The Lost Tribe of Coney Island

by Claire Prentice

  It seems likely that Friday had been taken to Ontario Beach by, or with the knowledge of, George Fuller, the Rochester-born businessman who had bought Friday from his relatives in the Philippines. Fuller presented himself as a caring patron who had adopted Friday in order to give the boy an American education and a good start in life. But if this was true, why had Fuller given the boy to Truman to exhibit in America? The only possible answer is that Fuller did so for his own financial gain, or to assist his friend the showman.

  Tainan:12 His bad experience with Truman didn’t put Tainan off America or the Igorrote exhibition business. The boy was enormously popular with the public and with the American showmen who followed in Truman’s wake. Tainan’s youth arguably made him better able to cope with the demands of life as a human exhibit. Every time the showmen came to the mountains of northern Luzon to look for volunteers, Tainan was there, a willing volunteer ready to embark on another adventure. He was part of Schneidewind’s group that traveled to Europe in 1911. By the time he returned to the Philippines in 1914, Tainan spoke good English. Though I could find no records describing what became of him, his tours had given him linguistic skills that would have equipped him well for a professional career with the civil service, as a teacher or businessman.

  Daipan: The young woman routinely described in the press as “the belle of the village” returned to America in 1908, appearing, among other places, at the Iowa State Fair, the very one that fired Truman’s passion for fairs as a boy. According to an article in the Des Moines News, Daipan, still “an Igorrote beauty with much charm of manner and a fascinating smile,” was expecting her first child with her husband-to-be, Lai-dis. Two years earlier, Daipan had been married in an elaborate wedding ceremony at Sans Souci in Chicago to fifteen-year-old headhunter Sadoy. This sham marriage was presided over, of course, by Truman Hunt.

  The other members of Truman’s Igorrote group, including Feloa and Dengay, disappear from the written record after they returned to the Philippines.

  Antero:13 Schneidewind’s popular interpreter and Truman’s former houseboy returned to America with Schneidewind in 1907. This time Antero brought a wife, Takhay Ulapan, and the couple had their first child, a daughter who, according to legend, they named Sylvia because she was born in Pennsylvania. In 1908, the couple had another daughter at Ontario Beach Park in Charlotte, Rochester, New York (the very place where Friday was rescued by the ASPCC). She weighed six pounds and they named her Charlotte. The couple had a third daughter, Maria, on the boat back to the Philippines in 1909. They went on to have ten children—eight daughters and two sons. In 1911 Antero planned to go with Schneidewind to Europe, but officials in Bontoc, who were reluctant to let the tribespeople go, ordered him to stay and continue the work he had started on the Bontoc census. After participating in the Igorrote tours, Antero worked as an interpreter for the government in the Philippines and became a businessman and farmer.

  A firm believer in the importance of education, Antero encouraged all of his children, boys and girls, to concentrate on their studies. According to his descendants, Antero remained interested in the world beyond his doorstep throughout his life. He regularly ventured down to the coast to trade and took a keen interest in the foreigners he met in his domestic travels. Along with Julio, Antero made a major contribution to Carl Seidenadel’s book on the Bontoc language. Antero died around 1940 and his wife passed away in the early 1980s.

  James Robert Amok: Amok was born in 1894 in Bontoc and first traveled to America with Schneidewind. He arguably became the most Americanized of the nikimalika (as the Igorrotes who exhibited in America were known at home), and was willing to endure all manner of hardships and degradations in order to stay on in the US.

  How he got the names James and Robert varies according to sources: he was either given them by American missionaries in the Philippines or, perhaps more likely, simply adopted them during his travels. Amok, or Jim, as he was known, worked as a translator for Schneidewind’s European tour group. He appeared in a variety show at the Waverley Market Carnival in Edinburgh, Scotland, in December 1915 and exhibited in Cuba two years later, most likely as part of a tour organized by Samuel Gumpertz. In Edinburgh Amok was described by one theater critic as possessing “in a marked degree the characteristics of the authentic ‘wild man.’ He is remarkably dexterous in throwing his native weapons, and he performs on the platform native dances and semi-religious rites which are of a realistic character, and are carried through with an absorption which surpass in effect any possible acting.”14

  Amok went on to become the longest-serving Igorrote at Coney (the government clampdown on Igorrotes being imported to the US for exhibition purposes after 1914 seems to have been applied to groups and not individuals). A 1917 newspaper article referred to Amok appearing in chains in a cage at a Coney sideshow, where visitors paid a dime to peer through the bars at him.15 He was a regular fixture at the resort right through the 1920s, by which point Coney’s heyday had long passed.

  During World War I, Amok was conscripted despite the fact he had never been made an American citizen. The once-ferocious headhunter appealed on the grounds that he had become a “peaceful man who should not be made to fight for the United States, not being a citizen thereof.”16 In the same article, Amok was described by the Coney sideshow barker as “a ferocious cannibal, with an insatiable appetite for gore” but, he insisted, the tribesman’s savage nature deserted him outside of “business hours.”

  Amok’s appeal was overruled. He was deployed in France during WWI, where he was praised for his valor as a soldier and, according to newspaper reports, was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery in combat.

  After the war, he appeared in a variety show in New York that required him to climb a tree and declare war on his enemies at the top of his voice. In press interviews, he described his work as “silly business, but it paid well.”17 Amok died in New York in 1950 and is buried in the Long Island veterans’ graveyard. On his death, newspaper headlines lauded the onetime “sideshow freak” as an American hero.

  Frederic Thompson and Elmer “Skip” Dundy: The “Kings of Coney” seemed to be untouchable in the summer of 1905. But by 1906, things were unraveling. Thompson had fallen in love with a pretty, mediocre young actress named Mabel Taliaferro, whom he married after a whirlwind courtship. Thompson devoted his career—and much of his wealth—to making her a star, neglecting Luna Park and the Hippodrome. On June 8, 1906, Thompson and Dundy formally resigned their interest in the Hippodrome amid rumors that four hundred thousand dollars obtained for the theater from the National City Bank “had been spent extravagantly.”18

  Dundy died suddenly the following year of a dilation of the heart and an attack of pneumonia. Without his friend and business partner to keep him focused, Thompson lost his grip. His marriage fell apart and alcoholism took hold. Thompson had always relied on Dundy to take care of their money and, without him, he paid no attention to his financial affairs. He spent profusely, hiring a private train car whenever he traveled, taking a suite of six rooms in the Algonquin Hotel, and hiring a cook and two butlers. Thompson was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1912, giving Luna Park over to his creditors. The following year he married a childhood friend. Despite his troubles the showman remained enormously popular. A benefit held in his honor at Coney in 1916 was attended by hundreds of old friends and colleagues and succeeded in raising thirty thousand dollars.

  Thompson’s capacity to generate ingenious schemes never died, but deprived of the counterbalance offered by his business partner, his grand plans, from founding a permanent World’s Fair atop the new Pennsylvania Station in New York to designing and manufacturing airplanes, never got off the ground. Thompson’s days as a genius of the show world were over. He contracted Bright’s disease, the same condition that led to Truman’s death, and died on June 6, 1919, penniless and physically spent. He left an estate of seven hundred dollars, just enough to cover his medical and funeral expenses.

  Co
l. John Hopkins: Anyone who crossed Col. Hopkins did so at his own peril. The vaudeville legend produced a file weighing five pounds on his dealings with Truman Hunt, which he handed to Barker during Truman’s trial in the hope that it contained something incriminating that could be used against his business associate turned enemy. It didn’t. Two years after appearing in court to testify against Truman, Hopkins threatened to stage a one-act play exposing his associates’ true characters and “concerning whom the world needs a clarification of opinion.” Variety reported in 1908 that his press agent, Mrs. Emille De Howard, was trying to dissuade him.

  Hopkins’s health deteriorated in the last years of his life but his wit remained pin sharp. During one hospital stay, he was asked by nurses whether he wanted to see a minister, to which he replied, “What would I do with a minister? If you’ll send an undertaker and a gravedigger, they might find it of interest to talk to me.”19 Later, as he lay on his deathbed, the vain impresario, who was then seventy-nine, told staff at the Jewish Hospital in St. Louis that he was sixty-three. He died at five o’clock in the afternoon on October 24, 1909.20

  Samuel Gumpertz: When Dreamland burned to the ground in 1911, the fast-thinking Gumpertz threw up a tent on Surf Avenue and christened it the Dreamland Circus Sideshow. He supplemented his income by taking a select group of his Coney performers, including the Igorrote James Robert Amok, on tour to Europe and Cuba. Gumpertz earned a living from his Coney sideshow throughout the 1920s, specializing in freak shows, human oddities, and circus attractions. Among his best known performers were the two-foot-tall Baron Paucci, “the world’s smallest perfect man”; “Lionel, the dog-faced boy”; and “the famous pinhead Zip What Is It,” who worked for him for many years. A great Coney Island enthusiast and promoter, Gumpertz helped organize the annual Mardi Gras parade and served as president of the Coney Island chamber of commerce. In 1929 Gumpertz finally quit Coney and went back to his circus roots, going to work for Ringling Brothers.

  Adele von Groyss: The “baroness” rivaled Truman for self-invention and self-promotion. Though she didn’t publicly condemn her old friend, she did not remain in contact with Truman after news of his scandalous behavior hit the headlines. However, her relationship with the Igorrotes endured. In 1910 she tried and failed to set up a school and conservatoire for fifty Igorrotes in Fordham, New York. She wanted to do this, she explained, because the Igorrotes were “remarkable musicians” who “with few exceptions, all have good voices.”21 Her plan was blocked and von Groyss blamed the racial prejudice of Fordham residents, stating: “The general impression among Americans is the Igorrotes are a lower order of beings and therefore must have unspeakable vices, but on the contrary they have wonderful natural intelligence. What is more astonishing than all, they don’t steal or lie, virtues you will find in few of the other races.”

  Von Groyss established herself as the hostess of an avant-garde salon in New York. In that role she promoted Dogmena,22 a young Igorrote tribeswoman as her protégée, and anointed her an Igorrote princess. Dogmena, scantily dressed in scarlet silks, danced to music composed by von Groyss, and her performances climaxed with the Igorrote plunging a spear into an imaginary head on the floor.23 Dogmena was in demand at high-society gatherings from Delmonico’s and the Hotel Astor in Manhattan to meetings of the International Artistic Social Club and private parties in Washington, DC, garnering attention in newspapers as far afield as London and New Zealand.

  Intriguingly, in a 1911 interview, von Groyss referred to a young woman named Dookmena (perhaps another journalistic mangling of an Igorrote name) as one of the original Igorrote group who exhibited at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904, adding that “just before it was time to send her back she met a negro named Jackson, who got her away and gave her American clothes. Then she became his wife, and your [American] Government couldn’t send her back.”24

  One of nature’s survivors, von Groyss worked tirelessly for charity, was a member of the Ladies Auxiliary, and remained a regular fixture in the New York press, turning her hand to everything from writing a recipe column to playing the piano to accompany silent movies in New York theaters. Interestingly, given Truman’s Elks connection, in 1931, music students of von Groyss gave a concert at the Elks Club in Patchogue, Long Island.25

  Frederick Barker: The release of Truman was a rare low point in Barker’s career. Shortly after, Barker left government service and went on to have a successful career working as a lawyer for the Guggenheim brothers in Mexico and South America, where they had mining ventures and other business interests. Barker had a son, Francis, and a daughter, Mabel, with his second wife, Josephine. His work took him to Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico, where he and his family lived from 1907 to 1918. Barker died in Los Angeles in 1954, aged eighty-three.

  Frank McIntyre: The Truman Hunt–Igorrote debacle did nothing to harm McIntyre’s professional reputation. In 1912 McIntyre was promoted to chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs. In 1919 he was awarded a distinguished service medal and praised for his “breadth of view and sound judgment,”26 the same qualities he had applied to pursuing Truman Hunt more than a decade earlier. McIntyre rose to the rank of major general before retiring in 1929 after forty-three years of service with the army. He died at Miami Beach, Florida, on February 16, 1944.

  Col. Clarence Edwards: “There is probably no one American who throughout a long period of years has consistently done more to forward the Philippines than [Edwards],”27 reported a 1917 article in the New York Sun. The first chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs went on to become commander of the 26th Division in World War I. A controversial figure, he inspired great loyalty among his supporters but had a reputation for being outspoken and argumentative, which made him many foes. During World War I Edwards was openly critical of his army superiors, which led to his being relieved of his command. Following his retirement from the army, Edwards served as president of the grocery business his father had founded. He died in Boston in 1931.

  Dean Worcester: Truman’s onetime friend and ally held the position of secretary of the interior until 1913, making him one of the most powerful men in the Philippines and the longest-serving administrator in the colonial government. During his career Worcester amassed a collection of thousands of photographs of the Philippines’ “non-Christian tribes,” including the Igorrotes and the Negritos, which he used in public lectures, and magazine and newspaper articles to promote his view that the people of the Islands were not fit for self-rule. He was a controversial figure throughout his career, loathed by Philippine nationalists and US anti-imperialists alike. After resigning from government service, Worcester remained in the Philippines until his death in 1924. He left behind a vast collection of photographs, letters, and other documents, which tell a controversial but fascinating story of early American colonialism.

  Judge Moss: Never one to worry about going against the grain of popular opinion, the judge who let Truman walk free from the Shelby County court in 1907 devoted himself to a series of moral crusades during his long career. These included sentencing anyone found loitering in Memphis to sixty days in the workhouse and clamping down on Sunday opening in the city’s theaters in 1908. He died in 1914.

  David Frayser: In 1915 Memphis newspapers reported that Truman’s former attorney had gone missing after buying a train ticket to Knoxville on March 17. He was still missing in May. Family and friends had made every effort to locate him, and reportedly did not know whether he was living or dead. He later reappeared in Memphis, having apparently suffered a nervous breakdown, and returned to his newspaper roots, taking a job with the Commercial Appeal. He died in 1932 of bronchial pneumonia, aged seventy.

  Truman Hunt: Truman might have escaped the full force of American justice, but his final years were a kind of long, drawn-out punishment. Such a torrent of misfortune befell him that he must have wondered whether the Igorrotes had put a curse on him. The Filipinos were not vindictive people, nor did they practice voodoo, but in the years after 1907 the sho
wman had good reason to be superstitious.

  His post-jail life was marked by personal tragedy, financial hardship, and poor health. After scraping some money together, Truman and Sallie left Kentucky and headed west to make a fresh start. Truman, still chasing a fast buck, invested everything he owned in the Oklahoma oil fields. His dreamed-of fortune failed to materialize and his first child with Sallie, Patty, died in March 1908, aged just two. The couple had another two girls. They named them Bonnie and Mary (after one of Sallie’s sisters, who died the same year the child was born). Tragically, Bonnie and Mary also died in infancy.

  In 1910, six years after Truman bigamously married Sallie, the itinerant showman and his third wife finally settled at their first permanent address, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Truman returned to medicine and Sallie had a fourth daughter, Catherine, named after the older sister who had been Sallie’s rock during Truman’s trials and incarceration.

  Truman’s appetite for reinventing his own life story had not diminished with age: the Iowa-born showman told the 1910 census taker that he was born in Kentucky, and that he was the son of a Kentucky-born father and a New York–born mother. The census taken in Iowa the same year shows eighteen-year-old Calista, Truman’s daughter with his first wife, was still living with her grandmother and aunt Dora in Cedar Rapids.

  With a new home and a baby daughter, Truman and Sallie hoped finally to put their misfortunes behind them, but Truman began experiencing periods of intense pain caused by Bright’s disease, an inflammation of the kidneys, which was likely exacerbated by his fondness for liquor and rich food. His symptoms included dizziness, backache, and stomach pains.

  The former showman moved his family back to Iowa, and began peddling miracle cures via a post office box, with the claim “Diseases of Men Cured . . . We Guarantee What Others Simply Promise. I am a recognized specialist in all diseases of men.”28