How Sports Icon Jim Thorpe Emerged from the Indian Boarding School System

Enter any sports museum or hall of fame in the United States and you’re likely to encounter the name Jim Thorpe. Hailed as one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century, Thorpe won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics, played six seasons of Major League Baseball, nine seasons of pro football and two years with an all-Indian basketball team. He coached four years on the gridiron and went on to serve as the first president of what would become the National Football League.

In 1950, the Associated Press voted Thorpe—who was inducted into about a dozen different halls of fame—the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century. In 1999, ESPN named him Athlete of the Century.

A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe honed all that natural athletic brilliance at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania—an institution whose mission was to erase Native American culture and assimilate Indigenous youth. While the school helped rocket Thorpe to superstardom, it also left deep and lasting scars.

“At the center of Thorpe's life, was the...contradiction of Carlisle as the place where he gained his fame,” says David Maraniss, associate editor at The Washington Post and author of the book, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. “And yet it was the place that was trying to strip him of his identity.”

The U.S. government started the Native American boarding school system in the early 19th century with the aim of removing Indigenous children from their families and communities and integrating them into mainstream Anglo culture. Between 1819 and 1969, the nation operated or supported more than 400 boarding schools across 37 states (or then-territories).

These institutions, now widely documented for their systemic abuse, forced Native American children—some as young as five—to “unlearn” their ancestral cultures. Students’ hair was cut, their traditional clothing replaced with uniforms and their days regimented with military-style drills. They were banned from speaking Native languages or practicing tribal customs—restrictions often enforced with corporal punishment. Thousands are believed to have died at these schools, while countless others suffered lifelong trauma and abuse.

The bulk of Indian boarding school education focused on vocational training. Boys received instruction in trades such as woodwork and blacksmithing, while girls learned domestic tasks such as laundry, sewing and cooking.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first such boarding school in the country funded and operated by the U.S. government. Its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer, adapted harsh techniques he had used to “reform” Indian prisoners of war. In a now-famous 1892 address to the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, he summed up his assimilationist philosophy with the chilling phrase: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Born in Indian Territory near the town of Prague, Oklahoma, in 1887, James Francis Thorpe descended directly from famed Sac and Fox Chief Black Hawk. The future athlete had a twin brother and parents of mixed Native and European descent. Thorpe’s Native name, Wa-Tho-Huk, translated to Bright Path—or more specifically, “Bright path the lightning makes as it goes across the sky.”

Thorpe attended three Indian boarding schools in his life: the Sac and Fox Agency School in Oklahoma, the Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, and ultimately, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

One of the central traumas of Thorpe’s life came when attending the Sac and Fox Indian Agency School with his 9-year-old brother Charlie, who contracted pneumonia and died. Grief-stricken, Thorpe began running away from school—a pattern reflecting both his deep sense of loss and his resistance to the harsh institutions.

In 1904, 16-year-old Thorpe arrived at Carlisle. His report card for the first few years lists assessments ranging from “fair” to “very good” in his academic, industrial and dormitory life. Under “special remarks,” there is a single word: “deserter.”

“Carlisle students were shipped out for ‘outings’ where they worked essentially as indentured servants for area farmers,” says Maraniss. “He ran away from those twice.”

In what became a legendary—and life-changing—moment, three years into his Carlisle tenure, Thorpe observed the varsity track athletes practicing the high jump. Borrowing some track shoes, Thorpe easily cleared the 5-foot, 9-inch-high pole—while still dressed in overalls and a dress shirt—and broke the school record.

The school’s athletic director Glenn "Pop" Warner immediately recruited him for the track team. Later, Thorpe pressed Warner to let him play football as well. Thorpe overcame his coach's considerable resistance after proving he could elude 30 players in an open-field drill—twice.

Football seemed to unleash Thorpe’s full breadth of abilities. At Carlisle, he played several football positions, including punter, halfback and defense. He also excelled in every sport he tried, including lacrosse, basketball, baseball, boxing, hockey and swimming. He even won a ballroom dancing championship.

"When it comes to all-around athletes, I don't think anyone compares to Jim Thorpe," Lynne Draper, executive director of the Oklahoma-based nonprofit Jim Thorpe Association, told CNN in 2004.

After five years at Carlisle, Thorpe left to play minor-league baseball for the Rocky Mount Railroaders in North Carolina for parts of two seasons—a move biographer Maraniss described as "essentially running away again." The decision would later haunt him.

In 1911, unable to make a living, Thorpe reluctantly returned to Carlisle to resume playing his preferred sport: football. Selected to the All-America teams in 1911 and 1912, he achieved the unthinkable: helping an obscure Indian boarding school team amass a 23-2-1 record with crushing victories against collegiate powerhouses like Harvard and Syracuse. In the game against Harvard, Thorpe scored every point.

In a match between Carlisle and the formidable Army football team, future president Dwight Eisenhower injured his knee while trying to stop Thorpe, who scored 22 points in his team’s 27-6 victory. "Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed,” Eisenhower later noted in a 1961 speech. “My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw."

Thorpe’s rise to fame coincided with Carlisle’s unlikely emergence as an elite collegiate football school—a status Maraniss notes as ironic: “At the same time that the government-run school was trying to take away the identity of the Indian students, it was using the football team to attract large crowds because of the exotic nature of Indians,” he says. “The reason that Penn and Harvard, Syracuse and the Army wanted to play Carlisle is because they knew fans wanted to see the Indians. That's the central contradiction.”

Beyond football, Thorpe continued to excel in track and field events. He reached a pinnacle when representing the United States at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, winning gold medals in both the pentathlon and decathlon—despite having to wear poorly fitting, mismatched track shoes after his were stolen. He beat his nearest challenger in the latter event by nearly 700 points.

When bestowing the gold medals on Thorpe, King Gustav of Sweden told him, “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.”

In 1913, after Thorpe’s success at the Olympics and a ticker-tape parade on Broadway, U.S. newspapers revealed that Thorpe had played minor-league baseball. Even though he had earned just a few dollars a game, the Amateur Athletic Union retroactively withdrew Thorpe’s amateur status and asked the International Olympic Commission to strip him of his gold medals.

Pop Warner, who knew about Thorpe’s minor-league baseball interlude, remained silent during his star player’s biggest crisis. “There's no way he didn't know what was going on... One of his buddies was the scout who sent Thorpe and two of his friends down to North Carolina,” says Maraniss. “He lied about it, and pretended he didn't know and…blamed it all on Thorpe.”

Thorpe lived the rest of his life having the gold medals stripped. And though he went on to play other professional sports, including football and basketball, and to appear in some 70 films as a Hollywood extra, he struggled through his adult life with financial instability, failed marriages and alcoholism. It wasn’t until 1983—some 30 years after his death—that the IOC would restore his gold medals.