WHEN PATSY THORPE left the hills of Shawnee with her husband's body, she went ahead with the Catholic Mass, then took him to a local mortuary. Plans for a Jim Thorpe memorial were falling through. It was budgeted to cost at least $25,000 in public money, but Gov. Johnston Murray said the state couldn't afford that much and refused to fund it.

Without consulting her husband's children, Patsy began to look elsewhere.

"Moving my father's body around like some sort of commodity," Bill says.

Biographer Bob Wheeler, author of "Jim Thorpe: World's Greatest Athlete," interviewed Patsy during the late 1960s, a few years before her death. Wheeler says Patsy told him she began shopping the body when Oklahoma refused to pay for his memorial. "She was so incensed that she just lost it," Wheeler says. "It would take a master psychologist to ascertain her motivations. Her personality was extremely complex."

Patsy looked east. There might be money in Pennsylvania, where Thorpe had gained his initial fame playing football for the Carlisle Indian school. Town fathers picked out a location for a memorial but their plans fell through. The head of a local committee has since said Patsy's dollar demands were too steep.

Next, Patsy went to Philadelphia, where she hoped to persuade NFL commissioner Bert Bell to help. Watching television in a hotel room, she saw a report about two towns some 80 miles to the northwest: Mauch (pronounced Mok) Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, from Native American words meaning "bear mountain." The towns, split by the Lehigh River, were locked in an intense rivalry. One was mostly German, the other Irish. "When they weren't getting along, one side would cut electricity to the other side because they had the transformer," says Danny McGinley, a local bartender and historian. "The other side had the water, so they would cut the water off over there." If a blaze broke out in one town, firefighters say, trucks from the other refused to help without special orders. Both towns depended upon railroads hauling coal, and both had boomed in the 1800s, attracting East Coast tycoons who built mansions and even an opera house. By the 1950s, coal was declining and the towns were economically depressed.

The TV report said Joe Boyle, editor of the Mauch Chunk Times News, was urging the towns to save money by combining. Boyle had established a fund to build infrastructure, lure employers and revive fortunes. He was asking all Chunkers to contribute a nickel each week. The Nickel a Week Fund caught Patsy's eye. She went to Mauch Chunk and sat down with Boyle. They cut a deal. Patsy would hand over Jim Thorpe's body if her dead husband was honored with a tomb and a public memorial. The towns would combine and rename themselves Jim Thorpe, Pa. The name, she said, would draw tourists and restore the economy.

Boyle died in 1992 and never revealed the terms of the arrangement. Neither have any other leaders among the Chunkers, many of whom are no longer living. Wheeler says Boyle told him that Patsy was paid, but only to reimburse the cost of her travel and lodging.

Not everyone in Jim Thorpe, Pa., was happy with the agreement. Joe Boyle's daughter, Rita, now living in Texas, says, "Daddy took a lot of heat for it because of the name change. My daddy's life was threatened."

Some residents started calling the town "Jim Chunk."

It bothered him, the look of it, as if no one even really cared. The whole thing really hit him, how far away his father was from home. - Anita, on her father Richard's reaction to Jim's grave

Still, when the pact was put to a vote in May 1954, the Chunkers approved consolidation and the tomb by a landslide. The body of Jim Thorpe was sure to create a renaissance. Maybe the NFL would build its Hall of Fame in Jim Thorpe, Pa. Maybe developers would invest in accommodations for a huge influx of tourists, perhaps even a hospital. Maybe there would be an athletic field and a manufacturing plant for sporting goods -- all with good paying jobs. Patsy talked of constructing a hotel with a Native American theme: Jim Thorpe's Teepees.

While a memorial was constructed, Thorpe's body sat in a mausoleum in a local mortuary. At one point, a rumor surfaced that his body hadn't actually been inside the casket that Patsy delivered. Joe Boyle and a group of other residents opened the crypt. Onlookers saw that Thorpe was indeed inside, his head wrapped in a plastic bag.

In 1957, Thorpe's body was placed in the new tomb. Etched on the sides of the red stone monument were pictures of Jim Thorpe playing football and baseball and running track, along with the words spoken by King Gustav V of Sweden at the end of the Stockholm Games: "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world." Thorpe's children did not attend the dedication.

There would never be a hall of fame or a hospital, no Jim Thorpe's Teepees. To this day, people on the streets of Jim Thorpe, Pa., recite a remark by a city leader, in a Sports Illustrated story from 1982: "All we got here is a dead Indian."

The tomb and its surroundings fell into disrepair. In the 1990s, Richard Thorpe, along with his daughter, Anita, and her two children, visited the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. They drove farther on, to Jim Thorpe, Pa., where Anita recalls Richard's shock at seeing his father's memorial. Alongside the road, she said it looked like a place where people might stop to "relieve themselves." "Dad was talkative and cheerful the whole way. Then he saw it, and the moment he did, and from then on all the way back, he hardly said a word," she says. "It bothered him, the look of it, as if no one even really cared. The whole thing really hit him, how far away his father was from home."

Bill visited the roadside crypt in the 1960s. "I was saddened to my core," he says. "At that particular time, they didn't even have a sidewalk in front of his plaque. I was there by myself, and I just wanted to spend some time. I stayed for, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 minutes. I was upset. The place looked like -- you know, it looked like hell. The lawn wasn't mowed. Weeds were there, and everything else, you know.

"But I stayed around, and I visited [with Dad]. We talked."

His voice quivers, and tears appear behind his wire-rimmed glasses. "It was just, you know -- [I was] sorry to see him go. I can't remember what I said or anything like that, but it was -- it was emotional. Actually, we talked."

Bill says he got a feeling that his father "wasn't in the right place."

JIM THORPE'S OTHER children shared the feeling. At first they were united. All of them wanted their father's body returned. In time, however, his daughters came to accept Jim Thorpe, Pa. In 1998, Grace presided over a rededication of her father's tomb. "I want to thank the community for all that you've done," she said. "I know my dad is happy to rest here."

At one point, son Jack seemed to agree. He wrote a letter to the town saying, "I now feel that the remains of Jim Thorpe are in a good place, and he is at peace." But then he changed his mind and rejoined his brothers in demanding that their father be brought back to Oklahoma. The presence or absence of Jim Thorpe's bones, the sons said, would not make or break the town of Jim Thorpe, Pa.

On June 24, 2010, Jack Thorpe, who by now had served for several years as chief of the Sac and Fox tribe, mounted a legal attack. Patsy had died in 1975, so Jack sued the town.

His lawsuit, filed in Pennsylvania federal court, cited the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed by Congress in 1990, requiring the return of Native American remains and sacred objects. The law, known as NAGPRA, gives tribes and families a way to repatriate Indian remains from museums, which it defines as any agency or institution that receives federal funds.

Over the years, hundreds of thousands of native people have been dug from their graves for storage or display at museums, universities and an array of gallery exhibitions across the country. At a 1987 congressional hearing, Robert McCormick Adams, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, testified that 42.5 percent of the 34,000 human remains in its collection were from Native Americans.

The federal government itself has exhumed Native Americans. In 1867, the Army surgeon general ordered military medical officers to send him Indian skeletons to study. The goal was to build research collections that aimed to prove white superiority by demonstrating that Indians had smaller craniums. The directive encouraged widespread looting. Medical officers, soldiers and sometimes civilians collected skulls from battlefields and waited for funerals to finish, then raided burial sites for skulls and bodies to send to Washington.

Using NAGPRA, the 4,000 members of the Sac and Fox tribe already had won the return of nearly 100 bodies. Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Muscogee who helped develop the act and get it passed, says bringing Jim Thorpe home would be important not just for the Sac and Fox but for all Native Americans. "It would send a message that our people are not being stepped on," she says. "It would show we are not going to be kept as collections or roadside attractions anymore. We are going to stand up to that."

THE SUIT ENRAGED the Thorpians, as residents had come to call themselves.

"The state of Oklahoma wanted nothing to do with Jim Thorpe, and a community took him in -- our community," says Michael Sofranko, the longtime mayor. "This is the place that took Jim Thorpe in. [We] changed the name of the community, and we have held up our end of the contract. We have done everything we were asked to do."

Six decades after the arrival of Thorpe's body, the fortunes of Jim Thorpe, Pa., have, indeed, picked up. Divisions have melted. The economy is strong for a town of only 5,000 in a region still being buffeted by the recent recession. Now, when Mayor Sofranko sits on the second-floor deck at the well-appointed Inn at Jim Thorpe, he sees Broadway bustling with people. Many are tourists. Some pedal red and yellow mountain bikes. Others amble along in stylish hiking boots, passing art studios and coffee shops.

The mayor concedes that few of the visitors have come to see Thorpe's tomb. They are there to play in the surrounding hills and on nearby rivers, which have become a hot spot for hikers, bikers and whitewater rafters. But Jim Thorpe's tomb and monument has played a part in this, Sofranko says. "To get things going." And residents are proud to possess Jim Thorpe's body. To suggest this might be worth reconsidering, if only on moral grounds, makes the Thorpians dig in. Oklahoma had its chance, says Ray Brader, sitting in the back of his gift shop on Broadway. Mention the spiritual claims of the Sac and Fox, and Brader grows indignant. "Jim Thorpe the Olympian was brought here, not Jim Thorpe the Native American." Thorpe smiles from posters and photos on streetlights and restaurant walls. His image is on T-shirts and coffee mugs. Students go to Jim Thorpe Area High School, home of the Olympians. "The movie about him with Burt Lancaster ['Jim Thorpe: All-American,' released in 1951], is required viewing when you grow up here," says Brandon Fogal, manager of a whitewater rafting business. "You see that film again and again. You can't escape hearing about him. It's hard to find people of any age who don't feel an attachment."

Each spring, Jim Thorpe, Pa., celebrates the birthday of its namesake. At his tomb, a local troupe of Native Americans dance, pray, chant and beat drums. Improvements are noticeable. The tomb is well kept and has additions: a bronze statue of Thorpe throwing a discus, another of him holding a football. Plaques describe his feats. A metal sculpture of a lightning bolt reminds visitors of his Native American name.

At a firehouse in a neighborhood called The Heights, volunteer firefighter Jay Miller and his colleagues are suspicious. Miller says Oklahoma didn't care about Jim Thorpe until his Olympic medals were restored in 1983. Other townspeople have heard a rumor that the tribe wants to put Thorpe's bones in a casino to boost business. They seem to see little irony in the fact that they have used his bones to build their own economy. Ninety-five percent of the residents of Jim Thorpe, Pa., are white. By count of the latest census, the percentage of Native Americans in town is nearly zero. But its residents do not accept the view that Jim Thorpe is a stranger. They say he belongs with them.

IN COURT, the Thorpians fought back.

Their attorneys argued that the town was not a museum, even under the most expansive definition of the law. Moreover, they said NAGPRA was not meant to apply to "modern remains such as those of Jim Thorpe." His wife and the town had signed a contract. "He was merely laid to rest," one court document read, "in accordance with his faith."

The town's case was helped by the fact that Jim Thorpe had never made a will. In the oral tradition of Native Americans, there are few written wills. The town's response also was strengthened by a legal brief from John Thorpe, the 59-year-old son of Jim's daughter Charlotte. In 2005, John, a Lake Tahoe disc jockey, had abandoned his father's surname, Adler, so he could take his grandfather's name instead. "I am extremely proud of my heritage," he says. Nonetheless, he favored leaving his grandfather's body in Jim Thorpe, Pa. He filed his brief after attending a Native American sun dance in Bastrop, Texas, where he went to a sweat lodge. In the steam and the smoke from burning cedar, John says, a spiritual healer "told me that he had made contact with my grandfather, and these were his words: 'I am at peace, and I want no more pain created in my name.'"

As the court battle waged, Jack Thorpe died of cancer at age 73. Bill and Richard Thorpe and the Sac and Fox tribe joined the lawsuit in his place.

On April 19, 2013, Judge Richard Caputo of the U.S. District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of Jim Thorpe's sons and the tribe. NAGPRA, Caputo said, superseded contract law. Congress, he said, had "recognized larger and different concerns in such circumstances, namely, the sanctity of the Native American culture's treatment of the remains of those of Native American ancestry."

Bill Thorpe remembers thinking: "This is all going to be done with soon. Justice."

NEARLY 300 ANGRY Thorpians packed a town hall. "We had an open discussion on what to do," Ray Brader says. "It was very emotional." Speakers included members of the Jim Thorpe High School history club. "It was beautiful," adds his co-worker, Anne Marie Fitzpatrick. "The last thing they said was: 'Please leave our namesake alone.'"

The town decided to appeal.

On Oct. 23, 2014, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Caputo and ruled in favor of the Thorpians. The reversal was based on what is known as the "absurdity doctrine," which judges can use when they think the results of a case have gone against congressional intent.

Chief Judge Theodore McKee said Thorpe's burial accommodated the wishes of his wife and was therefore lawful. In addition, McKee said, Jim Thorpe, Pa., did not meet NAGPRA's definition of a museum, even as broad as the definition was.

"We find that applying NAGPRA to Thorpe's burial in the borough is ... a clearly absurd result ... contrary to Congress's intent to protect Native American burial sites," McKee wrote. Therefore, Jim Thorpe, Pa., "is not subject to the statute's requirement that his remains be 'returned' to Thorpe's descendants."

In Pennsylvania, there was joy, mixed with relief.

In Oklahoma, misery. "It felt like this was the same old story, the same old raw deal that Indian people have always gotten," says attorney Stephen Ward, who represented Thorpe's sons and the tribe. "It felt like the courts just don't work well for Indian people."

Bill and Richard Thorpe appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Oct. 5, 2015, the court declined to hear the case without comment.

Bill Thorpe heard the news over the phone. He could barely speak. "It hurt bad," he says. "The worst part of it is that we felt like we were not being heard. Not even given a listen, a chance to tell our story. It's as if you don't count or exist. But then again, we've gotten used to this sort of thing. It's the Indian way, maybe. We've had to get used to it. Disappointment. Bitter disappointment."

THE BONES OF Jim Thorpe do not rest easy.

Bill and Richard Thorpe and the Sac and Fox tribe believe that Jim Thorpe, Pa., wouldn't be harmed by giving up their father's remains. "What difference could it possibly make?" Richard says. "The town can keep its name and everything else. Just give Dad back."

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There has been talk, however vague, of suing in state courts, of a boycott, of getting help from a wealthy Oklahoma oilman, "someone like T. Boone Pickens," says Massey, the Sac and Fox historic preservation officer.

More concretely, Bill Thorpe has engaged Tom Rodgers, a Washington lobbyist who was a key whistleblower in the 2006 case against Jack Abramoff, the D.C. power broker sent to prison for defrauding Native American tribes. Rodgers, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, is working pro bono.

He plans to meet with the civic leaders of Jim Thorpe, Pa. "I am going to appeal to their sense of ethics and morality," he says. "You are displaying a man's remains and making money off of it. Jim Thorpe may be buried there, but that is not his home. I will remind them of history: how the white man took our land, our children, and then they came and took our spirits and our bones. Failing that, we will go another route."

Rodgers won't say on the record what that route might be.

Meanwhile, the burial land waits. Thorpe's daughters are interred near Cushing, Oklahoma, surrounded by gentle hills in every direction. His first wife is laid to rest there, too. Behind her is a gray, leaning stone topped by a rounded sculpture of a baby lamb. Buffeted by a century of hard weather, its inscription is so worn that only part of it can be read: "James, Son of Jim/May 1915" -- the toddler who died in his arms. Near Stroud, there is a plot in a circular memorial park for military veterans, across the highway from a small casino and a few dozen paces from the tribal headquarters, a police station and grounds used for sacred tribal gatherings. And there is a flat, rectangular cemetery near the North Canadian River and a school that Jim Thorpe attended before he went to Carlisle. It is easy to imagine him as a boy there, chasing horses in the distance, hunting rabbits and squirrels. In one corner, by a low fence, near a leafy tree, lies his father, Hiram.

Bill reflects on the possible sites and thinks of his own father, Jim Thorpe.

He curls his right hand into a fist.

"We are not giving up."