Sport and Survival in the Redwood Empire: Johnny Southard and America’s “First” Ultramarathon

On June 21, 1927, Johnny Southard crossed a finish line to win America’s first official ultramarathon, a 480-mile footrace along California’s north coast. His accomplishment made him a rare example of visible and celebrated Indian modernity at a time when many Anglo-Americans believed Native people to be vanishing from the Earth. In other ways, however, Southard’s story is typical of a rural, ethnic laborer of the Industrial Age. Centering a historical narrative on Johnny Southard allows us to tell larger regional histories of settler colonial violence and popular stereotyping, and recreate a social history of modern Indigenous labor, religion, and, most importantly, survival in post-genocide California.

Such a project expands the history of settler colonialism beyond the better-known history of the mid-nineteenth century. There is now marvelous work on the violence wrought by the 1848 California Gold Rush through the 1870s, but these histories of catastrophe can obscure survival beyond the era. In fact, a general non-Native American public still tends to understand North American Indigenous people as relics of the past. Because of the popular appeal and accessibility of biography, and in this case the popular draw of sports stories, the genre can publicize a corrective to pervasive, popular, and imagined parameters of Indigenous history. Southard’s story is particularly important in constructing larger histories because he was a member of the Karuk Tribe, a nation without a reservation, divided between several agencies that changed frequently. Karuk histories therefore doesn’t show up in historical/ anthropological archives to the extent others do. Southard’s biography, aided heavily by oral history, can help reconstruct Karuk and broader Indigenous histories while highlighting Native perspectives more than conventional archival work could.