Richard Henry Pratt (1840–1924) was a Civil War volunteer who returned to army service in 1867 as an officer with the “Buffalo Soldiers,” a Black American regiment that served in the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century. Pratt had been an administrator for most of his Civil War career, and he continued in similar posts afterward, gathering testimony from prisoners taken during the Indian wars. In the 1870s he was selected to accompany and monitor some prisoners of war imprisoned in Florida. Pratt asked for and received permission to introduce educational programs to the prisoners. From the results of these initial experiments he conceived the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which Pratt founded in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.