Jim Thorpe

The Full Biography

Jim Thorpe. Athlete. The Sac and Fox kid who made a 1912 week into an American sermon, then spent a working life watching the medals leave and a body take jobs the sermon would not pay.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a Carlisle Indian, an Olympic all-around, a man Sweden’s King Gustav V is supposed to have called the greatest athlete in the world. What the still cannot show is Wa-Tho-Huk, James Francis Thorpe of near Prague, Indian Territory, a Carlisle and Pop Warner shop, medals stripped for a few dollars of summer baseball and restored in pieces — co-champion in 1982, sole champion again in 2022 — and a death in 1953 in a trailer in Lomita, California, that no paper has been allowed to make comfortable.

He was born on May 22, 1887, on the Sac and Fox reservation near Prague, in what was still Indian Territory. His father, Hiram Thorpe, was Sac and Fox and Irish. His mother, Charlotte Vieux, was Potawatomi and French. The boy’s tribal name, Wa-Tho-Huk, is usually rendered Bright Path — the path lightning makes across the sky. A twin brother, Charlie, died of pneumonia when they were children. The family farmed. The schools were government schools. He was sent to the Sac and Fox agency school, then to Haskell Institute in Kansas, then, in 1904, to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Richard Henry Pratt’s experiment in making Native children into something the government could file. Pratt’s motto was “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Thorpe arrived as a boy who could already run. The school used the running.

Glenn S. “Pop” Warner found him on a track. Football was the first American climate. In 1911 Carlisle beat Harvard, 18–15, and Thorpe dropped the kicking that decided it. He was a first-team All-American that year and again in 1912: a runner, a kicker, a defender, a body the eastern papers treated as a marvel and a type. Carlisle was not a college in the Ivy sense. It was a vocational school that fielded a team the Ivies could not always tackle. Warner used him as the whole offense. The boy from Indian Territory became a headline the country could cheer without asking what the school was for.

Stockholm, 1912, is the week the sermon still uses. He won the pentathlon. He won the decathlon. He also competed in the high jump and the long jump. The decathlon total, 8,413 points, stood as a world mark until 1927. The story that King Gustav V told him, “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world,” and that Thorpe answered, “Thanks, King,” has been told so often it has become furniture. Whether the exchange is courtroom-true or newspaper-true, the week was real. He came home a civic object. Parades. A ticker tape. The country that had built Carlisle to erase him now needed him as proof that an American body could do anything.

Then the amateur police arrived. In January 1913 the Worcester Telegram reported that Thorpe had played minor-league baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910 — Rocky Mount and Fayetteville, Eastern Carolina League — for small money, the kind of summer cash college men took under assumed names and were not stripped for. He had used his own name. He wrote the Amateur Athletic Union a letter that did not dodge: he was not wise in the rules; he had played for money because he was poor. The AAU asked the American Olympic Committee to erase him. The International Olympic Committee struck the medals. Ferdinand Bie of Norway and Hugo Wieslander of Sweden, the silver medalists, were declared champions. Wieslander is said to have refused to accept Thorpe’s decathlon medal as his own. The rule was the country’s, not a god’s. The hunger was Thorpe’s. The example the amateur movement needed was a Native man who had not known to lie.

He played for pay after, because pay is how a body eats. In 1913 he signed with John McGraw’s New York Giants. He was a major-league outfielder for parts of six seasons with the Giants, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Boston Braves, a .252 hitter, a name in the lineup more than a bat the pitchers feared. Football was the better instrument. He joined the Canton Bulldogs in 1915, already a drawing card, and helped make a factory-town team into a professional fact. In 1920 he became the first president of the American Professional Football Association, the league that would be renamed the National Football League. He was still a player. The presidency was a star’s name on a letterhead, not a desk job. He played for the Cleveland Indians, the Oorang Indians — a touring team of Native players backed by a dog kennel — the Rock Island Independents, the New York Giants of the football league, and, as late as 1928, the Chicago Cardinals. He barnstormed. He played basketball with a traveling side. He was, for a stretch, the most complete athlete the American century had hired and a Native man the amateur rules had used as a lesson. Both are the biography.

The baseball years were a name in a lineup more than a bat. McGraw used him as a gate and as an outfielder who could still outrun a mistake. In 1916, on option to Milwaukee, he hit. In 1917 the Giants and the Reds both had him. In 1919, with the Boston Braves, he had his best major-league stretch and then the league was done with the experiment. Football kept him longer because football could still use a body that ended tackles and a name that filled a Saturday. Canton, with the Bulldogs, was the real shop: a factory town, a professional fact, Thorpe as the reason a paying crowd showed up. The Oorang Indians, in Marion, Ohio, were the other fact — a kennel owner’s touring side that asked Native men to put on a show between kicks. He captained it. He took the check. A complete life of the first NFL president has to hold that the presidency was a letterhead and that the touring years were a living. Hollywood hired the name in the early 1930s for bits and serials. Battling with Buffalo Bill. White Thunder. He advised on Knute Rockne, All American. In 1932, when Los Angeles hosted the Games, he was in the city and not on the American team; the amateur rule he had already paid for still held. In 1951 Burt Lancaster played him in Jim Thorpe — All-American, a Warner picture that sanded the poverty and kept the medals as a tear. Thorpe was a consultant. He was not rich from the consulting. The Associated Press, in 1950, named him the greatest athlete of the half-century, ahead of Babe Ruth. The honor did not pay a rent. He married three times: Iva Miller, a Carlisle classmate, in 1913, four children; Freeda Kirkpatrick in 1926, four more sons; Patricia Askew in 1945. There was drinking. There were years of digging ditches, of merchant-marine work, of security shifts, of a body the sermon still used while the man stood in a line.

Thanks, King.Jim Thorpe, answering Gustav V — the exchange the papers kept

The turn is the stripping, not Stockholm. A complete life of 1912 has to hold Carlisle’s shop, the baseball dollars, the restorations that arrived when he could not spend them, and a Native athlete the country used as a mascot and a lesson. He did not get a long rich elder lap. He got jobs and, decades after the trailer, a paper.

The children and the wives have had to share a father who is a sermon and a legal object. Friends from the playing years describe a man who could still wreck a field and could not wreck a rule that had already wrecked him. The Thorpe in California was a man who had already been called the greatest and was now a neighbor with a past the paper would not yet fix. Patricia was with him at the end. The fandom is louder than the kitchen. That is the usual math.

The later years

The years after the medals left were not a coda. They were the life. He played baseball through 1919 and football into 1928, a star whose drawing power outlasted his legs. The Oorang Indians, in 1922 and 1923, were a Jim Thorpe traveling show dressed as a franchise: exhibition games, a kennel owner’s marketing, Native teammates asked to perform Indianness for white crowds between kicks. He took the work. He had children to feed. In the 1930s the pictures and the extras lists in Los Angeles were another paycheck. He spoke at banquets when a banquet would pay. He did not become a comfortable elder of the Olympic movement. The movement had already used him as an example and closed the file.

In 1941 he became an inspector at a Ford plant. In the war years he tried to enlist and was too old. He did merchant-marine work. He struggled with alcohol in public enough that the papers, which had loved the 1912 week, could now love a fall. Patricia Askew married him in 1945 and tried to manage the name as a small business: appearances, a restaurant idea, the endless request that someone give the medals back. The Associated Press poll of 1950, greatest athlete of the first half of the century, ahead of Babe Ruth, was a civic object he could hold in a clipping. It was not a pension. On March 28, 1953, he died of heart failure in his trailer in Lomita. He was sixty-five. He was broke in the way a famous man can be broke: the name still earned a headline and did not earn a house.

The body became a second argument. Patricia accepted an offer from the Pennsylvania towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk: bury him there, and the towns would merge and rename themselves Jim Thorpe. They did. A monument went up. The Sac and Fox Nation and some of his children have, for decades, asked that he be brought home to Oklahoma. Courts have gone both ways. The town still has the name. The family still has the wound. In 1982 the IOC, after a campaign by Robert Wheeler and Florence Ridlon and the Thorpe family, restored him as co-champion of the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon and sent replica medals to the heirs. In 2022, after a campaign by the Native-led group Bright Path Strong, the IOC went further. On July 15, 2022 — the 110th anniversary of the decathlon medal ceremony — it named him the sole gold medalist in both events. Bie and Wieslander remain silver. The paper is a civic apology. He had been dead for sixty-nine years. He could not spend it.

Oklahoma still claims the boy. Carlisle is a closed school and an open argument; the remaining buildings sit on a campus that is now the U.S. Army War College’s neighbor, and the football field is a memory the school’s survivors still argue about. Canton put him in the charter class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963. The College Football Hall of Fame had already taken him in 1951. Bright Path Strong, a Native-led group, spent two years on the sole-champion ask. The IOC’s 2022 announcement named the descendants, named the Sac and Fox, and named the anniversary. Replica medals had already gone to the family in 1983. The 2022 paper is the one that takes Bie and Wieslander back to silver and leaves Thorpe alone on the gold line. The trailer in Lomita is the remainder the halls do not display. The Pennsylvania monument is the remainder a tourist can photograph. The 2022 announcement is the remainder the country prefers. All three should run. He had already, in 1912, written the public man. The forty-one years after the medals left were the life. The seventy years after the trailer are the argument. A sermon that stops at Stockholm is a cleaned room. A legal brief that stops at 2022 is a different cleaned room. The boy from near Prague, the Carlisle back, the man in the Eastern Carolina League, the first president of a league that became the NFL, and the neighbor in a California trailer are the same person. The file is not allowed to pick one.

After he was gone

Every amateur rule still pays him a tax. Every “world’s greatest athlete” still steals Stockholm. Carlisle is the correction and the wound. The 1982 paper made him a co-champion. The 2022 paper made him the sole champion again. The Pennsylvania town still carries his name. The Sac and Fox still ask for the bones. The trailer is the file.

He came out of Indian Territory, wrecked a football climate, took Stockholm, lost the medals to a summer paycheck, worked, died in a trailer, and was restored on paper when he could not spend it. If you only remember 1912, you have the sermon. If you remember Carlisle, the baseball dollars, and Lomita, you have him.

Portrait: Unknown author (U.S. National Archives) · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Jim Thorpe · Full Biography · 50 Plus Hub
https://50plushub.com/nostalgia/stars/jim-thorpe/story