Lars Anderson - Carlisle Vs. Army: Jim Thorpe, Dwight Eisenhower, Pop Warner, and the Forgotten Story of Footballs Greatest Battle

The 1912 Carlisle Indian football team. James Francis Thorpe, twenty-four (back row, third from left), and Coach Glenn Pop Warner, forty-one (back row, fourth from left), are standing side by side. (Courtesy Cumberland County Historical Society)

The 1912 Army football team in their lettermen sweaters. Dwight David Eisenhower, twenty-two, is standing third from the left in the center row; Omar Bradley, nineteen, is in the back row, third from the left. (Courtesy the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library)

THE THRILL OF POSSIBILITY

T he hand-rolled cigarette dangled from his lips, and a string of smoke drifted up around his brown eyes as he nervously paced through the locker room at West Point. Dressed in a bowler hat and dark gray suit, Glenn Pop Warner was buried deep in his own thoughts. Out on Armys football field five thousand fans filled the wooden bleachers and hundreds of others sat in folding chairs along the sidelines. Warner could hear the crowd murmur with expectation as he took another drag from his usual pregame cigarette, releasing more smoke from the orange glow of the burning tip. Time was running out before kickoff, and he was still searching for just the right words to spark a fire in the hearts of his Carlisle Indian School football players.

He moved between the benches in the small, musty locker room, striding past his players as they pulled on their red jerseys with the letter C emblazoned on the front, tightened the laces on their black cleats, and strapped on their leather helmets. The forty-two-year-old coach, with his bushy dark hair and barrel chest, had been daydreaming for months of this moment: the game against Army. On this autumn afternoon in 1912 he planned to unveil his latest offensive creationthe double wingfor the first time. The Indians had been practicing the complicated formation since the middle of the summer, and Warner hoped it would confuse the bigger, brawnier, stronger Cadets.

It was late in the season and, for Carlisle, the national championship was tantalizingly close: If the Indians beat Army, just three opponents stood between them and an undefeated season. Warner looked around at his twenty-two boys. They ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-four. Most of them had close-cropped dark hair, copper skin, and coffee-colored eyes, and were as thin as blades of prairie grass. They had come from reservations that dotted the plains of Middle America and as far west as Arizona to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for Indian boys and girls.

At Carlisle, the Indians were assimilated into white culture and forced to abandon every last trace of their heritage. The white teachers cut the Indians shiny black hair that reached down to their shoulders. They took their clothing, which was made from animal hides, and handed the boys blue military uniforms and the girls Victorian dresses. From the moment they first rode through the school gate in a horse-drawn covered wagon, the kids were not allowed to speak in their native languages. It would be English only from this point on.

The football team at Carlisle played all the powerhouses of the dayHarvard, Yale, Princetonand now, on November 9, 1912, at West Point, Warner narrowed his eyes into a liquid gleam of intensity and began to speak in his gravelly voice, hoping to prepare his boys for a battle with another of those top-ranked teams. With the fervor of a tent-revival preacher, the coach told his players that this was the time and the place for the Indians to finally prove that they could play the white mans game better than the white man himself could. In graphic language, he explained that this was a chance to exact revenge for all the cold-blooded horrors that the white man had inflicted on their people in the past. It was the ancestors of these Army boys, Warner forcefully stated, who had killed and raped the ancestors of the Carlisle players.

On every play I want all of you to remember one thing. Remember that it was the fathers and grandfathers of these Army players who fought your fathers and grandfathers in the Indian Wars. Remember it was their fathers and grandfathers who killed your fathers and grandfathers. Remember it was their fathers and grandfathers who destroyed your way of life. Remember Wounded Knee. Remember all of this on every play. Lets go!

Nothing could cause the emotional temperature of the Indians to rise like the mention of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and after Warners speech was over the players stormed out of the locker room and into the cool November air, filled with primal rage. Outside, the maples, elms, and oak trees that towered throughout the sixteen-thousand-acre West Point campus were tinted red and goldthe colors of the northeastern autumnand a breeze strummed the branches. Above the Indians as they jogged onto Cullum Field, the cold sky was heavy with an underbelly of clouds that threatened to flood the ground with sleet. It was the kind of football weather that Warner loved: raw and foreboding, perfect for the most important game of his career.

Located forty-five miles north of New York City, the field at West Point was laid out on the granite cliffs high above the Hudson River. Hundreds of feet below the grassy field, scores of boats that had ferried fans from Manhattan and other ports along the Hudson were docked on the rocky shoreline. Late-arriving fans streamed out of the tiny West Point train depot. Once they stepped off the coal-driven locomotive, they climbed the steep hill that led to the broad green plain of the United States Military Academy, anxious to see the battle between Carlisle, the most famous underdogs of the early twentieth century, and the Cadets of Army.

While the Carlisle players warmed up, halfback Jim Thorpe loped around the field in his easy, graceful gait. Every movement he made to prepare for the game looked effortless. He kicked forty-yard field goals that cleaved the uprights, he flung beautiful passes that spiraled sixty yards through the air, he sprinted up the field with the ball in his hands and faked out imaginary defenders with feet as light as a ballroom dancers. The twenty-four-year-old Thorpe had participated in the decathlon and pentathlon at the Fifth Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, just four months earlier, and had generated more newspaper stories than any other athlete in the summer and fall of 1912more than Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers, Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Chicago White Sox, or the Kentucky Derby winner, Worth. At this moment Thorpe was operating at the height of his athletic powers, and a stadium full of onlookers followed his every step, his every kick, his every snap of the wrist.