In the autumn of 1912, the football team from Carlisle Indian Industrial School took the field at the U.S. Military Academy, home to the bigger, stronger, and better-equipped West Points Cadets. Sportswriters billed the game as a sort of rematch, pitting against each other the descendants of U.S. soldiers and American Indians who fought on the battlefield only 20 years earlier. But for lightning-fast Jim Thorpe and the other Carlisle players, that day's game was about skill, strategy, and determination. Known for unusual formations and innovative plays, the Carlisle squad was out to prove just one thing — that it was the best football team in all the land.
Art Coulson, Cherokee, was an award-winning journalist and the first executive director of the Wilma Mankiller Foundation in Oklahoma. His first children’s book, The Creator’s Game: A Story of Baaga’adowe/Lacrosse (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013), told of the deep spiritual and cultural connections of American Indian people to the sport of lacrosse. Art still plays traditional Cherokee stickball, an original version of lacrosse, when he is visiting friends and family in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Art lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota, with his wife and two daughters.
After studying illustration at Maidstone College of Art in Kent, Nick Hardcastle was accepted on the illustration course at the Royal College of Art in London, and following his graduation he continued to live and work in London for 18 years. During that time he created illustrations for clients in publishing, advertising, design, architecture, and editorial work. Now based in Bridport, Dorset, which is on the famous Jurassic Coast, he continues to work for a wide range of high-profile clients in the UK and elsewhere. His more unusual commissions have included a series of illustrated panels on the walls of Wapping Underground Station in London and a drawing of the Royal Train for Intercity that was presented to the Queen and which resides in the library at Windsor Castle.
• Against-the-odds football story perfect for Fall • Ideal offering for National Native American Heritage month in November • Author Art Coulson is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and provides an afterword with additional context about the story
