It's been a winter for reading some excellent books in the Gisriel household and The Real All-Americans by Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post columnist, is no exception. Subtitled, The Team That Changed a Game, A People, A Nation, Jenkin's book details the founding of the Carlisle Indian School and the rise to national prominence of its football team. This is not simply sports history, however, it is cultural history and it is told with a swiftly moving style that covers some 300 pages.
Jenkins begins by interweaving the history of the Indian Wars in the West with the biography of the school's founder, Richard Henry Pratt, a cavalry officer who took a genuine interest in the plight of the Indians. He firmly believed that the only way for the Indians to succeed, indeed to survive, was to shuck their Indian identities and become fully Americanized. Hence, he felt that founding a school in which this could occur would be a service to the Indian children.
The school was opened in 1879, just as football was gaining popularity on college campuses, especially on the East Coast. Pratt was at first opposed to his charges playing the sport, but he began to see that this was a way to show the country that his Indian students could achieve anything that the white man could.
Jenkins traces both the early history of football and the contribution of the Carlisle Indians to the game. Football was a brutal sport at the beginning and there were no set rules. For example, 1904, writes Jenkins "was among the dirtiest and most violent college football seasons ever played. There were twenty-one fatalities and more than two hundred serious injuries across the nation." To combat this no-holds barred style, the Indians, who were almost always lighter than their opponents, but also faster and quicker, began to experiment with various formations and trick plays. It was the Carlisle Indians and not Notre Dame who introduced the forward passing game and captured the imagination of the football world in 1907.
With legendary coach "Pop" Warner at the helm and legendary athlete Jim Thorpe running around and over opponents, Carlisle moved to national prominence. Attitudes about Indian education began to change, however, and with Pratt no longer superintendent of the school, the fortune of both the students and the football team began to wane.
Sally Jenkins has superbly woven the history of the school and its football team into the story of the nations' history and the history of football itself. I recommend The Real All Americans for football fans and history lovers alike.
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