Wesley Maddux, a white man who owned a saloon in Happy Camp, California, and his first wife, a local Native American woman. John Wesley Maddux did have a daughter named Sarah, but little else is known about her. While at school, Sarah apparently fell in love with a young man who was a member of the school’s baseball team. Being shy, she hoped to attract his attention by appearing on stage in the school’s dramatic productions. One such performance took place late in February, 1911, and all confirmed that she did an outstanding job. However, Sarah was bereft to learn that the object of her affections had not even been present to witness her triumph. Feeling rejected, Sarah swallowed a caustic compound—possibly lye or mercury—and died about two weeks later from the painful effects. She was buried in Rosedale Cemetery. It is not known whether the young baseball player ever knew of her interest in him. © 2024 by Donna L. Carr. Last revised 27 November 2024. If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!
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Alfred Scott, 1881-1906 Phoenix Indian School Student Buried in Rosedale North (Grave marker photos courtesy of Pioneers’ Cemetery Association, Inc.) Alfred Scott was born about 1881 in California. His records at Phoenix Indian School list him as a ‘Mission’ Indian, probably Luiseño.
Opened in 1890, the Phoenix Indian School was intended to function as a residential industrial school and to teach Native American teens and young adults useful occupations such as carpentry, animal husbandry, and the domestic arts--sewing, cooking, nursing. In time, its dormitories housed a total of about 700 pupils from 35 different tribes, including some advanced students from other Western states. The school was designed to be a self-sufficient as possible. Vegetables were raised in the gardens. Male students tended the cows in the dairy and made the furniture used in the classrooms and dormitories. Female students sewed school uniforms and practiced some native crafts such as basket-weaving. In addition to classes in occupational skills, the school had an academic curriculum similar to that taught in the average high school of the time. Many of the teachers were themselves Native Americans from tribes elsewhere in the United States, on the theory that they would serve as relatable role models. The school newspaper was produced in the campus print shop, and the school’s military drill team, marching band, and football and baseball teams were highly regarded. Each fall, students participated in the annual territorial fair, exhibiting handicrafts and taking part in horse races and foot races. Alfred Scott played left outfield on the school’s baseball team in 1901. In 1904, he gave a declamation entitled “The Road to Placerville”, from Mark Twain’s book Roughing it, at a literary night performance. In 1905, Alfred married an Anglo schoolteacher, Mae Glase, in Los Angeles, California. They had met while Miss Glase was teaching at the Phoenix Indian School. After the wedding, the young couple moved to Fort McDowell, where Mae taught elementary school. Tragically, Alfred was already suffering from tuberculosis and died less than a year later on 10 April 1906. He was buried in Rosedale Cemetery, and his widow had a red sandstone monument placed on his grave. Mae Glase Scott eventually moved to Murray, Utah, where she was employed for 33 years as a schoolteacher and principal. She died in Seattle in 1951. © 2021 by Donna Carr. Last revised 24 October 2021. If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!  Edna Hillman, 1891-1912 Maidu Schoolgirl Buried in Rosedale Cemetery, exact location unknown (Photo of a Maidu family, 1906, William Thunen, photographer) LCCN 2020635536 Edna Hillman was born around 1891 in Greenville, California, to George and Maggie Hillman. She is known to have had two brothers.
Government and school records describe Edna as a full-blood Digger Indian. That was a somewhat pejorative term applied to many tribes that lived in the Great Basin regions of Utah, Nevada, and northern California. The area around Greenville was home to the Maidu tribe, so it is likely that she was Maidu. The Maidu were hunter-gatherers who typically lived in dugouts and subsisted on acorns, game, seeds, and edible roots, hence the name. During the Gold Rush years, the Maidu were dispossessed of their lands and decimated by diseases to which they had no immunity. Her parents having died, Edna was enrolled in a boarding school in California in 1897. She was a Methodist; it is not known whether that was by choice or because the school that took her in happened to be Methodist. By all accounts, Edna was a good student. Since she was 19 and an orphan, she herself signed the permissions to attend Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania for five years. A Carlisle trade school education was the best available to Native Americans of the turn of the century. Edna’s classes would probably have focused on practical skills such as cooking, sewing, and nursing. When Edna arrived at Carlisle on October 9, 1910, she was 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighed 133 pounds. However, she entered the school’s hospital in August 1911, where she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Her medical records show what she was fed. She was sometimes nauseous and often refused the milk and eggnog that was pressed upon her (many Native Americans are lactose-intolerant). By November 1911, Edna was failing rapidly. Having no family left in California to care for her, she asked to be sent to a government sanitarium in Phoenix. She left the school on December 11 but, by the time she reached Phoenix, it was clear that she was too far gone to recover. She died on January 22, 1912, and was buried in Rosedale Cemetery. ©2021 Donna L. Carr. Last revised 2 June 2021. If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!  Emma Burrows French, ca. 1885-1911 San Carlos Mohave Buried in City Loosley Cemetery, exact location unknown (Stock photo of Mohave mother and child, ca. 1900 Emma Burrows was born around 1885. She was a member of the San Carlos Mohave (Yuman) tribe. Her maiden name appears in the written record as Burrows, Burroughs, and Burris.
She graduated from the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1906. On 7 August 1907, she married William French, a Salt River Maricopa who had been a student at the Phoenix Indian School. Witnesses to the marriage were William’s brother Clarence and a woman named Ossie Mollie. Emma’s first child, a girl, was born 22 July 1908 but died 11 May 1909 of whooping cough and lobar pneumonia. The Frenches were living at 231 North 2nd Street at the time. On 4 December 1909, Emma gave birth to a boy, William. However, he too died on 13 April 1911 of pulmonary tuberculosis. Both children were buried in Rosedale Cemetery in Phoenix. When little William expired, the family was residing at 918 East Jefferson Street in Phoenix. By May 1911, Emma herself was in the last stages of pulmonary tuberculosis. She was taken to Fort McDowell, possibly for medical care, and died there on 14 May. She was buried in Rosedale, presumably near her children. William French remained a widower for more than two years, after which he married Ada Quorah (Cora) and fathered seven more children. © 2021 by Donna L. Carr. Last revised 25 March 2021. If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!  Laura Long Cochran, 1871-1899 Matron at Phoenix Indian School Buried in Rosedale North, Lot L43 (Photo: The main building at Phoenix Indian School, 1900, courtesy of the Arizona Memory Project) Laura Long was born on September 11, 1871, in Kansas. She was the daughter of Isaac Zane Long, a prominent member of the Wyandotte Nation, and Catherine McConnell. Her father Isaac is thought to have been a descendant of the famous frontiersman Isaac Zane and his Wyandotte wife Myeerah, whose interracial romance was romanticized in Zane Grey’s novel, Betty Zane. Born in Zanesfield, Ohio, Isaac went west when the remnants of the Wyandotte tribe were removed to reservations in Kansas around 1843.
Even though school records list Laura as being only one-sixteenth Wyandotte, she seems to have been regarded as Native American throughout her life. In 1891, she was working and going to school at the Quapaw-Wyandotte Indian School in Seneca, Kansas. Thereafter, she attended Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, from which she graduated in 1895. By 1896, she was employed as a matron at the Phoenix Indian School. Opened in 1891, the Phoenix Indian School was intended to function as a residential industrial school, training Native American teens and young adults in useful occupations such as carpentry, animal husbandry, and the domestic arts--sewing, cooking, nursing. In time, its dormitories housed a total of about 700 pupils from 35 different tribes, including advanced students from other Western states. Like Laura, many of the teachers were themselves Native Americans from tribes elsewhere in the United States, on the theory that they would serve as relatable role models. On February 22, 1897, Laura Long married John Piper Cochran, a blacksmith at the Phoenix Indian School. John does not seem to have been Native American; he and his parents consistently listed themselves as white on the federal census. Laura and John had one son, John D. Cochran, born March 30, 1898, in Phoenix. Laura died on January 8, 1899, of inflammation of the bowels and peritonitis (possibly a ruptured appendix). After a Methodist funeral service attended by almost all the Indian School students, she was laid to rest in Rosedale North, Lot 43. Weeks later, her husband’s parents, William C. and Mary Cochran, came to Phoenix to take nine-month-old John back to Kansas with them. Following John P. Cochran’s remarriage in 1901, young John went to live with his father and his new stepmother. © 2022 by Donna Carr. Last revised 8 October 2022. If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers! |
