On Thanksgiving Day of 1907, Francis Cayou’s Little Giants won their most stirring victory in his storied four-year coaching career at Wabash. A few days later President George Mackintosh fired Cayou. How could this have happened?
Born March 7, 1874 on the Omaha Reservation near Decatur, NE, in 1893, Cayou graduated from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1896 but remained under the school’s jurisdiction until 1899 and continued playing football for the Carlisle Indians.
Smaller and younger than most of their opponents, the Carlisle players relied more on quickness than on brute strength. They regularly lost to their Ivy League opponents (the best teams in the country), but routinely won the rest of their games.
Enrolling in the engineering program at the University of Illinois in 1899, Cayou played on the football team for three years. He also excelled in track and field but left Illinois before completing the engineering course.
Described as “gregarious, fluent and fine-looking, with a beautiful singing and speaking voice and social connections stemming from his fraternity membership,” Cayou appears to have been fully accepted as part of mainstream Midwestern society, a striking contrast to the experience of his African-American contemporaries. In 1903 he married Annabelle Elmira Snyder, a beautiful 18-year-old blonde described by many as the “prettiest girl in Illinois.”
In 1904 president william kane hired Cayou as the Wabash football coach, track coach, and athletics director. In The First Hundred Years, Osborne and Gronert tell us that Kane was “a believer in the wholesomeness of athletics… With his disposition always to stress character, [he] wanted for Wabash College not less college spirit but more college spirit, first of all for its moral effect, and second for the effect it might have on increasing the enrollment…. And so in the fall of 1900 football was revived. The first college intercollegiate game that a Wabash football team had played since 1896 was a game with DePauw, at Crawfordsville. Wabash won, six to nothing.”
Cayou was a perfect fit for the Wabash of the Kane era. Although he was a hard taskmaster during practice, “The Chief,” as he was affectionately called by his players, was a supportive and inspirational leader on game day. Although their overall record was only 17-12-1 (excluding games against high schools), the team won all its games against small-college opponents.
But Wabash also took on the strongest teams in the Midwest, routinely playing games against Big Ten opponents. Their record against these teams included a number of close losses and an occasional victory, including a 5-0 win over Notre Dame in South Bend. Impressed by the stirring efforts of the Wabash players against their much heavier opponents, Chicago and Indianapolis sportswriters began to refer to the team as the “Little Giants,” a term that may have originated with Cayou and Walter Eckersall, a three-time All-American at the University of Chicago and a referee of many Midwest football games.
The 1907 season, Cayou’s last, was to end with one of the most dramatic wins in the Little Giants’ storied history. The final game played on Thanksgiving Day at Saint Louis University, which had been undefeated for three years and unscored on for two. At the end of the first half Saint Louis enjoyed an 11-0 lead (touchdowns were worth five points, conversions one). However, in the last few minutes the speed of the Little Giants began to assert itself. Time ran out in the half with Wabash on the Saint Louis 3-yard line.
According to some notes from Assistant Manager James D. Adams 1909, at halftime Cayou climbed upon an old broken-down stove in a tiny dressing room at Sportsman’s Park and addressed the players, “speaking as he always did with his teeth tightly closed, his voice low and penetrating”:
‘You boys have played the greatest game of your entire life. I’m proud of you to the bottom of my heart and this is the last game for several of you. You will never wear this uniform again. Hundreds and thousands of people are watching the results of this game and you’ve got the opportunity to make yourselves champions of the Southwest if you’ve got the moral courage to do it. You were sweeping them off their feet as the half ended. You’ve got them beat and I’ll not put a man in to play who will not promise me that he’ll refuse to leave the field without a victory.’
As Cay (pronounced “Ki”) stopped talking, every player crowded for his turn to grab the coach by the hand and look him in the eye and say, ‘Cay, I promise.’”
The second half was all Wabash. The Little Giants scored four touchdowns, although two were disallowed, and Pony Sohl kicked both points after to win the game, 12-11. After a wild celebration on the field, the team and its supporters returned to the hotel.
Adams describes what happened next.
Cay came to me several times in the hotel lobby and said, “Jim, round up the boys and we’ll go down to the train.”… As Cay and I stood there, Walter [Eckersall] and another former Chicago athlete who had officiated at the game came into the lobby. They ran up to Cayou: “Cay, you’ve got the greatest little bunch of players that ever lived,” they exclaimed, grabbing him by one leg and the other by the other as they carried him into the bar room.
“At about that time, our cabs arrived and the boys climbed in too excited to notice that Cay was not along. Our train pulled out without Cayou. He told me later that he had one drink with [Eckersall] and then rushed out to hail a cab. The train had just left the station, and he had to wait for the next one— on the following morning.
Many Wabash supporters, including President Mackintosh, were at the station when the train carrying the team arrived in Crawfordsville. When Cayou failed to emerge from the train, tongues began to wag. Rumors circulated that Cayou had stayed behind and gotten drunk. [At this stage of his life, Cayou was a frequent gambler, but he does not appear to have had a drinking problem until a few years later.] We know that basketball coach Ralph Jones was gunning for Cayou’s job, and there were others who had something to gain by his departure. They were able to win the support of the College’s most influential professor, Mason B. Thomas, who was dean and chairman of the Athletics Committee. Ultimately, President Mackintosh decided to dismiss Cayou at the end of the academic year. Although the students vigorously objected to his dismissal, Cayou urged them to accept the decision and remain loyal to the College.
For the next five years Cayou coached at Washington University in St. Louis. He began to gamble more frequently and became a heavy drinker. He was divorced, remarried, and divorced again. After leaving Washington he had a variety of jobs: as a salesman of athletic equipment, as an athletic director at various clubs, and as a referee of football games and track meets. During the summers, he sang and acted professionally and may even have taken a turn on the Chautauqua circuit.
Finally, Cayou married a member of the Osage tribe and spent the last 25 years of his life on the Osage reservation in northern Oklahoma. He completely embraced the lifestyle of his people and was a frequent lecturer on Indian culture and history. He died on May 7, 1948.
One can only speculate on whether Cayou would have been dismissed from the College if President Kane had still been alive in 1907. Kane would have been less likely to have been influenced by Cayou’s detractors, and it is clear that Cayou and Kane shared a common vision of the role of athletics at Wabash.
When the Wabash College Athletics Hall of Fame was established in 1982, Francis Cayou was one of the original 13 inductees.
Much of the material in this biographical sketch is derived from “Hail to the Chief,” an article by Richard E. Banta ’25 published in the February 1966 edition of the Wabash Bulletin. Additional quotes from Some Little Giants, by Max Servies ’58