Path lit by lightning, p.8
Path Lit by Lightning, page 8
It went like this: On his way to the intramural ball game, dressed in overalls, a twilled-cotton work shirt, and borrowed gym shoes, Jim stopped to watch the track team’s high jumpers. Most stories say the bar was set at five feet nine inches. When the team’s jumpers one after another failed to clear that height, Thorpe asked if he could try. By some accounts this elicited derisive laughter from the varsity men. This guy in his overalls? Probably an embellishment to dramatize the story, but what was not exaggerated was the ease with which Thorpe rose over the bar and descended into the pit. With little effort he had jumped higher than anyone in Carlisle history.
Word of Thorpe’s feat quickly found its way to Coach Warner. In “Red Son of Carlisle,” Thorpe said Warner heard about it from a fellow student named Harold Archenbald. Close, but there was no student by that spelling. He meant Harry Archambault, a Sioux from the Standing Rock reservation who had been at Carlisle since 1902 and knew Jim from the time the skinny Sac and Fox kid had first entered the Large Boys quarters three years earlier. Archambault was a pole vaulter on the track squad and took photographs for the school paper. Other accounts said Warner was tipped off by one of the school’s athletic stars, Albert Exendine, who like Jim was an Oklahoman, though from the Delaware nation. In either case, Warner was always scouring the grounds for athletes and reacted quickly, summoning Thorpe to his office the next day without offering a reason. Jim had never played for Warner, never been to his office, never talked to him before. He feared that he was about to be reprimanded by the coach who, in his second coming, wielded as much power as anyone there, even the superintendent.
In Warner’s version of their meeting, Thorpe came in and said, “You wanted to see me, Coach? Have I done something wrong?”
“Son,” replied Pop, “you’ve only broken the school record in the high jump, that’s all.”
“Pop, I didn’t think that [was] very high,” Thorpe responded. “I think I can do better in a track suit.”
In Thorpe’s version, he came into Warner’s office and stood there quietly as Pop looked him over. “Are these the clothes you had on yesterday when you made the high jump?” Warner asked.
Thorpe nodded. “I want you to go to the club house, take those overalls off, and put on a track suit,” Warner then said. “You’re now on the track team.”
Warner saw enough promise in Jim to put him under the mentorship of Exendine, who had graduated but returned to town to prepare for Dickinson Law School and was conveniently available to renew his athletic career under Warner. Although Carlisle was no more than a high school in academics, in sports it had been competing at the college level since the 1890s. The track team that spring had dual meets with Penn State, the Naval Academy, Syracuse, and Bucknell, the first and last at home, the middle two away. In preparation for the season, Warner had installed a new cinder track around the athletic field and recruited a squad from the Small Boys quarters to smooth it.
The spring was unusually wet and chilly, limiting practices, but Exendine worked with Thorpe on his high-jump and shot-put techniques. His disciple showed the first hint of all-around promise days before the start of official contests with his performance at the school’s annual Field Day competition on the Saturday afternoon of April 19. With students filling the grandstands in clusters, cheering raucously and waving banners for their class’s athletes despite the blustery weather, Thorpe’s Room 9 finished second in points, most of them earned by him. He won the 120-yard high hurdles, finished second in the 220-yard hurdles, won the high jump, and finished second in the shot put. That showing brought new status to Jim among his classmates, but it was a ceremonial exhibition match that was missing some of Carlisle’s varsity track stars.
The day before the first official meet a week later, Jim and his classmates were called to the auditorium for a school-wide assembly. President Roosevelt had established Arbor Day by issuing a “Proclamation to the School Children of the United States about the importance of trees.” After speeches by students and teachers and a reading of the president’s declaration, the assembly joined in singing “America.” By the time they reached the second verse—My native country thee / Land of the noble free / Thy name I love / I love thy rocks and rills…—eyes turned to a little band of students from the Hopi nation who had arrived at Carlisle only three months earlier, essentially as kidnapped prisoners, noble but not free in their native country, brought to the school against their will in a government effort to control and assimilate the recalcitrant Hopi people. The Hopi boys knew no English until they were taken to Carlisle. Now here they stood, extolling America “in perfect English and good melody.” Pop Warner was there, unaware that one of the frailest among the Hopi boys was a remarkable long-distance runner who years later would join Jim Thorpe in leading Carlisle to world fame.
The ceremony ended on the school grounds with each class choosing a spot to plant a tree, seventeen in all. The Hopi planted an elm and named it Hopi, short for Hopituh Shi-nu-mu, roughly translated as Peaceful Little Ones. The junior class named an oak after Pop Warner. Jim’s class, “gaily adorned with streamers tan and blue,” walked together to a spot near the hospital chosen by the school nurseryman and tenderly placed a horse chestnut into the rich soil.
Jim had success that track season, but not dominance. He failed to place in the meets against Navy and Syracuse, finished second in the high jump against Penn State, and placed second in the 120-yard hurdles and high jump against Bucknell. “The No. 9 pupils are proud of their two members James Thorpe and George H. Thomas who did such fine work in the dual meet with Bucknell last Saturday,” an item in the Arrow noted. It was in the high jump against Bucknell that Jim broke the school record, matching the first jump he had made so nonchalantly in overalls on his way to a pickup baseball game. All that was enough to earn him his first varsity letter, a big yellow C to be sewn onto his red letterman sweater.
Before Carlisle’s academic department shut down for the school year in June, three boys in grades ahead of Jim—Michael Balenti, a Cheyenne; William Garlow, an Onondaga; and William Newashe, a Sac and Fox who had known Jim since their childhoods in Indian Territory—left to play semipro baseball for Hagerstown in the Sunset League. Reports about other players at Hagerstown indicated some were paid as much as $75 a month. The three were well-known athletes on campus, and their exploits in summer ball were reported several times in the school paper, including a first-person account from Newashe. This was Newashe’s first experience with summer ball, and it surprised him that they played almost every day, he wrote. There were teams in Martinsburg and Berkeley Springs, West Virginia; Frederick and Sparrows Point, Maryland; Hanover and Carlisle, Pennsylvania; and Winchester, Virginia. “The crowds in Virginia and West Virginia were not as good as the crowds in Maryland and Pennsylvania,” Newashe observed. “And there is usually some betting done in the game nearly every day.” After a weekend game against Carlisle, Balenti slipped away to visit his pals at the school and told stories about his life in semipro ball. The school paper also noted that another student, Jesse Youngdeer, was playing semipro baseball that summer somewhere “in the west.”
Their experience was regarded as normal for students who had the talent, and in almost every respect it was. Students and staff at Carlisle knew Newashe, Garlow, Balenti, and Youngdeer, read about their exploits, and welcomed them back later, when they would continue playing baseball or football at school. School records indicate that the experience was considered an Outing, just like going to a sponsor’s farm. On the Outing line in Garlow’s student file, one of the notations reads: “Hagerstown Baseball Team.” As athletic director and head coach of most sports, Pop Warner kept tabs on his athletes every summer and could learn from public reports and his network of scouts who was playing and where. He did not instruct his boys not to play. The fact that Jim’s friends and teammates were doing it, that it seemed utterly ordinary, and that Warner likely knew every detail—all of this would become crucial context for the controversial events a few years later involving Jim and semipro baseball that haunted him the rest of his life.
While most of his classmates left for summer Outings, returned home for vacations, or took summer jobs, Jim remained at Carlisle. He and some friends slipped away from campus briefly to hunt and fish at Tagg Run, the school’s forested summer camp south of Carlisle on the northern edge of the Blue Ridge range. When he returned, a wisecracker in the Arrow wrote that “Thorpe must have been visiting Alaska where the Eskimos live”—implying that he was fond of an unnamed Inuit girl. At school that July and August he worked as foreman of a crew of students slapping fresh coats of paint on old campus buildings, and in the evenings he loped down to the athletic field to play pickup football and baseball. He anticipated the fall football season, and early reports speculated that he would soon be a star in both track and football, but baseball was also piquing his interest. He loved taking the mound for the Big Chiefs in the intramural league. The easygoing mix of work and unstructured play seemed to have a positive effect on his disposition. His friend Harry Archambault, the pole-vaulting Sioux photographer, bought a new camera that July and practiced by taking shots of his friends. When Jim posed for Harry, it was said that “he had on the smile that won’t come off.”
* * *
IN THE YEARS after richard Henry Pratt was ousted from the institution, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School underwent a gradual change in emphasis. Pratt’s successor, Major William A. Mercer, also came out of the U.S. Army, a cavalryman whose last posting had been as an Indian agent at the Uintah and Ouray Agency in Utah, after similar assignments in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska. He had been dealing with Indians, first killing them, then overseeing them, since the final Sioux campaign that ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota on December 29, 1890, when at least 250 Lakota people, including many women and children, were slaughtered by the Seventh Cavalry, in which Mercer was a lieutenant. Unlike Pratt, Mercer never underwent a road-to-Damascus conversion about Indians or came to think of himself as their savior. He did not lobby for the job, but was chosen at least in part because he was on friendly terms with Teddy Roosevelt. It was thought he would be less ornery than Pratt and more willing to do the bidding of the Indian bureau.
Mercer was not interested in turning students into brown-skinned white people, had no training in academics, and wanted to focus on the third word in the school’s name: Industrial. He did not share Pratt’s conviction that an Indian could be as intelligent as any white person, or as successful if given the chance. His policies, reflecting those of Commissioner Leupp, came from the notion of white superiority and a belief that the students could grasp only so much; better to “let Indians be Indians” and focus on developing their practical skills. The Mercer administration was a mix of good and horrid intentions, just as Pratt’s was, though from a different perspective, but it did offer some benefits to the students that Pratt did not. Under Mercer’s tenure less attention was paid to strict notions of Christian obeisance, there were more social gatherings and dances, traditional Indian arts and crafts were encouraged, and competitive sports, especially football, were emphasized more than ever.
The arts program was run by Angel De Cora, a talented Winnebago artist who was given her own studio, the Leupp Art Studio, located near the main gate and across the lane from Pop Warner’s house. It was named in honor of the Indian commissioner, who had recruited her. De Cora was well established by then as an artist fluent in two worlds, Indian and white. She had run studios in New York and Boston and had been trained first at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, when it was a school for both African Americans and Native Americans, and then at two prominent white colleges, Drexel and Smith. She refused to be easily categorized and saw herself as a link between cultures, rejecting neither while firmly opposing Pratt’s assimilationist philosophy as it applied to art. She saw it as her mission at Carlisle to revive the inherent creative instincts in her students, which she said “had not perished but only lain dormant” in the Indian schools. “The method of educating the Indian in the past was to attempt to transform him into a brown Caucasian within the span of five years,” she said. “The educators made every effort to convince the Indian that any custom or habit that was not familiar to the white man showed savagery and degradation.”
That changed under De Cora. Rather than instruct her students in the European model, she took them outside to see beauty in their natural surroundings and had them study photographs of their reservation homelands, reconnecting them to their roots as a means of artistic inspiration. To promote their work, she eventually established another school publication, the Indian Craftsman, that featured student illustrations and border designs along with poems and stories that were “not only about Indians but by Indians.”
Not long into her stay at Carlisle, she secretly married a younger man who would play football with Jim Thorpe while serving as her assistant at the art studio. William H. Dietz was his name, but he called himself Lone Star Dietz, and his life, as would become clear later, was a brilliantly concocted and deceptive work of art all to itself. De Cora was thirty-five when she eloped with Lone Star, eleven years her junior. They lived near the old stone Guard House in a small cottage where Lone Star kept a pack of wolfhounds that he exercised by riding his bicycle up and down the school lanes with the dogs trotting behind him. The marriage would not last long. De Cora’s reputation also seemed short-lived; after dying during the great flu epidemic in 1919, she trailed into obscurity for much of the twentieth century, her art dismissed as insufficiently authentic, not Indian enough. But that was an overreaction and eventually her life and work regained stature to the point where the Winnebago nation in Nebraska, her homeland, named the Angel De Cora Museum after her.
If the government in Washington thought Indian schools were a drain on the federal budget, Superintendent Mercer saw it as his responsibility to run Carlisle as a capitalist operation. One aspect of Pratt’s old regime that fit into that plan was the Outing system, which provided a cheap labor pool to the region while also saving the school money. Mercer also saw the industrial shops as assets and took it upon himself to hawk the school’s products. An advertisement placed in the Arrow and Indian bureau newsletters around the country showed drawings of carriages that came out of the wagonmaking shop—a top buggy, a two-seated surrey, and a two-seated mail wagon—with a caption underneath stating “for descriptive circulars and prices address Major W. A. Mercer, U.S. Indian School, Carlisle.”
The school’s most profitable enterprise was its football team. Many of the newer buildings on campus were built by students and funded by proceeds from football games. All money from ticket sales and guaranteed percentages for away games went through the Carlisle Athletic Association, formed by Pop Warner and run by him again upon his return, enhancing his already formidable status on campus. While the grandstands at Carlisle’s home field, even when full, could hold only modest crowds of a few thousand, the team of Indians was a popular attraction on the road against Ivy League schools and top universities in the Midwest, where crowds of twenty to thirty thousand were common and Carlisle benefited from a guaranteed percentage of the gate. As much as Mercer was Commissioner Leupp’s man, he was also Coach Warner’s. Winning wasn’t the only thing to him, but winning while making money from football was, and after Warner returned from Cornell, Mercer did nothing to discourage the coach from recruiting the best players even if they did not fit the normal criteria for Carlisle.
That freedom was the main reason Warner had fled his alma mater to return to the Indian school. He thought the administration at Cornell cared little about football and less about winning. Some of the friction was personal, a lingering grudge between the school president and Warner over his expulsion of the team’s most popular player, Lawrence Rice, who Warner thought was undermining his leadership but others considered a model student and sportsman. There was a far larger issue as well—the growing violence of the game. At another Ivy League school, Dr. Charles Eliot, the president at Harvard, equated football with murder and wanted to ban it altogether. Cornell was not that extreme, but less enthralled with the sport and more concerned than Warner about its harmful effects on young men.
Before 1906, there were rules in football, but few to tame its ferocity. The game seemed a case of unnecessary roughness. Teams would line up head-to-head with no neutral zone and bang away at each other, hold, scrap, lock arms for brutal arrow-like flying wedges, slug, bite, pile on, and attack with deadly force. Helmets, more like thin leather straps or bonnets, had been around since the 1890s, but they were not yet mandatory, and few players wore them. From 1901 to 1905 there were 71 recorded deaths in football. In 1905 a Union College back, Harold Moore, died of a cerebral hemorrhage after being kicked in the head while trying to tackle a New York University runner. He was one of 18 players who died that year. An unofficial casualty count of the 1905 season read like a military after-action report: deaths, 18; partially paralyzed, 1; eyes gouged out, 1; intestines ruptured, 2; backs broken, 1; skulls fractured, 1; arms broken, 4; legs broken, 7; hands broken, 3; shoulders dislocated, 7; noses broken, 4; ribs broken, 11; collarbones broken, 7; jaws broken, 1; fingers broken, 4; shoulders broken, 2; hips dislocated, 4; thighbones broken, 1; brain concussion, 2. And these numbers were likely an underestimate.
And Christian reformers encouraged Native American boys to play football, the game of Harvard and the Ivy League boys, because the indigenous game of lacrosse was too savage.
Teddy Roosevelt, whose son had been injured playing football at Harvard, summoned several prominent Ivy League athletic directors to the White House and told them the only way to save the game, which he loved as much as they did, was to reform it. Walter Camp of Yale, considered the father of American football, was reluctant to change, but several new rules were instituted for the next season, including one that Warner took advantage of as much as or more than any coach in the nation. It was the forward pass, legalized as a means of spreading the field and making each play seem less like a rugby scrum. The pass had been legal for a year by the time Warner returned to Carlisle, and he saw it as the perfect tactic for a team of swift, savvy, fluid, and undersized players.
