These days, most visitors to the picturesque Poconos town of Jim Thorpe are tourists enjoying white water rafting, mountain biking, paintball, hiking, dining, riding the historic railway or simply taking a stroll among the 19th century architecture of this charming little (pop. about 5,000) former coal mining town 27 miles northwest of Allentown.
Many also make an excursion just out of town, to a small park off State Road 903, an undistinguished truck route near the Lehigh River. There, a 20-ton red granite monument dedicated on May 30, 1957 and a sculpture garden detail the incredible athletic achievements of the town’s namesake, proclaimed by the King of Sweden to be the greatest athlete in the world for his unprecedented performance in the 1912 Olympic Games.
Although Jim Thorpe, a Native American of the Sac and Fox tribe in Oklahoma, never visited the town – then consisting of the boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk – in his lifetime, the spot became his final resting place after the two boroughs merged in 1954 and renamed the new municipality Jim Thorpe at the urging of his third wife, all parties involved in the change seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the legendary Thorpe’s name one last time.
Perhaps “resting place” is not the proper phrase to describe the grave site, for, as author David Maraniss documents in “Path Lit by Lightning – The Life of Jim Thorpe” (Simon & Schuster), Thorpe’s life and even the years following his death of a heart attack – at his home, a trailer park in Lomita, Calif., on March 28, 1953 – were anything but restful.
In a painstakingly researched and detailed narrative that fills nearly 600 pages, Maraniss not only tells the often tragic tale of the Oklahoma native, who began his sports career 100 miles from his grave site as a student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, and died in poverty, but not obscurity. He also reaches back 80 years from Thorpe’s birth, to the parallels between Chief Black Hawk, another legendary hero of the Sac and Fox tribe, and the sports hero, who was told by his mother that he was a descendant of the chief.
Maraniss makes a solid case that the two were connected in spirit if not by blood, and that both were exploited in their lifetimes by white society for financial gain; Black Hawk and countless other Native Americans in the bloody push westward for land and resources in the name of white society’s belief in “manifest destiny” and Thorpe’s bloodless but cynical exploitation throughout his lifetime and beyond for the financial gain of everyone but Thorpe.
“Path Lit by Lightning,” the biography’s title, is a loose translation of Thorpe’s tribal birth name, a name that echoed Black Hawk’s ferocity when Thorpe was competing, but sadly did not apply to the arc of his life off the field.
Mention Thorpe’s name to people of a certain age, and two associations that pop up are “world’s greatest athlete” and “stripped of his Olympic medals for playing professional sports.” The author thoroughly documents the truth of the first assertion and debunks the condemnation of Thorpe for the second beyond a reasonable doubt.
Maraniss convincingly asserts that the real villains behind Thorpe’s undoing threw him to the wolves to save their own reputations and advance their personal agendas; his coach, Glenn Scobey “Pop” Warner and Avery Brundage, who would go on to conspire with Hitler’s Nazi henchmen to organize the 1936 Berlin Olympics eventually become the head of the International Olympic Committee.
Maraniss’ scholarly yet entertaining depiction of Thorpe’s athletic triumphs and personal misfortunes makes “Path Lit by Lightning” an engrossing read.
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