Among the greatest athletes in history, James Francis Thorpe is legendary. Born on a farm near Prague to parents who were part Sac and Fox and part Pottawatomie, he attended both Haskell and Carlisle Indian Schools (1907-1912). He became an international sports hero at the 1912 Olympics in Sweden, where he won the decathlon and pentathlon. In the pentathlon he won four of the five events while in the decathlon he scored a new world-record of 8,412 points.

Thorpe was crowned the “greatest athlete of the half century” by a 1950 Associated Press poll of America’s sportswriters, and in 1969, the National Football League included Thorpe in its NFL 50th Anniversary All Time Team. In 1999 The Oklahoman chose him as the state’s greatest athlete of the 20th century.