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Case file s193 · Music and sport · 1953
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1953
Jim Thorpe: Jim Thorpe 1913b-cr
Jim Thorpe. Underwood & Underwood. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Died
28 March 1953
Place
Lomita, California · United States
Field
athletics, American football, baseball · Sport on the timeline
Legal tradition
US common law (Pennsylvania); federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) · Common law
Historical event
1912 Stockholm Olympics; NAGPRA, 1990
Religion
Jim Thorpe: Catholic (recorded as Native American Roman Catholics on Wikipedia)
Music and sportBodies, bones and burialsPostwarNorth AmericaUnited States

Jim Thorpe's widow sold his body to two Pennsylvania towns, which renamed themselves after him

Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox citizen, won the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics. He died in California in 1953 and was due to be buried in Oklahoma. His third wife, Patricia, removed the body during the Sac and Fox funeral rites†. In 1954 she made a deal with the boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania. They merged, took the name Jim Thorpe, and built a monument over his remains. Thorpe had never lived there†. In 2010 his son Jack Thorpe sued under NAGPRA, joined by his brothers Bill and Richard and the Sac and Fox Nation. In 2013 US District Judge Richard Caputo ruled that the borough was a "museum" under the Act because it received federal funds, and ordered the remains returned. In October 2014 the Third Circuit reversed. Chief Judge Theodore McKee wrote that applying the law to a body at its final resting place would be absurd. On 5 October 2015 the US Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, without comment. The tribe's lawyer said legislative options remained. In 2026 the body is still in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, a town Thorpe never saw.

What the law took from it

Whoever holds the right to dispose of a body can sell its location, and a court will not undo a burial that has stood for 60 years.

Sources
  1. penntoday.upenn.eduScholarship
  2. constitutioncenter.orgPress
  3. kosu.orgPress
  4. hyperallergic.comPress

Cite as: celebrity.estate, “Jim Thorpe's widow sold his body to two Pennsylvania towns, which renamed themselves after him,” story s193, https://www.celebrity.estate/jim-thorpe-1953, updated 30 October 2026.

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Where this case sits

Music and sportBodies, bones and burialsPostwarNorth AmericaCommon lawUnited States