Renata Birkenbuel
ICT
Imagine wearing a heavy, woolen, long-sleeved, sailor suit-style dress as a uniform while playing basketball outside in the stifling St. Louis, Missouri heat.
It’s 1904 and you’re a teenage girl from the government-run Fort Shaw Indian School – where the prairie meets the mountains and where temperatures are significantly cooler as the Sun River flows nearby and hefty winds from the Rocky Mountain Front blow you around in typical Central Montana fashion.
But instead you’re at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, competing against – and beating – non-Native teams from Illinois and Missouri, who greatly underestimate your savvy, athletic Indian girls’ team.
At the turn of the century, it was the very early days of girls’ basketball – and the Fort Shaw team stole the spotlight as it played – and beat – Helena, Butte Parochial and even state college teams – in dance halls, armories and gymnasiums across the state of Montana, then eventually all challengers at the spectacular World’s Fair.
It’s a story of excellence, resiliency, learning and opportunism. Once the team started winning and popping up in newspaper stories, the Indian School Superintendent and eventual coach F.C. Campbell finally promoted the team and filled out their playing schedule.
The girls hailed from their homes in the West region: Fort Belknap, Fort Peck and the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, Eastern Washington, Northern Wyoming and Idaho.
Attending the eye-opening World’s Fair while also performing colonial literary readings and dances for fair-goers, the girls were expected to wear their traditional dress off-court to satisfy the powers-that-be.
The obvious social gap between non-Native visitors and the girls’ culture confused them, but on the plus side, their experiences opened an entire new world.
A full 120 years later, their ground-breaking accomplishments serendipitously unlocked a whole new world for their admiring surviving descendants, as well.
Enter Ardis Cecil, descendant who helped organize the recent descendants gathering of the stunningly successful team of girls who attended the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School, which existed from 1892 to 1910.
Within those years, the new sport took Fort Shaw, Montana, the Rocky Mountain region, the nation and even the world by storm. The iron rim was netless; the basketball, large, leathery and heavy; and dribbling had not yet come into play.
But the girls knew how to pass, run and strategize. They routinely drew large crowds standing on the sidelines unexpectedly cheering them on.
The girls, as Indigenous women, reportedly seemed non-threatening to white crowds, even as the team found themselves in an unlikely situation of pushing social boundaries.
Cecil, adamant about keeping her ball-playing ancestors – great aunt Nettie Wirth and grandmother and team chaperone Lizzie Wirth – plus their extraordinary squad uppermost in the public’s mind, proved to be the heart of the June 8 celebration.
Originally from the Fort Peck Tribe, Cecil magically collaborated with Burnette Batista of the Sun River Valley Historical Society and Kristi Scott, director of The History Museum in Great Falls. They drew a few hundred descendents to Fort Shaw for the union.
“I’m originally from Poplar, which is on the Fort Peck Reservation in Northeast Montana,” Cecil told ICT. “And I’m currently living north of Coeur d’ Alene in a town called Hayden, Idaho. And I am an enrolled member of the Fort Peck Tribes. I’m Assiniboine of the Red Bottom Band.”
Several related families met for the first time in the modern Fort Shaw Elementary School on June 8, when descendants gathered to celebrate the major milestone in girls’ basketball history – and Indigenous history.
Elouise Berry, of Billings, Montana, and the granddaughter of Lizzie Wirth, attended. She was unavailable for comment, but Cecil, acting as event emcee, was thrilled to spend time with her cousin.
A few showed up to reunite with relatives; many more arrived only to meet relatives they didn’t know they had. It was all due to a high-achieving teen basketball team who represented the old ways while it was thrown into the white world’s new, modern world.
When the Fort Peck Indian Agency School in Poplar burned in 1892, among the children sent 350 miles west to Fort Shaw was Nettie Wirth, Assiniboine, descendent of the Red Bottom band.
Genie Butch, Fort Peck Assiniboine and great aunt to ICT Editor-at-Large Mark Trahant, joined a solid teenager squad that at one time or another included star shooter Minnie Burton,19, Lemhi Shoshone; Katie Snell, 17, Assiniboine; Genevieve Healy, 16, Gro Ventre; Rose LaRose, 17, Shoshone and Cree; Flora Lucero, 15, Chippewa; and Sarah Mitchell, 15, Assiniboine; Belle Johnson of the Fort Belknap Reservation who started school years earlier at Fort Shaw at age 10; Emma Sansaver, Metis, 18; and Josephine Langley, 16, Blackfeet.
Langley, a natural leader and teacher, eventually stopped competing and instead tutored and chaperoned the younger girls at the school.
The game was in its infancy in terms of rules and regulations, then transformed into the very limiting half-court “girls rules” until modern times. But wherever the team played, crowds stood on the sidelines and often shouted, “Shoot, Minnie, Shoot!” to Minnie Burton, the top scorer.
“They were good at passing,” added Peavy, who ventured from Vermont for the recent gathering.
One of the first newspapers to publish the eventual catchphrase was the Exponent student newspaper after the Fort Shaw team routed the Farmerettes of Montana Agricultural College 36-9 in Great Falls.
Stars of that particular game proved to be Nettie Wirth, Minnie Burton, Emma Sansavere and Josephine Langley.
Minnie Burton made sports headlines across Montana in newspapers of old, yet her family, Lemhi Shoshone, was unaware of her mainstream popularity and athletic acclaim.
By November, 1904, World Championship trophy in hand, the team boarded a train to head back to Fort Shaw.
The film, Playing for the World, debuted to great acclaim at The History Museum in Great Falls, where descendants, both co-authors, history buffs and this reporter filled the room on Feb. 19, 2009. You can watch it for free.
Indoors or out, they were always up for a game – especially against naysayers or the North Dakota team that tossed pre-game racial epithets at them. During the traveling season, Fort Shaw pummeled the non-Native team, 34-0.
They often played outside at different venues,” said Cecil. “I think that the Superintendent Campbell, when they were expecting a large crowd for one of the games closer to Fort Shaw, said, ‘Well, let’s just do it outside.’ And they were able to do it outside. They (did not have) the normal basketball we have up to date, but it was something that didn’t bounce. You’ll see a lot of throwing in the games when you hear about their playing.”
After getting their fill of Coca-Cola, ice cream, plus seeing strange new World’s Fair acts like sliding elephants, vaudeville performances, newfangled exhibits of baby incubators and shiny new buildings like the Model Indian School in St. Louis, the Fort Shaw girls donned their wool uniforms again.
They trounced the Missouri All-Stars, 24-2, in one game of a best-of-three series in the stifling heat. They eventually clinched the series, 17-6, to become the undisputed world champions in the fall of 1904.
In November, 1904, World Championship Trophy in hand, the players boarded a train to head back to Fort Shaw.
Initially, Peavy and co-author Ursula Smith accidentally happened upon a photo of the team while doing other research at the Montana Historical Society in Helena.
That’s when the authors dug their heels in deeper to unearth enough for a comprehensive, fact-filled book on the team, Full-Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School, Basketball Champions of the World, published in 2008. Smith died in 2021.
“So our work with the descendants helped them know,” said Peavy. “We researched what they couldn’t know and they told us about the girls as people, and that enabled us to bring them alive.”
A monument, a rock inscribed with the players’ names, was dedicated in 2004 in Fort Shaw. Names inscribed on the granite are LaRose, Lucero, Snell, Burton, Healy, Mitchell, Sansever, Butch, Johnson and Nettie Wirth. Overhead hangs a metal identifying arch.
In 2004, two descendants raised funds and oversaw the design, construction and dedication of the granite monument: Barbara Winters, granddaughter of player Emma Sansever, and chairwoman of the Sun River Valley Historical Society at the time, and Bill Sansaver, relative to three players.
The Facebook page for descendants has gained in popularity and remains a valuable source for descendents newly discovering the team. Peavy said anyone can join the online group.
Fast-forward again to June 8, 2024, to the descendants’ celebration at the former boarding school and nearby current public school.
“I’m not as tough as those Fort Shaw girls that wore wool clothing and played in the heat,” added Cecil, who wore a special shawl sporting a warrior horse design at some of the events.
Peavy expressed surprise at the array of descendents who showed up at the event held at the current Fort Shaw Grade School and the historical Fort Shaw Indian School grounds 28 miles west of Great Falls.
“We ended up probably having close to 300 people at this event,” said Peavy. “And there was a group of people that walked in and I said, ‘Oh, I’m glad you’re here, and who are you here to see? And they say they were relatives of Genevieve Healy. And behind them, another group came in and … the first group did not know the second group. And then a third behind them walked in, also for Genevieve Healy.”
The celebrations continued beyond Fort Shaw.
Cecil and Peavy next traveled to Fort Benton, Montana, to see where the girls had played in an existing dance hall located above a pharmacy.
Poplar, Cecil’s home town on the Fort Peck Reservation next held a Nettie Wirth Memorial Service on June 12 that drew about 40 people.
The Fort Shaw Indian School closed in 1910, separating the girls, most of whom married or returned home to their reservations and respective families.
Their bond was undeniable, as they had experienced something no Indigenous teens had before: a spectacular, eye-opening World’s Fair and large cheering sections wherever they played games – amid the assimilation and tragedies that typically beset forced boarding school kids.
“Basketball was the great equalizer,” added one unnamed descendant in the conclusion of the Tantoo Cardinal-narrated PBS documentary.
“It’s not just their history. It’s ours. It’s ours,” said an unnamed descendant interviewed in the PBS film, Playing for the World. Within the film is a modern-day photo of an earlier descendants’ get-together clearly reflects the faces of the young athletes who made history.
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