(1887-1953)
Sauk and Fox football and baseball player and Olympic athlete
James Francis Thorpe (Wa Tha Huck, Bright Path) was born on May 22, 1887, in Keokuk Falls, south of what is now Prague, Oklahoma, on the Sauk and Fox Indian Reservation. He and his twin brother, Charlie, were baptized on November 17, 1887, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, in what is now Konawa, Oklahoma, their mother's home.
Jim was one of eleven children born to Hiram P. Thorpe, a man of mixed Sauk and Fox and Irish ancestry; and Charlotte Vieux, of mixed Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Menominee, and French ancestry, the great-granddaughter of Jacques Vieux, a French fur trader. Jim's father was a horse breeder and trainer and occasional bootlegger. Life was a struggle for the family, and only five of the eleven children grew to adulthood. Jim used to run down the horses on their ranch on the banks of the North Canadian River, an activity that developed his strength and stamina, and helped him hone the athletic skills that would later make him famous.
Like many other Indian children, Thorpe went off to Indian boarding schools. He began at the Sauk and Fox Mission School at age six, and went on to Haskell Institute and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. While the government's assimilationist lessons were imperfectly learned—Thorpe never forgot that he was an Indian—he never again lived in an Indian community.
It was while he was at Carlisle that Thorpe gained international fame. An outstanding football player, he was so skilled at running and place-kicking that he was chosen for the 1911 and 1912 all-American teams. In 1912 he participated in the Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, where he won both the decathlon and pentathlon—a feat that has never been equaled.
Barely a month after his Olympic victories, however, Olympic officials demanded the return of Thorpe's medals. They had discovered that he had played semiprofessional baseball with the Rocky Mount League, in North Carolina, during the summers of 1909 and 1910. Seventy years later, in 1983, the International Olympic Committee president Juan Samaranch of Spain apologized and returned the gold medals to Thorpe's heirs. They are now displayed under a portrait of Thorpe that hangs in the rotunda of the state capitol in Oklahoma City.
Jim Thorpe's personal life was not a happy one. At age nine he lost his twin brother. Jim's mother died of childbirth complications when he was attending Haskell, and he became an orphan at age sixteen when his father died of gangrene poisoning after a hunting accident. His first son, Jim Jr., died in his arms at age two, from pneumonia. Iva Margaret Miller, his first wife, divorced him after the birth of four children: Jim Jr., Gail, Charlotte, and Grace. His second wife divorced him after the birth of four sons: Carl Phillip, William, Richard, and John. He was later married to Patricia Agnew, with whom he lived until he died. Through it all he learned to overcome tragedy and still perform. Losing the Olympic gold medals was only one tragedy he overcame.
After the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe returned to Carlisle and played his last season of amateur football. In 1913 he turned professional, signing a contract with the New York Giants baseball team. Two years later he started playing part-time professional football in Ohio for Jack Cuzak's Canton Bulldogs. He was paid $250 a game, an unheard-of sum at the time. For the next fifteen years, he played baseball in the spring and football in the fall.
In 1920, when Thorpe became the first president of the American Professional Football Association (now the National Football League), professional football was in its infancy. Thorpe's talent and enthusiasm drew the public to the game and helped establish it as a national pastime. Perhaps this is why the first image to greet visitors at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, is a statue of Thorpe, with a football under his arm, charging down the field toward another touchdown.
In the early 1930s, when Thorpe became too old for sports, he turned to acting, playing small movie roles in California. Working also as a casting director for various studios, Jim rounded up Indians for westerns. He insisted that only Indians should play Indian roles, but was frequently overruled.
Big salaries and pension benefits for players in professional sports did not exist during the time of Thorpe's career, and even with his film jobs it was difficult for him to make a living during the depression years. Strapped for cash, he sold his life story to Warner Bros. for less than three thousand dollars. The film company released Jim Thorpe, All-American, starring Burt Lancaster, in 1951. Thorpe was paid as a part-time consultant during filming, but he never received royalties or further payments for the film, which continues to be shown. Ahead of his time as a professional athlete, he was unable to reap any substantial monetary benefits from his unprecedented sports achievements.
Running as a constant through Thorpe's life was a love of sport and competition. His daughter Grace remembers her father standing at center field at the Haskell Institute football stadium in Lawrence, Kansas, when she was five years old. He kicked a football through one goal post, then turned around and easily kicked another ball to the goal post at the other end of the field. When asked what sport he preferred, Thorpe would often reply that he liked hunting and fishing best of all. He kept many coon dogs in his small backyard in Hawthorne, California, and made frequent trips to the fishing piers at El Segundo and Redondo Beach.
Jim Thorpe died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 28, 1953, in Long Beach, California. Despite the fact that he never capitalized on his fame, Thorpe's athletic achievements continued to impress the sporting public. In Associated Press polls of sportswriters taken in 1950 and 1975, Thorpe was judged not only America's greatest all-around athlete, but also America's greatest football player. In 1955, the town of Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, changed its name to Jim Thorpe, and his body was reinterred there. The words King Gustav V of Sweden spoke in 1912 are inscribed on Thorpe's rose granite sarcophagus: "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world."
Jack Newcombe, The Best of the Athletic Boys: The White Man's Impact on Jim Thorpe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1975); Gregory B. Richards, Jim Thorpe, World's Greatest Athlete (Chicago: Children's Press, 1984); Grace F. Thorpe, Chronicles of Oklahoma "The Jim Thorpe Family: From Wisconsin to Indian Territory," parts 1 and 2, 59, no. 1 (spring 1981): 91-105; no. 2 (summer 1981): 179-201.
Grace Thorpe
Sac and Fox
Stroud, Oklahoma
