The Army built this post in 1867, first called Camp Reynolds, to protect settlers and miners in the Sun River country. When it was abandoned in 1891, the Interior Department took it over, and after fire destroyed the government school on the Fort Peck Reservation, thirty-five children from Fort Peck became the first students of the Fort Shaw Government Industrial Indian Boarding School, which opened in December 1892. Like Carlisle in Pennsylvania, on which it was modeled, it was built to cut children off from their languages and their families' ways and remake them for white society.
Josephine Langley, a student hired as an assistant, taught the girls basketball, and from 1902 the school had a team that beat nearly every high school and college side in Montana, some boys' teams included. In 1904 the superintendent took the girls, from several nations across Montana and Idaho, to the St. Louis World's Fair, where they lived at the fair's model Indian school as living proof of what assimilation could do, gave recitals and played twice a week. That fall they beat the Missouri all-stars 24 to 2 and 17 to 6 and came home with a silver cup naming them world champions.
The school closed for lack of students in 1910 and its buildings went to the local school district; only a few stone buildings of the post remain. A century after the fair, a steel arch reading 1904 World Champions and a granite monument topped with a bronze basketball went up on the old grounds, next to the elementary school.
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