Path lit by lightning, p.13
Path Lit by Lightning, page 13
The main address at the Sheridan ceremony was delivered by Brigadier General Horace Porter, who spoke at length not only of Sheridan’s actions during the Civil War but also of his later role in the 1870s as commander of federal troops during the western Indian wars. It was under Sheridan, head of the Military Division of the Missouri, that the army crushed uprisings by Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, Ute, and Sioux raiders desperately trying to keep their tribal homelands. And it was under Sheridan that professional white hunters littered the western flatlands with rotting bison carcasses, slaughtering millions in a calculated plan to deprive Plains Indians of a mainstay of their existence. The heralded Sheridan was a complicated figure whose military acumen helped hold the Union together and liberate the nation’s enslaved blacks, yet whose “the-only-good-Indian-I-know-is-dead” formulation was the flip side of Richard Henry Pratt’s founding motto at Carlisle, the Indian school whose football boys were heading to a practice field in St. Louis at the very time the general’s bronze statue was being unveiled.
The coming of the Indians thrilled St. Louis football fans and sportswriters at the Post-Dispatch, who said the Thanksgiving Day matchup was “causing more interest than any football contest that has ever been scheduled in St. Louis.” One called it the biggest event in St. Louis since the 1904 world’s fair. On Thanksgiving eve, a thousand St. Louis University students marched behind the band out to Sportsman’s Park to watch the final practice, yelling themselves hoarse, an unprecedented show of football fealty that even brought a smile to the dour mug of Billikens coach Eddie Cochems. Pop Warner ran his boys through a light practice at the nearby Washington University field. Thorpe, Balenti, and Hauser took turns punting and catching punts, and their coach, normally gloomy about his team when chatting with the press, was impressed, saying he had rarely seen his players show “such ginger and speed.” On game day, an observer noted that “the entire St. Louis eleven seemed badly frightened before the game.” It turned out that Carlisle was not as speedy or gingery as Warner might have wanted, but his boys dominated so thoroughly that he pulled Thorpe and other starters from the game at halftime.
The next day it was back to Union Station for a 450-mile train ride along the path of the Missouri River north and west from St. Louis to Omaha and across to Lincoln, the state capital and home of the University of Nebraska. The Carlisle squad had five days there before the midweek game on Wednesday afternoon, December 2. Knowing his boys were tired from having played eleven contests, more than most teams and with two more to go, Warner avoided scrimmaging and limited practice to an hour a day. The weather was rainy and turning more frigid by the day, so several practices were held in the Nebraska gym, and Thorpe and his pals spent much of their days and nights hanging out in the hotel lobby. They particularly enjoyed loitering near the cigar stand and flirting with the young women who worked there. Word spread around town about the “romantic members of the Carlisle team” who were telling tall tales about their exploits and how they were all descended from Indian chiefs, even Chief Pop.
Carlisle’s team had two reputations, both inaccurate. One was that they played dirty; the other that they were choirboys off the field, tamed by years of admonishments from white administrators not to do anything that would embarrass the Indian race. A column in Lincoln’s morning newspaper repeated a charge from a Minneapolis sportswriter that they used “urgentlemanly language” during the Minnesota game and that captain Wauseka had roughed up an official—behavior that prompted Minnesota to cut off all athletic associations with Carlisle. The truth was that the Indians swore less than most college boys and that by far the most foulmouthed person at Carlisle was their coach, whose salty language offended his players. And Minnesota did not cut off relations with Carlisle, but the other way around, for less sensational reasons that became apparent later that week. As for being choirboys off the field, the Carlisle players knew how to present themselves as dignified young men, but they also partied, drank, and chased girls when opportunities arose. Thorpe’s popularity seemed to intensify week by week, and with it his opportunities. “His loving fans in each town or city began to toast him in the local saloons in post-game celebrations,” Pop Warner recalled. “This new-found success and the many invitations for free drinks of whiskey or beer, however, would eventually begin to cause problems off the field for the Carlisle star.”
The Indians were welcomed at every stop as performers in a traveling troupe that entertained the public and pumped money into the local economy, the football equivalent of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show. On game day in Lincoln, the university dismissed classes at two so students could reach Antelope Park for the two thirty kickoff. It was the coldest day of the season, a wind-whipped twenty degrees. A week of rain had forced the grounds crew to cover the field in straw, and when it was raked off, the ground was soggy and freezing fast. The stands filled early, all Nebraska rooters save for one section in the north bleachers that rocked with local Omaha and Winnebago Indians who rooted for Carlisle and took the field at halftime, dancing to the beat of an Omaha drummer. The game was well decided by then, and Thorpe’s day was also done. In the first half, according to the Nebraska State Journal, Jim had “played a spectacular game for the Reds, his fast, dodging runs so dazing the Cornhuskers they were seldom able to bring him down.” Soon after he scored on defense, scooping up a fumble and dashing forty-five yards for a touchdown, Pop decided to send in his second-string to play out the rest of the 37–6 victory, and Thorpe watched from the bench.
In the cold, crowded sidelines across the field, one face stood out. It was George Flippin, the leading physician in the town of Stromsburg and a former Cornhusker star from the early 1890s who had come to Lincoln to watch his alma mater take on the famous team of Indians from the East. Flippin was as much of a rarity as they were. He was an African American, the son of a freed slave who had fought in the Civil War with the Fourteenth U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment. The first and only black player on those early Nebraska teams, Flippin had faced his own civil wars. When his teammates voted him captain, the coach overruled them, saying the future doctor did not have the brains to lead. The Missouri squad chose to forfeit its game with Nebraska rather than take the same field as the star halfback. When Nebraska played a road game in Denver, the team’s hotel said Flippin could not sleep there.
Denver was Carlisle’s last stop on the 1908 road trip. There was no question about whether the Indians could find an accommodating hotel. Native American athletes were discriminated against and disparaged in various ways, but rarely as overtly as black athletes. They did not face the same color bars on the field or on the road. The concern was not whether Denver’s people would reject Carlisle but whether Carlisle would reject them.
Weeks earlier, just as the team was leaving campus, Superintendent Friedman had declared that the western tour was excessive. He did not want to grant the players a three-week leave of absence. Drop the Denver game, he directed, and a telegram soon arrived at the University of Denver announcing that decision. It so happened that Henry A. Buchtel, the chancellor, was also the governor of Colorado, and a football fan. Buchtel immediately launched a lobbying campaign to save the game, which had been billed as a test of whether western football could compete with the game in the East. Not incidentally, it also would be a lucrative gate attraction for the school. Thomas M. Patterson, publisher of the Rocky Mountain News and former U.S. senator, wrote to Teddy Roosevelt that “all the state has become interested in the game” and that “we feel that if you say the word sufficient leave will be granted.” Word went down from the White House to the Department of the Interior to Commissioner Leupp at the Indian bureau questioning why Carlisle dared to break a “binding football contract.” Friedman explained that the contract had been signed before he took over at Carlisle, that he opposed such a long trip, and had asked Warner to cancel it. Only after Denver refused to go along, Friedman said, did he realize how much it meant to the western school, so he backed down. But from then on, with Leupp’s approval, he instituted a new rule: no more than two western games, and none west of the Mississippi.
By the time Carlisle reached Denver, Friedman was busy trying to explain something else to Washington. The Interior Department had received copies of an article that made Carlisle sound like a prison. “Superintendent Friedman of the Carlisle Indian School has sent out a telegram to police in several cities asking for the arrest of an Indian couple who eloped from the school yesterday,” the February 2 story reported. “The girl was a pupil at the institution, but her sweetheart came here from the west. The superintendent declined to permit the wedding without the consent of the girl’s parents. Instead of waiting for the approval, the couple eloped. Their names are Joseph Twin and Lystia Wahoo.”
Joseph Twin was a Winnebago from Nebraska, a friend of many of the Winnebago fans who had just seen the Carlisle game in Lincoln. He was also a former Carlisle student who had left school the previous summer and was well known to Thorpe and his teammates as an excellent athlete himself, a member of the baseball team for several years. It was commonplace for students at Carlisle to fall in love, and both Twin (age twenty-four) and Lystia Wahoo (almost twenty-one) were over the age of consent. The real reason Friedman did not want them to get married, he acknowledged, was that Lystia was a good student and he feared that Twin was “rather slow” and “did not have good job prospects.” That was why he sent out an all-points bulletin to find them and arrest them. Indians who ran away from school were treated not all that differently from cons on the lam. As it turned out, the couple escaped south to Savannah, got married, and settled in Cherokee, North Carolina.
Back in Denver, Carlisle played a sluggish game against the Ministers, fatigued by the high altitude and long season. They managed to win 8–4, an oddity that in that era meant two field goals to one. It was enough of a contest to please Chancellor Buchtel, who wrote a note of thanks to Commissioner Leupp on his governor of Colorado stationery. “We had a great game on Saturday…. The Indians have played thirteen games this season and have crossed all goal lines except three, namely Harvard, Annapolis, and Denver. So we are feeling very comfortable, thank you, over the fact that we belong in the same class.”
Thorpe returned to Carlisle in time to learn that he had been named third-team left halfback on Walter Camp’s All-American squad, and second-team All-Eastern by Caspar Whitney in Outing magazine, the only Carlisle player to make either list. The players elected Little Boy captain for the following year, but Pop Warner and the Athletic Association had to nix the idea, acknowledging that new school rules put into place after the 1907 critique by Carlos Montezuma meant that no Carlisle athlete could play more than four years. Little Boy’s four years were up, not even counting the time he had played earlier at Haskell. If Thorpe was the best player, his off-the-field actions seemed to be a problem for Superintendent Friedman. Twice that winter he and Sampson Burd slipped into town to play pool and drink for several hours, long enough for their records to include the notation “Ran.” In one document, Friedman described Thorpe as “far from being a desirable student,” a judgment that contradicted the assessment of the faculty. The record from the academic department listed Jim’s scholarship as “very good” and his deportment as “good.”
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THE 1909 SPRING track season lasted barely a month, from the Penn Relays in Philadelphia to the State Intercollegiate Championship at Harrisburg, but it was enough time for Thorpe to enhance his growing national reputation. As he had the previous two years, he foreshadowed his all-around dominance at the annual Carlisle Field Day exhibition, where during an unrelenting rain he brought in twenty-six of his class’s twenty-eight points, winning both hurdle events, the shot put, and the high jump, and finishing second in the broad jump and discus. For each victory he was given a watch fob by Warner, a gift in lieu of the cash bonuses the coach used to dole out to his most successful athletes. That meet was for local consumption; it was the dual meet in Elmira with Syracuse University on May 6, also in the rain and covered extensively by syndicated services, that spread Thorpe’s name to a national audience. The contest itself could not have been closer as Carlisle upset the Orangemen 59–58. Thorpe was “the individual wonder of the meet,” competing in eight of thirteen events and bringing in nearly half of Carlisle’s points by finishing first in the two hurdles, the shot put, and the broad jump; tying for first in the high jump; and finishing in the top three in the hammer throw and the two sprints.
The most notable performance came when Thorpe defeated “Big Bill” Horr, Syracuse’s gargantuan football tackle and track-and-field strongman, in the shot put. The winning throw of 42 feet 11 inches sounds meager in comparison with statistics from later generations, but in the context of the times—before more effective shot-putting techniques evolved and before the onset of diets, drugs, and sophisticated bodybuilding programs—it was enough to win most meets and only 6 feet off the world record. Horr had won the silver medal at the 1908 London Olympics in another field event, the discus. Soon he would take over as the head football coach at Northwestern. In a dizzying mix of metaphors, a wire service story that ran in papers around the country proclaimed that “Foxy Grandpa Warner” handed intercollegiate athletics “a jolt in the solar plexus” and “uncovered his ace” at the contest against Syracuse “when he turned loose Jas. Thorpe, the aborigine,” who won “so easily that it was like taking a pap-bottle from the baby.”
It was in Elmira that Foxy Grandpa Warner took his track and baseball teams to visit the Elmira Reform School, an institution that held fifteen hundred wayward boys. Carlisle’s star pitcher, William Garlow, wrote of his impressions after the visit. Whatever the confinements of Carlisle, he thought, at least it was better than a reform school where boys were marched around from place to place in military formations, had to sleep in rooms that were “barely enough to lie down in,” and answered not to their names but their assigned numbers. But if you tried to run away from either place, as Joseph Twin and Lystia Wahoo found out, there would be an all-points bulletin sent out for your arrest.
The culminating event of the season was the state intercollegiate meet at Harrisburg, on a beautiful Saturday in May when five thousand track fans, including several hundred pennant-waving Carlisle students, watched Carlisle take honors over Lafayette, Penn State, Dickinson, Swarthmore, Lehigh, and Washington & Jefferson. Thorpe was in “sensational form,” winning the low hurdles, high jump, broad jump, and shot put, while Lewis Tewanima sprinted the last lap for a convincing victory in the two-mile run. With the big Sac and Fox and the little Hopi distance runner leading the way, Carlisle had gone two years without losing a match. When the undefeated track team returned from Harrisburg, Thorpe and his teammates fell in behind the school band and marched up from the athletic field to the bandstand holding high the championship silver cup.
During much of April and May, Thorpe had been playing two sports, not only track but also baseball. Before the season was out, he tossed a no-hitter against a Hagerstown team and a shutout against Millersville, and “covered first base like a veteran” against Dickinson. He fit right in with some of his old pals. The double-play combination featured two of his football teammates, fellow Oklahomans Balenti at shortstop and Newashe at second. Batting leadoff and playing centerfield was Jesse Youngdeer, a Cherokee from North Carolina, and playing left field and batting third was Joe Libby, a Chippewa from Minnesota. Unwittingly, their love of baseball and Thorpe’s newfound affection for the game converged in a way that would affect him more than any of them could then understand.
7 Railroaded
THE PUBLISHER OF THE ROCKY Mount Record once said that “a mule with blind staggers” could meander beyond the circulation area of his newspaper in fifteen minutes. Not quite, but it was an appropriately evocative colloquialism that reflected the self-deprecating humor in that part of North Carolina and helped explain the fabulist instructions given to the newspaper’s cub reporter in the summer of 1909. A new character had ridden into town, someone who promised nothing but readers. Be sure to embellish every story about him, the publisher told Sam T. Mallison, his young sportswriter. Portray his baseball achievements in ever more spectacular terms and track his movements off the field in search of “pearls of wisdom from his lips which might edify or entertain the newspaper’s pantingly expectant readers.”
That was how Jim Thorpe was received when he reached town on June 15 to play for the Rocky Mount Railroaders, a first-year team in the new Eastern Carolina League. The fact that his arrival was hyped by the circulation-hungry local newspaper fit perfectly into the larger story of his experience as a minor league ballplayer in Rocky Mount. Why he left Carlisle, who knew he was in Rocky Mount, who lied about it, how he played on the field, how he performed off the field, and why any of that mattered were all part of the saga of Thorpe in the bush leagues. His two seasons there provoked exaggerations, prevarications, rationalizations, and occasional eruptions in a setting as unsavory as a loaded spitball, a raucous Class D league dripping with accusations of illegal trades, illicit betting, biased umpires, and thrown games.
The most important lie told about Thorpe’s experience in Rocky Mount came from Pop Warner, who described Jim’s departure from school as a matter of routine that turned into an act of deception. “Jim’s five-year term of enrollment at Carlisle concluded in the spring of 1909 and he returned to his home in Oklahoma,” Warner wrote in his autobiography. “Or, at least, that is where the school administrators at Carlisle thought he had gone to.”
