Born at six-thirty in the morning on May 28, 1888, in a one-room cottonwood and hickory cabin in the Plains country of Oklahoma Territory, Jim Thorpe entered the world as Wa-tho-huck, or "Bright Path," a member of the Thunder Clan of the Sac and Fox tribe. His mother, Charlotte View, named him for the sunlit pathway she saw after his birth. Raised in an outdoor life of constant physical activity, he later recalled that he and other children lived outside in winter and summer and played hard, believing such exertion laid the foundation for physical fitness in adulthood. His father, Hiram P. Thorpe, a direct descendant of Chief Black Hawk, was regarded as the greatest athlete on the reservation and excelled in sprinting, wrestling, swimming, high jumping, broad jumping, and horseback riding. As a boy, Jim especially loved catching wild horses and playing follow the leader; by age ten he had mastered the lasso, and by fifteen he said he had never met a wild horse he could not catch, saddle, and ride. These demanding pursuits, along with swimming rivers, running under horses, climbing trees, and leaping to the ground, helped make him strong, active, alert, and quick in judgment and decision. Although he slept early after such strenuous days, his path did not end in the local mission school or on Oklahoma farmland. When he was four months shy of his sixteenth birthday, a recruiter from the athlete department of the Carlisle Indian School enrolled him, and he soon became a star as Carlisle rose to athletic prominence.
