The truth was more prosaic. Not even a single enemy submarine had been sunk.
Edgar’s shipmates were still arguing as the convoy steamed slowly into Saint-Nazaire, gliding past beaches that sloped up to green, sunlit hills with cottages scattered across them. After thirteen days at sea, everyone on board relished the prospect of escaping from the discomfort and claustrophobia of seagoing life. But the low tide prevented the Antilles and her sister ships from entering the congested little harbor until about five o’clock that evening.
On either side of the Antilles, much smaller boats bobbed about. The crews of these waved their hats and shouted, “Vive les Américaines!” A cheering throng of Frenchmen and black-clad women was already on the quayside as the ship docked. Edgar’s friends from the First Telegraph Battalion were soon streaming down the gangplank. As they marched across the cobbled quayside, children scampered alongside them, tossing flowers in their direction and reaching out to touch their hands—just the sort of schmaltzy scene within which Edgar so often portrayed himself.
5
When the Antilles completed the return journey to Hoboken about a month later, Edgar was immediately taken away for questioning. Captain H. C. Craig, an army officer who worked out of an address on River Street, just across from the docks, undertook the interrogation. Presumably as an upshot of the articles published by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle while Edgar was en route for France, Craig accused him of being an impostor.
Edgar began by denying this accusation. Under the pressure of cross-examination, though, he was forced to admit he wasn’t Tom Longboat. But he said his real name was also an Indian name. It was, he claimed, Thomas Tewanna. His story may well have elicited pity because Craig didn’t take the matter any further. Instead of feeling the chill grasp of handcuffs around his wrists, Edgar was allowed to collect his meager wages from his time aboard the Antilles, and then leave Hoboken.
* * *
—
No longer trading on Tom Longboat’s fame, he had, by the second week of October, found his way to cold, blustery upstate New York, where he called himself Chief White Elk, the name he’d been given when he worked for Dr. W. H. Long’s Big Indian and Medicine Concert Company. Edgar assigned Chief White Elk a rich backstory. Predisposed to cast himself as a macho yet cerebral man, he borrowed aspects of his jazzed-up version of Tom Longboat’s past, sparing him the inconvenience of learning a new role. Chief White Elk thus became a survivor of the Princess Pat Regiment and a onetime member of Carlisle’s crack football team.
He also led people to think he was on furlough from his duties as a wireless operator aboard a U.S. Army Transport Service vessel, where he’d been serving since being invalided out of the trenches—not that he’d even visited the trenches during his brief sojourn in France, much of which appears to have been spent unloading his ship’s cargo of military equipment. With vivid specificity, he detailed the wounds he’d incurred at the Battle of Verdun. A silver and steel plate was, he said, implanted in his chest, where several ribs had been blown away. Shrapnel had blinded him in one eye—an illusion that required a piratical eye patch. Rubber bandages swathed his legs, which had been burned by a flamethrower and “practically shot to pieces.” Worse still, he’d lost his hearing in one ear.
Experience was teaching him that the bigger the lies he told, the more avidly people seemed to embrace them. He’d surely have realized that those people probably wanted to feel a connection—however loose—to world events, to have something out of the ordinary to tell their friends, something that made them feel special.
Stopping in Poughkeepsie, its brick and timber buildings lining the east bank of the Hudson River, Edgar picked up an engagement to lecture about the war. Three days after the lecture, news broke that the real Tom Longboat had been killed on active service. Coverage of his demise was sometimes illustrated by photos of Edgar pretending to be him.
While news of the celebrated athlete’s death spread across the Eastern Seaboard, Edgar headed north. As Chief White Elk, he visited Schenectady, another small, prosperous riverside city. There, he spun a yarn about being on his way to visit his birthplace—the Onondaga Reservation, near Syracuse.
That Wednesday he hobbled along the section of State Street traversing the city’s business district, his imaginary war wounds signposted by the cane he used. Austere three- and four-story edifices, intermingled by fussily decorated storefronts and theaters, served as an honor guard for this ample, brick-paved thoroughfare, along which streetcars trundled. Edgar limped into the building that housed Schenectady’s Daily Gazette. He captivated one of its reporters with his broad grin, his colorful tales of football stardom and military service, his account of how the French respected and appreciated the American troops, his stoic acceptance of his war wounds, and his confidence in the successful outcome of the war. When the reporter inquired whether he thought the Allies would win the conflict by next spring, Edgar heaped his response with feigned bemusement: “The Allies?” A sardonic smile preceded the moment he added, “Not the Allies—you mean America will finish it for the Allies.”
Seemingly overcome by quivering rage, he spoke about what America was fighting against. He described entering Belgian villages and seeing infants who had been skewered with bayonets. These sort of atrocity stories had been making the rounds since the early days of the war, so Edgar upstaged them by saying he’d witnessed some Scottish soldiers—“kilties,” he called them—being crucified by the Germans.
“Maybe you haven’t heard just how it was done,” he continued with the gleeful aplomb of a born raconteur. “The horrible thing took place right before our eyes and we were unable to help them. The four men were placed against a structure and their arms were pulled out with ropes so that the cords or tendons stuck out and could be seen. Then several German soldiers—‘barbarians’ is a better term—took knives and cut off the men’s ears and noses and other parts of their bodies. After the Germans had cut holes through their shoulders, they literally pulled the skin from their bodies.
“Barbarism in the primitive stage is far superior to German warfare. They stop at nothing and won’t ever stop until they are beaten—and beaten badly. That will be the part which America will play before summer.”
In the next day’s Gazette, a lengthy piece about Chief White Elk appeared. The piece softened up the citizens of Schenectady for his usual shakedown.
By that weekend he had reason to feel as if fate had intervened on his behalf. Word was circulating that the SS Antilles had been torpedoed off the French coast. Up to seventy personnel were missing, presumed drowned. Of those, the majority belonged to the civilian crew. Edgar could so easily have been among them. But he’d lived to flimflam another day.
* * *
—
Accompanying him on the last Thursday of that month was a man who went by the name of H. H. Klein. They’d met somewhere between Schenectady and the industrial city of Wheeling, West Virginia, slightly less than four hundred miles away. In Wheeling, the pair entered the McLure Hotel. The largest and fanciest hotel in the vicinity, it was just the class of establishment where Edgar and his fellow con artists sought their prey. It offered a sharp contrast to the boardinghouses and hotels at which he and his coworkers in Dr. W. H. Long’s medicine show would have stayed. Rooms open to folk like them tended to be dark, dirty, and vermin infested, their thin walls giving rise to a popular quip about how “you could hear the fellow in the next room making up his mind.”
Klein signed the visitors’ book at the McLure with a few indecipherable squiggles. Though he showed up at the same moment as Edgar, Klein told the desk clerk that he’d known Chief White Elk just a matter of hours. The scene of their meeting, he stated, was Zanesville, Ohio—seventy-four miles east. He said he’d taken pity on the chief and brought him to Wheeling.
In the argot of con men, Edgar’s companion was “a shill”: a person who helped to p
erform short cons. On the day of their arrival at the McLure, Klein orchestrated a conversation with a Jewish visitor from Pittsburgh. Klein ended by inviting him to a talk set to take place at the hotel that evening. The talk was being given by a soldier lately returned from France.
Along with the man from Pittsburgh, a substantial crowd showed up to hear Edgar speak. He told the audience that Germany was whipped and that the war was pretty much over. Flattering them with the impression they were privy to inside information, he spoke about how the government had covered up the sinking of an American troopship. Two thousand soldiers had, he said, lost their lives. He described his time in the trenches as well, his reminiscences spiced with the sort of “weird tales” so characteristic of his habitual straining toward the extraordinary, the unexpected. And he referred to the metal plate inserted after he’d suffered a serious chest wound—a cue to tap on his rib cage. Something must have been concealed under his clothes, because the tapping produced a metallic noise. It also aroused his audience’s sympathy. With Klein’s help, he collected donations from many of the people there.
Edgar and Klein checked out of the McLure next morning. A short time afterward they went their separate ways.
Newspapers across the eastern states meanwhile carried stories that Tom Longboat hadn’t, contrary to previous reports, been killed in France. These stories about his resurrection could easily have been triggered by the confusion Edgar had sowed, which had led people to mistake him for the famous athlete. But on closer inspection it turned out that the real Longboat was indeed alive.
Most of the press stories quoted the same extract from a letter he’d written to his former manager:
I was over the front lines last night and I was sweating like an old horse. I was covered with mud from head to feet and I don’t know how many times I fell in the shell holes over the wires. They cut me all up. Everything was flying around, high explosives, shrapnel, whizz-bangs, coal boxes, rum jars, oil-drums. That made me real sore on this fellow having [a] good time all over the country on my reputation, so I am going to put an action against that man. I am going to have three charges against this man, one for making false statements, second for impersonation, third [for] intent to defraud the public at large.
If Longboat was ever going to follow through with his threats, he’d have to identify Edgar and track him down first, neither of which was remotely probable so long as the two men were on different continents. Besides, Longboat had plenty of other things to worry about—little things like trying not to get shot or blown up.
* * *
—
Less than two weeks after leaving the McLure, Edgar was in the one-horse Kentucky town of Dry Ridge. He needed only to glance around to see how small-time his life was in comparison to his big-time dreams. As he schmoozed his way through that evening’s audience, which had just heard him deliver a speech in the persona of Chief White Elk, he harvested money from them. Half the proceeds would, he said, go toward his living expenses, and the other half would be donated to the local branch of the Red Cross.
Resisting the temptation to let greed derail a good scam, he did in fact pass on some of his takings to the Red Cross. Yet he still aroused the suspicions of the town’s postmaster, who appears to have been a member of the American Protective League. This business-supported volunteer organization, which functioned as a semiofficial adjunct to the Department of Justice, had already enrolled more than one hundred thousand members, each pursuing the financial bounty awarded for the identification and capture of German spies. Over that weekend, the meddlesome postmaster went to the trouble of placing a long-distance phone call to the Cincinnati office of the Bureau of Investigation. He apprised the bureau of his vague misgivings with regard to Chief White Elk.
But providence favored Edgar, because the bureau had no reason to link the chief to its earlier hunt for the fake Tom Longboat. The bureau’s Cincinnati office did, nonetheless, have access to a report about the chief, previously deemed important enough for it to have caught the attention of the organization’s director, Bruce Bielaski. The report concerned the chief’s layover at the McLure Hotel, during which he’d publicly accused the government of conducting a cover-up. His accusation placed him within the expanded remit of the bureau. Since America had entered the war, this had shifted toward not only apprehending spies but also implementing recently passed legislation that criminalized anything liable to hamper the war effort. On the evidence of what the chief had said at the McLure, the bureau suspected he might be peddling pro-German propaganda. Accordingly, Dry Ridge’s postmaster was directed to converse with the chief and look for signs of anti-American bias.
Four evenings later, the postmaster waylaid Edgar at another of his Red Cross fundraisers. He met the postmaster’s questions with what appeared to be honesty, his apparent frankness likely helping to quell the man’s suspicions. He said he’d be heading down to Lexington, Kentucky, that evening for a speaking engagement, after which he meant to travel to Corinth and then Knoxville, Tennessee. His entire itinerary was hogwash, though. By the following day he wasn’t even in Kentucky. He was the better part of seven hundred miles away in warm, humid New Orleans—a city of crumbling houses garlanded by cypress vines, of alleyways strung with washing, of doors opening into dark courtyards, of precarious-looking iron balconies decorated with pots of geraniums, of passersby speaking in the slow-tempo lilt of Creole French, of banner headlines about the revolution in Russia, where Moscow had just fallen to Communist forces.
For his next move, Edgar employed Tom Longboat’s name to write to Captain Chamberlain, the Hoboken-based army officer who had helped get him the job on the SS Antilles. The letter depended upon Chamberlain having missed all the newspaper stories about the real Tom Longboat’s anger at the man impersonating him. Edgar announced that he envisaged giving talks about his time aboard the Antilles. He requested a statement confirming he’d been part of her crew when she sank. No such statement was forthcoming, which suggests that Chamberlain had read about the real Tom Longboat or else studied the pertinent crew roster and failed to find the athlete’s name on it.
Undeterred by Chamberlain’s silence, Edgar resorted to forging a typewritten letter of endorsement from the U.S. Army Transport Service. He also amended his old Certificate of Identification, referring to his time on the Antilles. Where Tom Longboat’s name had featured, he skillfully added a new one. In what amounted to a cheeky in-joke, he used Chief White Elk’s initials and the covering letter to reinvent himself as a onetime vaudeville singer named C. W. Ellis. He could now profit from the marketable topicality of being a survivor of the Antilles, but he had a powerful disincentive to remain in New Orleans, because the local police had lately declared a crackdown on the common practice of impostors masquerading as current or past members of the military.
* * *
—
Edgar utilized his shipboard experience to secure a berth on a vessel carrying refrigerated fruit to California. Probably docking in the Port of Los Angeles, he then traveled inland. By the second week of December, he was in Laramie, where eastbound Union Pacific trains halted every few hours, often pausing while large numbers of sheep and cattle were loaded onto freight cars.
Despite being Wyoming’s oldest city, its rectilinear street plan punctuated by huge Colonial-style properties, Laramie was no older than many of its residents. Mingling with them, Edgar introduced himself as C. W. Ellis, veteran of the Princess Pat Regiment and survivor of the sinking of the Antilles. Ostensibly striving to raise funds to return to his home in Portland, Oregon, he spoke with the management of the Empress, a palatial movie theater where he hoped to secure a booking.
To verify his claim about having been aboard the Antilles, he showed them his forged paperwork. He could also back up his story by displaying what passed for war wounds. These may have been self-inflicted or even the result of an assault several weeks earlier. One thin
g was for certain: He kept applying some form of cream that prevented them from healing.
Satisfied that he was “no faker or impostor,” the Empress’s management hired him to provide a live component to the 8 p.m. movie show on Monday, December 10, 1917. Edgar agreed to perform a few French songs, talk about the battlefront horrors he’d witnessed, and award what purported to be “a French watch direct from France” to the cutest woman in the audience—an old medicine show gimmick. His seventy-five-minute performance was slated to follow a couple of short, silent comedies and a newsreel—a brand of current affairs bulletin. For his efforts, he’d receive 50 percent of the box office takings.
* * *
—
After the show, Edgar collected his half of the ticket sales—which may have earned him a sizable sum, as the theater seated more than 1,500 people. He then took off without settling the bill at his lodgings. Grifters like him commonly bilked landladies and hoteliers by resorting to what was dubbed “a boardinghouse deceiver”—a cheap and often empty cardboard suitcase, left behind in the grifter’s room to imply he’d be returning later that day.
From Laramie, Edgar rode the train almost 180 miles across the prairie to Rock Springs, Wyoming. He could have used some rest, but napping on these long rides was never easy due to the noisy “train boy” who paraded up and down the aisle, selling books, candy, and assorted merchandise. In the remote yet ethnically varied city of Rock Springs, its crooked streets dominated by black smokestacks and the gray shaft houses of coal mines from which emanated the metallic heartbeat of machinery, Edgar jettisoned his most recent alias. He went back to styling himself as Chief White Elk, one of just seven survivors from the Princess Pat Regiment. But he had the misfortune to be in town at the same time as another so-called war pretender, whose arrival appears to have put the police on high alert.
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