The Iron Men

Back in 1899, the football team at Sewanee sparked the beginnings of SEC football as we know it today

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On a clear November night in 1899, the bleachers and sidelines of the University of Texas’s homefield were packed with fans—5,000 in their finery—cheering and anxiously awaiting the first snap of the game.

Joe Abbott, a University of Texas guard, locked gazes with opposing lineman “Wild Bill” Claiborne, a starting guard for Sewanee, a small college that sits on a mountain in Tennessee. Claiborne wore a black patch over his blind eye.

Wild Bill pulled off his eye patch, threw it over his shoulder and pointed at his menacing, discolored eye. “See this?” he growled. “Got it the last time out.” The Texas center hiked the ball. Twenty-two men sprang into each other. Some knocked heads. Some dived at shins. Some threw fervent gut punches. It was a bone-crushing and sometimes fatal era of college football.

Behind his team’s sideline, Luke Lea, the Sewanee team manager, took his derby hat off, smacked it to his thigh, and smiled widely. Lea was convinced that he had just witnessed the dawn of what would become the South’s greatest passion and the envy of a football nation.

Today’s mega-power collegiate football region is irrefutably the South. However, during the first thirty years of the sport, Southern football dominance was yet to be achieved. The nineteenth-century powerhouses were Harvard, Penn, Yale, and Princeton. Most Southern schools did not field a football team until the early 1890s, more than two decades after the college football inaugural game between Rutgers-Princeton in 1869.

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At the end of the 1890s, a nation increasingly hungry for college football had no regard for the Southern game. Eastern sportswriters, coaches, and fans ignored football below the Mason Dixon line.

Tired of the East’s disrespect for Southern football—Lea and the Sewanee administration unified around a goal to catapult Southern college football to national prominence, with Sewanee at the vanguard. They were determined to “. . . bring fame to Southern teams, to raise (their) younger athletes to the standard of the East,” as Lea put it in the Sewanee school newspaper, The Purple.

So, Lea, part prophet and wholly a gambler, hatched and orchestrated an astonishingly reckless campaign. The twenty-one-year-old liberal arts student booked his 1899 Tigers on a 2,500-mile, nine-day train excursion to play five games in six days—from Sewanee to Austin and back. All five opponents—Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU, and Mississippi—were larger schools with physically larger players than Sewanee’s.

Departing on November 7, 1899, the Tigers traveled thirty-six hours in a Pullman sleeper from Sewanee to Austin. Their punishing road trip launched against the Texas team whose players averaged 180 pounds to Sewanee’s 163, but Sewanee was quick and gritty, and won 12 to 0. After Sewanee and the University of Texas collided and kicked up clouds of dust, the home team hosted a ball in honor of their new friends from the Cumberland Mountains.

After drink and dance, the Sewanee men said goodbye to their friendly foes and boarded their train. The next day in Houston, the Tigers shut out the Aggies, 10-0—officially sweeping the state of Texas.

Exhausted and battered, the Tigers were back in their sleeper car a few hours after the A&M game. The next morning, they arrived in the Crescent City, where a specially selected committee of Tulane students welcomed them at the Southern Pacific depot. That afternoon, Sewanee beat Tulane 23-0. In the spirit of New Orleans generosity and good sportsmanship, the Tulane men were gracious hosts and treated their guests to a night of theater and drinking.

The next day was Sunday and Sewanee’s first day off the gridiron since they’d left Tennessee four days before. After attending mass, the Tigers rested, nursed injuries, and some no doubt also nursed hangovers, before attending an afternoon sailing party hosted by the Tulane students and footballers.

Monday, Sewanee lined up against LSU in Baton Rouge and beat a less experienced Tiger squad, 34–0. The Purple indicated that LSU played “good ball” despite the score and “yielded gracefully to the inevitable.” Nobly, the LSU players sent the victors off to Memphis, wishing them good fortune against the Ole Miss Rebels.

The Sewanee Tigers had now shut out four teams in five days. Years later, one of the Tigers recounted how the team’s trainer, Cal Burrows, rubbed the players’ legs to enable them to sleep. Despite pain and exhaustion, Sewanee stifled Ole Miss and finished their march across the Southland with a 12–0 triumph.

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On their epic 1899 trip, the Tigers shut out the five teams they faced, scoring 91 points and allowing none. For the season as a whole, they continued their streak, shutting out 11 opponents; scoring 322 points, while only giving up 10, which was to John Heisman’s Auburn squad.

According to the Sewanee team captain, Henry Seibels, there were no jealousies between his teammates, who survived and triumphed by virtue of “an indomitable will to conquer.” Many sports luminaries have declared that the greatest college football team of all-time is the Iron Men—as the 1899 team is still referred to on the Sewanee campus.

Although Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU, and Mississippi all fell to the Iron Men of Sewanee, Tennessee, they, too, were part of the birth of Southern football. Thirty-four years later, LSU, Tulane, and Mississippi joined Sewanee as four of the thirteen charter members of the Southeastern Conference. Eventually, Texas A&M in 2012 and Texas in 2024 would also become part of the most powerful college football league in the country.

Perhaps the biggest impact the 1899 Sewanee Tigers had on their region was that they inspired Southern colleges to support their football teams vigorously. Over the following century, Southern college football gradually transformed into a cultural phenomenon and the most dominant force in the college game. Seventeen of the last twenty NCAA National Champions have hailed from the South.

Today, the crowd noise is deafening at a big-time Southern football game. Part of the thunderous roar is an echo from 1899 when a small school on a Tennessee mountain top wildly welcomed home their intrepid warriors, just back from an incomparable, monumental road trip. 

David Neil Drews is the author of the novel Iron Tigers.  Learn more at irontigersfootball.com.