POTTAWATOMIE COUNTY, Okla. — The northeast corner of Garden Grove Cemetery is a crowded one. But Jack Thorpe, the 73-year-old son of Jim Thorpe, sees room for at least one more.

“More than likely, Dad will end up right here,” Thorpe said. He pointed to a plot-size patch between a short chain-link fence and an unmarked rectangle of crumbling red brick. A step away was an undated stone the size of a shoebox lid reading, simply, “SON.”

Jack Thorpe, the man suing Jim Thorpe, Pa., for his father’s remains, stepped out of the oppressive midday sun and into the shade of a scraggly oak. He took a drag from his cigarette. Beads of sweat slid down his cheeks. Birds chattered somewhere in the bushes. Jim Thorpe’s father and a sister and a brother and more than a dozen other relatives are buried here, beneath the baking, sandy soil and the thin grass.

There is no town nearby, just a crossroads without street signs. A mile down a dirt road that was nothing more than a wagon trail when Jim Thorpe was a boy, a granite marker stands as tall and sturdy as the man it honors.

“Birth site of Jim Thorpe,” it reads.

Jack Thorpe pointed downhill toward a stand of trees. That is where the one-room log house stood. That is where a blacksmith, a Sac and Fox Indian named Hiram Thorpe, forged a family, including a boy who became the world’s greatest athlete — the 1912 Olympic decathlon and pentathlon gold medalist, a Hall of Fame football player, a major league baseball player.

Thorpe, whose veins also held Potawatomi blood from his mother’s side, remains a hero to Americans, native and otherwise — a man whose life story is part of the curriculum at schools in Oklahoma and whose name adorns buildings, highways and hospitals in what used to be Indian Territory.

“I want to see him put away properly,” Jack Thorpe said. “I want to put him where he wanted to be.”

Until then, Jim Thorpe remains far from home. He very likely never visited the towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, straddling the Lehigh River in the Pocono Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. But months after Thorpe died in 1953 at age 64, his third wife, Patricia, struck a deal.

Build a monument and care for the remains, and a nifty roadside attraction and Jim Thorpe’s name for the merged towns are yours. And so it has been, for more than 50 years.

And now, Thorpe versus Thorpe.

“I don’t have anything against Jim Thorpe, Pa.,” Jack Thorpe said. “But some things are not for sale.”

Jack Thorpe waited long enough. He waited for Jim Thorpe the town to volunteer Jim Thorpe’s remains. He waited for Patricia to die, which she did in 1974. He waited for his three half-sisters to die, too, because they had differing views on their father’s final resting place and Thorpe “didn’t want to iron this out in public.” Grace, the most adamant about letting their father be, was the last to die, in 2008 at 86.

In June, with the backing of his two surviving brothers, Jack Thorpe sued the town of Jim Thorpe in United States District Court. Citing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, the suit contends that Jack Thorpe, as a lineal descendant, has legal claim to his father’s remains.

No trial date has been set. And the town of Jim Thorpe, which slowly rebuilt itself as a tourist center with perhaps a little nudge from the dignified memorial and mausoleum for its namesake, is debating how to proceed.

“I can see the point of both sides,” said Kate Buford, the author of “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe,” to be published in October. “It’s a really difficult issue.”

She said that the town had honored Thorpe’s memory “very well and very sincerely.”

Jack Thorpe said that could continue.

“We’re not trying to get them to change the name of the town,” said Travis Willingham, the lawyer handling the case for Jack Thorpe. “We just want the body back. I would hope we could work this out.”

Thorpe has said that under Sac and Fox beliefs, his father’s soul is doomed to wander until properly put to rest. Last weekend, he backed away from that assertion. This has less to do with Native American burial traditions than bringing his father “full circle” and “doing the right thing,” he said.

“If it doesn’t work out, if the federal court doesn’t say that they must return them, it’s all well and good,” Thorpe said. “At least I tried. And I’d give the town 100 percent support.”

Thorpe is a former chief of the 3,600-member Sac and Fox nation. He has the wide face and thick hair of his father and a paunch above his belt. He wears gold-framed glasses and a silver-and-turquoise watch. He has a hearty laugh that turns his face red and his eyes shiny when he tells stories, some of them off-color, about his father, whom he refers to as Dad.

Thorpe is now the director of the tribe’s housing authority, and his office in Shawnee is filled with mementos of his father’s career. A frame holds medals from boyhood track meets in Carlisle, Pa., where Jim Thorpe attended an Indian school and first made his name as an athlete. Mixed with the Carlisle medals is a souvenir spoon from Jim Thorpe, Pa. The towns are about 100 miles apart.

A file in Thorpe’s desk holds loose family photographs. One shows Jim Thorpe playing football in the yard with his sons.

Jack Thorpe was the youngest of Jim’s four sons with his second wife, Freeda Kirkpatrick. (With his first wife, Iva, Jim Thorpe had another son, who died young, and three daughters. He had no children with Patricia.)

Jack’s parents divorced when he was 4, and he spent much of his childhood the way his father had, at Indian boarding schools outside Oklahoma.

He was 15 and in Oregon on March 28, 1953, when he heard about his father’s death on the radio. Jim Thorpe had been eating dinner with Patricia at their home in California when he had a heart attack. His body was brought to Oklahoma.

Last Sunday, Jack Thorpe stood inside a Kickapoo ceremonial house, much like the one that the closely related Sac and Fox used for Thorpe’s burial ceremony 57 years ago.

A rectangle more than 20 feet long, the structure has a floor of hard dirt and a ceiling of woven dried cattails. The lone door opens to the east. Benches line the other three walls. The house, said Ruth Sanderson, a full-blooded Kickapoo, is one of the few remaining, used for ceremonies like baby naming and funerals.

Jack Thorpe said his father’s coffin was on the bench on the north side of a ceremonial house, his head pointed west, after the ceremony’s evening meal. In a tradition dating thousands of years, people sang and prayed through the night. At dawn, the body was pulled through the wood-slatted wall in the northwest corner — “To let the individual cross to the other side,” Sanderson said — and buried before noon.

The plan was to bury Thorpe temporarily in a mausoleum at nearby Fairview Cemetery until details for a monument could be sorted out.

Patricia Thorpe, who was not Native American, arrived in the dark of that spring night with a hearse and a police escort. Thorpe’s body was hauled away. Months later, after the Oklahoma governor vetoed an appropriation for a Thorpe memorial, a deal was struck with a couple of struggling towns in Pennsylvania.

And Jack Thorpe began waiting for his father to come home.

If and when Jim Thorpe makes it, the overnight Sac and Fox burial ceremony will be completed. By noon the next day, Jack Thorpe hopes, the body will be taken to a little cemetery near a four-way stop, and buried under the sun-baked soil next to a chain-link fence.

Jack Thorpe plans a simple memorial: James Francis Thorpe, World’s Greatest Athlete.

Neither the pastor of the Garden Grove Missionary Baptist Church across the road nor the cemetery’s trustees seem worried about attracting too many people to this out-of-the-way spot.

“His family is buried up here,” said Bob Denney, a cemetery trustee whose grandmother attended school with Jim Thorpe. “He’s more than welcome.”

John R Thorpe

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