The Haskell Cemetery is located on the east edge of the Haskell campus. When the school, known as the United States Indian Industrial Training School, opened on September 17, 1884, officials were warned by Major Haworth, Superintendent of Indian Schools, to delay the opening date. He feared that removal from their camps and change of environment in the summer heat would endanger the health of the students. The weather report for that September indicated that it was the dampest month in seventeen years; nine inches of rain fall. The pupils not only had to reckon with the elements, but with substandard living conditions, for most of the buildings were not yet ready for occupancy due to insufficient funding by the government. There was no heating system, nor a cistern, and much of the carpentry work needed in the laundry and kitchen was non-existent.

The first students, ranging in age from five to twenty, came from the Ottawa, Ponca, and Pawnee Agencies in Oklahoma. The next group of students arrived with their parents in a wagon train of forty-two Cheyenne and thirty-six Arapaho, none of whom could speak English. The parents chose to remain at the school because of curiosity and apprehension about leaving their children, living in stone structures without heat, without their native foods, without being able to communicate, and breathing the same dampness. Only a short time later, they watched helplessly as the conditions took their toll on the children.

Freezing cold followed the month-long dampness, and the unfinished buildings without heat became unbearable. But just as suddenly the cold weather was followed by warm weather; however, by this time the devastating effect on the children was quite apparent. They were suffering from exposure. After recurring cold and heat waves, by the 29th of November, one death had occurred—Harry White Wolf, a Cheyenne baby of six months. He came with the Cheyenne and Arapaho wagon train. Out of three hundred students, ten deaths from pneumonia and lung ailments were recorded that first winter.

During the next five years, conditions at the school worsened because of an inappropriate budget, crop failures, and devastating fires. Buildings could not be rebuilt or repaired, and equipment could not be replaced, sometimes supplies never reached the school. Sanitary conditions were appalling, for there were no sewers nor city water. Forty-nine deaths were recorded during these five years.

However, in 1889 conditions at the school began to improve with the investigative reports submitted to the government by Superintendent of Indian Schools, Daniel Dorchester. Money for improvements and supplies began to arrive soon after Dorchester’s investigation. Nonetheless, ten students died of pneumonia, consumption and malaria that year. By 1913 there were 102 marked graves in the cemetery. The last person to be buried in 1913 was Galeb Lew, a full-blood Ukie from the Round Valley Reservation in Covelo, California. He died from tuberculosis on July 10th. It was not until February 17, 1943, when Cecilia Mae Fiddler, a Chippewa from North Dakota, died of tuberculosis that another burial was held in the cemetery.