Path lit by lightning, p.31
Path Lit by Lightning, page 31
On May 29, 1914, nearly four months after the investigation, Carlisle expelled Julia Hardin and her sister Maggie, sending them home to Oklahoma. An Indian Service official in Shawnee lamented that “the Hardin girls should have appreciated the opportunity afforded them at Carlisle and have conducted themselves in such a manner as to have set a good example for girls of more Indian blood rather than a bad one.”
Two weeks later, Julia got a strikingly different message from the government—a letter of praise from the Bureau of Indian Affairs:
My dear friend,
I take pleasure in transmitting herewith a letter from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs awarding you one of the third prizes that were given to students… during the past school year throughout the Indian School Service. I also enclose the emblem that represents the prize. Let me congratulate you, hoping that what you learned in gathering the material for your essay broadened your views about the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.
15 The Myth of a Vanishing Race
IN FOOTBALL AND TRACK AND field, Jim Thorpe’s talents were obvious, his success assured. Not so in baseball. From his first season with the New York Giants into his third, it was the same uncertain adventure. Here scribes had John McGraw declaring that “Jim Thorpe has found himself.” There they quoted Wahoo Sam Crawford, who had played against Jim from Tokyo to London, saying he was an unnatural hitter with a strange “little upward chop as he swings.” Here was a headline announcing “Jim Thorpe Wins Place in Regular Lineup of Giants.” Next came a story by Bozeman Bulger, famed sportswriter of the New York World, explaining how Thorpe proved that great athletes often failed at baseball. One month up, one month down, never fluid and easy, always a grind.
The Bulger story appeared in early May 1915, just after Thorpe had been demoted and dispatched across the Hudson River, farmed out to the Jersey City Skeeters of the International League. McGraw had threatened to send him down the year before, and the IL’s Toronto Maple Leafs had been pining for him, but that never happened and instead he had endured a second unproductive season on the Giants bench, getting only thirty-one at-bats, hitting no home runs, stealing one base, compiling another batting average below .200. Bulger noted that Thorpe could run faster than any man on the club, defeat any teammate in a wrestling match, and outjump them all by many inches, but “he apparently lacked the baseball instinct, which strangely enough is possessed in large quantities by runts and weaklings who cannot run fast, who are not strong of muscle, and could not win an athletic prize to save their lives.” Jim’s baseball foray was a noble effort, but now it seemed to be over. Jersey City, Bulger thought, might be the end of the trail.
The end of the trail was a familiar theme that year. Across the continent at the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair, the phrase was being evoked in a larger context, a grand celebration of human progress. The official name of the fair told part of the story. It was called the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. Panama because the Panama Canal connecting the oceans had been completed months earlier, Pacific marking the four hundredth anniversary of explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s encounter with the Pacific Ocean. In the words of ethnohistorian Abigail Markwyn, the exhibition was a spectacle of “expansionism, conquest, and progress.” Manifest destiny accomplished, the western frontier conquered, progress inevitable.
The most popular attraction at the fair captured those ideas. It was sculptor James Earle Fraser’s statue of an Indian on horseback, slumped in defeat, titled The End of the Trail. Eighteen million fair visitors who gazed upon the monumental figure near the fair’s front entrance saw these words describing it: “The drooping, storm-beaten figure of the Indian on the spent pony symbolizes the end of the race which was once a mighty people.” The statue and the idea behind it caught the fancy of the majority white population. It was photographed more than anything else at the fair and then copied in various statue versions throughout the country in years to come, displayed in places as diverse as the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and a city park in Waupun, Wisconsin.
Although Fraser conceived it out of sympathy, The End of the Trail became an icon of something more complex, a symbolic representation of what centuries of U.S. military might and decades of forced assimilation had wrought. Like the eighteen-foot-high figure on horseback, Indians by 1915 were romanticized as a vanishing race, once savage but now tamed and disappearing, overtaken not by oppression but by the scientific progress of the modern world. It was history written from a comfortable distance by the winners. It was also simplistic and ultimately wrong.
The precise number of indigenous people in the United States before Europeans arrived remains uncertain, estimates varying widely. In an essay in the seminal 2017 anthology The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations, Russell Thornton, an Oklahoma Cherokee and UCLA anthropologist who studied Native American populations, put the figure in the middle range of estimates, at about seven million. Through the genocidal combination of war, disease, and government neglect, the population diminished exponentially from the sixteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century, reaching a low of about 248,000 by the 1890s and the massacre at Wounded Knee, the last major act of military violence against the Indian people. But a quarter century later, as The End of the Trail arose at the San Francisco World’s Fair, the numbers were slowly rising. Thornton noted that the 1910 census counted 265,683 Indians in the continental U.S. plus another 25,331 in the territory of Alaska, marking “the first increase in the Indian population since European contact.” The indigenous nations did not vanish but kept moving, adjusting, and finding ways to survive against the odds.
The same could be said of Jim Thorpe. Here he was in May 1915, approaching his twenty-seventh birthday. He had already lost much in his life—much of the land and freedom of his Sac and Fox heritage, a beloved twin brother, both parents, the magnificent trophies and gold medals of the Stockholm Olympics, and now, perhaps, his hopes of succeeding as a major league baseball player. More losses were yet to come, year after year, some inflicted on him by society, others of his own doing as a talented but flawed human being. From that perspective, his story could be viewed as tragedy, the decline and fall of a once mighty figure, ennobled in his weakness. But Thorpe’s life might best be understood not as tragic dissolution but as gritty perseverance. With all the obstacles the world and his own failings put in his way, from the duplicity of powerful men to his personal struggle with alcohol, Jim kept going. Rarely demonstrative, more introvert than showman, lonelier than he ever showed the public, he endured nonetheless as the itinerant entertainer, the athlete, the Olympian, the Indian in constant motion, moving from one city to the next across America, fueled by a combination of willpower and often desperate financial need, searching for ways to adjust and survive.
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MCGRAW’S DECISION TO send him to the minors did not disillusion Jim. To the contrary, he had wanted the move. Being a scrub on the bench was “a pretty tough business,” he said. He would rather play every day somewhere else than “sit around and watch the other fellow do the work.” So off to the minors he went. He and Iva, nine months pregnant, maintained their apartment near the Polo Grounds after he was demoted, and he commuted across the river to Jersey City. He played well immediately, starring in the first home series against the Toronto Maple Leafs where he batted third, played right field, and scored both runs in the first game. It was the start of a bountiful week of multi-hit games. As was often the case with Jim, from his earliest days at Rocky Mount to his spring training performances at Marlin Springs, he made a good first impression.
His life took another turn for the better on May 8 when Iva delivered a ten-pound baby boy. Jim was overjoyed, passing out cigars to teammates and writing letters to friends and relatives, including one to Iva’s sister, Grace, and brother-in-law, Charles Morris, in Arkansas City, Kansas, just across the border from Ponca City, Oklahoma. “In that husky little fellow who I was told was a chip off the old block I placed my dreams and ambitions for the future,” he later wrote. “I was building my own monument, I thought.” The christening of James Francis Thorpe Jr. took place at St. Aloysius Roman Catholic Church in Harlem.
Soon Jim was off on a road trip with the Skeeters—and the main gate attraction again. Upstate New York was gray and frigid when the Rochester Hustlers held their home opener on May 17. The sports columnist for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle found Thorpe an easy subject for hackneyed sarcasm, combining Indian stereotypes with his Olympic misfortune. “By noon we had exhausted all our expletives regarding the weather and had half a mind to go up and ask Jim Thorpe, Olympic champion and right fielder for the Jersey City club, what he thought about it, thus: ‘Ugh, big chief. Do wintry chills send redman’s thoughts leaping backward to when ice crusted Thorpe wigwam?’ And then we thought better of it, remembering that Thorpe was still healthy and that our life insurance hadn’t been paid. But Jim Thorpe, just the same, probably knows a heap about cold weather. The AAU decision about his medals probably gave Mr. Thorpe quite a working knowledge of chills.”
Although the Skeeters were dwelling in the International League cellar, Jim’s stellar play at the plate and in right field continued through midsummer. The cycle of Thorpe the player of great potential and Thorpe the disappointment seemed back at the positive end of the perpetual loop. The Associated Press declared again that Jim was “destined to develop after all into a major league star of the first magnitude” and criticized McGraw for not sending him to the minors earlier so that he could develop with regular playing time. The Brooklyn Daily Times wrote that Thorpe was showing “flashes of brilliant playing ability” and would “undoubtedly wear a Giants uniform” soon.
Then his luck turned. During a home game against the first-place Buffalo Bisons in July, thieves broke into the dressing room at Skeeters Park on West Side Avenue and stole Jim’s diamond ring, valued at $400. His tenure on the Skeeters ended a few days later, when he was transferred to another team in the International League, the Harrisburg Indians. Many accounts said Thorpe requested the transfer, which brought him close to his old turf in Carlisle, twenty miles to the southwest, but that makes less sense when one considers how the move took him farther from New York City and his wife and infant son. Some stories said the Skeeters, managed by Hooks Wiltse, a former Giants teammate who had traveled around the world with him, had tired of Thorpe, although no reasons were cited. One disparaging nugget made its way into sports pages around the country, asserting that with Jim ending up in lowly Harrisburg, “the AAU ought to be convinced he never was a professional.” In any event, Harrisburg wanted and needed him after a starting outfielder broke his leg.
Jim was received as a hometown hero. Additional bleachers went up in Island Park’s right-field section to accommodate the largest crowd of the season. He did not disappoint, clouting a home run to center that was described as “one of the longest ever made on the Harrisburg field.” He stayed hot well into August at the plate and on the basepaths, with several multi-hit performances and twice stealing three bases in a game, though he still had trouble hitting the curve from right-handed pitchers and was uneven in the field. The Buffalo Courier, calling Jim “a fairly well known Indian,” described a typical game in which he “showed he is human like the rest of us.” He dropped an easy fly ball in left but also got three hits and three steals and “did more damage to the Bison cause than to Harrisburg.”
His best friend on the team—and roommate on the road—was Al Schacht, a jovial little pitcher from New York’s Lower East Side later known as “the clown prince of baseball” for his comedy routines on the field and as the proprietor of a Manhattan steakhouse. Schacht was five years younger than Jim and as a teenager had idolized the All-American football player at Carlisle. “He called me ‘little Injun,’ ” Schacht recalled. “Said I looked like a Jewish Indian.” When Schacht asked him about the Olympics and how Jim felt losing the medals, he could not elicit much of a response. “I mentioned it twice to him about the medals, he wouldn’t answer me, wouldn’t say yes or no. Just say, ‘Ooooh’—much like that.” He considered Thorpe “a good-natured fellow [who] wouldn’t hurt anybody,” yet said he remembered a time when Jim “cleaned out a saloon.”
Alcohol and insults formed the combustible mix. The incident had happened earlier in the season, when Jim was still with Jersey City and Schacht was on the Indians, then still located in Newark. As Schacht recounted it, after a game between the two teams, both men were heading to their homes in New York and stopped at a bar near the train depot before catching the commuter line into the city. Three “real tough mugs” in the bar started riding Jim from a nearby table, ridiculing him for the error he had made in left that day when he charged a ball and it bounced up from his glove, splitting his lip. “A guy comes in with a beer in his hand to join these three fellows and sees Jim and starts ribbing him. Jim is getting a little firewater and I know it’s bad.” The heckler says Jim “will get his brains knocked out some day going after a fly ball,” Schacht recalled. “And Jim says, ‘You little boys better keep quiet there or I’m gonna go over and spank you.’ ” With no interest in getting caught up in a bar brawl, Schacht said, he went to the bartender to urge him to quiet the hecklers before they got hurt. “And I hear, boom, boom, and two guys are out, and another is against the wall…. That was Jim Thorpe.”
Schact’s memory was imprecise. There was more—or less—to the story than that. Thorpe and the catcher for the Jersey City team, William Reynolds, were arrested during a brawl that night, charged with beating a young man named Edward La Forge. According to a complaint sworn out by La Forge’s mother, Reynolds kicked the young man in the head. What Thorpe did was unclear. The charges were dropped when La Forge told authorities he could not remember the brawl, and years later Jim claimed the story libeled him.
Harrisburg took advantage of his popularity by staging a Thorpe Day at the ballpark on August 17. More than two hundred students of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School came to honor their famous alumnus at a doubleheader against the Providence Grays. John DeHuff, acting superintendent after Moses Friedman’s ouster, arranged for the Cumberland Valley Railroad to carry students and guests at a bargain seventy-five-cent round-trip rate to and from Harrisburg. Before the game, the Carlisle students presented Jim with a baseball bat in the red and gold school colors, then marched across the diamond to take seats in the centerfield bleachers, all waving pennants, the young women in their traditional broad-brimmed hats. “Cheers greeted the big Indian at his every appearance and play,” reported the Carlisle Evening Herald, adding that Jim “played a good consistent game and figured strongly in the credit end of the box score.”
What was daily existence like for the greatest athlete in the world playing baseball in the International League in 1915? It was several calibers higher than the Rocky Mount Railroaders team Jim had played for six years earlier, but still it was the bushes, rough and haphazard. Crowds in Harrisburg that summer were so unruly that Edward G. Barrow, the league president, said the “rowdyism must cease” or he would transfer the team next season. The fans were like riotous vaudeville theater audiences, but instead of rotten tomatoes they heaved more dangerous projectiles. “Part of the enjoyment of a ball game is vested in the good-natured roasting that the fans can give an umpire, but when it goes to such a limit as throwing pop bottles and other missiles, it will not be tolerated,” Barrow said. Umpires were not the only ones taking cover. Players and teams were flying around like tossed pop bottles, moving from one team and city to another. Harrisburg, now ordered to behave or else, had a team that year only because the Indians had suffered from miserable attendance figures in Newark, where they were losing fans to the upstart Federal League, and fled to Pennsylvania’s capital city. The Orioles moved from Baltimore to Rochester for the same reason.
Although it boasted a worldly title because of its teams in Toronto and Montreal, the International League’s daily milieu was closer to the sticks. The day after Thorpe Day, the Harrisburg team drove to the hamlet of Chambersburg for an exhibition against a local squad in the lowest rung of the minors. Thorpe was part of a traveling crew that included the team president, three local sportswriters, manager Eddie Zimmerman, and seventeen players. They left Harrisburg at midmorning in a six-car caravan, five men to a car; meandered through the fruit orchards of Cumberland and York Counties; stopped in Mount Holly Springs for a Farmers Picnic where the players danced “with the fair country maidens”; and then rumbled on to Gettysburg for a two-hour tour of the Civil War battlefield. The roads were unpaved and rugged, the automobiles unreliable. One car caught fire on the last leg between Gettysburg and Chambersburg, and several others had flat tires along the way, but they arrived in time for the five o’clock start at a lumpy and potholed ballyard on the edge of a cornfield.
