Carlisle Indians, College Football's Real Pioneers

[Wetzelbill]

This is awesome. Also, I am a Blackfeet Indian, and I've had relatives who went to Carlisle. -Bill


Editor's Note: Excerpted with permission from "The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, A Nation" by Sally Jenkins. Copyright 2007 by Sally Jenkins. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday.



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In 1879, a cavalry officer named Richard Henry Pratt established an experimental boarding school for American Indians in an Army barracks in Carlisle, Pa. His purpose was to "civilize" his students and make them U.S. citizens. "Kill the Indian, save the man," Pratt liked to say.

On Carlisle's athletic field, however, a different experiment took place, this one conducted by the pupils. In 1895, the students took up the American game of football, still in its formative years, and began to schedule the Ivy League teams. For the next 20 years, the dispossessed Carlisle Indians ranked among the foremost football powers in the country. Under the creative tutelage of coach Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, they developed an innovative array of trick plays, reverses, end-arounds and flea-flickers, and threw the first spirals through the air on a major stage. Today, every time a quarterback feigns a handoff, or rears back to throw, a debt is owed to the Indians.

The talent for deception was partly out of necessity: With a student body of just 1,000, ranging in age from 12 to 25, Carlisle was perpetually outmanned and dangerously undersized. Football was a dull, grinding and occasionally lethal sport, with deaths regularly reported on the field But the Indians began to explore a new kind of football.
-- Sally Jenkins

Chapter 6: Cheats & Swindles
As the 1896 football season began, Carlisle adopted school colors for the first time: the Indians would wear old gold and red. Not just any red either, but a splash of bold primary color, the most vivid red imaginable. Carlisle red wasn't claret, ruby, blush, crimson, or any other subtle derivation or blend. It was the kind of red that came from a bucket of paint or an artery.


http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=jenkins/070806

[Wetzelbill]

1. No takers?

It's a great piece too.