ABSTRACT
“The principal lever by which the Indians are to be lifted out of the mire of folly and vice in which they are sunk,” wrote T. Hartley Crawford, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in his 1838 annual report, “is education.” 1 Sharing similar beliefs, Pitchlynn, who had complained of dirty slaves at the Choctaw Academy and who believed that the model of his Christian marriage would end polygamy among the Choctaws, was primarily responsible for the enactment of the Choctaw government’s School Act of 1842. For Pitchlynn and other mixed-breeds, the Fort Coffee, New Hope, Spencer, and Wheelock Academies provided the means of bringing civilization to full-bloods and of improving the cultural level of the planter and trader class. Similar to missionaries, Pitchlynn believed in the superiority of European and Christian values over traditional tribal practices. Filling the temperance meetings and religious services at Doakesville and Fort Towson, these self-righteous mixed-bloods, such as Pitchlynn and Basil and Forbis Leflore, wanted to bring about the final eradication of Indian values and traditions, and their replacement with the culture of the most pious of Protestant European Americans.
