Depending upon your perspective, it’s rather opportune or an irony that A. G. Spalding’s middle name was, indeed, ‘Goodwill.’ Mastermind of the 1888 baseball world tour that showcased star players from the National league, including his own Chicago White Stockings, Spalding conceived of his players as “baseball missionaries,” traveling to Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, Egypt, and much of Europe, to proselytize both the greatness of the game as well as that of the US. Depending upon your perspective.

So newspaper reports that a letter was awaiting the team when they arrived in San Francisco–from a King, no less–inviting them to play in Honolulu seven days later, seem as much 19th century PR slug as genuine news item. Or as it appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on November 17, 1888:

Manager Anson, who is taking two American baseball nines to Australia, found a letter from King Kalakaua of the Sandwich Islands awaiting him in San Francisco. Kalakaua requested Anson to bring his players to Honolulu if possible. The dusky island potentate felt certain, he said, that the Sandwich Islanders would be delighted with the game.

Sounds quite impromptu and impressive, no? Minus the bit about the “dusky island potentate”…

In truth, the team’s exhibition in Honolulu had been in the works for weeks, enough time to build a grandstand for 800 at Makiki Field and plan an elaborate celebration led by the Royal Hawaiian Band. Spalding’s cousin, a Honolulu businessman, chaired the welcoming committee. As it happens, the ship that the team was on would arrive a day later than scheduled, and the games would not be played because of the blue laws at the time. (The team arrived on a Sunday.) Baseball by this point in Hawaii’s history was not some miraculous western invention but part of the rhythm of the islands, played by the sons of missionaries as early as the 1840s. Mark Twain too is known to have watched games while he was there in the 1860s, though his commentary after was disparaging.

By way of our correspondent, Lara Mann, comes this find:

This must be a pretty wild picture. From The Milwaukee Sentinel, July 30, 1892.

A Cleveland, O., engraver, under the auspices of the baseball league, has just published a picture representing the Indians playing baseball when Columbus discovered America. And the Indian spectators are so absorbingly interested in the game that the sudden appearance of Columbus and his Spanish companions from another world does not evidently divert their attention from the game until finished, although the Indians don’t know but that they were from the moon or the celestial regions.

Much has been said of the species of insanity that reveals itself in the mind of the baseball devotee of to-day during the progress of a game or pending the report of one, but it wasn’t supposed the noble red man was affected by a similar weakness. During the Minneapolis convention, when President-making for the greatest Republic on earth was supposed to interest the average mind, the baseball fanatic, when the most exciting scene of the convention was on, would come into the Times’ telegraph room and breathlessly inquire for the latest news from the plains of Bitter creek, where the club from Podunk Center was contesting a game of ball with the amateur nine from Litchfield Corners.

It looks, too, from casual study of this reminiscent picture from the special artist of Mr. Christopher Columbus, that the Indians, in 1492, had the same rules and code of procedure that the American league has adopted just 400 years later, for 1892. It has been supposed that the great American game of baseball was progressive, like everything else, but probably the Indians had it then reduced down to perfection so that progress was impossible. Some of the literary cranks, who hate baseball on account of its monopolizing so much space in the newspapers, have told us it was a barbarous game; and perhaps they knew all the time that it originated and was perfected by the barbarians of North America, since it is native-born. No naturalization papers have been necessary, and outside of any legal procedure, it would seem that under the refining influences of civilization it has surprisingly preserved its native purity.

What interests me is that the picture was patronized by the Baseball League, depicting Indians as the originators of baseball. I assume that they were trying to show that baseball is wholly America’s sport because nothing can be more indigenous to America than Indigenous Americans. The whole thing’s kind of back handed though: in once instance we invented baseball, but in another we didn’t care that a whole mess of people were arriving on our shores. I don’t know where else they were thinking baseball came from, but the tone of the article makes this proposition sound like the latest, wildest scientific theory: that Indians could have invented baseball. And of course the article ends with the disclaimer that if Indians did in fact invent baseball, then it must have been “barbarous” and “reduced down to perfection,” a phrase I find to be both hilarious and two-faced: “reduced” as in “boiled down to, purified” or “reduced” as in “simplified, dumbed-down?” Not quite the unambiguous journalistic style people seem to shoot for these days.

[ed. The description of this etching reminds us a lot of this one in which Alaskan natives are depicted playing baseball in the dead of winter, while wearing seal skin parkas and mittens, naturally. But we've yet to track down the etching described in the article above. Anyone?]

The caricaturing of Indians baseball players in the nineteenth-century newspapers goes a long way in explaining why American Indians became thought of as mascots for sports rather than the brilliant fielders and star players that they often were. Indians are being dumbed down in the newspapers as caricatures of savage drunkards, [as if they are the only ball players who drink, that's laughable if you follow sports]. Most of these newspaper reports are second hand, third hand, reports, but they spread like blogs of the 21st century with a repeated message. Indians are savages . . . even when they are good baseball players. It seems to me to be a no-win situation.

So it comes as little surprise, if always still a kick in the gut, to come across an article like the one which appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser dated February 13, 1890, reporting with an incredulous wonder the arrival of an Indian student to Yale University who might, just might, contend to play on their hallowed fields:

News comes from Yale College that “H.H. Lyman, a full blooded Sioux Indian, of the Yankton tribe, is a candidate for a place on the nine,” and that “he will undoubtedly be selected.” This is interesting for more reasons than one. Mr. Lyman will add a picturesque element to next season’s baseball games. When Harvard and Yale meet on Holmes field at Cambridge the presence of the full blooded Sioux cannot fail to prove a very strong attraction to our people. Possibly a generous enthusiasm for him may somewhat impair the loyalty of spectators who would naturally shout for their home team.

There is something highly interesting, from a scholarly point of view, in this case. For it is said on good authority that the Sioux student is not only an adept at the bat, but is highly proficient in the class room. There is a problem for those to solve who magnify the laws of heredity. A youth comes from a tribe of red Indians. The future candidate for a place on the Yale nine imbibed with his infant nourishment influences handed down through long generations of barbarism. Yet, behold, in young manhood this brave takes his place in academic halls, side by side with scions of New England’s earliest families, with you whose ancestors haunted the cloisters of Oxford and Cambridge in old England, and straightway he proves himself their intellectual as well as their athletic peer.

It will not quite suffice to aver that this case is exceptional. Even so, the exception needs to be accounted for. But, while instances of scholarly aborigines at our chief seats of learning are not numerous, it is no uncommon thing to find at Harvard and Yale bright, vigorous, masterful students, who are natives of countries that no one ever thinks of as in the first or even the second rank, judged by standards of culture. Such young men cannot apply to themselves Tennyson’s splendid boast:

I, the heir of all the ages,
In the foremost files of time.

But they often display an astonishing capacity for entering into an inheritance which is not theirs by birthright.

“This article mostly dumbfounds me, it’s so offensive,” my fabulous research assistant, Lara Mann, wrote when she came across this piece. “Mr. Lyman was obviously an oddity that they were reporting on, not so much for his baseball prowess as his intellectual capacity. There were several Indian baseball teams (tribal, boarding schools, etc.) in 1890, so that wasn’t weird. What is out of the ordinary is that Lyman was playing on a white team, especially a collegiate team, AND (even more exceptionally) excelling academically, seeing that he is sub-par ‘judged by standards of culture.’” And even in an article in which the “savage drunkard” seems trumped by “noble” triumphs both on and off the field, still emerges the idea of imbibing, here “his infant nourishment influences handed down through long generations of barbarism.” That image can’t but appear.

As you can imagine, “H. H. Lyman” did not miraculously, behold!, materialize a collegiate ball player in New Haven, but is best we can trace Henry H. Lyman, a graduate of Hampton Institute and member of the 1889 Hampton Indian Nine at a time when the historically black college was forced by law to field segregated teams. That’s Henry in the image above, seated on the far left. We can imagine, but not know for certain, that he was one of the many taken away personally by Captain Pratt and brought to Virginia by steamboat and train. After graduating from Hampton, Henry Lyman went on to Yale to study law, graduating in 1891. After that, we lose his thread. There is mention that he practiced law in New York City for a year before he became ill, that he traveled back to Hampton for a time before returning home to the Yankton Agency in the hopes that his health would improve. “Lyman seems to illustrate an interesting ‘transition’ I see going on in America in the late 1800s,” Lara concluded. “There were Indians in a bunch of different capacities in the American mind, some obviously thought to be more civilized than others, judging from tone. Lyman seems to represent a new possibility for the American Indian in the American conscience.”

For more, a three part series from Indian Country Today profiling life at Hampton Institute for American Indian students. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Image: The 1889 Hampton Indian Nine. Hampton University Archives/Indian Country Today.