James M. Redwine

Haskell Indian Institute

The Game

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Those of you who have read my historical novel, Echoes of Our Ancestors: The Secret Game, know of the actual 1924 football game that was played in Osage County, Oklahoma between the Native American school boys from Haskell Indian Institute in Lawrence, Kansas and professional players from Kansas City. What was planned to be an exhibition game to encourage wealthy Osage and Quapaw Indians to contribute money for a new stadium at Haskell, became a gambling extravaganza where more than 200,000 dollars changed hands and thousands more were contributed for the stadium. The game was the brainchild of head Haskell football coach, Frank McDonald, whose exhibition spun out of his control when gamblers and grifters got involved.

Peg and I wrote and published Echoes in 2014 based on the memories of our Osage friends, Judy Taylor, her daughter Barbara nee Taylor Pease, and one faded newspaper article. However, I recently was with professional writer and photographer, Ryan RedCorn of Osage County, who happened to know a great deal about The Game and recommended a book by Coach Mc Donald about one of the all-time greatest Haskell football players, John (Big Skee) Levi, who starred in the Secret Game. Peg managed to find and order a rare copy of Coach McDonald’s book; it is interesting and well worth the $90 it cost. McDonald’s book explains why this 1924 game had to be played in secret and kept secret:

“This game played in the Osage Hills has to be one of the best kept secrets of all time. Not only would anyone who participated be declared professional but it most probably would have ruined the future(s) of Coach(es) Frank McDonald, Dick Hanley and assistant coaches. While the team was suiting up for the game I (Coach McDonald) was explaining to Fred Lookout (Principal Chief of the Osages) and his committee the serious aspects of what might happen to the Haskell Indians. They immediately lined up some scouts to police the crowd and report anyone who was taking notes. They found one newspaper reporter but the committee conferred with him and assured me he had been handled ‘Osage Style’. If anyone had showed up with a Brownie camera they might have been scalped.

The next morning when we changed trains at Ottawa (Kansas) to come on to Lawrence (Kansas) we had a station platform meeting with the team. We really painted a bleak picture of what might happen if the word got out. There would be firings of the coaches and expulsion of the players-and the worst-No Stadium.

Several years later in an appearance before the Rotary Club at Lawrence I revealed the secret of the ‘Game in the Osage Hills’.”

John Levi of Haskell by
Frank W. McDonald, pg. 48

Also, in McDonald’s book on pages 42-43 he referred to a September 20, 1970 article that appeared in the Star Magazine:

“FOOTBALL WITH A HASKELL WAR WHOOP

It was a real game of cowboys and Indians with thousands of dollars riding on the outcome.

The game was football and it is probably no exaggeration to say that $200,000 changed hands between oil rich Indians betting on the game. That was almost 46 years ago, and the lasting result can be seen today in the Haskell stadium at Lawrence, Kansas.

In upholding Indian pride that day, the Haskell team earned the hard cash gratitude of wealthy Osage and Quapaw tribesmen.

The 1924 football season had just ended. The Cowboys were the old professional football team. The Indians were from the Haskell Indian Institute. In theory it was a game between Fairfax, Oklahoma and Hominy, Oklahoma. The Cowboys were masquerading as Fairfax and the Haskell team was substituted en masse for the Hominy Giants.

Colleges all across the land had learned that crowds of people would happily pay to attend football games and the initial stadium building craze was on. Frank W. McDonald of Lawrence was in charge of raising funds for the Haskell stadium which was the third largest in the state when it was dedicated in October 1926.

It is now presumably safe, McDonald said recently, to acknowledge how one single football game, the secret, illegal, wildly improbable contest played in the late fall of 1924 in the rolling Osage hills west of Bartlesville, (Oklahoma) built the Haskell stadium.

No program listed the players and no newspaper chronicled the game, and it’s a good thing, in competing against professionals in an unsanctioned game, Haskell and its players were risking their eligibility. But the good-will Haskell engendered that day with the recently oil- and mineral-rich Osage and Quapaw Indians of Northeast Oklahoma unquestionably built the stadium.”

Gentle Reader, the purposes of this column are to reprise The Game and recommend both McDonald’s book and Echoes and also ask if anyone has any further information about The Game or maybe even has a surviving relative who could pinpoint where, “(I)n the rolling Osage hills west of Bartlesville”, the game was played. If so, please let me hear from you and Thank You!

Contact Info: P.O. Box 119, Barnsdall, OK 74002, jmredwine@aol.com or 918-287-8009

For more Gavel Gamut articles go to www.jamesmredwine.com

McDonald’s book is available online. Echoes of Our Ancestors: The Secret Game is also available from the internet, in Oklahoma at The Woolaroc Gift Shop, The Osage County Historical Society Museum, and Peg’s booth at The Great Exchange Flea Market in Pawhuska; in Indiana at Caper’s Emporium in New Harmony.

Name, Image, Likeness

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As of July 02, 2021 the NIL of collegiate athletes are no longer the property of their school and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Each student athlete, depending upon many factors such as the laws of the state where their school is located, may sell his or her fame to the highest third-party bidder. Colleges may provide stipends designed to “enhance education” but may not pay athletes to play. However, third parties such as wealthy boosters as well as corporations may.

Until six months ago it was an unpardonable sin for amateur athletes to be caught acting as though they owned their own financial souls. In the land of the free and the home of individual liberty, beginning in 1906 when the NCAA was founded, Big Brother was in charge of amateur athletics, especially at the collegiate level. Of course, Americans being Americans, countless ways were found to transgress the rules without paying any price. The unpunished sins of many were paid for by the examples made out of a few, the greatest amateur athlete in the world for one.

Jim Thorpe was a Native American born on the Sac Fox Nation in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in 1887. Thorpe was taken from his family when he was ten years old and sent to Haskell Indian Institute in Kansas then at age sixteen to Carlisle Indian Institute in Pennsylvania. During parts of the summers of 1909 and 1910 Thorpe was paid $2.00 per game to play semi-professional baseball. In the Olympics of 1912, where baseball was not an event, Thorpe won gold medals in both the pentathlon and decathlon. The 1912 Olympics were held in Stockholm, Sweden. Sweden’s King Gustav V in awarding the medals to Thorpe said to him, “Sir you are the greatest athlete in the world.” In 1913 the Olympic Committee took Thorpe’s medals away from him and expunged his records because of his semi-pro baseball participation. The medals were returned to Thorpe’s family in 1983, thirty years after Thorpe’s death. I guess it is true, “Timing is everything”. Had Thorpe won his medals after July 01, 2021 no sin would have been assessed. In fact, under the new NIL rules Thorpe would have probably made millions, legally, while still an “amateur”.

The management of NIL and amateur athletics in schools now falls under the same entities that have been charged with addressing COVID. The federal government, each state, counties, cities and schools have a say and a role. What could go wrong?

While it is the right thing to finally put the ownership of an athlete’s Name, Image and Likeness where it belongs, with the athlete, there will undoubtedly be much to consider. Some will be good. For example, my alma mater, Indiana University, has labored in the football vineyards unsuccessfully for years. But one of IU’s alumni is billionaire Mark Cuban who is a rabid IU fan. I say “Go, Mark!” And Harvard, not known for football for a hundred years, has celebrated drop-outs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Do you think the honorary doctorate committee may take note? Then there is Princeton alum, Jeff Bezos, America’s wealthiest possible booster. What Jeff did for Amazon perhaps he can do for Princeton athletics. After all, Princeton played in the first college football game against Rutgers in 1869. Renewed glory may await if NIL swag can be offered and the transfer portal can be properly greased.

And please let me say I am fully in favor of everyone being the sole owner of their own NIL. If athletes can market themselves, my only objection is that my high school sports career was of no value to anyone. I believe capitalism and individual liberty is a good system. And if chaos at the top of college sports caused by NIL is good for college sports and if money in the hands of alumni is the mother’s milk of NIL, the future of college sports looks exciting.

My position is athletes should have control over their own images. And call me cynical, but I believe imaginative schools and boosters can find ways to categorize practically anything from books to private jets as “educationally enhancing”.

As for regulating NIL and putting that regulation in the hands of the same people who for the past two years have attempted to address COVID, I say, “Please leave it alone, let the free-market system work it out”. However, I am a little concerned with the effect collegiate NIL laissez-faire competition might have on amateur sports below the college level. When Tee Ballers start threatening to enter the Little League Transfer Portal unless their parent coach provides a new bicycle, we may need some way to reign things in.