Tewanima

Continued from Page C1 Affairs officials because of his opposition to white education.

Tewanima learned to speak English at Carlisle and managed to tell track coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, “Me run fast good.” Warner discovered soon enough that Tewanima spoke eloquently through his running, a Hopi way of life that legend has it included 120-mile roundtrip barefoot runs to watch trains go past Winslow.

“To tell the truth, Lewis knew a shortcut on the west side (of Second Mesa),” Wilfred Tewawina, a Hopi elder who grew up in Second Mesa, told

in 1991, only slightly lessening that achievement.

Jim Thorpe, with whom Tewanima is forever linked, started at Carlisle in 1904 when he was 16 but was away from the school working on farms for much of the next three years. Thorpe’s legacy began in the ’07 football season on a 10-1 team.

But Thorpe was not the star of the team and in track did not qualify for the 1908 Olympics. Instead it was Tewanima and Frank Mt. Pleasant who qualified for London, where Tewanima was ninth (3:09:15) in one of the more famous Olympic marathons. Acollapsing Italian, Dorando Pietri, was carried across the finish line in that race and later disqualified.

The newspaper praised Tewanima, “who up to about a year ago had never worn a running shoe and who was suffering from sore feet and bad knees to come in among the first 10. His performance is all the more credible when it is considered that he came in ahead of the famous (Tom) Longboat (of Canada) who has been training for years and who has heretofore been considered the greatest long distance runner upon this continent.”

President Theodore Roosevelt took particular note of Tewanima at the reception for the 1908 Olympic team at his home in Sagamore Hill, N.Y.

“This is one of the originals,” Roosevelt said. “He’s a fine Indian.”

By 1912, Thorpe and Tewanima were such a force that they practically won track meets by themselves and were named to the Olympic team without competing at trials.

Tewanima went to the Stockholm Olympics in that event and the10,000. He ran the shorter race first, keeping up with all but Johan Kolehmainen, the first of the Flying Finns, who won in a world record 31:20.8. No American would again medal in the 10,000 until Billy Mills’ upset victory in 1964. Tewanima also was 16th in the marathon (2:52:41).

“The little Hopi is the greatest amateur runner in this country and probably in the world for distances from 12 to 20 miles,” Warner said. “Everyone who knows him admires his gameness and the modest and unassuming way in which he takes his victories. He is the easiest athlete to train that I ever handled because he has no bad habits, follows instructions and never shirks practice.”

Tewanima was content being in the lengthy shadow of Thorpe, whose gold medals in the 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon and All-american football prowess made him the “most wonderful athlete in the world,” as declared by Swedish King Gustav V.

No sooner had the Olympic celebrations ended than Tewanima returned to Second Mesa. He rarely left home for the rest of his life, with the notable exception of his first plane flight in1954 to New York upon his selection as one of the 22 greatest U.S. track Olympians.

“Not enough land for sheep,” Tewanima said from atop the Empire State Building.

In 1957, Tewanima was the inaugural inductee into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame. He essentially was the state’s only Olympian for 40 years until Arizona State’s Bill Miller won a javelin silver medal in 1952. Charles Borah, a 1928 track relay gold medalist, moved to Phoenix after finishing at USC.

Tewanima fell to his death off a 70-foot cliff in January 1969 while walking home from a religious ceremony. He was thought to be in his early 90s and to have been the oldest living U.S. Olympian.