During the third weekend of December, Edgar and the other man were rousted on suspicion of being impostors. Edgar landed in the city jail, which probably bore the scars of an incident that had occurred less than forty-eight hours earlier. This involved a gang of vigilantes breaking into the jail, seizing an African American prisoner, and then lynching him on a nearby railroad bridge.
When questioned by the Rock Springs police, Edgar conceded that Chief White Elk wasn’t his given name, yet he remained insistent about being an Oklahoma-born Cherokee. At various times he said his real name was W. C. Ellis, C. W. Ellis, and W. E. Ellis.
The subsequent investigation by the county prosecuting attorney and the city’s mayor revealed that Edgar had been carrying forged U.S. government documents—a revelation that prefaced one of his rare bursts of truthfulness. He confessed that, contrary to what he’d told the audience at the Empress Theater, he hadn’t served with the Princess Pat Regiment. And he finally came clean about the fact that his self-professed war wounds hadn’t been incurred aboard the Antilles.
He was in enough of a hole without the investigators digging up anything else from his criminal past, but they swiftly unearthed two of the outstanding warrants against him, the most recent of which stemmed from his failure to settle his rooming house bill in Laramie. The other warrant, dating back to the previous December, had been issued against Chief White Elk. It referred to an alleged fraud committed in Albany County, New York State.
A few days after Edgar’s arrest, the Albany County Sheriff’s Department was notified that the warrant from Laramie took precedence.
* * *
—
Sheriff Carl Jackson escorted Edgar from Rock Springs to the Laramie County Jail. There, he joined nineteen other inmates, among them a young cowboy charged with stealing money from a fellow ranch hand. Edgar would have had no trouble fitting in or acclimatizing to the familiar jailhouse regimen.
Both Sheriff Jackson and Laramie’s chief of police interviewed him. Responding to questions about his true identity, Edgar gave the same names he’d supplied the Rock Springs police.
Soon he had to face a fresh allegation. The manager of the Empress Theater accused him of obtaining money under false pretenses. In his defense, Edgar maintained that he’d been paid for his singing, not for talking about the war. Lack of evidence prevented the authorities from taking the matter any further, so the county attorney charged him with “false representation” instead. For some reason the charge of defrauding the owner of the boardinghouse had, in the interim, been dropped.
On Friday, December 21, 1917, Edgar was taken from the county jail to the city’s large, brick-built courthouse for his arraignment. As he waited to appear in front of the judge, his mind may have drifted back to his courtroom debut when he was just fourteen. He’d been playing hooky from the Roman Catholic school on his street, and mixing with other truants his age—boys whom his sardonic father had labeled “bums.” Those boys had, as his father put it, helped Edgar to get “into a lot of little jams,” which culminated in him hustling several of the downtown storekeepers in Central Falls. Seeking nothing more than excitement, he’d go into one store and spin a tale about being sent to fetch change for a nearby store. Even at that age he was plausible enough to persuade people to give him money. He’d then pocket the cash and hand it to his father under the pretense that it was his weekly wage from a part-time job. But he came unstuck one afternoon when he took a shot at scamming a saloon owner, who detained him and summoned the police. The next morning Edgar found himself charged with larceny, which provided his ticket to a quasi-military Rhode Island reform school, where he became Cadet Laplante.
Ushered into the courthouse in Laramie just over a decade and a half later, he stood before a placid, bespectacled judge. Edgar pled guilty to the charges against him under the name of C. W. Ellis, yet even then he got lucky. The judge wouldn’t accept his plea on the grounds that it had no basis in evidence.
Sheriff Jackson requested more time to build a case against the defendant, so Edgar was remanded into his custody, pending another court appearance.
While Edgar languished in his cell, Jackson contacted police departments outside Wyoming. He also wrote to the Hoboken offices of the U.S. Army Transport Service, which furnished him with Edgar’s plump file. It revealed that Edgar had been pretending to be the athlete Tom Longboat.
Despite the sheriff’s efforts, there remained insufficient evidence to prosecute Edgar on charges of either fraud or false representation. The county attorney released him, but only after he was made to promise that he’d “quit posing as a hero.” Edgar said he had learned his lesson and “would never again be caught in a similar mess.”
Late on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 16, 1918, he walked out of the Laramie county jail. He’d been allowed to keep the amended Certificate of Identification and the forged letter from Captain Chamberlain. For all the contrition Edgar had displayed in front of the county attorney, his continued possession of these documents indicated that he hadn’t learned his lesson. Unlike most people, he couldn’t simply assess his options and choose to behave differently. Choice never entered the equation. He didn’t have a choice. He just couldn’t stop himself.
6
Edgar traveled south across the state line into Colorado and over mile upon arid mile of the high plains, which receded toward the far distant Rocky Mountains. When he got to Denver, where an electric lightbulb–encrusted “Welcome Arch” greeted visitors emerging from the rail depot, he would have had no difficulty buying liquor, even though Prohibition—almost two years away from being imposed throughout the country—was already on the Colorado statute book. He only had to approach the boys hawking copies of the Denver Times on the downtown streets, along which there was a dense crop of twelve-story office blocks. The boys would have been happy to sell him a quart of “Sugar Moon”—a type of local moonshine, concocted using sugar beet.
Just a day after his arrival in Denver, Edgar moved on to Pueblo, Colorado. Under a cold blue sky, the city’s outlying districts were rimmed by a much more fertile landscape, irrigation canals slicing through lush, farmstead-dotted fields. Yet there was nothing rural about Colorado’s second city. Behind its drably functional buildings and grand mansions were the smokestacks of steel mills and smelting plants, which had people likening it to Pittsburgh. Edgar didn’t have happy associations with smelting plants. Several years back, he and a Rhode Island buddy had worked in just such a plant over in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, but they’d soon walked out because they couldn’t handle the backbreaking work.
In Pueblo, where enforcement of Prohibition was no more effective than in Denver, Edgar registered at a hotel owned by an independent woman with a passion for off-road auto racing. Her four-story establishment hosted not only regular meetings of the Catholic Women’s League but also a share dealership for a new car company.
Fresh acquaintances of Edgar, now calling himself Clyde White Elk, were encouraged to believe he was a full-blooded Cherokee chief from Oklahoma, who had been educated at Carlisle. He couldn’t be content with this familiar deceit, though. He also had to tell people that he spoke six languages and fourteen Native American dialects. Yet even that wasn’t enough. So he claimed to have studied at the prestigious Rush Medical Institute in Chicago. Again, that fell short of the level of distinction he lusted after. Ornamenting his persona still further, he characterized himself as a nomadic adventurer, who was nonetheless a man of means—part owner of 480 acres and eight big oil wells.
Like a novelist reconfiguring and embroidering his own experience in order to make a better story, he talked about being aboard the SS Antilles as a seaman and interpreter when the decisive torpedo struck. He substantiated his story by brandishing the documents he’d brought with him from Laramie. To illustrate what—with calculated jingoism—he painted as the everyday heroism of American servicemen, he recounted an inci
dent that occurred, he said, the day before the sinking of the Antilles.
She and another homeward-bound troopship were, his fabricated tale began, sailing almost side by side out of a French port. In the five-hundred-yard gap between the two vessels, a periscope suddenly broke the surface. Both troopships were set to fire at the submarine, yet neither did so. The risk of hitting the ship opposite was simply too great.
Before the submarine could attack them, a large airplane flew low overhead. Somewhat implausibly, Edgar claimed to have heard the pilot shout, “I’ve got him!” The airplane then swooped down over the periscope and dropped a depth charge. He described the airplane going into a steep climb, its pilot unfurling an American flag. Everyone aboard the Antilles cheered. At that point there was an explosion. The force of it supposedly blasted the wrecked submarine high into the air. It sank stern-first as soon as it struck the sea.
* * *
—
Only about twelve hours after his arrival in Pueblo, Edgar was in his hotel room when he received unexpected visitors. They were from the Pueblo Police Department. With them was Special Agent R. Lee Craft, local representative of the Bureau of Investigation. The bureau had become accountable for enforcing the seven-month-old requirement that men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty should register for military service. On suspicion of failing to comply with that law and thus being what was known as “a slacker,” Edgar was again arrested. This time he gave his name as Clyde White Elk.
Special Agent Craft and the police officers took him across town to city hall, adjacent to a big construction site where work was well-advanced on a much larger replacement. Inside the current building were the police headquarters, where the staff treated Edgar with surprising politeness. He expressed confidence in his ability to satisfy the authorities as to his status. Until that could happen, though, he’d have been held in the cramped, frowzy, and windowless bullpen, the occupants of which inhabited a perpetual dusk.
* * *
—
When Special Agent Craft interviewed him later that day, Edgar trotted out bogus stories about his background. He said the title of “chief” was just a nickname, given to him by his friends. Proudly labeling himself “an original American”—a synonym for Native Americans in widespread use then—he referred to his Cherokee parents who lived in Chickasha, Oklahoma. Though he admitted knowing it was a legal requirement for him to register for the military draft, he confessed he hadn’t done so. He mentioned that numerous men from his reservation had gone to Washington, DC, to offer their services to the military. The sole reason for him not going with them, he stressed, was that such a journey would have been pointless, because he wasn’t fit for military service. He explained that he had injuries to his side and chest, along with a detached retina in his right eye. Even so, he assured the special agent that he’d be happy to register. As evidence of his willingness to do his bit for his country, he said he’d left home last July and traveled to New York City, where he had signed on as an ordinary seaman with the U.S. Army Transport Service.
He described making two trips to France on the Antilles. Then he told what proved “a most thrilling” account of the sinking of that vessel. He and the other survivors had, he said, been taken back to France prior to being repatriated. They’d landed in San Francisco, from where he had traveled to Laramie, planning to spend a few days there before returning to Chickasha.
But he claimed that the authorities in Laramie had been instructed to arrest all strangers, leading to him being detained there for a month while the police made inquiries about him. With what must have been intended to mimic disarming openness, he remarked that he deserved to be punished if he’d violated the law.
A disagreeable surprise awaited him. Special Agent Craft outlined the full reasons why he was being held. Edgar was suspected of being a German spy as well as a draft dodger.
Infuriated by what he’d just heard, Edgar replied that his failure to register for the draft was his only crime. He said he’d find out who had accused him of spying for the Germans. Far from losing his nerve, he countered with a reference to having “a brother in Washington who would take up the matter for him”—something of a veiled threat against Special Agent Craft. Edgar also tried to apply psychological leverage by saying he needed to resume his journey in order to get home before the anticipated death of his aged mother, who was awaiting a reunion with him.
After the interview, a reporter from the local newspaper approached a city hall official and asked how the bureau’s Pueblo branch was progressing with its investigation. The official kidded that Clyde White Elk appeared to be able to speak nine languages “and lie like a pirate in nine of them.”
Oblivious to the extent of those lies, Craft arranged for a telegram to be sent to the military draft board in Chickasha, notifying them of Clyde White Elk’s arrest. The draft board was sure to expose Edgar as an impostor and force him to register for military service.
* * *
—
“We have no knowledge of the case,” came the swift response from Chickasha. Edgar was fortunate that the draft board wasn’t inspired to launch a futile hunt for Clyde White Elk in their roster of Cherokee residents. Instead, Special Agent Craft merely received instructions that the prisoner should be made to register at the nearest draft board.
For the time being, however, Edgar was left in the bullpen at city hall, where his companions included a bootlegger, the proprietor of a speakeasy, and a vagrant awaiting medical treatment. Over the next five days, snow meanwhile powdering the streets outside, Edgar had time to contemplate the tight spot into which he’d gotten himself.
If Craft linked him to the man posing as Tom Longboat—the man sought by the bureau in California—Edgar would be in big trouble. Even if he avoided such a scenario by catching another lucky break, officers from the local police department made it clear that he needed to explain a lot of things. He’d otherwise face “severe penalties.”
* * *
—
Assisted by Sheriff Carl Jackson, who passed on the fruits of the Laramie investigation, Special Agent Craft became aware of many of Edgar’s aliases, Tom Longboat among them. Craft was now just one step away from tying him to the cons he’d pulled in San Diego and elsewhere.
Maybe realizing that he had to keep the bureau from digging any deeper into his past, Edgar devoted some of Thursday, January 31, 1918, to writing a confession. It contained admissions that he hadn’t been aboard the Antilles when it was torpedoed, and that he hadn’t put his name down for the draft.
“I am sincerely sorry,” he wrote, “and am willing to do what my government wants me to do.” In a bid to fend off the allegation that he was working for the Germans, he stated, “I am American and proud of it.” He added that he’d been traveling the country, singing and lecturing. “I even helped to recruit for our army by encouraging our boys by telling them I had been in France.” He concluded by insisting that his songs had been patriotic and his lectures had tackled the question of how the country could best fight autocracy and respond to the demands of President Wilson. At the end of his confession, he declared, “The above is true so help me God.” Then he signed it, “Chief White Elk.”
Later he submitted a request to speak to Craft again. The request was granted.
Edgar used Craft’s visit to affect a display of counterfeit candor. He said he’d been “confused” on the day of their previous discussion. Using astute flattery, he explained that he’d been thrown off balance by the authorities’ speed and accuracy in excavating his past. He mentioned that the police had shown him “so many courtesies” that he’d felt ashamed to acknowledge he had done anything wrong. Apparently keen to set the record straight, he presented Craft with his confession.
* * *
—
Six more days passed, during which Edgar was joined in the cells by a Greek vagrant and an
other suspected draft dodger. But just when it seemed as if Edgar might be spending a lot longer in Pueblo’s jail cells, he was led out of the murky bullpen at police headquarters.
Another hour went by before he was taken to an office in a different part of city hall. The office housed one of the local draft boards. Edgar’s tactic of writing a confession had worked.
District Attorney Harry B. Tedrow, a dimple-chinned Midwesterner thirteen years his senior, manned the office. Under Tedrow’s supervision, Edgar filled out a draft registration form. He gave his name as Touaxonanna, his title as Chief White Elk, his birthplace as Syracuse, his place of residence as Chickasha, and his occupation as “vaudeville performer.”
The registration process completed, he was advised to remain in Pueblo until he received a military serial number. He was then permitted to walk out of city hall, where he’d spent almost thirteen days.
* * *
—
Gunshots echoed around the theater. They were fired by the Cheyenne Brothers, a sharpshooting vaudeville duo featured in a benefit show the following Monday. Held at a theater in Pike’s Peak, a blue-collar neighborhood of Pueblo, where line upon line of close-set frame houses knelt in supplication to the smoky presence of a massive steelworks, the show was in aid of the Our Boys in France Tobacco Fund—“The boys want tobacco and it’s our duty to help them get it.”
Edgar was on the same bill as the Cheyenne Brothers, necessity presumably drawing him back into the world of lower-echelon vaudeville, a world of Spartan dressing rooms, negligible backstage assistance, shabby lodgings, and nearly inedible food, a world from which he’d long been straining to break free. Every time he finished a song, the capacity crowd at the Pike’s Peak Theater demanded an encore. His Chief White Elk act, which also featured him playing the piano, went down so well that the management had him stay on for a couple more shows that week. These were headlined by the Speedway Girls—a dozen-strong troupe of petite and glamorous girls whose peppy song-and-dance numbers pulled in big audiences. Touring with the girls was a veteran comedian named Ben Lambert. On Tuesday evening someone handed Lambert a telegram just as he stepped offstage partway through his act. The message reduced him to a state of such debilitating grief that he was unable to complete his routine. So the theater’s manager strode in front of the audience, explained the reason for the comedian’s absence, and read out the telegram he’d received:
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