Frank Mount Pleasant

Franklin Pierce Mount Pleasant Jr. (June 13, 1884 – April 12, 1937) was a Native American football player, track and field athlete, and coach of football, basketball, and baseball. He played college football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and Dickinson College and graduated from Dickinson in 1910. He was the first Native American to graduate from Dickinson. He made the 1904 and 1908 US Olympic track teams, placing sixth in the triple jump and long jump at the 1908 Summer Olympics.

Mount Pleasant served as the head football coach at Franklin & Marshall College (1910), Indiana Normal School, now Indiana University of Pennsylvania (1911–1913), West Virginia Wesleyan College (1914), and the University at Buffalo (1915). He was also the head basketball coach at Franklin & Marshall for the 1910–11 season and the school's head baseball coach in the spring of 1911. After World War I, in which he served as a first lieutenant, he settled in Buffalo, New York, where he worked odd jobs.

Early life and athletic career Franklin Pierce Mount Pleasant Jr., called Frank, was born into the nation on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in New York; it is the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. He was the son of Tribal Chief John (aka Frank Senior) and Rachael. The 1907 Carlisle Indians team, coached by Pop Warner went 10–1 with a 26–6 victory over the perennial powerhouse, Harvard. The team's only loss of the season came against Princeton, in a game in which Mount Pleasant did not play.

His teammates included Jim Thorpe, future Pro Football Hall of Famer, and Albert Exendine, future College Football Hall of Fame inductee. Despite being a second-team All-American, Mount Pleasant never played professional football; the National Football League (NFL) was not started until 1920. He did play semi-pro football in Buffalo, New York. Mount Pleasant moved to the University of Buffalo in 1915, where he coached the football team to a 3–4 season. Mount Pleasant's coaching career was cut short by World War I. He was commissioned and served as an officer, a first lieutenant.

Later life and death After the war, Mount Pleasant settled in Buffalo, New York. He played several years of semi-pro football with the Buffalo All-Stars. The team included many former college stars, including Tall Chief, a teammate at Carlisle Indian School. But the next day, Francis M. Kujawa, the Buffalo medical examiner, ruled the death as the result of an accidental fall.

Legacy and honors Mount Pleasant was posthumously inducted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame (1973), the Hall of Fame at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (1998), and that of Dickinson College.

Head coaching record Football