Kate Beaton at Hark! A Vagrant has introduced me to another new historical figure. Born in 1886, Tom Longboat was an Onandagan from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. He was an outstanding athlete, winning, among many other races, the Boston Marathon in 1907. He collapsed during the Olympic marathon in 1908, then turned professional and was crowned the World Professional Champion. Longboat received many accolades during his career, but sports writers could never get past his identity as a Canadian Indian, and treated him an anomaly, calling him "obstinate" and “unmanageable,” and falling on racist tropes to describe him at every turn.
Beaton has a half-dozen strips illustrating events in Longboat’s life, taken from an account in the book Canadian Folk: Portraits of Remarkable Lives, where you can read about Tom Longboat.