Gridiron Gypsies: How The Carlisle Indians Shaped Modern Football

by Tom Benjey

Overview

After pleading with Superintendent Richard Henry Pratt to be allowed to play football against other schools, the small complement of students old enough competed against college men from coast to coast. Some had never seen a real football before and most were learning English. Located in a small town in Southcentral Pennsylvania, they traveled considerable distances to play all their important games on the road, but still won most of them. Soon, Carlisle players became known nationwide and more teams than they could schedule requested games. Large crowds turned out to see and support them. Their games were covered as much nationally as were the large universities. After hiring Pop Warner as their coach, they were a phenomenon. Carlisle players made All-America lists and seven have been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. These include Jim Thorpe, James Johnson, Gus Welch, Ed Rogers, Al Exendine, Joe Guyon and Lone Star Dietz.

The only previous attempt at writing Carlisle Indian School's football team's history was made in 1951, well before modern research tools were available. Dr. Benjey's work includes all the games they played and at the correct locations and on the actual dates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936161065
Publisher:	Tuxedo Press
Publication date:	11/01/2022
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	734,699
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

A statement by the presenter at a talk about the Carlisle Indian School near the end of the last century set Dr. Tom Benjey in motion. When she said that Lone Star Dietz led Washington State to an undefeated season and victory in the first Rose Bowl in 1916, the indignant Michigan alumna sitting next to him said, "Oh no! Michigan won the first Rose Bowl in 1902 over Stanford." When they returned home, Benjey did a little research and found Dietz to be a fascinating character about whom no biography had been written. He was hooked. A couple of decades and several articles and a few books later, he felt confident enough to write a complete and accurate history of the Carlisle football team.

Editorial Reviews

10/24/2022

Benjey reveals a fascinating, little-known slice of American history with this exhaustive examination of the football team at the Carlisle Indian School, a federally funded Pennsylvania boarding school for Native Americans that opened in 1879—and, before its closure in 1918, shocked the nation with its sports teams’ athleticism and competitive spirit. Those qualities are exemplified by the football program’s most famous alumnus, Jim Thorpe, a three-time All-American at Carlisle. Benjey tells the story of Carlisle’s football team, the “Indians,” season by season, drawing from press accounts and painting it all with a sportswriter’s sense of drama and color, while also explicating controversies and challenges the program faced, the intentions of its founders, and the stories of its participants.

As the title suggests, this work is written in the spirit of the times it surveys. Benjey’s use of “Indians'' throughout (not just as a team name) reflects the tenor of the century-old press accounts that he draws on, which tend to sound like this: “Hoodwinked and hypnotized by the native trickery and masterful strategy of the aborigines … St. Louis University went down to an ignominious defeat.” The accounts of games and seasons are engaging and exciting, bursting with fascinating revelations, like Carlisle losing to Harvard 12 to 11 in the last-ever game at the original Soldiers Field, as Benjey charts the team’s growth from underdogs to powerhouse.

Benjey’s focus is on the games themselves, two decades’ worth recounted with vigor and attention to the history of college football and Carlisle itself. Especially interesting is America’s response to Carlisle’s success and the question of what a Carlisle education offered its students—and whether and how they benefited afterwards. Abundant photos, newspaper cartoons, and other well-selected visual documentation fill out the story, both celebrating these athletes and offering an illuminating (and sometimes upsetting) glimpse of bygone attitudes.

Takeaway: The fascinating history of a Native American college football program founded in 1879.

Great for fans of: Wade Davies’s Native Hoops, Steve Sheinkin’s Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team.

Production grades Cover: B Design and typography: A Illustrations: A Editing: B Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews