The Path That Led To Stockholm

James Francis Thorpe was born in May 1887 — or 1888; his estate cites the earlier year, official records suggest the later one, and no birth certificate has been located — near present-day Prague, Oklahoma, in what was then Indian Territory.

He was a citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation, a people whose ancestral homelands had been in the Great Lakes region before a series of forced removals, treaties, and the upheavals of the nineteenth century had brought them to Oklahoma.

His Sac and Fox name was Wa-Tho-Huk.

The translation offered most often is “Bright Path,” though other renderings — “a path lighted by a great flash of lightning” — carry a more dramatic quality.

His father, Hiram Thorpe, was of Sac and Fox and Irish descent.

His mother, Charlotte Vieux, was of French and Potawatomi ancestry.

The family background was complicated in the specific way that the collision of Native American and American settler worlds had made complicated across generations — multiple nations, multiple lines of ancestry, navigating an Indian Territory that was itself being rapidly transformed by the forces of American expansion.

He grew up on his family’s ranch, hunting and fishing and running.

He had a twin brother, Charlie, and the death of Charlie from pneumonia when both boys were around nine years old was a blow from which Jim took years to recover.

He ran away from school after Charlie died — literally ran, covering twenty-three miles on foot to get home from the Sac and Fox Agency School.

It was the first demonstration of a physical gift that would eventually define his life.

The boarding school system found him, as it found most Native children of his generation.

He attended the Sac and Fox Agency School, then Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas.