Francis Quirk and the Strange Case of Football Figure/Artist William “Lone Star” Dietz

This post continues our series on artists supported by Quirk through exhibitions at the Lehigh University Art Galleries, we explore the strange case of William H. “Lone Star” Dietz. Dietz’ paintings were included in a 1955 exhibition that also included sculpture by Princeton’s Joseph Brown and Jose de Rivera, formerly of Yale. At the time of the exhibition Dietz was 69 years old.

1955 Photo of Francis Quirk, William "Lone Star" Dietz and Joe Brown discussing sculpture. (Could the portrait in the background may be the work of Dietz or Quirk?) 

Dietz was best known as a football player, attending Oklahoma’s Chilocco Indian Agricultural School. He would later move on to Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian School playing football with NFL Hall-of-Famer, Jim Thorpe under famous coach Pop Warner. Later he would move into coaching at various college and professional teams. The 2012 College Football Hall of Fame member coached at Purdue, Washington University, Louisiana Tech University, University of Wyoming, Albright College and Haskell Indian Nations University.

His professional coaching career was short from 1933-34 with the Boston Redskins who were using Fenway Park. While details are not available it is believed that his background may have influenced the naming of the franchise that eventually moved to Washington DC.

In the Native American Community, he is a controversial figure as his heritage has been contested in that he may have been feigning this ancestry. The following test is excerpted from Wikipedia. 

Dietz's heritage was first contested in 1916 after former neighbors who settled on the Pacific Coast heard he was posing as an Indian. In December 1918 the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated his heritage after he registered for the draft as a "Non-Citizen Indian" with an allotment. The Bureau found he had taken on the identity of James One Star, an Oglala man of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation 12 years his senior who had disappeared in Cuba in 1894. Dietz also claimed he was the head of an American film company that produced propaganda films for the war.

Dietz was tried in Spokane, Washington in June 1919 for the first offense. One Star's sister, Sallie Eaglehorse, testified after seeing him for the first time at the trial that Dietz was definitely not her brother. Still, the judge instructed the jury to determine whether Dietz "believed" he was an Indian, not whether it was true. Despite that others had witnessed his birth in the summer of 1884 or had seen him the following day, Dietz's mother Leanna claimed he was the Indian son of her husband who had been switched a week or more after she had a stillbirth. Dietz's acting ability along with his mother's fallacious testimony (to protect him from prison) resulted in a hung jury, but Dietz was immediately re-indicted. The second trial resulted in a sentence of 30 days in the Spokane County Jail after he pleaded "no contest".

Through the research on Quirk, we have learned that Lone Star also was an artist who had achieved some level of notoriety for his painting. The December 6, 1955 article from Lehigh’s Brown and White discusses the upcoming exhibition and mentions Dietz' “prize winning landscape, My Pittsburgh.” You can see photos of the "My Pittsburgh" painting on an excellent blog kept by Tom Benjey. He painted portraits as well. Our search for information on Dietz as an artist has brought limited success. However, Tom Benjey's biography of him "Keep A-Goin" provided some helpful information. After his football coaching days ended, Dietz would have a short-lived effort at running an art school in Pittsburgh. The Korean War turned the enterprise into a financial disaster. He would later move to Reading, Pennsylvania and undoubtedly met Quirk  through geographic proximity.

On AskArt.com we were able to find the image below of a Dietz painting executed in 1930. "Sioux Country, Late Afternoon" has a certain beauty in the use of a varied color palette and attention to detail. Despite a clear layer of surface grime, it still retains considerable charm. When we found this image, we were surprised at the strength of his work. 

Sioux Country, Late Afternoon by William "Lone Star" Dietz 1930

Several of Dietz' paintings can be found at Albright College. These include paintings of All-American Albright Quarterback Dick Riffle, the Albright Lion and "The Pursuit of Knwoledge: A College Fantasy."

Dietz' artistic career apparently did not bring him financial success as when he died in 1964, there was not enough money to fund his tombstone. His former teammates took up a collection to fund a simple marker inscribed with “William ‘Lone Star’ Dietz born in South Dakota.”