Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team

After their wins, Thorpe and Tewanima sit on stage and endure long congratulatory speeches “in the blazing sun” (179). Thorpe needs to make a decision about what he should do next, and many promoters try to convince him to play professional baseball, box, and wrestle. Warner wants Thorpe to return to Carlisle for another football season and believes the promoters are only trying to use Thorpe’s celebrity to increase ticket sales. The narrator implies that Warner may be exploiting Thorpe in his own way to maintain his position at Carlisle and the team’s success.

Future president Dwight Eisenhower enters the story and works his way onto the Army football team. Seeing the Army game on the 1912 football schedule motivates Thorpe to stay on one more year at Carlisle. With the government’s continued abuse of Indigenous communities, beating the Army team would be a symbolic victory, even more meaningful than beating Harvard.

Carlisle plays its “whirlwind offense,” calling plays so fast that the defense cannot adjust. The team breezes past Dickinson College, Villanova, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Georgetown. Then, they lose momentum and tie Washington and Jefferson College 0-0. The Carlisle squad has their eyes set on Army and its new star halfback, Dwight Eisenhower. Thorpe briefly loses focus at a bar while waiting for a train and has too much to drink. The boys guide him to the train.

The following day, Thorpe apologizes to his teammates for setting a bad example and promises never to exhibit such behavior again. He knows they represent the entire Indigenous community, and the press will use any excuse to cast them in a negative light.

As Carlisle and Army prepare for their meeting, Warner invents new formations to confuse the Army defense. Warner wakes the team early for morning workouts before they go to class; everyone is focused on the game. Army is also focused and working hard. The coming game is important for both sides because of “the still-fresh-on-the-mind wars the government had waged against the Native American people” (196). Warner believes the game matters so much to his team because this would be the first time Indigenous men competed on equal terms against white men representing the US Army.

Carlisle and Army play a hard-fought game. Carlisle’s new offensive sets are working, but it is the Carlisle spirit that keeps them on top. Before the game, Warner tells his team, “Remember it was their fathers and grandfathers who killed your fathers and grandfathers. Remember all of this on every play!” (200). Warner isn’t just trying to get a rise out of his players. This is the truth, and nobody feels it more than the Carlisle players, as they run out to the field and beat Army 27-6.

Warner gives his team a day to celebrate the Army win, and then they’re back to preparing for Pennsylvania as they try to keep their undefeated streak alive.

The game is tough—back and forth the whole time. Thorpe makes a mistake late in the game, allowing a Penn touchdown, and Carlisle loses 27-26. Everyone is crushed, including Thorpe, who runs to the locker room without greeting the fans. Again, Warner blames Thorpe for the loss, rather than himself.

The team readies itself for the last game of the season, and Thorpe’s last game at Carlisle. Playing catch in a park before their game against Brown, the Carlisle boys don’t recognize Charles Clancy, Thorpe’s former baseball coach from North Carolina, who tells a reporter, Roy Johnson, that Thorpe played for him. While the team plays their last game of the season and Thorpe revels in his last appearance on a football field, Roy Johnson gets to work on the story of Jim Thorpe being paid to play semiprofessional baseball, a story that will change their lives completely.

Carlisle ends their season with a 12-1-1 record. Thorpe is, again, a first-team All-American. The rest of the story of the 1912-1913 academic year is Roy Johnson’s January 22 Worcester Telegram story that Thorpe had been paid to play minor-league baseball for two months, which would exclude him from being an “amateur.” This means his Olympic performance could be discredited because Olympic athletes were supposed to be amateurs, i.e., unpaid. As the story unfolds, there is nothing Jim can do but watch. Superintendent Friedman and Warner both lie to the press, saying they never knew about the two months Jim spent playing baseball in North Carolina. They draft a confession and make Jim sign it, which he will later call “hard and cruel” (215).

The International Olympic Committee claims there is no case in the matter, but American Olympic Commissioner, James Sullivan, petitions hard to have Thorpe’s Olympic performance deleted from the books and his medals stripped. Even Sweden’s silver medal winner behind Thorpe at the Swedish games says he wants nothing changed, but the American officials persist. Warner, Thorpe, and his team know the petitions are racially motivated and would not be happening if Thorpe were a white student from Harvard.

On February 1, 1913, Thorpe heads into the New York Giants baseball team offices to sign a contract to play with them. He is receiving offers from promoters and marriage proposals from women each day, but he remains committed to Iva Miller. Pre- and post-Olympic scandal becomes the dividing line of Thorpe’s life. After he signs his contract and the reporters ask about the scandal, Thorpe replies, “No one knows how sorry I feel about that. That is all over now, and there is nothing more to say about it” (222).

This epilogue closes out the story lines and arcs for many of the book’s main characters. Thorpe shows emotion about his Olympic medals being stripped when he walks into Giants catcher John “Chief” Meyers room with “tears rolling down his cheeks. ‘You know, Chief, the King of Sweden gave me those trophies,’ Thorpe said. ‘He gave them to me. But they took them away from me. They are mine, Chief! I won them fair and square’” (223). Later this same year, Thorpe marries Iva Miller. They have a son who will, in four years’ time, die from inflammatory rheumatism in Thorpe’s arms, an event that will change him forever. Thorpe never becomes an incredible baseball player, but he does play professional football for the Canton Bulldogs and is in the league when the American Professional Football Conference is formed and then renamed the National Football League.

Warner goes on to coach for several other teams after Carlisle and wins two national championships. The Epilogue’s focus, though, is on the questions surrounding whether Warner ever truly had his Indigenous players’ best interests in mind.

Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School is decommissioned in 1918 and turned into the Army War College.

Gus Welch goes on to fight as an American soldier in World War II before coming home to coach football and get married.

In the face of unending racism, the Carlisle men stay bound together. Even after Thorpe’s death in 1953, Welch keeps fighting to have the gold medals returned to Thorpe’s family. Welch passes the fight onto Thorpe’s daughter, Grace, after his own death in 1970, and she continues the campaign. Finally, in January of 1983, the International Olympic Committee presents Thorpe’s gold medals to his family at a ceremony in Los Angeles, California. In reply to a reporter’s question about how her dad would have felt at this moment, Grace believes Thorpe would say, “It’s about time” (233).