The Historic Conferences at Lake Mohonk, NY

Beginning in 1883, Albert and Alfred Smiley, twin brothers and devout Quakers, hosted the "Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian." These annual gatherings met at the brothers' Mohonk Mountain House, a 259-guestroom resort nestled in the mountains west of the Hudson River in upstate New York. There, white middle-class Protestant reformers delivered speeches, shared ideas, refined their plans, and issued recommendations. Their goal was to lift up and civilize the American Indian. Their plans always assumed the vitality of education and the necessity of schools.

Many of the attendees held membership in the Indian Rights Association, the greatest such organization of the time, founded and led by William Welsh. Many of them had read Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, which sought to do for Indians what Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, had done for slaves. In the words of historian Francis Paul Prucha, the conferences at Lake Mohonk "had tremendous impact on formulation of federal policy."[1]

Note

[1] Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 161. For an excellent overview of the origins, activities, and legacy of the conferences at Lake Mohonk, see Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier, 1846-1890, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), ch. 7. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 5, esp. p. 90, note the significance of the Mohonk conferences to the period that emphasized assimilation and allotment.