The Lost Tribe of Coney Island

by Claire Prentice

  Speaking of which, Truman couldn’t wait to take Sallie in his arms that evening. Not that they would have much privacy. They would be staying in the spacious and rather grand Broadway home of their friends Adele and George Wilkins, until Truman found them somewhere of their own. A bungalow would be provided on-site at Coney for the Igorrotes’ manager, but he wasn’t sure it would be a suitable place for Sallie to live.

  Truman had first met Adele von Groyss—to use her rather grand maiden name, which she preferred to be known by—in the Philippines, where she was volunteering with the medical corps. She was born in Austria and claimed to be a baroness. He had no idea if it was true but he cared little. The baroness was small and plump with extravagantly coiffured blonde hair and a taste for elaborate hats. Of more interest to Truman, his friend was extraordinarily well connected, and had thrown some of the best parties he had ever attended. Her New York home was decorated boldly with tribal masks and abstract art. The showman was glad that Sallie would have some female company during her first weeks in a new city when he would be working day and night. As he looked down the tracks for the train, Truman made a mental note to ask Thompson for a restaurant recommendation when they got to Luna Park. If any man could point him in the direction of a good dinner, it would be Thompson, who, like Truman, only ever ate in the finest restaurants. He would take Sallie, Adele, and George out to dinner to celebrate the tribe’s safe arrival in New York.

  A train drew up and Truman yelled to Callahan and Julio to get the tribespeople on board. The few passengers who shared the Igorrotes’ train car were unable to hide their astonishment; some looked on with open mouths, others hurriedly moved on to another car. These reactions no longer surprised the Igorrotes. But Julio felt a mixture of hurt and annoyance at their negative reactions. Did they feel frightened of them, he wondered. Or was it revulsion? Did they regard him in the same way, despite his fine clothes? His thoughts were interrupted as the doors closed and they pulled out of the station.

  The train jerked and clanked as its wheels gripped the tracks, pulling its cargo onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Julio instinctively looked back toward Manhattan as they journeyed across the water. Without uttering a word, he threw up his arm and pointed to the rest of the tribe to look up. Their eyes darted from the soaring St. Paul Building, up to the Park Row Building, the world’s tallest building when it was completed in 1899, to the trio of towers making up “newspaper row”—the New York Times Building, the Tribune Building with its thin clock tower, and the Pulitzer Building with its distinctive dome. Tainan ran from his seat to the window and pressed his face against the glass. Friday followed. Maria clutched Daipan’s arm. The panorama of the Manhattan skyline grew wider and more spectacular as they drew farther away. Julio’s usually sophisticated veneer dissolved as he gazed up in amazement. He caught Maria’s eye and grinned. Julio knew the sight would stay in his memory forever. Truman looked up from his newspaper. He wasn’t given to sentimentality, but his heart stirred at the sight of the tribespeople. The Filipinos sat in silent wonder as the train continued across the bridge and down into Brooklyn. They hadn’t seen anything yet.

  7

  Meeting Uncle Sam

  LUNA PARK, MAY 15, 1905

  The Igorrotes meet Uncle Sam, June 1905.

  THOMPSON KEPT A showman’s hours and was rarely up before noon. But he rose early that day, eager to welcome his new stars. It was ten thirty in the morning and the park was not yet open when he got word that the Igorrotes had arrived. He left his bungalow and hurried over to meet them near the park entrance. As he turned the corner and caught his first glimpse of the Filipinos, he smiled broadly, stopping for a moment to admire them. The Igorrotes had already pulled off their American clothes and stood in their G-strings, rummaging in their basket hats for their pipes, unaware they were being watched. Thompson’s eyes wandered over the head-hunting tattoos that covered the men’s chests. He noticed the huge bamboo plugs in some of the women’s ears. The tribespeople were magnificent. They were going to make him a fortune. He strode over to meet them.

  Shaking Truman’s hand, he glanced from Fomoaley, whom Truman introduced as the tribal chief, to Tainan and Daipan. Thompson could hardly contain his delight as he looked around his new exhibit. Julio stepped forward and extended his own hand. The park boss took it gladly and told the interpreter he was thrilled to welcome the tribe to Luna Park. He had reserved a prime spot for them and invited them to come and inspect it for themselves. Thompson led the way to a far corner, which he’d deliberately chosen so that the tribe’s many visitors would have to walk past all the other enticing rides and attractions before they reached the Igorrotes.

  The tribespeople walked past the gates leading to a dozen other attractions, unable to read the signs announcing the thrilling rides and spectacles waiting inside. Your spot is over—began Thompson, but he was interrupted by a loud trumpeting noise that made Tainan shriek with fright. Truman and Thompson laughed. The elephant stables lay just behind the plot where the Igorrotes would live.

  There was a fence around the Igorrote Village, intended to make sure no one but those who paid to enter could enjoy the show. A sign had already been hung over the entrance, announcing that this was the home of the Filipino tribe. Truman eyed the wording. There was no mention of dog eating. He would get that added. The site looked ideal. There was plenty of room for the tribespeople to build their homes, along with a large arena for their tribal performances. Truman indicated his approval to Thompson and told him they would set to work building the village immediately; they would do without rest. Thompson told him not to hurry. He planned to stage a second grand opening to announce the arrival of the tribespeople on Saturday. In the meantime, they would offer those who came to Luna Park a sneak preview of the tribe building their village. Truman smiled. He liked his new business associate’s style.

  Luna Park occupied thirty-eight acres and operated like a self-contained town, employing more than a thousand people and housing its own telegraph office and long-distance telephone service. Dubbed an “electric Eden,” it was a dream world lit by one million tiny electric lightbulbs (the electric bill was four thousand dollars a week1) and filled with domes, spires, minarets, lagoons, colonnades, and castles. In the park grounds, Thompson and Dundy staged dramatic dioramas of real and imagined events like The War of the Worlds, The Kansas Cyclone, and The Fall of Port Arthur. They were designed to take advantage of the public’s fascination with wars, disasters, and distant lands and people at a time when newspapers carried few photographs. Thompson and Dundy believed that novelty was the key to success. Each year they scrapped any attractions that weren’t creating a buzz and replaced them with new, more spectacular creations.

  Brand-new for the 1905 season was The Dragon’s Gorge, created by Ohio-born inventor LaMarcus Adna Thompson, known as L. A. Thompson.2 For ten cents it took passengers on a six-minute scenic railroad ride to the North Pole, past icebergs and “a real polar bear hungrily eyeing a real Esquimo paddling about in a real canoe on real water”3 specially imported from the Arctic, then on to the Orient and the dizzying heights of the Rocky Mountains. En route, it visited Havana Harbor the morning after the February 1898 destruction of the USS Maine, a crucial milestone on the road to the Spanish-American War, which led to America taking control of the Philippine Islands. Without this important event in US history, Truman Hunt would likely never have ended up in the Philippines and America might never have laid eyes on the Igorrotes.

  Over at Fire and Flames, a fire chief yelled into his trumpet that a real-life fire was about to break out. Crowds handed over their money and hurried inside. To their surprise, behind the entrance the atmosphere was festive, with a marching band leading a parade up the street. Just as the onlookers were starting to get restless, a man came running out of a hotel screaming, “Fire,” setting in motion an exquisitely choreographed presentation featuring one thousand performers. Alarm bells clanged and horse-drawn fire wagons rushed to the scene of a bla
zing six-story building. On the opposite side of the specially built fake street, firefighters battled to overcome the (real) flames while men, women, and children (all actors paid to take part in the staged event) jumped from the windows of the building into nets below. In Dr. Martin Couney’s Infant Incubators, mewling rows of premature babies were kept alive using costly state-of-the-art equipment, more advanced than anything in New York’s hospitals. One of the oddest attractions in a resort filled with the bizarre was The Fatal Wedding, a five-cent show in which a lovely young woman in a bridal gown and veil with orange blossoms in her hair walked behind a screen, only for herself and her beloved to be transformed into skeletons who were then served a sumptuous wedding feast.4

  If Thompson was the brains behind Luna Park’s most imaginative spectaculars, then Dundy deserved the credit for filling it with exotic animals. His love of elephants bordered on an obsession and he imported the largest show herd in the world to Luna Park. For a dime apiece, a stenographer from Hoboken and her mailman beau could enjoy a five-minute ride of a lifetime perched atop one of Dundy’s prized beasts.

  Despite Thompson’s insistence on novelty, one attraction was too popular to be torn down. A Trip to the Moon, the ride that had brought Thompson and Dundy into business together four years earlier, was still delighting crowds. Could the Igorrote Village succeed in surpassing the profits of Thompson and Dundy’s most popular ride? Ever the betting man, Dundy felt confident that they would.

  Finally, on Saturday, May 20, 1905, a week behind schedule, the Igorrote Village opened to the public. Crowds thronged Stillwell and Surf Avenues. Sixty thousand people surged through the gates of Luna Park. Many made straight for the Igorrote Village. Feloa had been given the job of barker to draw in the crowds, and stood at the entrance shouting in his native tongue. The men, women, and children who passed him gazed at his tattooed, nearly naked dark skin. Hypnotized by the sight of this fierce headhunter from another world, they handed over their quarters. As they entered the Philippine attraction, the visitors stopped and stood in wonder. Even by Coney’s standards, the Igorrote Village was an astonishing sight. Against the backdrop of the Electric Tower, the Helter Skelter slide, and the outdoor circus, the Filipinos were living in small huts with thatched roofs and walls constructed using a mix of straw, mud, and bricks. Their village was surrounded by a bamboo fence and was decorated with spears, shields, and skulls. In a confidential tone, Truman told the visitors that these skulls were the mortal remains of the Igorrotes’ enemies. In fact they were the skulls of animals, but, Truman reasoned, nobody need know this but him.

  The architecture of the village was very loosely based on the Igorrote settlements of northern Luzon. Igorrote homes in the Philippines were typically squat structures, too small for a full-grown adult to stand up in. They were dirty, dark, and damp with low thatched roofs and mud floors. Rice and corn hung from the roof beams to dry. Each hut had a sleeping room at one end into which the entire family retired at night, carefully shutting the door behind them. When it was cold, a fire would burn all night in the center of this room so that by morning the tribespeople were covered in soot, their eyes burning red from the smoke. An adjoining room was used as a storeroom. The family hens and pigs lived inside, or in a small pen underneath the hut.

  At Luna Park, Truman Americanized the design, making the huts taller and more spacious to accommodate visitors to the park and adding a front door flanked on either side by white wooden shutters to make them look more appealing to American eyes. These would help keep out Coney’s bright lights but did little to keep the resort’s noise at bay. Over the following weeks the Igorrotes would build and rebuild these structures, so that visitors could see them involved in constant activity.

  Under orders from Truman, the tribespeople were still building their homes on opening day. To the amazement of the onlookers, the agile Igorrotes climbed up the bamboo frames of their huts using their bare hands and feet, carrying bales of straw balanced on their backs. Fomoaley watched over the construction, shouting out instructions in the Igorrotes’ clipped tongue. Truman, who was standing at the edge of the village, offered a commentary for the crowd. Look, he said, at the Igorrote men’s unusually long big toes, which splay out to the side. He explained that these had evolved over time to work like thumbs, helping the men climb the tall trees in their native habitat.

  Truman pointed to a tower standing at the entrance to the Igorrotes’ enclosure. This, he explained, is an authentic headhunters’ watchtower. These can be found at the entrance to Igorrote towns and villages in the Philippines. From these towers the tribespeople keep a constant lookout for advancing enemy headhunters hoping to take them by surprise. The crowd looked at the imposing structure. It towered over the Igorrotes’ homes. At its top stood a platform ringed by a bamboo fence and topped with an umbrella-shaped thatched roof. A door at its base led inside to some steps, which they could climb to the top. The Igorrotes had been puzzled as to why in a country without headhunters they needed to build a tower, but they had done as Truman asked. Though he had said nothing, Julio understood that it was part of the show, there to shock and awe. Less authentic were the telegraph poles behind the village, which could be seen over the tops of the Igorrotes’ huts.

  In the center of their community, the Igorrotes were busy building a hut raised on stilts four feet above the ground. It was entered by a small ladder that could be drawn up into the single living and sleeping room inside. This hut, Truman told visitors, is the home of Manidol, the medicine man (this was another new tribal post created by Truman). The medicine man, he continued, is second in importance only to the tribal chiefs, and he is treated with a great deal of respect by his countrymen and women. His job was “to exorcise troublesome spirits and allay bodily pains,” making him, in the words of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “a cross between a voodoo doctor and a Christian Scientist.”5 At one side of the village was a small hut where Callahan spent his nights, allowing him to keep a watchful eye over the tribe. Aside from Julio, the Igorrotes were not permitted to leave the village at any time, not even to venture out into Luna Park’s grounds.

  The Igorrotes were miners and agricultural workers at home, renowned for their highly skilled irrigation and cultivation techniques, which enabled them transform even the steepest mountainside into thriving rice terraces. There was no room for rice terraces or mines at Luna Park, so Truman had them erect a copper-smelting plant across from the medicine man’s hut, which the Igorrotes would use to make their smoking pipes, along with jewelry and other trinkets to sell to their visitors. Under their agreement with Truman, along with their monthly wages of fifteen dollars each, they could keep all the money they raised from selling souvenirs—rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, textiles, spears, and shields. As the visitors milled around, Julio invited a group of American men to throw coins to a distance of about five yards from where several Igorrote boys stood. The men obliged. The boys took aim and fired their arrows at the coins. When one of them made a bad miss, laughter rang through the village as the others teased him.

  Do the boys hunt heads? someone in the crowd wanted to know. But before Truman could answer, Fomoaley let out a yell. The Igorrotes laid down their tools. One by one they walked forward and began to form a circle around Fomoaley, who stood erect. Truman informed the crowd that this man was the tribal chief. Quietly at first, Fomoaley began to utter a stream of guttural sounds. Gradually his voice grew louder and more rhythmic as the rest of the tribe joined in his chant. Their chant turned to song and the Igorrotes began to sway in time to the beat of the tom-tom drums. Truman decided that he would let the strange scene speak for itself. He watched with a satisfied smile as the crowd of onlookers grew until there wasn’t an inch of standing room to be found.

  Women pushed to the front of the crowd; children were lifted onto their fathers’ shoulders. A young Igorrote man struck a gong and the chief picked up a thin strip of bamboo. Another tribesman appeared carrying a live hen. Fomoaley lif
ted his hand and closed his eyes as if in silent prayer. What happened next led several people, men among them, to faint. With a flash, the tribal chief lowered his hand and began to beat the bird with the bamboo strip, first its wings, then its neck and finally its head, his strokes growing faster and faster. Women threw their hands up to cover their eyes. Young boys looked on with morbid delight. The crowd gasped as the bird fell dead.

  Fomoaley picked the hen up by its rubbery orange feet and held it over the fire, burning its feathers to a crisp and rubbing them off with sticks. Then, with one deft stroke, he sliced open its stomach and, with a flick of his wrist, ripped out the blue-green tangle of its guts. A young Igorrote man held out a small ceramic beaker to catch the blood. When enough of the dark red liquid had dripped inside, Fomoaley lifted the cup and, chanting quietly under his breath, walked over to his hut. There, watched over by the medicine man, he sprinkled a few drops of blood over the roof. One by one the men of the village came forward and took the beaker, each sprinkling the hen’s blood over a hut. It was exactly as they had rehearsed it. Truman spoke again, informing the crowd that this was a tribal custom intended to ward off evil. The onlookers stood in stunned silence.

  The sacrifice of the hen brought the American Humane Association knocking on Truman’s door. They had received a number of complaints about the bloody incident and arrived at Luna Park to investigate. Truman put up a rigorous defense of the practice, explaining that it was an important Igorrote custom. As well as blessing their homes, Truman said that the bird’s slaughter was part of a sacred funeral rite, held to mark the sad passing of their tribal elder in Seattle, which the group had been unable to commemorate while they were traveling. After a few words in the right ears from Thompson, the authorities accepted Truman’s explanation.