The Lost Tribe of Coney Island

by Claire Prentice

  The air was chilly and the sky was already growing dark when Barker and the Filipinos reached the station in Memphis. In San Francisco they would catch the army ship to Manila. There they might cross paths with the new Igorrote exhibition groups being assembled by Schneidewind and Col. Hopkins for the 1907 summer season. Both men had invited Julio to work for them, but the translator recently confessed to Barker he was having serious doubts about whether he wanted anything more to do with the trade. Hopkins had even asked Barker to abandon his government career and join him in his enterprise. Barker had politely declined. Chasing around after Truman had provided him with more than enough excitement for a while. Besides, he was looking forward to finally getting home to his wife.

  Looking down at the tribespeople, Barker could hardly believe that his own adventure with them was coming to an end. He didn’t feel ready to bid them farewell. The government agent was not given to displays of emotion, and, as he stood on the platform, his depth of feeling surprised him. Swallowing hard, he wished Julio, Maria, Feloa, Dengay, and little Tainan well. Feeling a lump rise in his throat, he told them to hurry up and board the train. Julio was the last to climb the steps up to the car. At the top he turned around and looked back at Barker. His dark eyes reflected back the sadness Barker felt. The interpreter reached down and shook the government agent firmly by the hand. Then he disappeared off to join the others.

  All aboard, cried a voice in the distance. Inside, Tainan pressed his face up against the window. Barker stood motionless on the platform as the train pulled out. He thought of the train journey that had led the Filipinos to Coney Island two years previously. What a lot had happened to them in that time. He wondered what the tribespeople would tell their families when they reached home. Would they tell tales of adventure and excitement and of the fame they had achieved? Or would theirs be a sorry story of how America had let them down? Had he, Barker, let them down? The thought depressed him. He stood looking down the railroad track into the darkness long after the train disappeared in a puff of gray smoke.

  Afterword

  An Igorrote village in Northern Luzon, Philippine Islands

  THE TRAIN CARRYING the Igorrotes homeward bears the Lost Tribe of Coney Island into the mists of time. After nearly two years in America, during which their every move was scrutinized by the press and the paying public, the spotlight dims and goes out. The tribespeople who had captivated the nation with their spear-throwing demonstrations, their tribal dances and songs, disappear from the American consciousness.

  Researching the final chapters of this book, I became consumed by a desire to know what happened to the Filipinos after they left America, particularly those who testified against Truman in court. I longed to discover that Truman had gotten his comeuppance in the years after 1907 and that the tribespeople had gone on to have long and happy lives. As I discovered, Truman’s life following his release from jail does offer a karmic revenge of sorts, but the story of what happens next to the Filipinos in Truman Hunt’s exhibition group is frustratingly incomplete.

  Some of that is due to the ravages suffered by the Philippines during World War II, when Japan and America fought for control of the country and a huge volume of the islands’ historical and cultural records was destroyed. Vital records relating to entire years and even decades were wiped out.

  From those records that survive I have pieced together some details of what happened to the Filipinos in Truman’s 1905 group, together with a few of those who toured with Schneidewind. I hope this book might lead to further discoveries about their later lives.

  Julio and Maria: Despite Hopkins’s and Schneidewind’s pleas, Julio and Maria did not return to America for the 1907 summer season. Indeed, from the records that exist, it seems that Julio and Maria never set foot in America again. The interpreter, who had looked up to Truman and even aspired to be like him, had been badly hurt by the showman’s betrayal. When he returned to the Philippines after testifying against his boss in court, Julio received earnings totaling just over thirty dollars. This was exactly the same amount as everyone else in the group, and amounted to a little over a dollar for each month Julio had spent in the country. It was a far cry from the twenty-five dollars a month, plus bonuses, that Truman had promised to pay his trusted assistant. Julio had imagined that a year in America would make him rich and open up the possibility of a new life, perhaps in the Promised Land. Instead he returned home to an existence that differed little from the one he had left behind.

  Worse, Julio must have wondered if he had only himself to blame. He had turned a deaf ear to the complaints of the Igorrotes who had exhibited in St Louis in 1904 that Truman had stolen their wages, amounting to just under four-thousand dollars.1 With the benefit of hindsight, Julio must have realized that Truman ordered him to take a circuitous route to Manila with the 1905 group bound for Coney in order to avoid running into officials in Cervantes or one of the other major towns who might have tried to stop him taking the tribespeople out of the country.

  Had Julio been suspicious at the time, but kept quiet because he regarded Truman, his boss, as a friend and ally who could further his own ambitions? If so, he must have been haunted by this memory, and his own silence, during Hunt’s 1906 and 1907 trials.

  Though Julio ultimately fell out of love with America, his influence on American-Filipino relations and the world’s understanding of the Bontoc Igorrote tribe was significant and long lasting due to the work he did, while waiting for Truman’s trials to come to court, on the linguist Dr. Carl Seidenadel’s guide to the Bontoc Igorrote language.2 In the introduction to his book, which was published in 1909, Seidenadel described Julio and the other tribespeople who assisted him as the “most sympathetic people, men of astonishing intelligence, inborn independence and frankness, strong principles of honesty, kind disposition, a vivid desire for learning, and blessed with the divine gift of healthy humor.” By contrast, Seidenadel had nothing but contempt for Truman, whom he described as “unscrupulous” and as having inflicted “manifold wrongs” on the Filipinos.

  That he, Julio, along with Antero, Dengay, Tainan, and others, had contributed to such a significant work would undoubtedly have been a source of great pride for the scholarly Julio.

  There is a death certificate in the National Archives of the Philippines for a Julio Balanag (note the different spelling), who died of malaria on April 10, 1922, aged thirty-three. If this is Julio, it was an untimely end to a promising life. It would also have made him sixteen when he arrived in America with Truman in April 1905, not twenty-one as stated in the ship’s passenger list. There is no way of knowing for certain whether this is him, though the inexact spellings and imprecise and incomplete records at that time in both the Philippines and America indicate it could be. Judging by the photographs of Julio that survive, it is possible that the interpreter was younger than he claimed. If Julio was indeed sixteen when he accompanied Truman to Coney Island then it gives his story an added poignancy—the man whom the Igorrotes looked to as their bulwark against the mysteries of America was only a boy himself. If this is him, his youth would also make his betrayal at the hands of Truman, a man old enough to have been his father, all the harder to bear.

  The Philippines National Archives hold a death certificate for a woman named Maria Balinag, who died on December 10, 1914, aged thirty, in Mabini, Bohol, an island one thousand miles south of Bontoc. When she arrived in America, Maria gave her second name as Alijas, not Balinag. Though it is possible that this document refers to Julio’s wife, both the location of her death and the discrepancy in her surname mean this is far from certain.

  I could find no record of Julio and Maria having children.

  By a strange coincidence, Julio’s older brother, Nicasio Balinag, a distinguished civil servant, went on to hold Truman Hunt’s old post of deputy governor of Bontoc (and later of Kalinga Province) as the administration of the islands passed out of American control and into the hands of the Philippine people.

&nb
sp; The nikimalika: America’s fascination with the Igorrotes continued long after Truman’s trial and exit from the tribal exhibition scene. For a decade after the Filipinos were first exhibited in America, showmen continued to travel to the Philippines to gather their own Igorrote groups. In the mountains of northern Luzon, recruiters found no shortage of volunteers despite what Truman had done. The Igorrotes traveled all over America and beyond, to the UK, Cuba, and mainland Europe. From Magic City, Paris, to London’s Earl’s Court and the Waverley Market in Edinburgh, the tribespeople delighted crowds wherever they went.

  And for many years after their Luna Park debut, the Filipinos continued to be a big draw at Coney Island. In May 1909, four years to the day after Truman and the Igorrotes arrived at Coney, the New York Sun described how “[o]ver in Dreamland high above the minarets and spires clinging to a bare pole with his naked toes was a Filipino headhunter who looked out over the crowds, shading his eyes with a brown hand. It was so high where he had climbed like a monkey that the savage looked no bigger than a small boy. Suddenly he threw out a shrill cry, caught up a brass gong from the crow’s nest at the very top of the pole and began to sound it with slow steady strokes. The strong resonance rose over the multiple voices of Coney and rolled in waves head long after the brown hand ceased to strike.”3 The village was under the management of Captain J. R. McRae, formerly of the Philippine constabulary.

  Even without Truman, the Igorrote stories had become self-perpetuating. FILIPINOS WED BAREFOOT, read the headline in the New York Times on June 2 that same season. The accompanying article described the wedding of Tu-Go-Dan and A’Lao, which took place at City Hall, presided over by Alderman Smith, and watched, of course, by the Dreamland press agent, the tribal chief Chemingo, “the medicine man,” and many of the couple’s Filipino friends. “The marriage took place in the basement before a large and interested crowd. The Filipinos were all barefooted and dressed in native costume. The press agent declared that the bride had fortified herself on the trip up from the Island by smoking two long, black cigars.”4 Despite the change of manager, and tribespeople, the stories stayed the same. After the wedding ceremony, it was reported that the Igorrote Village would celebrate with a four-day-long feast at which “four dozen chickens will be roasted and two dozen dogs will be served as a delicacy. Two barrels of rice will be used in making the native wine that will go with the eatables.”5

  As the years went by, the Igorrotes lost none of their ability to stir the hearts of the American people. At the end of the 1909 season, a Coney Island caretaker described how people sent clothes to the tribespeople from all over the country. “Great bundles of clothes of all sorts, worn and half worn. People coming by and feeling sorry for them because they had so few on. Going home and sending them back by the next train. Those Igorrotes just laughed at them, at the idea of putting anything more on than was absolutely necessary . . . Why, we had to send bundles of clothes to the charity people, to the Salvation Army people and the aid societies. We’d have been overrun with old clothes.”6

  Richard Schneidewind: In comparison with Truman, Schneidewind appeared to be a good and paternalistic manager, but he soon became embroiled in his own scandals. In 1907 when Schneidewind brought a new group of Igorrotes to America, officials in the Bureau of Insular Affairs learned that Schneidewind had been employed as a clerk in the Manila post office in 1901 but had been dismissed after it was discovered that he had taken part in a smuggling scheme, sending many packages of valuable goods to a confederate in San Francisco, who sold them there and in Los Angeles. Despite this, Schneidewind established himself as a major figure in the Igorrote show trade. After three successful tours of America, in 1905, 1907, and 1908, Schneidewind set his sights farther afield. In 1911, despite vociferous opposition from Bontoc elders, the Bontoc lieutenant governor John Early, the local Episcopal bishop, and officials of nearby towns, Schneidewind was permitted to take a group of fifty-five Igorrotes from the Philippines to Europe. They exhibited in France, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Several babies were born on the tours, in Paris, Pennsylvania, and Madison Square Garden, New York.

  Schneidewind and his associates were unfamiliar with the European entertainment business, and, after two years on the road, they ran in to serious financial difficulties. What happened next was alarmingly familiar. According to American newspaper reports, a group of starving Igorrotes was found wandering the streets of Ghent, Belgium, in the winter of 1913. The group’s interpreters, Ellis Tongai and James Amok, wrote to US president Woodrow Wilson, begging for his assistance. In their letter they complained that they had not been paid for many months and reported the deaths of nine members of the group, including five children.

  Schneidewind tried to persuade the Filipinos that their difficulties were only temporary, and promised them that if they stayed on and continued working for him until the 1915 San Francisco Exposition, they would be rewarded with a very handsome wage. Despite the hardships they had endured, about half of the group agreed to stay on with him in Europe. But, fearing another scandal, the US government intervened, and in December 1913 the US consul in Ghent escorted the tribespeople to Marseilles to catch a boat to Manila. The government spent $2,668.26 sending the group home. Intriguingly, the US consul reported that one of the tribesmen managed to separate himself from the rest of the group in Ghent and, according to several railway-station employees, was last seen “boarding an early train leaving for Brussels.”7

  In May 2011 the Belgian government named a tunnel in the Ghent railroad station the “Timichegtunnel,” after Timicheg, one of the nine Igorrotes who died on Schneidewind’s European tour.

  Schneidewind’s disastrous European venture did little to help the image of the Igorrote show trade. In 1914 legislation was passed by the Philippine Assembly to put an end to the exhibition of Filipinos abroad. As a measure of the seriousness with which the Philippine lawmakers regarded the subject, the ban was included as an amendment to a new antislavery act.

  Schneidewind, like Truman before him, exited the Igorrote show trade. But before he left the business of exhibiting exotic people altogether, he had one last shot, managing a Samoan Village at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. After that he packed up and moved back to Detroit with his wife, Selma (whom he had met at Riverview Park, Chicago, when he was exhibiting the Igorrotes there and whom he had married in October 1906). There he worked for a streetcar company and later sold cars. Schneidewind died in January 1949. His son, Dick, whom he had with his first wife, a Filipina named Gabina, was a brilliant man who went on to become a professor of metallurgical engineering at the University of Michigan.

  Though the exhibition of large Igorrote groups ended in America after 1914, the word Igorrote lived on in the American vocabulary. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the appearance of “Marquita, the Igorrote girl violinist” at the Hippodrome, Thompson and Dundy’s old theater, in 1924.8 Almost two decades after her tribe’s first appearance at Coney Island, the girl needed no further introduction.

  And in Memphis, the scene of Truman’s violent criminal assault and robbery, the Igorrotes were still being hailed in the press as “one of the best attractions ever brought to East End [Park]” nearly thirty years after their appearance there.9 The article in the Commercial Appeal continued, “Even in cold December days they astonished the residents of Madison Heights by continuing about their daily routine with even less clothes than Gandhi wears.”

  Today, more than a century after the Igorrotes first wowed crowds at Coney Island, most Americans probably don’t know who the Igorrotes were, but a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times paid its own tribute of sorts, informing readers that once upon a time a tribe of “scantily clad Philippine Igorots from the Luzon highlands reenacted a daily ‘Bow Wow Feast’ ”10 in America.

  Friday: Friday was separated from Truman Hunt’s troupe in the chaotic summer of 1906. By August, while Barker was in Chicago preparing to send most of Truman’s Igorrote gr
oup home, Friday was six hundred miles away, in an orphanage in Rochester, New York, run by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ASPCC). The boy, who stood less than three feet tall, settled in quickly. He made friends and started attending school, where he “was progressing rapidly in his studies.”11 Though his English was limited, the Negrito, whose new friends nicknamed him “Gubbo,” regaled his classmates with tales of his life as a performer at Coney Island. According to an article in the local newspaper, he gave the other children Spanish lessons and enjoyed playing with toy cars and trains.

  The story of how Friday had ended up at the ASPCC was a sorry one. After becoming separated from the rest of Truman’s group, Friday had been locked in an enclosure in the Ontario Beach Park in Charlotte, Rochester, on the banks of Lake Ontario. There he was forced to perform a degrading sideshow for crowds of men, women, and children who gawked at him through the iron bars. After being tipped off by a concerned member of the public, Agent W. A. Killip of the ASPCC led a raid on the park and sprang Friday from his torment. Newspaper reports described how an angry American man (possibly Felder or Friday’s guardian, Fuller, or one of their associates) tried to prevent Killip taking Friday away, insisting that the boy had been brought to the US under a five-thousand-dollar bond and could not therefore be taken anywhere without the government’s permission. The agent assumed the man was bluffing but wrote to the War Department asking if they knew anything about the boy.

  Friday begged Killip to let him stay on in Rochester. He was an orphan; he had no family to go back to. He dreamed of completing his education and staying on in America. But in October Agent Killip received a letter from the War Department, confirming that Friday had been brought to the US under bonds and that he must now return home. Friday was distraught.

  The War Department sent a man to collect Friday. He was taken to Chicago to join Schneidewind’s group. On October 10, 1906, they left Chicago for Manila. The American dream was over for the Negrito boy who had charmed crowds the length and breadth of the country.