In the book the glory of their times, there are stories written about baseball at the turn of the century. Some of these stories are written by Native American baseball players, like Jim Thorpe, who played in the major and minor leagues. Their perspective is a valuable one and echoes many of the problems and issues that are still faced today.

Chief Meyers is one of the ballplayers that writes his accounts of what it was like to be a ballplayer at the turn of the century. He grew up with his tribe of Cahuilla Indians, also known as the California Mission Indians, that were descended from the Shoshone. They were able to maintain their culture for many years, virtually untouched by white civilization due to the remoteness of their location.

He left his tribe as a young man to play semi professional baseball for a few years, and then went on to Dartmouth, one of the first Universities dedicated to the education of the Indian people. Although he was unable to complete his studies there, Chief Meyers always considered himself a Dartmouth man and was extremely proud of his attendance there.

From Dartmouth, he returned to baseball and recounted what it was like to be a ballplayer in the early part of the 1900s.

"In those days, you know, the Indian was in the position of a minority group. Still is, for that matter. Nowadays, you can't ridicule an Irishman on television, you can't ridicule a Jew, and you can't ridicule a Negro. But they kill us all the time-make everything out of us they want. Every night you see them on television-killing us Indians. That's all they do.

That's one reason I don't look at anything but a ball game or the news on television. I like the ball games and the news, but after the news, then comes the killing. Those things I don't like to talk about… I see them…I know them…but I don't like to talk about them.

The world seems to be turned all upside down today. Progress, they call it. The radio and television and all, brainwashing the children and teaching them to cheat and steal and kill. Always violence and killing. I think it's an awful bad example for the youngsters. Why can't they teach people about the good things in life, instead?

In the old days, you know, a shake of your hand was your word and your honor. In those days, if anything was honest and upright, we'd say it was "on the square". Nowadays, they've even turned that word around: now it means you don't belong. "Square deal" is no more. You're a "square". Where do they get that stuff, anyhow? It just doesn't make sense-at least not to me, it doesn't.

I guess I'm like the venerable old warrior Chief of the Great Six Nations, who announced his retirement by saying, "I am like an old hemlock. My head is still high, but the winds of close to a hundred winters have whistled through my branches, and I have been witness to many wondrous and many tragic things. My eyes perceive the present, but my roots are imbedded deeply in the grandeur of the past."