Rose LaRose came from a multicultural family and spoke at least three languages. Her father, a tribal policeman, was Shoshone and Chippewa and spoke Shoshone, English, and Michif (the dialect of the Métis people). Her mother was a Bannock with some English ancestry. Both parents supported Rose’s decision to leave the Fort Hall Reservation in 1901 to attend Fort Shaw, where she replaced Delia Gebeau on the basketball team in the summer of 1903. Rose returned to Fort Shaw in 1905, married in 1913, and had one son. It is unknown what became of her after that time.
Flora Lucero was the daughter of a hot-tempered Spaniard and his Chippewa wife. She and her sisters, Rosa and Emma, briefly attended St. Peter’s Mission School before being recruited by Fort Shaw in 1897. Flora’s years at Fort Shaw and the joys she found there were marred by family tragedies, including the expulsion of her half-sister Rosa (who had gotten pregnant), her other sister’s death from pneumonia, and the murder of her father in 1900. Flora contracted tuberculosis while at the World’s Fair, and its effects lingered throughout her lifetime. She and her husband raised two sons on a farm near Minot, North Dakota, before she succumbed to diabetes in 1958.
Katie (Catherine) Snell grew up at Fort Belknap, where her Euro-American father farmed on her Assiniboine mother’s allotment land. She attended the Fort Belknap agency boarding school before transferring to Fort Shaw in 1895, leaving behind her younger sister, Mabel. Shortly thereafter, Mabel died suddenly at the agency school. Mabel’s death broke Katie’s heart and also affected her friendship with Gen Healy, who was still at the agency school at that time. Katie married just six months out of school and raised a large family on her allotment ranch on the Fort Belknap Reservation.
Minnie Burton made the difficult choice to leave her home for an education at Fort Shaw. A member of the Lemhi Shoshone nation, Minnie knew that her tribe strongly opposed sending their children away. Tall and athletic, she had hoped to become a star double-ball player like the grandmother who raised her after Minnie’s mother’s death. Her father worked as a translator, and he worried that if tribes failed to educate their children in English, no one would be able to advocate for them in their dealings with the government. Thus, at seventeen, Minnie left a job at the local agency school to seek further education at Fort Shaw, hoping to return to the reservation as a teacher. She hesitated to play basketball at first, but by the fall of 1902, the Shoshone girl was a star player and the inspiration behind the cheer, “Shoot, Minnie, shoot!” In 1907 the United States removed the Lemhi Shoshone tribe from their homeland, and Minnie gave birth to her first child while under military escort to the Fort Hall Reservation. She worked as a seamstress in Indian schools and died at age thirty-three after giving birth to her fifth child. Minnie had kept her stories of Fort Shaw and basketball to herself after returning home. Nearly a century passed before her family knew of the important role she played on the world’s best basketball team.
A fun-loving rebel, Gen (Genevieve) Healy held no fondness for school. After the death of her mother, Gen’s father, Colonel Healy, deliberately tried to raise his children away from the influence of their Gros Ventre relatives, even hiring a Frenchman to look after them. He sent them to the Fort Belknap agency school and then to St. Paul’s mission school. Used to the freedom of life on the ranch, Gen once ran away from St. Paul’s. In early 1897, Gen and her siblings were transferred to Fort Shaw, where she excelled in music, made friends easily, and enjoyed the physicality of competitive basketball. She married soon after leaving Fort Shaw in 1908 and raised several children as well as a few grandchildren, whom she delighted with tales of basketball and the World’s Fair. She outlived all of her teammates, passing away at ninety-three in 1981.
Superintendent Campbell recruited fifteen-year-old Gennie Butch, an enrolled Assiniboine of multitribal descent, from Fort Peck in 1901. She had older sisters at Fort Shaw. In 1907, her schooling completed, Sarah Mitchell married Fort Shaw’s disciplinarian, Phillip Courchene, and for two years worked as the school cook and assistant matron. The Courchenes then moved to Fort Peck and raised eight children on their ranch. Sarah Mitchell Courchene helped tribal members by acting as interpreter when necessary, and she was president of the Fort Peck Indian women’s Home Demonstration Club. She died at age forty-four.
Emma Sansaver and her siblings belonged to a Métis family of Chippewa-Cree and French Canadian descent. Because they were not enrolled in a federally recognized tribe, the Sansavers were ineligible to attend a government school, but did attend St. Paul’s Mission School at Fort Belknap with other Catholic Métis children. In 1897, the nuns altered the Sansavers’ tribal affiliation from “Chippewa-Cree” to “Sioux” on school enrollment forms and recommended their transfer to Fort Shaw. The new school was a haven for the Sansavers, who, since their father’s death, had lived in a camp of landless Indians near Havre, where their alcoholic mother took up with an abusive man. In time, studious Emma became an aggressive forward on the basketball team. Just days before Emma played a game in Havre in 1903, the town’s newspaper printed an article revealing her mother’s disappearance and presumed murder, inciting white Montanans’ renewed disparagements of the “landless half-breeds.” Years later, Emma declared herself a “white” on her marriage certificate—perhaps because Fort Shaw had trained its Indian students to be white, or perhaps hoping to shield her future children from the racism she had experienced. She died at thirty-nine of septicemia following the birth of her ninth child.
Superintendent Campbell recruited fifteen-year-old Gennie Butch, an enrolled Assiniboine of multitribal descent, from Fort Peck in 1901. She had older sisters at Fort Shaw, but Gennie, who was still mourning her mother’s death, was sad to leave her younger siblings. She met Gen Healy on the train en route to Fort Shaw, and Gen’s gregarious personality eased Gennie’s anxiety. Gennie was a good student and a fine ball player, and her three years at Fort Shaw were the last happy years in her too-short life. Married in 1908, Gennie Butch Hall died from “a lethal dose of salts” a year later, raising suspicions that her husband may have had a hand in her untimely death.
Belle Johnson originally attended the Willow Creek School on the Blackfeet Reservation. Her mother, Jennie Johnson, hesitated to send her children to Fort Shaw, but Josie Langley assured her friend that she would look after the Johnson children. Their transfer may have spared the Johnson children’s lives, as deadly epidemics of typhoid and smallpox besieged the abysmal Willow Creek School soon after their departure. Jennie Johnson died of an illness in 1900, making orphans of her six children. At Fort Shaw, Belle sought Josie’s company, and Josie recognized the girl’s athletic talent and leadership abilities. Belle succeeded Josie as team captain in 1902 and led the team in the unbeaten streak that carried them to St. Louis in 1904. In 1907 Belle married Marion Arnoux, and they raised seven abandoned children in addition to three of their own. Belle Johnson Arnoux worked as a nurse’s aide at hospitals on the Blackfeet Reservation and at the Cut Bank Indian Boarding School. She was widowed three times and passed away in Helena in 1953.
Lizzie and Nettie Wirth were among Fort Shaw’s first students in 1892. Their Assiniboine mother grieved to have her daughters sent away, but their German-born father insisted after the Fort Peck agency school burned down. The Wirth sisters transitioned fairly easily to the culture and expectations at Fort Shaw. Nettie enjoyed classical music and found a friend in mandolin player Gen Healy. Lizzie and Nettie were among the starting five on the first competitive team and both went to St. Louis in 1904. Nettie worked as a seamstress at Fort Shaw until it closed in 1910, then moved to Seattle with her three sons. In 1962, the organizers of the Seattle World’s Fair celebrated the 1904 Fort Shaw team’s accomplishments by proclaiming a “Nettie Wirth Day” at the fair.