“Idolized, publicized, dramatized, picturesque members of a fast diminishing aboriginal race, they were the white man’s heroes. But the white man’s adulations and his indulgences helped write ‘finis’ prematurely on the records of some of them even as his vices quickened the racial degeneration of their stock.”
“Sockalexis, Thorpe, Bender, Longboat and Meyers! There were scores of other notable Indian athletes from ’93 to 1915, but the names of those five were household words in the early days of the new century.”
