Long time readers of the faculty lounge may recall a blog post from 2010 about a lawsuit, based on the Native American Graves Repatriation Act, over Jim Thorpe's remains. Should be stay in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania — or be exhumed and removed to his ancestral home in Oklahoma? Neely Tucker has an extensive aritcle on the continuing dispute in the Washington Post (it remains to be seen whether the town had an enforceable contract with Thorpe's widow, to have his remains in exchange for naming the town after him). Long time readers may also recall my love of Oklahoma and deep interest in its often tragic history, from segregated housing and schools, to lynching, race riots and later sterilization.
Neely recounts the tragic story of much of Thorpe's life — and captures the beauty of the state as well. The concluding few lines are captivating:
Nothing remains of the Thorpe family homestead. It’s a pasture at the dead end of a county road.
Cows outnumber people here by a significant margin. Coyotes are such a problem that on a recent evening two rotting corpses are strung up by their heels on a fence by the roadside, mouths open and teeth bared. The stench is thought to ward off their chicken-rousting brethren.
A mile or two farther out, a stone marker by the side of the road notes that the Thorpes’ log cabin stood nearby.
At dusk, the sun fades over a small rise that gives onto grasslands and the open expanse of the Great Plains. The sky goes from blue to black, a half-moon brilliant overhead. Lights from a few homes blink in the distance, a quarter-mile, a half-mile, a mile away. The land is that wide open.
It would have looked almost exactly this way — more wooded, more pastoral — in the 1890s, when the last of the Indian wars had not yet been fought, when Jim Thorpe was a boy in these fields, running after his father’s horses, playing with his brothers, sleeping in the loft of their cabin, the family together in the deep nighttime blackness.
All that remains of most of them lies a mile to the west, beneath the stars, beneath the stone markers that bear their names, buried beneath the plains of their ancestors.
Ah, this description calls to mind the beauty of the great plains, the huge sky, the land and the roads that go on forever. Always promising something better just up ahead. Read the rest of the story here.