Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe

by David Maraniss

A stunning photograph was taken of Jim standing on the stadium infield then. At first the viewer is drawn to the odd mix of socks and shoes, but soon the eyes move up to see his relaxed stance, hands on hips, left foot slightly forward, and then the majesty of his rugged face.

It could be said that Thorpe performed the entire decathlon as good as alone, the field being so far behind. Olympic officials, spectators, fellow athletes—all were stunned by what they had witnessed. “As Thorpe went from one strenuous event to another, never seeming to feel fatigue, the wonder and admiration of the onlooking athletes found expression in what came to be a stock phrase, ‘Isn’t he a horse!’ ”

Pop Warner later recalled. Thorpe finished 700 points ahead of the nearest competitor with 8,412 points, a record score.

With that win, Jim had provided the United States with six points, and when added with Lewis Tewanima’s two points for the silver in the 10,000, Pop Warner’s boys from the Carlisle Indian In...

as citizens—provided more points for America than any other educ...

“You, sir, are the most wonderful athlete in the world.”

Whether the conversation occurred is immaterial to the

indisputable fact that Thorpe was the greatest and most wonderful athlete in the world.

I declined as I didn’t want to be gazed upon as a curiosity.”

They could never fully erase history or the reality of Native American experiences.

From his two gold medals at the Olympics that summer to his brilliance on the football field that fall—where by the imprecise estimates of that era he scored more than twenty touchdowns and ran for nearly two thousand yards—it could be argued that Jim in 1912 had the single best athletic year in American history.

Native American scholars parsing it later could not help but focus on the emasculating resonance of those words, the stereotype of the poor Indian who was to be glorified and pitied at the same time, an instinctive creature who could not be held responsible for his ignorance. But this was not Jim’s concession of Indian inferiority. It was Warner talking, not Thorpe, drawing on a way of thinking about Indians that was deeply ingrained in the white American culture of the early twentieth century.

The deal was done. Thorpe was cut loose as Warner and Friedman saved themselves.

The reason? The rules of the Stockholm games “clearly prescribed that all protests against contestants on the grounds of professionalism must be filed within thirty days of the prizes.”

The decathlon medal was to be given to the Swede who’d finished second, Hugo Wieslander, who said that Jim Thorpe won it, not him, and that he neither deserved it nor wanted to accept it.

“The financial compensation must have been a violation of the amateur regulations and of a considerably more serious nature than the breach of the amateur regulations that Jim was disqualified for after the games,” Yttergren noted.

Patton was on the government payroll when he refined his skills in pistol shooting and steeplechase riding—and then used opium to enhance his performance during the games. Which man should be punished for what he did?

The notion that payments of that sort disqualified any of those college players from Olympic or AAU competition was rarely considered.

What the Linnen findings established above all else was the hypocrisy and duplicity of Warner and Friedman claiming that they were amateur innocents and shocked to discover that Jim Thorpe was a professional before the Olympics because he had played minor league baseball.

The indigenous nations did not vanish but kept moving, adjusting, and finding ways to survive against the odds.

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.

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.

What the stories revealed was how willingly and inaccurately the press would turn on Thorpe—a pattern that would haunt him the rest of his career.

Until then, because of his Sac and Fox heritage, he was not considered competent to handle his own property affairs and required the guardianship of the government.

but others did not, viewing it as another form of forced assimilation.

once reflected that it was only in white society that Jim was considered shy.

The reasons were more financial and practical than ideological. It was not that enlightened minds came to regret the degrading racism inherent in a policy of forced assimilation that attempted to whitewash native culture, language, dress, and attitudes out of the students.

Washington, it just seemed that maintaining Carlisle was too expensive and that Indians were not worth the effort.

“The most precious trophy I had ever been awarded in my life had been taken from me,”

Professional football may pay in places where there is not the lure of big college contests, but it will never rival the amateur brand.”

The players understood that they were being asked to pander to the expectations of a white world.

4:15 train from Harrisburg reached the Carlisle station. No parade this time, but a warm reception and a reminder of what once had been, explaining why Jim would say, despite the culture-killing

callousness of Indian school education, that his days at Carlisle were the best of his life.

The column was a litany of derogatory Indian stereotypes condemning indigenous athletes to eventual failure.

The pervasive view of the debilitated Indian athletes failed to consider the corrosive effects of a dominant culture that left them straddling two worlds, constantly fighting against the odds, romanticized and dehumanized at the same time.

The world hasn’t been as kind to Jim as it should have been. In his old age the great warrior is deserving of better treatment than the fates have meted out. He was a man!”

It was Dietz, the artist, who designed the Redskins logo and might have inspired the nickname itself as the team changed from the Braves to the Redskins shortly after he was hired in 1933.

Life is full of curiosities: here was a white man passing through life as a Native American.

“Having driven him from his lands, breaking treaty after treaty, and subjecting him to every known spoilation, it soothed our consciences to rate the Indian as a lower order of human life putting him in the same class as the beaver, the buffalo and other wild creatures compelled to give way before the march of civilization.”

all the paraphernalia necessary for them to entertain white audiences with traditional Indian dances before and after games.

The indigenous ballplayers understood the contradiction of performances that helped them survive financially and to some extent celebrated their history while also serving as a form of minstrelsy accentuating dominant stereotypes of the American Indian.

Which represented the truer selves? A question tangled in generations of cultural conflict.

The problem was that Ben and Susey Harjo (Seminole Roll No. 1578) were classified by the government as “restricted” Indians, meaning they did not have full control of their own financial affairs

The duality of honoring his ancestry while performing as a white man’s version of an Indian was a situation Jim had dealt with all his adult life.

“Whether Jim is right or wrong, he’s really sincere in his feeling that only bona fide Indians should be permitted to portray Indian tribes on the screen, and not the proverbial Hollywood extras.”

But “the vote for number one was practically unanimous—Jim Thorpe, ball carrier and blocker, linebacker and broken-field star, passer and pass receiver, punter, drop kicker and placekicker, defense wrecker, a half dozen recalled the practically impossible things they had seen him do.”

Indians aren’t good actors anyway. An actor has to exaggerate. It’s against an Indian’s nature to exaggerate or be emotional.”

Tribes lost an estimated ninety million reservation acres to white settlers, dropped further into poverty, and were in danger of losing their traditional cultures along with their land. Land and the traditional ceremonies and ways of life were inextricably linked; when one was taken away, the other was endangered.

Thorpe had negative feelings about reservation life and believed that a return to any system that separated Indians from the economic mainstream was a step backward.