“When Old Men Were Young”

Will Ward, “When Old Men Were Young”
[Chickasaw Students Preparing for Vanderbilt at the Wall & Mooney School in Franklin, Tennessee]
From left: William T. Ward, George W. Burriss, William Bourland, Joe H. Goforth, T.B. McLish, Andrew Courtney, L.C. Burriss, J. Boudinot Ream, and Jacob L. Thompson
The American Indian (March 1930)
reproduction

In spring 1893, the nine students pictured here graduated from the Harley Institute, a free male academy in the Chickasaw capital, Tishomingo, Indian Territory.  With tribal support for their university educations, the students and the Chickasaw education superintendent traveled three days by train to Nashville, changed clothes at the station, and found their way to the Vanderbilt campus.  Chancellor James H. Kirkland told them that before they could matriculate, they first needed to prep for the Latin and Greek portions of the entrance exam.  At Kirkland’s urging, the students enrolled at Wall & Mooney’s School, now Battle Ground Academy, in nearby Franklin, Tennessee.  William Thomas Ward vividly remembered arriving in Franklin on the eleven o’clock night train: “[I]f the little town only had a population of twenty-five hundred people, there were only—it seemed to us—about twenty-four hundred and ninety-nine at the depot to see the . . . Indian boys from the Indian Territory.”  Over the next few years, seven of the nine students pictured enrolled at Vanderbilt.  This photograph, taken in April 1894 at Wall & Mooney, ran alongside a reminiscence Ward published in The American Indian magazine in 1930.  “What memories this picture to the minds of those few still surviving have I have no means of knowing,” Ward wrote, “but I should think, to them as to me, would come the thought of a past full of hope, a life in the morning.”