by Glenn Stout
As Brown prayed, Patsy burst into the hut.
Richard and Bill and the rest of Jim Thorpe’s living offspring looked up, startled. They were the children of his previous two wives. Patsy’s relationship with the four sons of Thorpe’s second wife, Freeda, was strained. “A royal piece of work is what she was,” Richard says. “To me, that woman, she seemed just mean, all the time.” Adds Bill: “The way she looked at it, people answered to her. She didn’t answer to anyone.”
Patsy had brought the police and a few men in suits.
“He’s too cold!” she declared. She ordered the men to take the coffin.
“You can’t do this!” Bill shouted. “No! Absolutely no.”
Jim Thorpe’s daughters, Grace, Gail, and Charlotte, yelled: “No! No!”
So did other members of the tribe.
But the police, Bill says, stood nearby “while the hearse people took the body and the casket.”
Neither Richard nor Bill remembers Patsy saying more.
The two sons recall a sense of sheer helplessness. Patsy was white. Whites held virtually unquestioned authority on native land, especially in places like rural Oklahoma. The tribe members in the ceremonial hut had been conditioned to acquiesce.
“The feeling was like this,” Bill says. “ ‘What can we do?’ ”
Jim Thorpe’s children and members of the tribe never saw him or his coffin again.
“The way it happened that night—hell yeah, I’m still angry,” Bill says. “That kind of hurt doesn’t go away.”
The battle of Little Big Horn and the Nez Perce conflict were over, but the Massacre at Wounded Knee was still to come, when Jim Thorpe was born on May 28, 1887, in a wood cabin near Shawnee, on what was called an Indian allotment.
The United States was suppressing Native American religious practices, banning reservation residents from leaving without permission, putting agents in charge of the welfare of their children, and sending them to Indian boarding schools hundreds of miles from home to forcibly assimilate them into white culture.
Hiram Thorpe, Jim’s father, was part Sac and Fox and part white. Charlotte Vieux, Jim’s mother, was part white and part Potawatomi. As sometimes happened to Native American children, Jim Thorpe was baptized a Catholic and given a Christian name, Jacobus Franciscus. But he came to identify as a Native American and followed Sac and Fox ways as much as he could.
“Dad was connected to the land,” Richard says. “It gave him peace. Made him strong.”
By age eight, he was an expert fisherman and hunted deer and turkey. By 10, he was breaking wild horses. He liked to spend days alone, studying the movements of animals.
Apart from athletics, little came easy for him. His twin brother, Charlie, died of smallpox as a child. By his midteens, Jim had lost both his parents. He was sent away to a series of Indian schools. “Relentless and brutal places,” says Philip Deloria, a professor of history and American culture at the University of Michigan. “They were trying to beat the Indian out of these kids, and the kids were often paying with their lives.”
Thorpe gained national attention at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he played football for Glenn “Pop” Warner. In the first game of his breakout sophomore season, Thorpe, a pounding defender and slashing back, scored six touchdowns in two quarters. In 1912, Carlisle played Army at West Point, where George Custer is buried. “Your fathers and grandfathers fought their fathers,” Warner told his team. “These men playing against you today are soldiers. They are Long Knives. Tonight we will know if you are warriors.”
The game was a demolition. Carlisle won, 27–6.
“Standing out resplendent in a galaxy of Indian stars,” reported the New York Times, “was Jim Thorpe, recently crowned the athletic marvel of the age. At times the game itself was almost forgotten while the spectators gazed on Thorpe, the individual, to wonder at his prowess.”
Thorpe, 6'1" and 185 pounds in his prime, went on to become the nation’s biggest draw in the early days of professional football. He played baseball as well, including six seasons in the major leagues. He batted .252 in his career with the New York Giants, Cincinnati Reds, and Boston Braves, including a .327 season in 1919.
But it was during the 1912 Olympics that he gave people reason to regard him as the world’s best athlete.
He hardly trained. When he traveled to Stockholm aboard the SS Finland, he was relegated to sleeping in steerage while others on the U.S. team enjoyed upper-level staterooms. But he won a gold medal in what was then the pentathlon, which combined a long jump, javelin throw, discus throw, 200-meter race, and 1,500-meter race. Except for finishing third in the javelin, he placed first in each event.
He took a second gold in the decathlon, to this day considered the ultimate test of overall athletic ability. He beat his closest challenger by nearly 700 points, setting a world record of 8,412 points—a record that would stand for 20 years.
Few knew it at the time, but just before the decathlon’s 1,500, Thorpe had reached into his bag and found his shoes were missing. He went to the locker room and found a replacement shoe for his left foot. Then he dug in a trash can and found one for his right. In this mismatched, ill-fitting pair, he won the race.
“He could really move,” Richard Thorpe says, looking up at a painting of his father in Stockholm. “He was too old to show it by the time I came around, but sometimes you could see it. He could still have that ease.”
Jim Thorpe’s dominance at the Olympics, together with his feats in football and baseball, turned him into an icon. Deloria calls him “the first pop star” in American sports. In 1951, the Associated Press asked sports reporters and broadcasters to pick the greatest athlete of the half-century. Babe Ruth was second. The winner, by a large margin, was Jim Thorpe.
When he won his gold medals, Thorpe was not yet an American citizen (most Native Americans didn’t receive full citizenship until the 1920s) and he struggled to balance white expectations with his identity as an Indian. He was “part of the outside world, but he always felt a distance from it,” Bill Thorpe says. “When you grow up the way he did, that’s just the way it was.”
Thorpe drank too much. He worked to control it, but Bill says the combination of alcohol, bars, and a nettlesome public sometimes led to fights. His first child, Jim Jr., contracted polio at age three and died in his arms. He and his first wife, Iva, had three more children—daughters Gail, Charlotte, and Grace—before she divorced him, citing desertion. He had four sons with Freeda: Carl, Bill, Richard, and Jack.
Richard and Bill remember good times with their father. Roughhousing, fishing off the piers of Southern California, trips to San Diego. But he “wasn’t easy,” Bill says. “I think I still have a few scars on my butt from when he took a belt to us.” After 15 years, Jim and Freeda were divorced in 1941.
For much of his adult life, a shadow hung over Thorpe. In 1913, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) retroactively deemed him a professional (he had left Carlisle for a short time to play semipro baseball) at the time of his Olympic competition and famously stripped him of his medals. He was an easy target: Native American, and not well educated.
Thorpe’s playing days extended into the late 1920s. Afterward, he bounced around. He lived in California, Nevada, Michigan, Illinois, and Florida. He coached, sold cars, joined the Merchant Marine, and became a security guard at a Ford plant. He owned bars, judged dance competitions, and dug ditches. He drove a Model T across the country, hunting dogs at his side, and delivered speeches extolling physical exercise. He dressed in Native garb and lectured schoolkids and community groups on the history and potential of his people. In Hollywood during the 1930s and ’40s, he found his steadiest foothold, playing bit parts alongside Errol Flynn, Mae West, and Buster Keaton.
In 1945, Thorpe married Patsy, a dark-haired nightclub singer. She boasted of playing piano in one of Al Capone’s Chicago bars. Kate Buford, author of Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim
Thorpe, says Patsy was intelligent and witty but “also an alcoholic who was manipulative, mercurial, predatory, and sometimes cruel and unbalanced.”
Jim and Patsy Thorpe had a stormy relationship, full of hard drinking and sometimes fights. She managed his business affairs aggressively: booked his speaking engagements, negotiated with movie studios, and badgered reporters to write about him.
But they had trouble holding on to money.
By the early 1950s, they were living in a trailer on the flats of suburban Los Angeles. He underwent surgery for lip cancer. “We’re broke,” Patsy told reporters at a news conference afterward. She thanked doctors for operating free of charge.
“Jim has nothing but his name and his memories,” she said. “He spent money on his own people and has given it away. He has often been exploited.”
Thorpe suffered a series of heart attacks. His children prepared for the worst. One afternoon, Jim Thorpe began speaking about what the family should do with his body if he died. Bill says his father “wanted to make sure he was buried in Oklahoma. On Sac and Fox land.” Bill and Richard Thorpe say he repeated the request to others.
Jim Thorpe died on March 28, 1953, of another heart attack.
The family—including Patsy, Bill says—agreed to take his body home to the plot near Prague, close to the Indian allotment where he was born. There would be a traditional Sac and Fox rite, then a Catholic Mass. Afterward, his body would be kept in a mausoleum until Oklahoma built a Jim Thorpe memorial, which was being proposed by a state commission for construction on or near the burial site.
When Patsy Thorpe left the hills of Shawnee with her husband’s body, she went ahead with the Catholic Mass, then took him to a local mortuary. Plans for a Jim Thorpe memorial were falling through. It was budgeted to cost at least $25,000 in public money, but Gov. Johnston Murray said the state couldn’t afford that much and refused to fund it.
Without consulting her husband’s children, Patsy began to look elsewhere.
“Moving my father’s body around like some sort of commodity,” Bill says.
Biographer Bob Wheeler, author of Jim Thorpe: World’s Greatest Athlete, interviewed Patsy during the late 1960s, a few years before her death. Wheeler says Patsy told him she began shopping the body when Oklahoma refused to pay for his memorial. “She was so incensed that she just lost it,” Wheeler says. “It would take a master psychologist to ascertain her motivations. Her personality was extremely complex.”
Patsy looked east. There might be money in Pennsylvania, where Thorpe had gained his initial fame playing football for the Carlisle Indian school. Town fathers picked out a location for a memorial but their plans fell through. The head of a local committee has since said Patsy’s dollar demands were too steep.
Next, Patsy went to Philadelphia, where she hoped to persuade NFL commissioner Bert Bell to help. Watching television in a hotel room, she saw a report about two towns some 80 miles to the northwest: Mauch (pronounced “Mok”) Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, from Native American words meaning “bear mountain.” The towns, split by the Lehigh River, were locked in an intense rivalry. One was mostly German, the other Irish. “When they weren’t getting along, one side would cut electricity to the other side because they had the transformer,” says Danny McGinley, a local bartender and historian. “The other side had the water, so they would cut the water off over there.” If a blaze broke out in one town, firefighters say, trucks from the other refused to help without special orders. Both towns depended upon railroads hauling coal, and both had boomed in the 1800s, attracting East Coast tycoons who built mansions and even an opera house. By the 1950s, coal was declining and the towns were economically depressed.
The TV report said Joe Boyle, editor of the Mauch Chunk Times News, was urging the towns to save money by combining. Boyle had established a fund to build infrastructure, lure employers, and revive fortunes. He was asking all Chunkers to contribute a nickel each week. The Nickel a Week Fund caught Patsy’s eye. She went to Mauch Chunk and sat down with Boyle. They cut a deal. Patsy would hand over Jim Thorpe’s body if her dead husband was honored with a tomb and a public memorial. The towns would combine and rename themselves Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. The name, she said, would draw tourists and restore the economy.
Boyle died in 1992 and never revealed the terms of the arrangement. Neither have any other leaders among the Chunkers, many of whom are no longer living. Wheeler says Boyle told him that Patsy was paid, but only to reimburse the cost of her travel and lodging.
Not everyone in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, was happy with the agreement. Joe Boyle’s daughter, Rita, now living in Texas, says, “Daddy took a lot of heat for it because of the name change. My daddy’s life was threatened.”
Some residents started calling the town “Jim Chunk.”
Still, when the pact was put to a vote in May 1954, the Chunkers approved consolidation and the tomb by a landslide. The body of Jim Thorpe was sure to create a renaissance. Maybe the NFL would build its Hall of Fame in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Maybe developers would invest in accommodations for a huge influx of tourists, perhaps even a hospital. Maybe there would be an athletic field and a manufacturing plant for sporting goods—all with good paying jobs. Patsy talked of constructing a hotel with a Native American theme: Jim Thorpe’s Teepees.
While a memorial was constructed, Thorpe’s body sat in a mausoleum in a local mortuary. At one point, a rumor surfaced that his body hadn’t actually been inside the casket that Patsy delivered. Joe Boyle and a group of other residents opened the crypt. Onlookers saw that Thorpe was indeed inside, his head wrapped in a plastic bag.
In 1957, Thorpe’s body was placed in the new tomb. Etched on the sides of the red stone monument were pictures of Jim Thorpe playing football and baseball and running track, along with the words spoken by King Gustav V of Sweden at the end of the Stockholm Games: “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.” Thorpe’s children did not attend the dedication.
There would never be a hall of fame or a hospital, no Jim Thorpe’s Teepees. To this day, people on the streets of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, recite a remark by a city leader, in a Sports Illustrated story from 1982: “All we got here is a dead Indian.”
The tomb and its surroundings fell into disrepair. In the 1990s, Richard Thorpe, along with his daughter, Anita, and her two children, visited the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. They drove farther on, to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, where Anita recalls Richard’s shock at seeing his father’s memorial. Alongside the road, she said it looked like a place where people might stop to “relieve themselves.” “Dad was talkative and cheerful the whole way. Then he saw it, and the moment he did, and from then on all the way back, he hardly said a word,” she says. “It bothered him, the look of it, as if no one even really cared. The whole thing really hit him, how far away his father was from home.”
Bill visited the roadside crypt in the 1960s. “I was saddened to my core,” he says. “At that particular time, they didn’t even have a sidewalk in front of his plaque. I was there by myself, and I just wanted to spend some time. I stayed for, I don’t know, 30, 40, 50 minutes. I was upset. The place looked like—you know, it looked like hell. The lawn wasn’t mowed. Weeds were there, and everything else, you know.
“But I stayed around, and I visited [with Dad]. We talked.”
His voice quivers, and tears appear behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “It was just, you know—[I was] sorry to see him go. I can’t remember what I said or anything like that, but it was—it was emotional. Actually, we talked.”
Bill says he got a feeling that his father “wasn’t in the right place.”
Jim Thorpe’s other children shared the feeling. At first they were united. All of them wanted their father’s body returned. In time, however, his daughters came to accept Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. In 1998, Grace presided over a rededication of her father’s tomb. “I want to thank the community for all that you’ve done,” she said. “I know my dad
is happy to rest here.”
At one point, son Jack seemed to agree. He wrote a letter to the town saying, “I now feel that the remains of Jim Thorpe are in a good place, and he is at peace.” But then he changed his mind and rejoined his brothers in demanding that their father be brought back to Oklahoma. The presence or absence of Jim Thorpe’s bones, the sons said, would not make or break the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
On June 24, 2010, Jack Thorpe, who by now had served for several years as chief of the Sac and Fox tribe, mounted a legal attack. Patsy had died in 1975, so Jack sued the town.
His lawsuit, filed in Pennsylvania federal court, cited the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed by Congress in 1990, requiring the return of Native American remains and sacred objects. The law, known as NAGPRA, gives tribes and families a way to repatriate Indian remains from museums, which it defines as any agency or institution that receives federal funds.
Over the years, hundreds of thousands of native people have been dug from their graves for storage or display at museums, universities, and an array of gallery exhibitions across the country. At a 1987 congressional hearing, Robert McCormick Adams, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, testified that 42.5 percent of the 34,000 human remains in its collection were from Native Americans.
The federal government itself has exhumed Native Americans. In 1867, the Army surgeon general ordered military medical officers to send him Indian skeletons to study. The goal was to build research collections that aimed to prove white superiority by demonstrating that Indians had smaller craniums. The directive encouraged widespread looting. Medical officers, soldiers, and sometimes civilians collected skulls from battlefields and waited for funerals to finish, then raided burial sites for skulls and bodies to send to Washington.