The Real All-Americans Carlisle Industrial Indian School Football Team.
For a few years at the beginning of the 20th Century, football became a major sport in the US. One would think that the powerhouses of that era would be Ivy League schools, Army and Navy or Penn. No, it was a small school in Pennsylvania known as ''The Carlisle Industrial Indian School'' with a student body of all Native Americans some there by choice and many not. In age from six years old to twenty-five for a total of a thousand student body.
It is against this background that college football became ''the game'' The culmination of it was when Army played Carlisle Industrial Indians School. The game that changed football forever.
Jim Thorpe, Pop Warner (Carlisle coach) Dwight Eisenhower playing for Army.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Real All-Americans by Sally Jenkins
This book combines my two real passions – football and history – so was always likely to come out a winner in my eyes. The Journey begins in the American West, in Indian Territory, in the heart of the expansion westward, and the conflict between the new American nation and the Native Americans forever being forced into tighter and tighter pockets of land.
History is full of stories of the Indian Wars, the bitter conflict between the United States and the Native Americans, and many in the government and military at the time believed that the only way the conflict would ever be resolved was total military victory. Essentially to wipe Native Americans off the map entirely. One man had a different plan however, his plan to civilize the Indians and educate them, with a view to assimilation into the white man’s world.
His ideas brought about the creation of Carlisle Academy, a school for Indians. The children of great Indian Chiefs were collected and sent to Carlisle, where they could be educated, and sent home. Somewhere along the way, they began to play football – a game at this stage largely confined to the Ivy Leagues. Handicapped by a lack of size, the Carlisle Indians instead turned to invention, skill, intelligence and misdirection to overcome the odds. Carlisle not only battled superior size, but also the view that the white world had of the ‘lazy, stupid Indian’, an ignorant view that would be repeated when it came to black players years later.
Not only did Carlisle do itself proud on the football field, but they also produced one of the finest athletes the world has ever known, Jim Thorpe, a student at Carlisle from 1904 to 1913. The story features a series of famous football characters, from Thorpe, to Pop Warner, Dwight Eisenhower, and the imposing figures of the Ivy League powerhouses of Harvard and Yale. The book is not only a story of college football in the early part of the century, but also an amazing tale of the relationship between the white world and the Native Americans.
The inevitable and repeated betrayal of the US Government as it advanced westward led many Native American leaders to see that their way of life could never survive as it was. They felt that sending their children to be educated at a place like Carlisle would be a better option than annihilation at the hands of the military.
The Real All Americans brings you inside Carlisle Academy, into the world of the young Indians, striving for acceptance in a world of the white man, striving against xenophobic stereotypes of them as a people, and striving against a larger and arrogant opponent on the football field in the dominant Ivy League power houses. Carlisle is the tale of a generation of Native American children who lived through a remarkable time in American history, and who found time during the upheaval to take on the college football world and win.
By the beginning of the Carlisle football story, the team was just getting by with desire. The desire to compete and show well. By the end of their story, the Carlisle team had pioneered some of football’s biggest changes, been the inventors of some of the finest football seen in the land, and owned one of the world’s finest athletes.
This is an excellent book for those of you like me with an interest in both history and football, and it combines the two very well.
OFF-TOPIC COMMENTS WILL BE DELETED WITHOUT WARNING.
Tags
Who is online
111 visitors
The game that changed football.
cool story and video clip. from adversity comes excellence...
It's hard to imagine that a small group of Indians were the best of best in college football against the best in the country.
sounds to me like the players and pop warner revolutionized the game out of necessity. reading about thorpe losing all his olympic medals over bullshit and then dying in poverty pisses me off, again...
A sad situation for sure what is even worse is that he is buried in Jim Thorpe PA and he has nothing to do with PA or the town and SCOTUS said that they could not move his body back to his ancestral home to be buried.
fubar
what's cool though is that after watching that video, I went to youtube later and my feed was loaded up with stuff about thorpe. I'll watch most of it later, when people that remind me of his antagonists are well out of range. /s
There is some great stuff on youtube regarding Thorpe.
Jim Thorpe - "The All American"! He borrowed those shoes and won!
Most people are unaware that Jim Thorpe was the 1912 Intercolligent Ballroom Dancing Champion.
My Mom told us all about Jim Thorp when we were kids...
Very cool, never knew the natives had such an impact on the game. But one thing, Eisenhower didn’t just become a general, he became the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WW2.
Yes, he did and then two terms as President of the US.
Thanks for this article. I never would have known that Native Americans played a big part in the development of the game. Although I was never that attracted to football, either watching it of being on my high school's team (I wasn't a very good player), I'm aware of how important it is for Americans. In Canada, hockey was our game.
Today when watching a football game you see a forward pass or lateral or many of the plays that mark today's game they came from the Carlisle Indians.