American Indians have storied history in baseball

Between 1884 and 1947, from the year that Moses Fleetwood Walker played for the American Association’s Toledo Mud Hens until the Brooklyn Dodgers inserted Jackie Robinson into the lineup, the most prominent minority in baseball was American Indians.

One of the most insightful chapters in Larry Ritter’s classic, “The Glory of Their Times,” is based on his interviews with John Tortes “Chief” Meyers, the slugging catcher who played for John McGraw’s New York Giants and in his career’s twilight, for the Dodgers and Boston Braves, from 1909 to 1917. Although Meyers, a California Cahuilla Indian, had matriculated at Dartmouth and was better educated than most ballplayers, his peers often treated him poorly. Meyers answered with his bat, compiling a .291 lifetime batting average. His 1912 mark of .358 was second in the league only to the Chicago Cubs’ triple-crown winner Henry Zimmerman’s .372.

From 1890 to the 1950s, the nickname “Chief” was attached to virtually every American Indian wearing a baseball uniform, a subtle form of racism in a less enlightened era. In addition to “Chief” Meyers, there was Albert “Chief” Bender, a Minnesota Chippewa whose pitching led the Philadelphia A’s to three World Series titles. There was Bob “Chief” Johnson, one-quarter Cherokee, a five-time .300 hitter who knocked in 100 or more runs eight times for the Philadelphia Athletics. There was also Allie “Super Chief” Reynolds, a one-quarter Creek and a member of the New York Yankees dominant 1950s teams.

Some big-league American Indian players managed to avoid the Chief sobriquet, including the most well-known of them all, Jim Thorpe.

The first American Indian to reach the major leagues was Louis Sockalexis, an outstanding outfielder with the National League’s Cleveland Spiders from 1897 to 1899. Sockalexis was a Penobscot from Maine, who like Meyers, attended college – Holy Cross – before becoming a professional player.

Moses J. “Chief” Yellow Horse was a Skidi Pawnee and the first full-blooded American Indian to play professional baseball. Yellow Horse was born on Jan. 28, 1898 on an Oklahoma reservation where the federal government had forced his father’s Pawnee family and the rest of the Skidi tribe – or Wolf Band camps – to walk from their Nebraska camps to poor land south of the Arkansas river.

Thousands died along the way; disease and starvation killed others in the following years. Yellow Horse and his father worked on Wild West shows, where he got a reputation as a comedian with a fondness for alcohol. The government’s American Indian agency directed that Yellowhorse attend the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, and there he developed his baseball skills. He made it to the minor league Arkansas Travelers, where his reputation for unhittable pitches and alcohol-related exploits on and off the field spread across Oklahoma and into Arkansas. Batters who faced both Yellow Horse and Walter Johnson said Pawnee’s fastball was speedier.

In 1921, Yellow Horse joined the Pittsburgh Pirates with high but unfulfilled expectations. Rooming with the alcoholic future Hall of Famer Walter James “Rabbit” Maranville accelerated Yellow Horse’s demise. Ultimately, he lasted just two injury-plagued and demon rum-filled seasons with the Bucs. He drifted from minor league’s Sacramento Solons to the Ft. Worth Panthers, and finally the Omaha Rourkes where, in 1926, he pitched his last game.

Unable to find another franchise willing to gamble on him, Yellow Horse returned to Pawnee where, because of his alcoholism and rowdy behavior, his tribal brothers spurned him. From 1927 to 1945 Yellow Horse, lost within his tribe, earned barely enough to sustain himself. Then, in 1945, abruptly and without intervention, Yellow Horse gave up drinking. Now sober, Yellow Horse found steady employment, first with the Class-D Ponca City Dodgers as a groundskeeper and then with the Oklahoma State Highway Department.

By the time Yellow Horse died in 1964 at age 66, he had turned his life around and had earned all Pawnees’ respect. Still, Yellow Horse’s Northern American Indian Cemetery gravesite is evidence of American Indians’ undeserved second-class citizen status. Gravediggers placed Yellow Horse’s headstone in a remote corner in the American Indian part of the cemetery separated by a long row of cedar trees from the white section.

Columnist’s Footnote: American scholars have learned through their interactions with tribal elders that most American Indians do not want to be referred to as Native Americans and most certainly not by the politically correct, all-inclusive term “indigenous people.” To preserve their rich but vanishing history, Indians want to be called Indians.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers’ Association member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.