Laura (Long) Cochran

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)

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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.
 
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