Jim Thorpe

Jim Thorpe and his twin brother Charlie were born near Prague, in what was still Indian Territory, to a Sac and Fox father and a Potawatomi mother. Charlie died of pneumonia at nine, and Jim, by his own account, never fully got over it. His mother died in childbirth while he was away at the Haskell Institute, and his father died in 1904 of gangrene from a hunting wound, leaving him orphaned at 16 with no money and no home to return to. He worked horse ranches before a scout for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School found him. A coach named Pop Warner spotted him one afternoon crossing a track in street clothes, on his way somewhere else, and watched him clear the high-jump bar on a whim.

What followed at Carlisle and after is the most famous athletic record of the twentieth century, and BriefHistory.us tells it in full. This page picks up where the trophies stop mattering.

The professional money never lasted. Thorpe played major league baseball into his mid-thirties and minor league ball after that, then football until he was 41, but he had no pension and no second career waiting once his body gave out. He worked construction, dug ditches, stood as a bouncer, and took bit parts as an anonymous Native American extra in more than 70 Hollywood Westerns, occasionally speaking a line as himself. In 1950 he was hospitalized for lip cancer as a charity case — his third wife, Patricia, told reporters plainly, 'We're broke. Jim has nothing but his name and his memories.' He had outlived a son who died of influenza at three and had married three times by the time he died of a heart attack in 1953, at a diner table in California, still poor.

His family tried to bury him with Sac and Fox rites in Oklahoma — Patricia interrupted the ceremony and, after Oklahoma declined to fund a proposed memorial, shipped his body to Pennsylvania in 1954, where two struggling coal towns merged, renamed themselves Jim Thorpe, and buried him there in exchange for tourist dollars. He had never set foot in the state. His son Jack sued under federal Native American grave-protection law in 2010 to bring him home — the case reached the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it in 2015, and he remains in Pennsylvania. In 2024 the United States announced a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. The town that holds his grave still carries his name.

Jim Thorpe's life against the full span of the corpus.

• New York Giants (baseball) other
  Major league career, 1913-1919 1913
• Canton Bulldogs other
  Professional football, into the founding years of the NFL 1915
• Jim Thorpe -- All-American film
  Warner Bros. biopic starring Burt Lancaster, from a story Thorpe sold rights to in 1931 1951

• 1896 aged ~9 His twin brother Charlie dies of pneumonia at age nine
• 1904 aged ~17 His father dies of gangrene, orphaning him at 16
• 1907 aged ~20 Clears the school high-jump record in street clothes, unrecruited Coach Pop Warner saw it and brought him onto the Carlisle track team.
• 1913 aged ~26 Signs with the New York Giants after the Olympic medals are stripped
• 1918 aged ~31 His son James Jr. dies of influenza at age three
• 1928 aged ~41 Retires from professional football at 41
• 1950 aged ~63 Hospitalized for lip cancer as a charity case
• March 28, 1953 aged 65 Dies of a heart attack in Lomita, California
• 1954 aged ~67 His body is shipped to Pennsylvania and buried in the renamed town of Jim Thorpe

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