Mollie had reached Pawhuska. Although the reservation’s
capital then seemed a small, squalid place—a “muddy little trading
post,” as one visitor described it—it was likely the biggest
settlement Mollie had ever seen. She was taken about a mile away,
to a forbidding stone building that stood four stories high: the St.
Louis Catholic missionary school, where she was left in the care of
women in black-and-white habits. Mollie went through the front
door—Mathews once described the entrance to another Osage
boarding school as a “big, black mouth, bigger and darker than a
wildcat’s”—and down a labyrinth of drafty corridors; coal lanterns
glowed in the darkness.
Mollie had to remove the Indian blanket from her shoulders and
put on a plain dress. She wasn’t allowed to speak Osage—she had
to catch the white man’s tongue—and was given a Bible that began
with a distinct notion of the universe: “Then God said, ‘Let there
be light’; and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and
God separated the light from the darkness.”
Each hour of the day was regimented and students were lined
up and marched from point to point. They were taught piano,
penmanship, geography, and arithmetic, the world distilled into
strange new symbols. The instruction was intended to assimilate
Mollie into white society and transform her into what the
authorities conceived of as the ideal woman. So while Osage boys
at other institutions learned farming and carpentry, Mollie was
trained in the “domestic arts”: sewing, baking, laundering, and
housekeeping. “It is impossible to overestimate the importance of
careful training for Indian girls,” a U.S. government official had
stated, adding, “Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working
and industrious, providing by his labor food and clothing for his
household, if the wife, unskilled in cookery, unused to the needle,
with no habits of order or neatness, makes what might be a
cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and squalor?