Nellie Robertson Denny, born in 1871 on the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux reservation in South Dakota, came to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS) in 1880 as a nine-year-old child. After 10 years of schooling, she became a member of the second graduating class in 1890, where she was then hired by CIIS as a teacher and later, as chief clerk. She also ran the Outing Program at Carlisle – a system where students were placed in homes of white families instead of returning to their home communities during enrollment.
She married Wallace Denny (Oneida) and they both continued to work at the school until its closing in 1918. During Nellie’s tenure as chief clerk, she kept track of former students and handled the record keeping. She also was vital in helping facilitate the logistics of the closing of the school. Nellie and Wallace retrieved and salvaged the school’s photographs, newspapers, and athletic trophies, while the official school records were sent to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. In 1922, after hoping to set up a museum of their own, they decided to give their collection to the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, which was later transferred to the Cumberland County Historical Society at Nellie and Wallace’s urging.
After having spent forty years in Carlisle, Nellie Robertson Denny accompanied her husband and child to Palo Alto, California, where Wallace took a position working for the legendary football coach, Glenn “Pop” Warner, at Stanford University. They lived in California for twenty years. Nellie Robertson Denny died in May 1935 in Palo Alto, California.
James Francis Thorpe was born in 1887 to Hiram Thorpe and Charlotte Vieux in a one-room cabin near Prague, Oklahoma. Hiram was a farmer and Charlotte, a Pottawatomie Indian, a descendant of the last great Sauk and Fox chief Black Hawk, a noted warrior and athlete.