Excerpt from the article…

By the late 1860s, the U.S. government had expected to have the Indian problem well in hand. It had riddled the tribes with bullets, confined them to reservations, burned their crops and villages, introduced fatal diseases and allowed travelers on the recently completed Transcontinental Railway to gun down the sacred buffalo for sport.

And still, there were Indians – fewer than before, but enough to stand in the way of progress, still practicing their heathen ways.

In the end, it was a handful of well-meaning Christian folk who came up with what was very nearly the final solution.
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By taking Native children and raising them far away from their tribes and families, the church folk reasoned, they could be molded into model Christian farmers and laborers the government would have no cause to kill.

These boarding schools would, as Carlisle Indian School founder Richard Pratt would so famously put it, “kill the Indian in order to save the man.”