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.
