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.”