The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation . By Sally Jenkins. Photos, 343pp. New York, NY, Doubleday Publishers, 2007. $24.95.
THE REAL ALL AMERICANS satisfies the reader with an innovative look at the Carlisle Indian School through the perspective of the development of the American sport of football. The unsuspecting sports enthusiast may just find herself intrigued as a previously unknown history unfolds through Jenkins' stories of players and the unique circumstances that placed them at the first off-rez boarding school far from Indian Country. We are introduced to Carlisle athletes one by one as they move from their traditional communities on the reservations and agencies to the gridiron, where they meet and compete with the Ivy League teams typically credited with the early development of the game. Set just before and after the turn of the last century, we are privileged to meet and understand the experiences of real-people athletes, beyond the legendary treatment of the greatest of them all, the Sac and Fox athlete, Jim Thorpe.
Thorpe's cohorts on the field included athletes of much lesser fame who paved the way for him. They represented a variety of nations and cultures from every corner of the United States and in between. Anishinaabe, Lakota, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Alaskan, Oneida, Seneca, Tuscarora, Pueblo, Delaware, Mission and Cherokee were among the Indian nations represented on Carlisle's teams. Jenkins writes, "Their presence on the football field presented an unmistakable shadow play, for players and spectators alike, of the old frontier battles."
Winters in New England are lengthy and bitter, and the college-age students at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) Training School (Springfield College today) in Springfield, Massachusetts in the early 1890s could become somewhat boisterous when weather conditions prohibited their going outside to participate in sports.
In the late winter of January, 1910 Carlisle Indian School Athletic Director, Glen "Pop" Warner announced his intentions to replace the school's baseball program with lacrosse.