The American athlete and Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe has received numerous accolades for his athletic accomplishments.
The Associated Press ranked him as the “greatest athlete” from the first 50 years of the 20th century, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted him as part of its inaugural class in 1963.
The town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania was named in his honor. It has a monument site that contains his remains, which were the subject of legal action. Thorpe appeared in several films and was portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the 1951 film Jim Thorpe – All-American.
The son of an Irish father and a Sac and Fox Indian mother Jim Thorpe died on March 28, 1953, in Lomita, California, United States at the age of 65.
Did Jim Thorpe have a twin brother?
Yes, Jim Thorpe has a twin brother named Charlie Thorpe. The two were born on the same day May 28, 1888, in Prague, Oklahoma, United States.
Jim attended the Sac and Fox Indian Agency school in Stroud, with his twin brother, Charlie. Charlie helped him through school until he died of pneumonia when they were nine years old.
Jim ran away from school several times. His father sent him to the Haskell Institute, an Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas, so that he would not run away again.
Their mother Charlotte Vieux was a member of the Citizen Pottawatomie Band. Charlotte’s parents, Jacob and Elizabeth Vieux, shared between them a mixture of Pottawatomie, Kickapoo, Menominee, and French ancestry.
In 1867, when Charlotte was only four years old, her entire family and the thousand other members of their band were forcibly relocated from their home in Kansas to Indian Territory.
Their father Hiram Phillip Thorpe was born to a Sac and Fox mother and an Irish-American father. Summing up his lineage, Jim observed he was five-eighths Indian, one-fourth Irish, and one-eighth French.
Source: nflfaqs.com
