Ike Kahdot

The diminutive Isaac Leonard Kahdot (Ike, Chief) was the first Native American to play for Cleveland after it changed its name to the Indians in 1915. The 5-foot-5½-inch third baseman’s brief major-league career lasted just four games in the 1922 season. He went 0-for-2 at the plate. Though his major-league career was short, Kahdot enjoyed a long minor-league career, and would be, by the end of his life, the oldest living former Cleveland Indian, and for a brief time the oldest living ex-major leaguer. He also seemed to have a Forrest Gump-like penchant for crossing paths with Hall of Famers, including Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, and Carl Hubbell.

Kahdot, a member of the Potawatomi tribe, was born on October 22, 1899, in Georgetown, a mostly Native American community in pre-statehood Oklahoma, to June (Curley) and Peter Kahdot.1 The family, which included three younger brothers and a younger sister, lived near the Sacred Heart Mission and School in the Georgetown Community.2

Kahdot attended Sacred Heart briefly. “There were only two boys there at the time,” he said. “I didn’t like the priests, so I ran off every chance I got.”3

When he was 6, he was kicked out of Sacred Heart when he was caught with another boy who was smoking. Kahdot said that he did not smoke himself but was considered guilty by association. Regardless, he was whipped for the incident and ran away from the school for the last time. His family then sent him to the Friends Missionary School, where he stayed until he was 13.4

Kahdot recalled baseball being a large part of his childhood. “My dad gave me a bat, and a ball, and a glove when I was growing up, and I always had that with me,” he said. “We had an Injun team when I was a small kid, and my dad wanted me to play ball on it.”5

At 13, Kahdot went to the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, an Indian boarding school. Haskell was known for its nationally ranked football teams, but also produced a number of major leaguers, including Kahdot, Art Daney, and Ben Tincup, as well as Jim Thorpe, Louis Leroy, and George Johnson, who attended both Haskell and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.6 

Kahdot’s love of baseball blossomed at the school, where he played third base for the baseball team. He could not, however, overcome his homesickness, and his time at Haskell was interrupted when he and a friend, Luther Snake, ran away from the school and took a two-day journey by train and foot back home. “We got lonely,” he said.7

The Shawnee Indian Association gave Kahdot a job building a fence, but then sent him back to Haskell until he turned 18.8

At that time, he was starting to gain recognition for his baseball talent, and he was offered a job specifically to play baseball for the Empire Oil and Gas Company’s semipro team, the Bartlesville (Oklahoma) Empires.

Kahdot hesitated to take the offer on account of his commitment to Haskell, but the school granted him permission to leave, and he soon joined the squad.9

Kahdot was described as “a performer who won the admiration of all who have seen him play,” in a blurb about the hiring in the Lawrence Daily Journal-World. “He is the type who always believes there is a chance to field the ball until it touches the ground no matter how far away it’s going to land.”10

Although he was officially employed as a junior engineer, Kahdot said he was hired not to work, but to play ball. “We played about three games a week,” Kahdot told the Tulsa World’s Spencer. “They just paid me a salary, oh about $150 a month. And, well, I didn’t work. I’d just go down to the ballpark and stayed there all day.”11

He played for the Empires in 1919 and 1920.12

In 1920 Jimmy Hamilton, who managed the Joplin minor-league team, saw Kahdot play for the Empires and invited him to spring training. Kahdot was optioned to the Pirates in Pittsburg, Kansas, in the Class-D Southwestern League. He played there for a year and, despite hitting .322, was released after the 1921 season. He was then signed by the Coffeyville Refiners, for whom he hit .293 and led the league (the Southwestern had become a Class-C league) with 111 runs scored in 1921.13

Kahdot was called up to Cleveland as soon as the minor-league season ended in 1922, becoming the first Native American to play for Cleveland since it changed its name to the Indians in 1915.14 Kahdot’s major-league career was brief and relatively uneventful. He ran for Tris Speaker in the eighth inning in his first game, on September 5 in St. Louis, and was forced out at second on a groundball by Riggs Stephenson, the next batter.15 He struck out in his first major-league at-bat the next day, after entering the game as a defensive substitute.

On the 21st, Kahdot was part of a stunt pulled by Speaker, the Indians’ manager. As part of a “new act,” Speaker subbed out his starters and inserted “an entirely new team onto the diamond,” and, according to Francis J. Powers’ game recap in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “did not offend a soul by doing so.” Speaker wanted to give fans a glimpse into the team’s future because the Indians were out of contention. Kahdot was among a group of “youngsters the Indians’ scouts dug up as prospects. Boys concealed beneath the oil derricks of [illegible] plucked from the plain towns of Kansas and Oklahoma … to make heroes for major league fans of next year and the years after.”16

Kahdot acquitted himself well in the game, despite going 0-for-1 at the plate. “Ike Kahdot, the midget Indian third sacker, made quite the hit,” the recap continued. “He had a putout and an assist. At the bat, he flied to Mike in left field.”17

Over the course of the rest of the season, Kahdot played in two more games, running for Speaker in one and playing third base, going 0-for-1 at the plate, with a putout and an assist in the other.18

Although his career was brief, Kahdot crossed paths with a number of Hall of Famers. In addition to Speaker, he met Ty Cobb, and even shared a chew of tobacco with Babe Ruth.19

At the end of the season, Speaker gave each member of the team a baseball signed by every member of that year’s team. Kahdot considered that ball among his prized possessions.20

“It was a Reach baseball, brand new baseballs,” Kahdot recalled. “We got to take one with us, and that’s what we got.”21 He kept the ball the rest of his life.

He never made it back to the major leagues. Kahdot’s brief major-league career was typical of the early wave of Native American integration in baseball. Many of these players, including Kahdot, had long minor- and/or independent-league careers that indicated they could have been successful major leaguers if not for anti-Native-American prejudice that kept them from getting greater opportunities at a higher level.22 Yet, in Kahdot’s case, this narrative must be considered in light of the fact that he voluntarily bought himself out of his contract rather than accept the organization’s assignment for the following season.

Cleveland wanted to send Kahdot to Grand Rapids, Michigan, a team to which the Indians would assign young players with promise, but he refused the assignment. He had moved back to Coffeyville, Kansas, married his first wife, Jenny Mae Brown, and wanted to start a family.23

“They said, ‘[Y]ou can make yourself a deal if you want to go up there and play ball,’” Kahdot recalled. “But I didn’t want to go up there, So I bought myself from that team. It cost me, oh, about $2,500. That was some money in those days.”24

He apparently never regretted the decision, and would often dismiss the idea that the sport was prejudiced against him because of his Native American heritage. “Baseball’s been good to me,” he said. “If I hadn’t been playing ball, I wouldn’t be here today. They took care of me.”25

Kahdot continued to play ball after returning to Kansas. He played for 13 more years, hopping between minor-league and semipro teams for 15 more years in the Western League, Texas League, Western Association, Piedmont League, and South Atlantic League, appearing in 120-plus games each season but one.26 Current records show he played in 1,726 minor-league games.

In 1924 Kahdot, playing for Oklahoma City of the Western League, roomed with Carl Hubbell three years before the future Hall of Famer made it to the big leagues.27

He also befriended Coffeyville’s most famous resident, Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson, with whom he enjoyed hunting, and played shortstop on the Big Train’s barnstorming teams that toured Kansas and Oklahoma in the offseason.28

After he retired from baseball, Kahdot moved back to Oklahoma and worked in the Seminole oil fields. In 1941 he moved to Oklahoma City and for the next 15 years, he worked in various Oklahoma and Texas oil fields as derrick man, driller, and rope choker. Kahdot described his work schedule as “12 hours a day, 7 days a week.” He claimed that he “never missed a day.”29

In 1958, Kahdot left the oil fields for the Tinker Air Force Base water department, where he worked until he retired in 1969.30

During his retirement, he enjoyed hunting, fishing, and traveling in his motor home with his second wife, Lou.

Kahdot died at the age of 99 March 31, 1999, in Oklahoma City. He was considered by his tribe to be one of the last full-blooded Potawatomi.31 He was also, for many years, the oldest living Cleveland Indian, and, for the last seven months of his life, the oldest living former major-league baseball player.32

Notes

1 “Kahdot Isaac Leonard (IKE),” Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), April 3, 1999: 27. The 1900 United States census says that Peter Kahdot was a day laborer, and that Isaac had an older sister, Alen, born in 1897.

2 Gloria Thomas, “Baseball Was Good to Indian Boy from Sacred Heart,” Hownikan (Shawnee, Oklahoma), March 1992: 1, 3. Accessed December 15, 2022. 

3 Thomas.

4 Thomas.

5 Burl Spencer, “Oldest Cleveland Indian Remembers the Good Year: 1922,” Tulsa World, September 22, 1993. http://tulsaworld.com/archive/oldest-living-cleveland-indian-remembers-the-good-year-1922/article_1a42d1f0-ef5b-5b87-9217-de429ba91b66.html Accessed December 26, 2022.

6 Jeffrey Powers-Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 12, 101-102.   

7 Thomas.

8 Thomas.

9 Spencer.

10 “Haskell Star Here,” Lawrence (Kansas) Daily Journal-World, December 26, 1919: 6. Accessed January 8, 2023.

11 Spencer.

12 Royse Parr,“Isaac Leonard ‘Ike’ ‘Chief’ Kahdot,” in C. Richard King, ed., Native Americans in Sports (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 167.

13 Spencer.

14 Parr.

15 “Kolp Falters in Sixth After Holding Indians to Four Hits in Five Innings,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 6, 1922: 20.

16 Francis J. Powers, “Red Sox Defeat Speaker’s Army of Players, 15-5,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 22, 1922: 19.    

17 Powers. Information on Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference.com do not indicate the putout.

18 Spencer.

19 Parr.

20 Parr.

21 Spencer.

22 Powers-Beck, 100-101.

23 Parr.

24 Spencer.

25 Thomas.

26 Powers-Beck, 101.

27 Spencer.

28 Parr.

29 Thomas.

30 Thomas.

31 Thomas.

32 Email to author from Cassidy Lent, reference librarian, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, December 21, 2022.