As a part-time resident of Carbon County, Pennsylvania I couldn’t resist throwing in my two cents worth on a macabre situation developing there, in the form of this song. Before Julia Ward Howe wrote new and more reverent lyrics in 1862, the melody for Battle Hymn of the Republic was originally that of a much more repetitive and pedestrian song, John Brown’s Body, about the abolitionist who was hanged in 1859 for inciting a rebellion in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). More details in the bottom comments.

For those who have never heard of him, Jim Thorpe (1888-1953) was an athlete and a member of the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma. Although he rose to fame playing baseball and football for the Carlisle Indian Academy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he was also a frequent runaway in his early years. He hit the peak of his fame with the 1912 Olympics with Gold Medals in the Pentathlon and Decathlon, but he was stripped of his titles a few months later when it was revealed that he’d played semi-professional baseball in the past. (The medals were reinstated several decades after his death.) Although he made a successful living playing for both MLB and the NFL, after his athletic career was over he struggled financially and was bankrupt at the time of his death at the age of 64 in 1953. Upon his death, the towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, which had decided to merge, bought his remains from his widow, building a shrine to him and renaming the new single town after him as a tourist attraction. (The town of Jim Thorpe has only a tenuous connection to Jim Thorpe the person as the town is in Carbon County in the Pocono Mountains, over 100 miles from Carlisle.) After the death of his widow in 2007, his surviving children (from a previous marriage) and the Sac and Fox Nation initiated legal action to reclaim his body. Jim Thorpe's son seeks return of remains; Jim Thorpe at Find-a-Grave