Two years after Pratt banned football at Carlisle, about forty uniformed students gathered outside the door to the superintendent’s office. They took off their caps and held them in their hands. One of the boys knocked.
Pratt called for the visitors to enter.
The students filed in and crowded around Pratt’s desk. As they had planned, one of the teens, a champion on the school’s speech-and-debate team, stepped forward.
“Sir,” he began, “we understand your reasons for forbidding us to play football against outside schools.”
He then made the case in favor of competitive football. The sport was popular at the best colleges. It was a game of strength, discipline, teamwork, perseverance. It was dangerous, but so what? “We are not afraid of injuries,” the student explained. What they were afraid of was being denied the opportunity to compete, the chance to show what they could do.
Pratt was silent for a long moment. He was demanding a lot of these students. They were living far from home, totally cut off from families for years at a time. Maybe football could be a positive outlet for their frustration and their anger. Maybe the chance to compete against white schools had some kind of symbolic meaning for them. Maybe they just loved the game.
Maybe all of the above.
“Boys, I begin to realize that I must surrender,” Pratt finally said. “I will let you take up outside football again, under two conditions.”
The students cheered.
“First,” Pratt said, “you will never, under any circumstances, slug.”
Slugging—flat-out punching opponents when the referee wasn’t looking—was a common feature of early football. A football team representing Carlisle, Pratt knew, would be facing not only that kind of violence, but also the prejudice of white fans and sportswriters. Pratt explained: “Can’t you see that if you slug, people who are looking on will say, ‘There, that’s the Indian of it. Just see them. They are savages and you can’t get it out of them.’ Our white fellows may do a lot of slugging and it causes little or no remark, but you have to make a record for your race.”
“All right, Captain,” several of the students said. “We agree to that.”
“My other condition is this,” Pratt said. “That, in the course of two, three, or four years, you will develop your strength and ability to such a degree that you will whip the biggest football team in the country. What do you say to that?”
The students hesitated, and with good reason.
Professional football and the National Football League were still decades away. College football was football, and the sport was totally dominated by elite eastern universities. These schools recruited the biggest players and pounded their way to victory after victory. In the twenty-three years since the first game at Rutgers, every single national championship had been claimed by one of just four schools—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania, the “Big Four,” as sportswriters called them.
Carlisle, on the other hand, had a student body of fewer than one thousand. Just half the students were boys, and half of those were under sixteen. The would-be players had no football coach and knew very little beyond the basic rules of the game. How could they ever expect to beat a team like Harvard or Yale?
“Well, Captain,” the champion debater said, “we will try.”
“I don’t want you to promise to try,” Pratt snapped. “I want you to say that you will do it. The man who only thinks of trying to do a thing admits to himself that he may fail.”
The young men looked at each other.
Their spokesman said, “Yes, sir. We will agree to that.”
* * *
Step one was to learn how the game was supposed to be played.
Pratt was clueless, but a Carlisle teacher named Anna Luckenbaugh reached out to a friend of hers, Vance McCormick, a former Yale quarterback who happened to live nearby. He agreed to teach the team some football basics.
Vance McCormick, pictured here as captain of the Yale University football team, went on to become the first coach at Carlisle.
McCormick showed up in a hat and stylish suit. He walked onto a muddy field and looked over the group gathered in front of him, young men in loose canvas pants and tattered sweaters. Deciding to start with a simple demonstration, he picked up a football and tossed it down the slightly sloping field.
The watermelon-shaped ball waddled to a stop in a puddle. McCormick told the team to race for the ball, see who could dive on it first. No one moved.
Maybe, McCormick figured, the men weren’t following his English. He motioned with his arms toward the loose ball. No response.
So he turned and charged toward the ball himself, diving for it and landing headfirst with a splash. He came up covered in mud, brown water dripping from the brim of his hat. He was holding the football.
That was lesson number one—you’ve got to want it more than the other guy.
The proper way to cover a loose ball, as described in a correspondence course Pop Warner would begin selling in 1912.
McCormick continued dropping by Carlisle a few afternoons a week. Most of the players were a lot smaller than the brutes he’d played with at Yale, but he liked their desire and toughness. There was potential here for a decent team.
The players stunned McCormick by telling him they had their sights set a lot higher—they wanted to play his old team, Yale.
But best, all agreed, to start small. Carlisle’s first official game, played on November 11, 1893, was a scrimmage with Harrisburg High School. Carlisle won, 10–0. The following fall, the team played its first schedule of games against men their own age, college teams and athletic clubs.
Reality set in, fast.
They were mauled by Lehigh University, Navy, and Bucknell. The biggest crowd to see Carlisle that season gathered in a park in Washington, DC, for a matchup with the Columbia Athletic Club. Describing the Carlisle team as a cute little novelty act, the Washington Post attributed the big turnout to mere curiosity.
For a group of Assiniboine leaders from Montana, in town for talks with the government, the game had an entirely different meaning. They sat in the bleachers, cheering the visiting team with what the Washington Times called “obvious delight.” It was an early indication that Native Americans from all over the country might one day look to this Carlisle team for hope and inspiration.
If they were any good, that is. They weren’t.
In an article headlined LO, THE POOR INDIANS, the Post described the vicious beating Carlisle took that afternoon. The much bigger home team slugged openly, sending four Indian players staggering to the sidelines. The low point was when Carlisle’s Ben American Horse, nicknamed “Flying Man” for his bold leaps over defenders, tried his trademark move—and was met with a fist to the face. Blood spurted from his broken nose before he even hit the ground.
Final Score: Columbia Athletic Club, 18, Carlisle, 0.