‘Leav[ing] the white[s] … far behind them’: The girls from fort shaw (Montana) Indian School, basketball champions of the 1904 world's fair

Abstract

In spring 1903, barely a dozen years after the invention of ‘basket ball’, a girls' team from an Indian boarding school in Montana overcame racial and gender barriers to win that state's first basketball championship. Subsequently, these ten young women spent the summer of 1904 attending the government's Model Indian School at the St Louis World's Fair, where their twice-weekly intra-squad exhibition games provided fairgoers with their only glimpse of women's team sports. Having also taken on – and defeated – all challengers, they returned to Montana with a gleaming silver trophy declaring them ‘Basket Ball Champions’ of the 1904 World's Fair.