The Mafia Crime Fighter, Football Player, And Coach: Native American Heritage Month 2023

It feels awkward to post articles on Native American Heritage Month football players surrounding Thanksgiving. The concept of Turkey Day that the majority of us know is alarmingly whitewashed and disingenuous, so it makes the holiday the opposite of the celebration of Native American culture in America that the Heritage Month is designed to do.

“Truthsgiving” is a more accurate portrayal of Turkey Day that amplifies the voices of Native Americans and their perspective on the holiday (spoiler alert: the pilgrims stole food from Native Americans, there were no invitations to a celebration, and the thing shared the most was disease).

It feels relevant to point that out in a series that serves to highlight and honor Native American football players, both past and present. Make sure you catch up on all of the Native American Heritage Month 2023 articles so far, here and here.

The Native American Man This Article Is All About

Jim Thorpe is often the first Native American football player we know about in the sport’s history. Thorpe was a prominent Native American football player, coach, owner, and president of the NFL, among many other things. He is a great man to know.

But let’s get to know another Native American who made an impact on the football world and beyond, like being a crime fighter. Who is this mystery man? William Jennings Gardner!

William Jennings Gardner?

If you don’t know William “Birdie” Jennings Gardner, you are missing out! Birdie was born on January 23rd, 1884, in Towner, North Dakota, to his half-white, half-Ojibwe father, George, and his fully Ojibwe mother, Anastasia “Annie” Seice Gardner. The Ojibwe people are often referred to as the Chippewa in the United States.

William and his little brother George were raised on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, which was established in 1882. Jennings Gardner was raised in a chaotic time. The reservation shrank in his early years of childhood due to the greed of colonizers who systematically stole the land from Birdie and his community, obviously creating conflict.

As land continued to be stolen all across America, new tribes moved onto Turtle Mountain, seeking a place to live. Groups of people lived together who had never done so before, competing for the same limited resources on the reservation, which created conflict within the Native American community as well.

Despite colonizing the land, “settlers” didn’t do much but share disease. There was very little opportunity for children to be educated for this brand-new way of life that was imposed on them. A school was not opened in Turtle Mountain until the 1930s. Until then, any education offered came with strings attached.

Boarding Schools

Children, like Birdie and George, were forced to go to horrific boarding schools where their culture would be systematically stripped away from them if they survived long enough. The Gardner Jenning children attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which opened in the 1870s and closed in the 1920s.

The Carlisle Indian School Project is actively trying to bring awareness to the atrocities that occurred at the Industrial School. Carlisle deserves an article all on its own, but we will summarize a few things. There was a cemetery on campus that was the burial place for 186 children who died while the facility was open. 14 children remain unidentified.

Ms. Carr, the executive director of the project and member of the Cayuga Nation of New York, Heron Clan, describes it like this: “They were beaten when they did not do exactly what was expected of them. There was widespread sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse every single solitary day. There were little cells where children were put when they were bad.” What would earn children one of these punishments? Speaking their native tongue was one sure-fire way.

Unsurprisingly, this became a lesser problem with younger generations. Those children had never learned their native language because it had literally been beaten out of their parents, along with other important elements of their culture.

It’s important to know where Birdie came from and what his childhood was like. It’s also important to understand where the parents of the children, like Birdie, were coming from. If their children were not forced to attend, a commonality for tribes that protested against the colonizer’s invasion, then they attended because their parents were trying to provide them with an opportunity to live a better life amidst terrible oppression.

Birdie’s Unique Journey

To be clear, Birdie didn’t attend Carlisle until he was an adult. Instead, he attended Fort Totten Indian School at the tender age of seven, after it recently opened in North Dakota. His little brother, George, was even younger.

 

You would not be surprised to know that the school in Fort Totten was no better. Some Native Americans have spoken of their direct experience at the school, and families attested to how the abuses at these institutions created generational trauma that many families are still struggling through.

The generations had such different experiences. Parents would share horror stories of their time at boarding schools. Their children were expecting the worst, but since their culture was already stripped, the boarding schools found new ways to destroy children. Ms. Tracie Wilkie recalled a general lack of supervision and the drugs and alcohol provided by the staff. Her children also attended boarding schools.

While Birdie was attending school, he was dealing with the more horrific abuses that earlier generations experienced when they went to the recently opened institutions. There’s not much information about his experience in boarding school.

He was at school when his father died in 1894 and when his mother remarried a man named Joseph Rolette. Occasionally, Birdie is documented as having Rolette as his last name, although no official adoption has been reported.

Gardner Jennings excelled in sports as a child, which likely was what attracted him to Carlisle for a college experience of sorts.

College Days

At 20, Birdie pursued football, basketball, and track at Carlisle. If that name rings a bell, that’s likely because you recall that Jim Thorpe also attended this school (starting three seasons after Gardner Jennings). Pop Warner is also a prominent name since he created, debatably, the best college football program at the time.

Warner moved on from the school at the end of the 1903 season, and Birdie didn’t go until 1904, so he started the football program with a new coach, Eddie Rogers.

Rogers and Gardner Jennings got along smashingly. Both had Chippewa mothers, which was something they bonded over, and Rogers had also attended Carlisle.

Eddie left after a single season, with a rotating door of coaches for the next several years, with Birdie ending his collegiate football days being coached by Pop Warner. His little brother George followed in his football footsteps, attending Carlisle a few years into Birdie’s career.

Following in Eddie Rogers footsteps, Birdie also went to law school. He attended Dickinson School of Law (also at Carlisle) in 1907, graduated from Carlisle in 1908, and then graduated from Dickinson in 1909. If that’s confusing to you, you aren’t the only one. Education and college sports were a whole different thing at the turn of the century.

After graduating from Carlisle, Gardner Jennings coached at DuPont Manual High School in Kentucky while somehow still attending Dickinson. DuPont has its own… history. In 1904, the Kentucky Board of Education had to get involved because four Filipino engineering students were being barred from enrolling.

DuPont was a school for a word we won’t be using for African Americans. At this point, DuPont considered anyone who was Native American, black, or brown (except for Filipinos, apparently) as fitting under that umbrella. Ultimately, the students were shuttled to a different Kentucky school.

In 1910, Birdie passed the bar in Kentucky.

DuPont was not Gardner Jennings forever home. Next, he was the athletic director at Otterbein University and then at the University of the South.

In 1915, Birdie was ready to switch gears, planning on pursuing an occupation at Ford. World War I happened in 1917, and Birdie fought for the government that had given him a huge middle finger since they stole his land and his culture as a child.

William Gardner Jennings!

Now that we know William “Birdie” Gardner Jennings quite well, let’s hear about his spicy adult life.

The All-American football player excelled in the Army. He was quickly promoted to captain and was tasked with training new recruits to be prepared to fight the Nazis in Europe.

Birdie understood the importance of language, showing a sensitivity that was not particularly common in WWI. The captain was bilingual, but one of the languages he didn’t speak (Polish) was the sole language the soldiers he was training spoke.

Gardner Jennings, not one to allow a little thing like language barriers to keep his men from being the best-trained recruits in the Army, fixed the issue with ingenuity. He didn’t personally have enough time to learn Polish, so he tasked one of his lieutenants to do so. This man became an interpreter of sorts. The Polish soldiers reportedly appreciated his efforts to facilitate communication, and Birdie appreciated having flawlessly trained men.

In 1918, Birdie went to France and got gassed. The poisonous gases used during WWI all fit under the umbrella term “gas,” so specifics are unclear. The gas killed a lot of individuals, so the captain surviving at all was a blessing. Unfortunately, he had life-long side effects, probably of the lungs. That’s what the gas targeted primarily, besides tear ducts.

After returning to America in 1919, he was discharged towards the end of the year. Not one to waste time, Jennings Gardner tied the knot with Ms. Alene French, referred to only as a Michigan socialite. The couple had three children: a boy named Frank and two girls named Jacqueline and Alene.

Rumor has it that he did some coaching in 1919, but his next verified job prospects included running for political office and practicing law in 1920.

That same year, an old buddy came calling from Carlisle. Jim Thorpe! Thorpe was the coach of the Canton Bulldogs, and he wanted Birdie to play on the team. Granted, the former captain only played one game; he was 36 and the recipient of gas in the war and all.

Because the American Professional Football League would transition into the NFL in 1923, many people feel that Birdie was the oldest rookie to ever enter the NFL. Other football history sticklers (like me) would likely point to 35-year-old Otis Douglas, who played in the NFL when it was called the NFL in 1946.

After a short stint in professional football, Birdie migrated to St. Edwards College in Austin, where he coached football and baseball for a year. Imagine his socialite wife trying to keep herself in the society papers in so many different cities.

Just one year later, Gardner Jennings was off again coaching at Southwestern University in Austin suburb, Georgetown, Texas. He actually stayed there for a few years until throwing in the towel in 1925 and completely changing career paths. This man changed his career more than the average millennial. Granted, he probably had plenty of inner demons to run from with a childhood and war experience like his.

In what is both the coolest job ever (bringing a crime boss down) and also the lamest job ever (let people have their fun), Birdie was chosen to be one of a small group of agents in the Bureau of Prohibition.

He and his fellow agents were nicknamed the “Untouchables” because they were great at undercover work and couldn’t be bribed or scared away. I imagine that by the time Gardner Jennings was in his 40s, he had already seen it all and been through it all, so this gig was nothing new.

In 1930, Birdie became a part of the even smaller group, the “untouchables,” in a team of six that was specifically designed to bring the Chicago Outfit and Al “Scarface” Capone himself.

For unclear reasons, Gardner Jennings went on leave and then resigned in 1930, before Al Capone and his cronies were brought down in 1931. He came back a few years later, but then prohibition was over, so he was out of a job once again.

An Unfortunate Ending 

In an ironic and depressing twist, Birdie’s life fell apart soon after he lost his prohibition job. As it turns out, he was an alcoholic. Turning to booze and gambling, he called it quits with his socialite wife in 1943 and returned to Turtle Mountain to drink the rest of his life away.

Again, who can blame him? I cannot even fathom the things this man has seen.

Gardner Jennings passed away in 1965 in the hospital from heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver.

The former All-American was inspiration for a character in the ABC series “The Untouchables,” which ran for a few years starting in 1959.

I bet you weren’t expecting an article with Jim Thorpe, the oldest rookie in the NFL (maybe), and Al Capone. Yet here we are.

 

We aren’t in the business of judging people, least of all William “Birdie” Gardner Jennings. He has the skeletons in his closets like the rest of us, but he lived a life more exciting than most of us.

Whether you would consider Birdie’s life a cautionary tale or a story of hope would likely depend on what period of his life you were focusing on. Either way, he is an important member of the Native American football community and deserves to be honored as such. May he rest in peace.