Path lit by lightning, p.5
Path Lit by Lightning, page 5
Elementary grades at Haskell did not correspond precisely to public elementary schools, but records show that Jim in a sense started over again at a rudimentary level—Grade 1B. Along with working at the school farm and learning mechanical tasks, he was taught to add, read, spell, and write with a steady, looping cursive hand. But in terms of training for his future, the most important interest he developed at Haskell was a love of a game—football.
The season when Haskell started to emphasize football coincided with Jim’s first year. The new superintendent, H. B. Peairs, gave football his “hearty support,” reasoning that it would promote Haskell to a wider audience while further immersing the boys in a game of growing appeal in white society. Whether football was in fact a civilizing influence and means of enlightenment was another matter to be debated for generations to come. In his effort to bring big-time football to Haskell, Peairs enticed a young but well-known local figure to take over as coach, the first Haskell coach to be paid a salary. It was Will T. Walker, familiarly known as Sal, a former star center at the University of Kansas. Walker started training his new charges in the heat of early fall, laying out a practice field behind the disciplinarian’s house. He said he liked what he saw, promising to field the best Indian team west of the Mississippi.
Jim was only eleven when he started at Haskell and thirteen when he left, too young to play on the team, but he became entranced by the game and the Indian players and was a regular on the sidelines watching practice. “It was at Haskell I saw my first football game and developed a love for it, a love I have had through the years,” he recounted decades later. “Too young to take part in the football games at the school, I organized a team among classmates my own age. We fashioned a football from wool yarn and occasionally were successful in including one of the older boys to referee our game. We played after school hours on the outskirts of campus. An Indian by the name of Chauncey Archiquette on the regular Haskell squad was my football idol and in our scrub games with the homemade football I always tried to emulate him.”
Chauncey Archiquette was an Oneida from the Fox River Valley near Green Bay, the same pocket of northeast Wisconsin that produced the Potawatomi ancestors of Jim’s mother, Charlotte. Archiquette was the captain and star of the 1900 Haskell team that won nine games, including a shutout of the University of Missouri. As it turned out, he had already played several years of football at the Carlisle Indian School, and in fact had graduated from Carlisle before enrolling at Haskell and playing several more seasons—possible in that era before governing bodies were established to set eligibility rules. By one account, it was Archiquette, after taking a liking to the young boy, who gave Jim the makeshift football he used in intramural games. With that ball in his hands, even then, Jim was the fastest boy on the field. He had been around horses all his young life and tried to run like one—“head up and feet coming down with a thundering certainty.” Before Haskell, he had never thought about his future, but there the intimations of something better in his life began. He thought that someday he might want to be a football coach.
* * *
THE LACUNA IN Jim Thorpe’s life came at the end of his Haskell experience and during the year after. The one known constant in that period is that he was increasingly alone in the world.
It started when a classmate revealed that a secret was being kept from Jim, that while in the office of a Haskell administrator the classmate had seen a letter sent to the school stating that Hiram Thorp had been shot during a hunting accident and was dying of a chest wound. Jim would later say that the letter was written by his father, but the 1900 census recorded Hiram as unable to read or write. Was the letter written by Charlotte? Perhaps, although the Sac and Fox Agency annuity rolls of 1899 list her as “Separated from Husband” and Hiram as “Separated from Wife”—indicating he had split again. In any event, Jim’s response to the letter was to leave Haskell. He said he “jumped a freight train” in Lawrence, only to discover that it was northbound instead of southbound, so he got off and started to walk. “It took me two weeks,” Thorpe recalled. When he arrived at the log farmhouse above the North Canadian, his father was recovered, but as ornery as ever. “One day soon after, my dad gave me a licking that I probably deserved but didn’t like so ran away to the Texas Panhandle.” The story Jim would tell was that he stayed for a year in Texas, fixing fences and working as a ranch hand.
His account is the only record of that year; there are no documents, no recollections by witnesses. But there was one defining event that happened while Jim was in Texas. Charlotte and Hiram reunited long enough for Charlotte to give birth to another baby on January 5, 1902, the last of her eleven. No sooner had they named him Henry than he died on January 8. Charlotte died from complications of childbirth weeks later. She was only thirty-eight—a large presence gone. Her death reverberated through the broken family and ended up taking Jim, the son she saw as the reincarnation of Black Hawk, along his lightning path.
3 “This Is the Indian’s Home”
THE CARLISLE INDIAN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL had been operating for twenty-five years by the time Jim Thorpe arrived in early 1904. It was the flagship school of the federal Indian bureau, the first and largest of its kind, a non-reservation school for all tribes. The twenty-seven-acre campus covered a hill in the fertile countryside on the edge of the city of Carlisle, a short hop southwest on the Pennsylvania Railroad from Harrisburg, the state capital. The grounds and many of the buildings had once constituted the Carlisle Barracks, a military installation that traced back to before the Revolutionary War. Most of the forty-nine buildings—dormitories, classrooms, gymnasium, dining hall, and workshops—were painted steel gray. Exceptions were the laundry, the doctor’s cottage, and the superintendent’s house, formerly the commandant’s quarters, which was gleaming white with a roof redone in red and gold, the school colors. The oldest standing structure on the grounds, known as the Hessian Powder Magazine, with its arched roof and limestone walls lined with brick six feet thick, was built in 1777 by Hessian prisoners after George Washington’s victory at the Battle of Trenton and used to store gunpowder and cannon shot.
The Hessian captives also built the Guard House next door, a small prison with six cells, two with barred windows and four completely dark. A century and a quarter later the Guard House was still in use as a punishing jail for runaways and misbehaving Indian students. At least once during his time at Carlisle, Jim was among the Guard House’s unwilling overnight guests. That was for the older boys, referred to as the Large Boys. There was a less intimidating lockup room in the Small Boys quarters. On the grassy parade below the superintendent’s quarters a bandstand was used for orations and performances by the renowned school band, but also served as a place for paying penance. School administrators thought that making wayward Indian youngsters pace around the bandstand for two or three hours within sight of their classmates was an excellent form of punishment, especially if they had been drinking, in which case they were made to circle the bandstand with a DRUNK sign on their backs. “They are very sensitive to ridicule,” explained one administrator. “It only goes to help in the training of their minds… a little reproof goes deep.”
In good weather, the campus unfolded gentle and copious, lawns trimmed and verdant, wisteria vines draping violet over the veranda, tall oaks and elms providing leafy shade for the walking paths, the beloved Old Walnut Tree towering above the teachers’ quarters, fragrant flower beds popping with color. Down past the workshops on the north side of campus, a path wended through the Grove, five thickly wooded acres of willow, walnut, locust, hickory, and sycamore leading to a millrace and an old gray stone mill near Letort Creek. Nearby was the swimming hole at Conodoguinet Creek and the abundance of two school farms where limestone-rich soil produced crops of wheat, barley, oats, corn, potatoes, and garden vegetables.
It was on the warm but drizzly evening of February 6 that Jim rode into town on the local from Harrisburg, the last leg of a twelve-hundred-mile trip that began two days earlier in Stroud, not far from his home. The school’s assistant superintendent, Edgar A. Allen, also came in by train from the same direction that day after spending two weeks in Indian Territory promoting Carlisle and rounding up students. When Jim reached campus, an easy walk from the station at the corner of High and Hanover, he was directed to the Large Boys quarters, a three-story building as long as a city block.
In Carlisle’s leather-bound ledger book—Descriptive Record of Students As Admitted—his name was recorded on page thirty-three, student number 3205. On that single page was a listing of fifty male students who entered Carlisle in the first months of 1904, boys from the Sioux, Chippewa, Seneca, Onondaga, St. Regis, Sac and Fox, Assiniboine, Delaware, Shoshone, Arapaho, Cherokee, Ute, Inuit, and Oneida nations. The oldest was David Little Old Man, a twenty-two-year-old, six-foot Cheyenne who suffered from acute bronchitis. The youngest was Jeremiah Horner, a ten-year-old Onondaga who stood three foot three and weighed just over sixty pounds. One Sioux boy, Moses Norbert, ran away before he could be examined. Nearly half, like David Little Old Man, had health problems listed in the remarks. Weak heart. Weak lungs and heart. Half-blind eye. Chronic heart disease. Asthmatic lung disease. Under the listing for mother and father, half were recorded as having only one living parent and one in four was an orphan.
The entry for James Thorpe noted that he was Sac and Fox, son of Hiram, father alive, mother dead. His age was listed as seventeen, which he would not turn until May. The remarks section was blank. Most striking were the measurements of his height and weight: five feet and five-and-a-half inches and 115 pounds. He was soon outfitted in the Carlisle uniform: cavalry cap, light blue slacks with dark stripe down the leg, dark blue jacket, and buffed black shoes that faced regular inspection. From the options for manual training, Jim passed on the blacksmith trade of his grandfather and chose tailoring and painting.
The 860 Indian students at school that year came from eighty-eight tribes, but only 14 were Sac and Fox—10 boys and 4 girls. Jim found a boy from his tribe who gave him the first glimpse of what was expected of him. Reveille at six. Breakfast at seven in the dining hall. Four hours of classwork in the morning. Four hours of farm or industrial shop in the afternoon. A routine he had become familiar with, and had chafed at, during his days at Haskell.
* * *
THE EVENTS THAT took Jim to Carlisle—where off and on he would spend the next nine years—started with his return from Texas and the death of his mother, who was buried at the Sacred Heart Cemetery on the Potawatomi reservation near her parents. For a time after Charlotte’s death, Jim and his older brother, George, who was nineteen, took responsibility for their younger siblings, Mary, Adeline, and Edward. Jim helped on the farm and enrolled at the local public school in Garden Grove, a one-room and one-teacher school about three miles from home. “It was all book work there,” Jim recalled, “and I missed the football games for which I had developed some enthusiasm at Haskell.” He also missed watching his mother sew the family clothes and grind corn flour on ancient rocks, and he longed for the slow nights of games and storytelling on the front porch of the farmhouse when she was alive. “Mother’s death laid a quiet hand upon the little community in which we mingled.” But Hiram did not wait long before marrying again, taking a white woman named Julia Hardin as his fifth wife, and by all accounts she and Jim did not get along.
Two weeks before Christmas 1903, the Sac and Fox agent in Stroud received a letter signed “Hairm Thrope” (Hiram with the letters jumbled and misspelled Thorp gaining an e). It was probably written by Hardin, since Hiram Thorp was illiterate. The letter was filled with mistakes of spelling and fact, even making Jim two years younger than he was, but the point was obvious.
Dear Sir—
I have a boy I wish you would make rangements to Send of to School Some Ware Carlyle or Hampton I don’t Care ware. He went to Haskill but I Think it better one of the former plases so he Cannot run away—he is 14 years old and I Cannot do any thing with him So plese at your Earliest Convence atend to this for he is getting worse every day—and I want him to go and make something of him Self for he cannot do it hear.
A decade later, after Jim Thorpe gained world renown, another version of how Carlisle found Jim emerged. The two stories were not mutually exclusive, and in fact made sense when combined. A federal official named Alex Crain, who worked as the Indian agent in Wewoka in Seminole country but owned a farm near Keokuk Falls, claimed that he “talked the lad’s father into sending him to the big Indian school.” Carlisle was always scouting Indian Territory for new students. That was the point of the recent visit by the assistant superintendent. And there were occasional letters from the Carlisle administration like the one the Sac and Fox agent in Stroud had received in 1899: “Have you not a small number of exceptionally good boys and girls to send to Carlisle this year?” That inquiry included a not subtle hint that they were especially interested in strong boys who could play sports. Jim was small, but he had already expressed his love of football. It was not just watching his first pigskin idol, Chauncey Archiquette, that stirred him. As a student at Haskell in early January 1900, he had been among the boys who attended a breakfast in the dining hall and gaped in awe at the sight of the powerful Carlisle team when it stopped in Lawrence on a continental train ride east after a game against the University of California.
Haskell was regional; Carlisle was national, the mother ship of Indian schools, and part of the college football elite. It seems probable that Hiram and his new wife, whatever their motivation, got the idea from an agent like Crain, and that the boy was ready to go.
* * *
ON THE DAY before Jim arrived at Carlisle, Red Man, a school newspaper published every Friday by student apprentices in the printshop, posted a poem titled “This Is the Indian’s Home” by A. O. Wright, an educator in the Indian bureau’s administration.
Soon the last wild Indian pagan
Will forsake the tribal rule
All the reservations opened
All the children in some school;
White and Indians then united
Make one nation, great and free
One alone will be their country
One their speech and flag shall be.
Here, in mawkish rhyme, was the perfect encapsulation of Carlisle’s philosophy, connecting Anglo education and the elimination of reservations as essential to saving Indians by making their homelands and customs dissolve into white society. The Dawes Act took away the communal reservation land; Carlisle and its sister schools would do the rest. It was no coincidence that Senator Henry Dawes and Col. Richard Henry Pratt, the founder and longtime superintendent at Carlisle, were friends and coconspirators in what they considered a progressive and noble effort. Dawes had been a frequent visitor to Carlisle in the years he chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and at Pratt’s request often spoke at commencement exercises. When Dawes needed help persuading various tribes to go along with his reservation-busting act, Pratt, the ramrod-straight cavalryman, became one of his key emissaries traveling out to South Dakota to persuade the Sioux to cede more of their communal land in the name of progress.
At Carlisle, the Dawes Act was celebrated as an annual holiday. Dawes Day, it was called, a day for student assemblies, speeches, and debates over the act’s merits and drawbacks. Jim Thorpe had been at school only two days when he experienced his first Dawes Day. As the Red Man newspaper noted that weekend: “The 8th of February is recognized as Dawes Day in the Indian service. It was the eighth of February that the eminent senator’s bill for the Indians to receive lands in severalty was approved by the president.”
Ten days later, on February 18, Jim and his classmates were again called to the assembly in the gymnasium for the school’s twenty-fifth anniversary exercise. Scores of parents, dignitaries, and civilian guests were also present. Carlisle was neither a high school nor a college. It was an industrial school that also offered academic courses, but most of all it was a school of assimilation. Most students were in their teens, but their ages ranged from seven to the mid-twenties. The plan was for those in the upper school to stay at Carlisle five years or until they graduated, but that plan was decidedly flexible. Some students needed more time, some less, to reach a stage where the administrators could release them with a reasonable expectation that they would melt into the white world and not revert to the life of a blanket Indian on the reservation. That was the theme of Superintendent Pratt’s commencement speech, which he couched in the language of the nation’s ideals.
“United States, united people. How can we be made and keep our people united if we educate and train them to differences?” Pratt asked. “Here today we are considering our brother in red. He is not in the family, not part of the united people. He is a prisoner in our hands so we control him absolutely, therefore, his useless dependent condition and segregated situation stamps our brother-of-man-Christianity a myth and our equality and freedom Declaration of Independence a lie. The Indian peoples themselves want to be in our United States family and are willing to develop and exert their powers and are capable of accomplishing it.”
