Students Planting Onions [version 1], 1901

Male students posed in a field, kneeling on the ground planting onions. An instructor is overseeing their work. 

Johnston took two very similar photographs of this scene. The other version can be seen in Related Images.

In 1901 the Bureau of Indian Affairs contracted with the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston to document the school at Carlisle for an exhibit at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Johnston visited the school in the spring of that year and took at least one hundred photographs. When the school closed in 1918, two albums of Johnston's photographs were sent to the Pennsylvania State Museum, which transferred them to the Cumberland County Historical Society in 1934. This is one of the images from those albums.

This image appears with the caption ONION PLANTING in The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pa.: 23rd Year (Carlisle, PA: The School, 1902) [ p. 91].