Their hair was cut.

They were dressed in uniforms.

They were assigned English names.

They were drilled in the skills and habits of Euro-American working life.

The goal was assimilation so thorough that the student’s Native identity would be effectively replaced.

Thorpe arrived at Carlisle in 1904, at around sixteen years old.

He had already lost his twin brother, his mother, and, by the same year, his father.

He was an orphan from a Sac and Fox family in Oklahoma, dropped into an institution in Pennsylvania that was designed to make him someone different from who he was.