The Lost Tribe of Coney Island

by Claire Prentice

  Text copyright © 2014 by Claire Prentice

  All rights reserved

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Publishing, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo and Amazon Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

  ISBN-10: 1477825517

  ISBN-13: 9781477825518

  Cover design by Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover art (spine/back) courtesy of Library of Congress,

  Prints and Photographs Division,

  LC-DIG-ggbain-03959

  For Mum, David, and Bram

  In memory of Dad and Gran, who inspired my love of stories

  And with respect for the lives of Julio, Maria, Feloa, Dengay, Tainan, Friday, Fomoaley, and all the other Igorrotes who traveled to America

  Contents

  Start Reading

  SKETCH MAP OF THE PHILIPPINES

  Map of Coney Island

  Cast of Characters

  Introduction

  1 From One Island to Another

  2 First Steps

  3 The Journey from the Tropics

  4 The Money Men

  5 Welcome to America

  6 Making an Entrance

  7 Meeting Uncle Sam

  8 Divided Loyalties

  9 Tribal Life in the City

  10 Head-hunting the Star Attraction

  11 Unexpected Arrivals

  12 Another Unwelcome Visitor

  13 The End of the American Dream

  14 Tall Tales

  15 Fighting for Control

  16 A Break for Freedom

  17 Dear Dr. Hunt

  18 A Rival Enters the Fray

  19 Memphis Blues

  20 Raising the Alarm

  21 A Worthy Opponent

  22 Dr. Hunt, I Presume

  23 On the Run

  24 Luck Be a Lady

  25 An Ultimatum

  26 Judgment Day

  27 Vanishing Act

  28 In the Care of the Government

  29 A Gentleman Criminal

  30 Trials and Tribulations

  31 A Surprise Reversal

  32 The End of the Line

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  The Igorrotes at Luna Park, 1905

  Sketch map of the Philippines showing Bontoc in the far north

  Map of Coney Island showing the three big parks—Luna Park, Dreamland, and Steeplechase Park, 1907–1908

  Shall I tell you about life?. . . Well, it’s like the big wheel at Luna Park.

  —Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, 1928

  I was healer of their bodies, father confessor of all their woes and troubles and the final arbiter in all disputed questions.

  —Dr. Truman Hunt describing his relationship with the Igorrotes when he lived among the tribe in Bontoc in the San Antonio Sunday Light, November 19, 1905

  [The Igorrotes] are so punctiliously truthful themselves that the smallest of white lies on our part would rob us of their confidence and friendship . . . If an Igorrote makes a promise to you, no matter how trivial it seems to you, he will fulfill it if it costs him his life. And he expects you to take the same pains to fulfill your promises to him.

  —George Fuller quoted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 4, 1905

  Cast of Characters

  Truman Hunt: The Igorrotes’ manager. A former medical doctor and lieutenant governor of Bontoc Province in the Philippines. He takes the Igorrotes from the mountains of the northern Philippines to exhibit them on America’s fair and amusement park circuit.

  Julio Balinag: Truman’s twenty-one-year-old translator. He is half Igorrote and half Ilocano, a tribe regarded by Americans as superior to the Igorrotes. Julio is ambitious but principled, and takes great pride in his natty American wardrobe.

  Maria: Julio’s eighteen-year-old Igorrote wife is a mother hen who looks after the other members of the tribe.

  Friday Strong: The baby of the group, seven-year-old orphan Friday belongs to a different tribe—the Negritos. He stands less than four feet tall, and always has a cigar clamped between his teeth.

  Tainan: “The little boy with the big voice” becomes a favorite with the American public, not least for his performances of patriotic American songs, including “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” He is nine years old, and is friends with Friday.

  Fomoaley Ponci: The tall, chubby tribal chief. He becomes the butt of the Igorrotes’ jokes because of his self-importance and willingness to give lengthy interviews to the press.

  Feloa: A natural leader and a popular, outspoken tribesman. He leaves his wife and three young children in the Philippines to travel to America to earn his fortune.

  Dengay: A friend of Feloa’s. Dengay has a wife and four young children in the Philippines.

  Ed Callahan: The thirty-three-year-old former railroad clerk works in the Igorrote Village as Truman’s security guard and right-hand man. He is intensely loyal to the showman.

  Sallie Hunt: At the age of seventeen, the spirited Sallie left her large family behind in Kentucky to seek excitement at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. There Truman gave her a job as his stenographer and the two were married a few months later.

  Adele von Groyss: A flamboyant and eccentric Austrian expatriate famed for her avant-garde parties. Truman’s friend, she puts him and Sallie up in her Broadway home when they first arrive in New York in May 1905. Adele is fascinated by Igorrote culture.

  Thompson and Dundy: Dubbed “the Kings of Coney,” the founders of Luna Park think big and spend extravagantly. They are determined to book the Igorrotes for the 1905 season.

  Samuel Gumpertz: The manager of Dreamland, Luna Park’s main rival, which is situated just across Surf Avenue from Thompson and Dundy’s park. He too wants the Igorrotes.

  Frederick Barker: Truman’s nemesis: the high-minded, dogged, and handsome government agent who is tasked with finding Truman and bringing him to justice.

  Louis Blum: The Chicago attorney appointed by the government to prosecute Truman. Blum is an overweight bachelor with a ready wit. He’s a born optimist with an encyclopedic knowledge of the law and current affairs.

  Antoinette Funk: The tiny yet formidable attorney hired by Truman to defend him. She is of the surprising view that women don’t belong in the professions.

  Introduction

  The Igorrotes on show at Coney Island, summer 1905

  SITTING ON MY desk is a tattered black-and-white photograph of a group of tribesmen, women, and children, naked but for their G-strings. They are squatting on their haunches around a campfire. Several of them look directly into the camera. One points, another laughs and holds up a stone, as if pretending he is about to throw it at the photographer. Some of them are smiling, apparently sharing a private joke. In the background, a young boy and girl are making something out of bits of broken wood. Behind a low fence, a group of men in formal American clothes and derby hats stand watching the scene. If you look closely, you can see a few of them are laughing too. If it wasn’t for the observers in Western clothes, it could be a scene taken from an ethnographic journal. But this is no documentary image of a distant people unaccustomed to contact with the rest of the world: this tribe is very aware we are watching, and they seem frankly amused by it.

  When I first came across this photograph, I knew next to nothing
about it, but the energy of the tribespeople drew me in. I immediately knew I had to find out who these people were. Where and when was the picture taken? What became of them?

  My quest to unravel the story of the tribespeople in the picture has taken over several years of my life. It has been an addictive, fascinating, sometimes frustrating, but always fulfilling journey.

  Now I know that the picture is one of a handful of photographic relics of an extraordinary episode in American history. It was taken more than a century ago at Coney Island, ten miles from downtown Manhattan.

  The tribespeople are Bontoc Igorrotes, who became known in America simply as Igorrotes,1 meaning “mountain people.” Fifty of them were brought from their remote home in the northern Philippines to America and put on show at Luna Park in 1905. They were billed as “dog-eating, head-hunting savages” and “the most primitive people in the world.” The tribespeople became the sensation of the summer season and were soon in demand all over the US.

  Millions of Americans flocked to see the Igorrotes. The crowds were captivated by the tribe’s vitality, and thrilled and scandalized in equal measure by their near nudity, their dog feasts, and their tattooed bodies, which, the public learned, indicated their prowess as hunters of human heads.

  As I study the Igorrotes’ faces in the picture on my desk, I have often wondered what it was that persuaded them to leave their homes to set up camp in America’s most famous amusement park. What did they think of America and Americans? How did they find life under the gaze of an audience? How did the freedom-loving tribe cope with being locked up day and night at Luna Park? Did they regret their decision? What did they tell their families about their adventure when they returned home?

  It is impossible to imagine what it was like for these premodern people to be thrust into the heart of the quintessential modern metropolis, New York.

  This story is set at a time when disagreements about the political future of the Philippines had created a schism in American domestic politics. America had taken control of the Philippines from Spain following the 1898 Spanish-American War. But far from being welcomed with open arms, the American occupiers were met by a rebellion of Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo. The US deployed tens of thousands of soldiers to the islands. The three-year Philippine-American War that followed led to the deaths of over 4,200 American and 20,000 Filipino combatants. Hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians were killed in the fighting, or died of disease and starvation in the famine that followed. America won the war but was widely criticized for using excessive force and brutality to overcome the opposition to her rule.

  The assumption of American control over the overseas territory prompted deep soul-searching at home. Was it right for America to acquire an overseas empire? When, if ever, would the Filipinos be ready to take over the responsibility of governing themselves?

  The Philippine issue was the determining foreign policy concern of the day, and the thread that connected the three presidencies of the early twentieth century. William McKinley reluctantly led the US into the war with Spain and won control of the islands. Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed the presidency in 1901 after McKinley’s assassination, had unsuccessfully coveted the job of governor-general of the Philippines, and dreamed of guiding the people of the islands toward self-government, while William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s successor as president, had previously served as governor-general of the islands.

  The Philippine Islands were not just a concern for the upper echelons of the American government. Service in the Philippines united Americans from all walks of life: time and time again in this story we encounter men and women who worked in the islands, as government servants, police officers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, preachers, soldiers, and politicians, and who viewed their time there as a unique bond.

  As America was taking control of the islands, she was also sizing up her new subjects. Ethnologists were sent into far corners of the country to assess and report on the country’s many indigenous tribes. The islands’ people were then categorized according to their level of “civilization,” from barbaric to semibarbarous to those deemed cultured and educated.

  The earliest American visitors to the Philippines were particularly taken with the “savage” Bontoc Igorrotes. In his major study, The Bontoc Igorot,2 compiled in 1903, the American ethnologist Albert Ernest Jenks observed that, aside from cutting off the heads of neighboring villagers, the Bontoc Igorrotes were a peaceful, good-humored, honest, industrious, and likable people with low rates of crime. Jenks noted that they were true primitives who had no words for many items in modern culture, including shoes, pantaloons, umbrellas, chairs, or books.

  In 1904, the American government spent $1.5 million taking thirteen hundred Filipinos from a dozen different tribes to the St. Louis Exposition. The Philippine Reservation became one of the most popular features of the fair, and the Igorrotes drew the largest crowds of all. By displaying the tribespeople in this manner, the US government hoped to gain popular support for its occupation of the Philippines by showing the American public that the Filipinos were innocents, a people far from ready for self-government, and in need of paternalistic American protection.

  From the moment the Filipinos arrived on American soil, they were the subject of endless newspaper articles drawing comparisons between their culture and that of their American hosts. Many articles focused on the Igorrotes’ disdain for Western clothes and what was portrayed as their insatiable appetite for that most domesticated of American pets, the dog. But the Igorrotes were also invoked in articles about premarital sexual relations, hard work, and the simple life versus the complexities of modern living, while their trusting and trustworthy nature often drew comment.

  During this first visit to America by the Igorrotes, the Macon Telegraph provided its readers with an insight into the Filipinos: “The Igorrote is more honest and more honorable than the American. Knowing the value of money, he would not be tempted for one single instant to take that which did not belong to him, even if he were sure that his theft would never be found out. The property of another is absolutely safe in his possession.”3

  The Igorrotes were like a mirror held up to American society. America might be the more “advanced” culture, but while the host country took pleasure in patronizing the primitive tribe, it was not entirely immune to the idea that it might learn something from the Philippine visitors.

  Displaying human beings for the entertainment and edification of the paying public seems shocking today, but “human zoos” were nothing new in the early 1900s. For more than four hundred years, exotic humans from faraway territories had been paraded in front of royal courts and wealthy patrons from Europe to Japan, and more recently at world’s fairs and expositions as far afield as New York, Paris, and London. But what happened in Coney Island in 1905 was the result of two modern forces meshing: American imperialism and a popular taste for sensationalism. The Igorrotes who were brought from the Philippines became caught up in the debate about America’s presence in Southeast Asia. They were used to push the case that America had a duty to protect, educate, and civilize such savage beings, and later, when the treatment they experienced became a national scandal, they were used to argue that America had no place in the Philippines at all.

  The other force was equally irresistible. Early twentieth-century America was addicted to novelty and sensation. The human zoo that came from the Philippines and unpacked its bags at Coney Island in 1905 became the most talked-about show in town. The tribespeople were gawked at by everyone from ordinary members of the public willing to pay a quarter for the privilege of seeing human beings in the raw to anthropologists, politicians, celebrities, and even the daughter of the president.

  But there was another ingredient in this potent mixture, a volatile one that propelled the Igorrotes onto the front pages.

  Sitting next to the picture of the Igorrotes on my desk is another photograph, faded and torn in several places. In it, a
man in a panama hat and an expensive-looking three-piece suit stands with a fat cigar in his hand, smiling for the camera. He is surrounded by a group of bare-chested Filipino tribesmen. He is Dr. Truman Knight Hunt, a former medical doctor who met the Igorrotes after he went to the Philippines following the outbreak of the 1898 Spanish-American War. It was Truman’s idea to take the Igorrotes to Coney Island. There he transformed himself into one of the great publicists of his age, spinning a colorful web of stories about “his” tribe that the press and public lapped up.

  No one could have predicted what would happen next.

  In early American political, ethnological, and press accounts of the Philippines, Truman is a hero, revered by the Igorrotes for his strong leadership, his kindness, and his ability to heal their medical ills. Referring to Truman’s decision to leave America in 1898 to go and live in the Philippines, one newspaper article described how he “forsook civilization because he was disgusted with the shams and the pretense of the social world, and went to live among the simple, honorable, natural Igorrotes . . . The Igorrotes have learned that he is their friend, as just and honorable as they are.”4 By 1906, when the Igorrotes wind up as witnesses in an American court of law, the Truman we discover is a much darker, more complex character, accused of exploiting the tribespeople, stealing their wages, and treating them like slaves.

  What had happened to the former physician and civil servant–turned–showman in the intervening years? Were the allegations made against him true? Did the fame and fortune he earned as a showman warp him, transforming an upstanding American citizen into a greedy, heartless man?

  These pages tell a story of adventure, ambition, betrayal, triumph, and tragedy. Much of it is shocking and sensational and all of it is true.

  Throughout the process of writing The Lost Tribe of Coney Island, I have strived at all times to be faithful to the facts. There are frustrating gaps and inaccuracies in the archives and many of the accounts that do exist are open to question. When the Igorrotes first arrived in America, the press swallowed Truman’s tall tales and printed them verbatim. The reporters were often as guilty of stretching the truth to entertain the public as Truman was. Later, as the story took a darker turn, Truman frequently deceived the police and the US government about where his groups were performing in order to throw them off his scent. He also lied to the authorities and to the press about details such as how many Igorrotes he had brought to America and about aspects of their culture. I have sifted through these lies and distortions to find the facts underneath. Ultimately, only Truman Hunt and the fifty-one Filipinos who traveled with him to America knew the precise details of everything that transpired between them.