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WE WERE GETTING WEAKER.
We knew that Harvard was almost certain to score before the game ended. We needed more points. We had the ball on the Crimson forty-eight and it was third down. Remember, we only had three downs then, not four. We could either try to make a first, fail and give it up on downs, or punt. But Gus had another idea.
Field goal, he said.
Who ever heard of a field goal from here? I said. Punt the ball.
Nope, Gus said. Youre going to make it, Jim.
I took a look in my friends eyes and knew I had to try. I stepped back a couple of extra paces and waited for the snap. Bad ankle or not, the game depended on me. When I hit the ball, I hit it solid. The ball was low at first and a Harvard defender got a hand on it, but I had driven it so hard that the ball just kept going. It went right through the middle of the goal and landed twenty yards behind it. We were ahead 18-9 with only three minutes to go....
They had to carry me off the field, but I didnt care. Even those Harvard fans were cheering for me and our little Indian team. It was one of the best days of my whole life.
Jim Thorpe, 1912
This story is dedicated to the grandchildren of all those who were sent to Carlisle and to all those who ran.
The 1911 season has brought into the public eye a young Indian student at the Carlisle School who promises to be the greatest athlete the world has ever seen. James Thorpe, a Sac and Fox from Oklahoma, came to Carlisle in 1908 with no knowledge whatsoever of athletics. The world of college trainers has been astonished by his achievements. He is not only a basketball player, at which game he fills the center post with truly remarkable skill, but he is a baseball player of great talent and covers any of the sacks or outfields with as much credit as a professional. He can put the 16 pound shot 43 feet, runs 100 in 10 seconds, while the 220 hurdles he negotiates in 26 seconds. The high hurdles are pie for him in 15 4/5 seconds, while the 220 hurdles he negotiates in 26 seconds. The youthful redskin hunts, plays lacrosse, tennis, indoor baseball, handball, hockey all with equal skill and can fill almost any position on a football team with superlative credit.
from the Muskogee Times-Democrat November 1911
YOU CAN CALL ME JIM
You can call me Jim. Ive had other names, some good, some bad. Some of them Ive accepted and some I have fought against. But Jim, well, thats the one my pa gave when he first looked at me and my twin brother, Charlie.
James Francis Thorpe, he said. That is what we are going to name him.
Thinking back on it, he could have done a whole lot worse. At least he didnt call me after his own pa, my Irish grandfather, like hed been named. Then I would have been Hiram Thorpe the Third.
James Francis Thorpe wasnt bad at all. Ma had other ideas, though. She had in mind what she had seen when she looked outside our cabin there in Indian Territory that May afternoon in 1887 when I was born. And when an Indian woman has something in mind, she generally gets her way. A lot of Indians get their name from something their mother saw right after they were born. Like my friend named Two Dogs. Just kidding.
But Ma was not just kidding. That image of the sun lighting up the walkway leading away from the door was strong in her mind.
His name is Wathohuck, she said. Bright Path.
And that surely is a good name, too.
What were those other names I got called?
My brother. That was one of the very best of them.
Wait for me, my brother!
Charlie would call those words out to me when we were running across the plains chasing after jackrabbits or going up our favorite hill, him trying hard to keep up with me. And I always stopped to wait for him to catch up. I dont think theres anyone in life who ever comes closer to a person than his twin brother. We were always together. Were together now. And I hope you understand what I mean when I say that.
Stupid. That was what the teacher called me. And not just one teacher, either.
Stupid. I hated that name. That was one of the worst ones. Not the very worst, but close. It hurt so much because I wondered if it was true. When it came to book learning I was painful slow. I had always been the swift one when it came to outdoors things, the first to learn how to make and shoot a bow, to ride a horse. (When I was on a horses back I understood what some of our old men meant when they said us Sac and Fox could almost forgive the white man for the bad that was done to us seeing as how he also brought us the gift of horses.) Charlie, though, was the one who dashed ahead when we got sent off to the mission school at the age of six.
Jim, age three, with his twin brother, Charles
Just looking at all those strange twisty shapes crawling across the white pages, those letters and numbers like little black insectsit gave me a headache. The pictures werent so bad, but there wasnt ever enough of them.
You can do it, Jim. That is what my brother Charlie would say.
And because he believed in me, I finally did. I learned to read and to writebetter than any of those teachers ever thought I could. I even got so I could cipher, though it was hard to make real sense out of all the numbers, which didnt tell stories like words could do.
School, I never loved it, but I would have done anything for Charlie. Maybe, if he had stayed, I would have learned to like it better. But he didnt. When the influenza burned through the school that second winter like a fire out of control in the prairie grass, it took Charlie with it.
And I took to running away from that awful place. Even though I was small back thenI didnt get my growth until real latethey were never able to catch me. Just as long as I had a home to go to, I always got back home.
And Pa always had the same thing to say. Sometimes he was angry when he said it, sometimes he was just resigned.
Youre going back.
Pa had his way about that, just as Ma had hers about my Indian name. Not that she disagreed with him about my needing education. Both of them had seen how Indians were cheated by white men who knew more about such things as book learning. Being cheated was how we Sac and Fox had ended up way down in Oklahoma, far from the lands where our people used to live near the big freshwater seas. Wed been cheated so often by the whites that finally great chief Black Hawk fought back hard in a war that scared the pants off the United States back in 1832. Black Hawk and his men pushed back across the Mississippi and defeated the army and drove all the way up into Wisconsin before they finally got outnumbered and outgunned and had to surrender.
Pa was always proud of Black Hawk. He made sure that all his kids knew about him and shared that pride. No-ten-o-quah, my fathers mother, was from Black Hawks own Thunder Clan, so our family felt as if we were Black Hawks family. My mother even used to say that she thought I was Black Hawk come back to life again. I was born to do great things. My destiny was not to be the same kind of warrior Black Hawk was, but I would fight in my own way for Indian people.
