Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe

by David Maraniss

THE LATE REUBEN SNAKE, ONETIME chairman of the American Indian Movement and member of the Winnebago nation, said that to be an Indian meant “having every third person you meet tell you about his great-grandmother who was a real Cherokee princess” and “nine out of ten people tell you how great Jim Thorpe was.” Thorpe, in that sense, was one of the few Native Americans of the twentieth century whom people could cite and praise even if they knew little else about the indigenous experience.

Born in 1887, in the Indian Territory of what later became Oklahoma, Thorpe was the quintessential underdog who rose from nowhere to become the greatest athlete in the world, the Natural who could do anything on the fields of play.

He was an Olympic champion decathlete in track and field, a football All-American, a star pro and first president of what became the National Football League, and a major league baseball player, a seemingly indestructible force who ran like a wild horse thundering downhill yet was also a graceful ballroom dancer and gifted swimmer and ice skater.

Thorpe’s life spanned a sixty-five-year period when the dominant society believed the best way to deal with Indians was to rid them of their Indianness and make them as white as possible.

In the years after his playing skills faded, his life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, deferred dreams, lost opportunities, and financial distress resulting from a generosity that lapsed into wastefulness.

He was the American nomad, migrating from job to job, state to state, in search of a peace he never found before he died of a heart attack in a trailer park in southern California in 1953 at age sixty-five.

The most notable example of the savior type was Pop Warner, Jim’s coach at Carlisle. In Jim Thorpe—All-American, the 1951 movie version of his life, Thorpe (played by movie star Burt Lancaster) is the main character but Warner, who consulted on the script, is portrayed as the hero and wise man who discovered the raw athlete, molded him into a superstar, and then tried time and again in later years to save Jim from his worst impulses. The true story is less flattering. Warner was a hypocrite if not a coward. At the time of Jim’s greatest peril, when his Olympic medals were being taken from him because he had played bush league baseball, Pop lied and feigned innocence to save his own reputation while portraying Jim as the ignorant native.

There is strong evidence that James E. Sullivan, then the big man of American amateur athletics and the person most responsible for the decision to deny Thorpe his medals and records,

For all his troubles, whether caused by outside forces or of his own doing, Jim Thorpe did not succumb. He did not vanish into whiteness. The man survived, complications and all, and so did the myth.

PEOPLE WERE EAGER TO SEE “The Big Indian” as soon as he returned to America. He was a celebrity now, a global sensation after winning two gold medals at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, where the dapper king of Sweden was said to have called him the greatest athlete in the world.

Eight days later, on August 24, Thorpe was in New York for an Olympic victory parade, the largest in the city since Admiral Dewey’s return from battle in 1899 after the Spanish-American War.

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.

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 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.

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.

Jim and his classmates sat cross-legged on the gym floor, with parents and guests in chairs on the sides.