In 1904, he arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the institution that the military officer Richard Henry Pratt had founded in 1879 on the philosophy of systematic assimilation — the goal of replacing Native identity with something that could be absorbed into American mainstream life.

Carlisle was, by the time Thorpe arrived, the most famous Native American institution in the country, partly because of its athletic programs.

Thorpe’s mother had died in 1901, and his father died from blood poisoning in 1904, the same year Thorpe enrolled at Carlisle.

He was, by his mid-teens, an orphan from a family in which loss had come early and often.

The school that was supposed to strip him of his Sac and Fox identity instead gave him the arena in which the identity he would build for himself — athlete, champion, survivor — began to take its mature shape.