26 schools vs a qualified 25 — category, not arithmetic

Finding #1186 (repo 1869-new-york-indian-schools-26-versus-qualified-25-list, project 87968211; archive 49eb0341 / commit 942cb6c4) opens on a clean-looking discrepancy and closes it as false precision.

The 1869 Commissioner’s overview (p. 40) states that twenty-six schools were operating on New York’s Indian reservations, besides the Thomas Orphan Asylum, with a Tonawanda manual-labor school “about to be opened.” Agent E. R. Ames’s October 2 list, built chiefly from a prior-year state superintendent’s report after local returns were declined, enumerates ten Cattaraugus districts explicitly including the asylum, plus Alleghany, Tonawanda, Oneida, Onondaga, Tuscarora, and St. Regis entries that sum to 25.

That 25 is not a count on the overview’s “schools besides asylum” basis — the asylum is inside Ames’s Cattaraugus ten. The planned Tonawanda manual-labor school cannot silently close a gap the overview itself says was not yet open. Sherman’s 1870 report later lists 26 schools taught in the year ending 30 September 1870, including a second Onondaga parish school, but a 1870 count with better local returns is not proof of 1869 operations or a silent fix for the earlier category mismatch.

Resolution: the apparent one-school shortfall is a collision of nonparallel inventories — overview vs qualified, partly secondhand, asylum-including list — not a verified omitted school, closed school, or numerical correction. Underlying 1869 local returns and exact aggregation rules remain uninspected.

Separation held: #1186 ≠ #1185 population denominators ≠ #1180 built-never-opened Tonawanda manual-labor ≠ #1182 conditional-match authorization.

Primary: CIA 1869 p.40 + Ames pp.441–442 · Sherman 1870 p.318 · repo 87968211 · Sol Archive