VANCOUVER BARRACKS, WASHINGTON. 2.12.18. BEN LAMBERT, PUEBLO, COLORADO. YOUR BROTHER, ALVIN LAMBERT, WAS KILLED HERE AT 5:50 O’CLOCK TODAY. SIGNED COMMANDANT.
If Edgar needed any reminder of the danger awaiting him in the military, then here it was. Disinclined either to stick around until he was drafted or to persist with vaudeville, he skipped town and went back to Denver. He tried to safeguard himself against problems with the Pueblo draft board by sending them a postcard affirming his readiness to serve his country. “Will you please notify me when called, addressing me ‘General Delivery, Denver,’ ” he wrote. “I hope I am called soon, as I have made one trip to France and what I saw there makes me feel like fighting.” Yet he quickly placed a considerable distance between himself and the Denver post office where he’d asked the draft board to send his call-up papers.
7
Thick snow lay on either side of the track. Short of cash but sleek and recognizably theatrical in his blue serge suit, Edgar was aboard a train rattling through Utah. After leaving Denver, he’d tried his luck in a mining town where he masqueraded as an employee of a West Coast debt collection agency, but this latest grift had proved to be a dead end.
On Wednesday, March 6, 1918, he disembarked in Salt Lake City at what looked more like a French château than a railroad depot. Its grand, echoing concourse, overlooked by stained glass windows and a mural of covered wagons, led into a huge parking lot. Beyond was a road so wide that it could accommodate parallel streetcar lines. Jabbing through the adjoining roofline were the neo-Gothic spires of the vast Mormon temple.
At the theatrical costumier’s several blocks from the station, Edgar announced that he wanted to rent a traditional chief’s rig. He said he was “awaiting the arrival from the east of his Indian clothes.” Gaudy next to the muted colors prevalent in the men’s fashions of the day, his new getup featured a deerskin, moccasins, a beaded belt, and a feathered headdress, plus a brightly colored blanket draped around his shoulders.
Influence was a scent Edgar could sniff out at fifty paces, so he lost no time in zeroing in on Frank R. Newman, among Salt Lake’s most noteworthy citizens. Within walking distance of the costumier’s, Newman’s 44 East Broadway office stood opposite a downtown store somewhat optimistically advertising NEW SPRING HATS. A sign for Pantages Theater marked the entrance to the office. From this drab, three-story block, Newman—a snappily dressed, middle-aged huckster with slicked-back hair, puffy features, and a slightly gauche smile—managed the western sector of the vaudeville circuit named for its Greek owner, Alexander Pantages.
Reasonably safe in assuming that word of Chief White Elk’s fraudulence as a war hero hadn’t bridged the 425-mile gap between Pueblo and Salt Lake, Edgar must have told Newman about being aboard the Antilles on its final voyage. And Newman must have auditioned Edgar as a singer, because Newman booked him as a last-minute addition to Thursday’s lineup at Pantages’s Salt Lake venue.
Edgar, meanwhile, moved into the Hotel Utah, the monumental milky-white façade of which contrasted with the gray stone of the Salt Lake Temple, just across the street. Neatly uniformed women piloted the elevators connecting his hotel’s stupendous chandeliered marble and gilt lobby to its elegantly accoutered rooms, Turkish bath, roof garden, and multiple dining areas. Impressive though its amenities were, it lacked a bar, Utah being another of the so-called dry states that had enacted Prohibition. But Edgar didn’t need to go far to quench his thirst.
Despite the efforts of the local police department’s purity squad, which staged periodic raids, neighboring shoeshine stores trafficked in such large quantities of rotgut whiskey that their proprietors could afford to buy monogrammed silk shirts. The shoe shiners sold liquor made from raisins, molasses, and fresh fruit, its amber hue imparted by tobacco juice or sometimes iodine. His sleep probably deepened by a bellyful of this bootleg hooch, Edgar awakened to find the city had gotten much less congenial all of a sudden.
* * *
—
An impending statewide clampdown on what were dubbed “Indian slackers”—Native American draft dodgers—was announced in that morning’s edition of the Salt Lake Telegram. Motivated by a desire to continue his own draft dodging, Edgar headed through the freezing streets to the Keith Emporium, a department store only a ten-minute walk from his hotel. Within the store was the U.S. Navy Recruiting Office. He must have read the previous day’s newspaper story announcing that the recruiters had already filled their latest quota, because he made a token attempt to volunteer for the navy’s aviation service. To ensure he didn’t wind up on a list for future recruitment, he referred to a fictitious eye injury (maybe the detached retina he’d mentioned in Pueblo), which would be sufficient to exclude him.
Gossip about Edgar’s presence in the city spread rapidly, and his visit to the recruiting office attracted a reporter from the Salt Lake Herald. Edgar led the reporter to believe that his “love for the fighting profession” hadn’t been diminished by being thrown from the crow’s nest of the Antilles when she was torpedoed, or by having to survive adrift at sea until he was rescued. This alternate version of reality had also seen him return to the U.S. Army Transport Service and make “numerous trips across the danger zone of the submarine-infested Atlantic without mishap.” As the owner of oil wells that pumped cash into his bank account, he said he intended “to pay for treatment of his eyes with a view to making them serve his country.” He even jested about wanting to scalp Kaiser Wilhelm II.
In what was shaping up to be a busy morning, set to conclude with the usual rehearsals for the vaudeville show at Pantages Theater, Edgar ran into a petite thirty-one-year-old Native American woman. Her moccasins, buckskins, and headband surely gave him the chance to engage her in conversation and then catch her in the powerful spotlight of his charisma. She had a clear and educated-sounding voice, her manner demure yet charming and witty, her turn of phrase self-evidently smart and sporadically poetic. Her allure was physical, too. People often commented upon how pretty she was. The daughter of a Native American mother and a white father, she had a tawny complexion; button nose; dark, lustrous eyes; plump cheeks dabbed with rouge; and black hair that she fixed into braids that hung over her ears.
She was most commonly known as Burtha Thompson, but she also had a name drawn from the language of her mother’s tribe, the Klamath, one of a cluster of small tribes living in northwest California. Her Native American moniker was Ah-Tra-Ah-Saun, which meant “Valley of the Mountain.”
Despite being ostracized by the Klamath community for being what they labeled “a half-breed,” she took pride in her heritage. She’d been raised with a strong sense of her tribal identity. Just a few years earlier, she’d helped prepare a book about the traditions of the Klamath. On the grounds of her white ancestry, those customs barred her from inheriting her mother’s title as a “Talth,” a member of the Klamath high priesthood, comparable to the chiefs of other tribes and to European royalty. Staunchly ethical though she was in other regards, Burtha nevertheless insisted on styling herself Princess Ah-Tra-Ah-Saun.
Her royal title and passion for Native American culture must have heightened her appeal to Edgar. Conversely, Burtha’s response to him must have been shaped by his apparent status as a Cherokee chief, his good looks, casual magnetism, and talent for dispensing well-timed quips. He likely projected an aura of stardom by getting her a ticket to the vaudeville show in which he was performing that evening. Other young, middle-class women would have needed to obtain their parents’ blessing before accepting a theater invitation from a stranger, but Burtha faced no such constraints. She was a trained nurse who lived an independent, unmarried life away from her northwest Californian hometown. As such, she embodied the growing feminist phenomenon of the “New Woman,” for whom living away from home and smoking cigarettes—“liberty torches”—represented defiance against gender conventions.
That day there were three performances
of Edgar’s show, each combined with a screening of a short film. Music from the theater’s seven-piece band must have filled the building as the cast shuttled between their shared dressing rooms and the modestly proportioned stage. Edgar probably exercised his charm on the other performers: a trio of acrobats, a comedian, a song-and-dance duo, and the headline act, a lion tamer and his half-dozen lions, advertised as THE GREATEST ANIMAL ACT IN VAUDEVILLE. The rich odor of lions would likely have brought back memories of the badly treated creatures at the Coney Island amusement park where he used to work.
Also backstage at Pantages was the cast of what those in the business called “a girl show”—an eleven-strong chorus line, fronted by the daintily glamorous Marjorie Lake, a longtime vaudeville favorite who had a surprisingly deep singing voice. She and the chorus girls performed a one-act musical comedy set on a college campus. The girls whizzed through several costume changes before its flag-waving finale, so Edgar would’ve seen them skittering past in everything from evening dresses to scholastic caps and gowns.
Solo singers like him tended not to perform until just before the headline act. Through the usual blaze of spotlights that greeted him as he took his place onstage, Edgar would have seen an elegant three-tiered auditorium seating almost two thousand. He spoke about being “on the masthead of the United States ship Antilles when it was torpedoed,” an incident when he was “severely wounded.” And he sang a medley of numbers that included the maudlin Great War–themed “You’re a Long Way from Broadway (When You’re Somewhere in France).” It would have appealed to the gushingly patriotic Burtha, who was fixing to go to France and tend to the wounded. So impressed was she by Edgar’s singing that she regarded him as “a man with wonderful talents.”
On rather less evidence she swallowed his enticingly tragic rise-and-fall yarn, in which he’d been rated as “one of the world’s greatest singers” and “one of the world’s greatest athletes,” formerly “a great chieftain” with millions of dollars to his name. He also convinced Burtha that he was a qualified physician. No easy task, given that his quick-witted new acquaintance had spent years nursing alongside genuine doctors. What made him so plausible was his capacity to absorb a superficial knowledge of subjects that might prove useful.
Inside twenty-four hours of meeting Burtha, he’d installed her as his girlfriend. Shrewd and calculating as he was, he’d have been aware of how much her presence would aid his act. With a Klamath “princess” in tow, he’d appear more convincing as a Cherokee chieftain. And he’d become a still more romantic figure. He may even have realized that his fake identity could be both endorsed and enriched by Burtha’s patriotism and seemingly incompatible outrage at the ways in which “their people” were being treated.
Whites’ condescension toward what Burtha called “the race of red men” was one of many things she resented. Another was the discriminatory system inflicted upon Native Americans. Having been herded onto reservations set up by the government and left under the almost unsupervised control of agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a quarter of a million or so Native Americans lived in poverty. Disease, malnutrition, and even starvation added to their suffering.
Parcels of reservation land were allotted to individual Native American families, the objective being to transform them into farmers, and to break tribal loyalties, thus assimilating them into white society. But numerous corrupt county court judges had declared them incapable of managing their allotted land, some of which featured rich pasture, with oil and gas deposits beneath it. Guardians had then been appointed to act on behalf of its owners, who sometimes wound up paying 50 percent of their income in management fees. The lucrative nature of this racket saw attorneys vying for control of dozens of guardianships. Forgery, embezzlement, blackmail, kidnapping, and sometimes murder became the tools employed by those wanting to steal from Native Americans.
So Edgar’s new girlfriend had good reason to be highly critical of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the conditions that prevailed on reservations—conditions that made her feel lucky not to have been raised in such circumstances. “I was everything but a reservation Injun,” she believed, “and never had been, thank God for that.”
* * *
—
The Salt Lake headquarters of the U.S. Army recruitment service was at Main and Second South Streets. Under the businesslike command of a retired lieutenant, fifteen soldiers—all of them declared medically unfit for deployment overseas—staffed its hectic offices. Edgar and Burtha walked into these on the morning after his performance at Pantages. Their relationship buttressed by their shared patriotism—or the appearance of patriotism, in Edgar’s case—they volunteered to assist the city’s recruitment drive. Seeing as the recruiters were looking to enroll speakers to go into movie and vaudeville theaters, Edgar and Burtha’s offer was accepted. The couple would now be contributing to the campaign to fill numerous vacancies in the 145th Field Artillery Regiment, caused by men avoiding enlistment on medical grounds. Until the regiment reached its full numerical strength, it couldn’t be sent to France.
Edgar seems to have begun by setting up two recruiting talks for that evening: Friday, March 8, 1918. One of these bookings came courtesy of Frank R. Newman, his contact at Pantages. The other probably came through Otis Skinner, an aging and very famous American stage actor who had only the previous morning checked in to the same hotel as Edgar.
Donning war paint to go with his chief’s apparel, Edgar went to the Salt Lake City Theater for the first of that evening’s recruiting talks. From the stage, he spoke before the opening performance of the hit play Otis Skinner was taking around the country. Afterward Edgar and Burtha reported to Pantages, where they’d been shoehorned into the show. Both of them would be giving talks this time. Shy though she appeared, Burtha had experience in public speaking, albeit about Native American culture rather than recruiting. Large crowds appeared to hold no terror for her, either. Three years earlier she’d marched past thousands of people as leader of the “Native Daughters of California” section of the inaugural parade at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a giant jamboree held in San Francisco.
When Burtha and Edgar appeared backstage at Pantages, they’d have met Marjorie Lake, the singer topping the bill. Edgar had already worked with her, enabling him to introduce Marjorie to his girlfriend. Marjorie and her husband, a former actor named Harry C. Lewis who helped to run their touring theater company, struck up a friendship with the young couple.
Ripples of excitement passed through the full house as Chief White Elk and Princess Ah-Tra-Ah-Saun took to the stage. In his recruiting speeches, Edgar liked to refer to his own military service and to denounce “slackers”—hypocritically, of course, as he himself was a draft dodger. He urged “the palefaces not to let the Red Man outdo them in patriotic response to the country’s call.”
Though much of what Edgar said was bunk, his references to the willingness of American Indians to report for military service were entirely accurate. Disproportionate and inexplicable numbers of them were already in the uniform of the country that denied citizenship to more than two-thirds of their people.
Once the talks by Edgar and Burtha were over, Frank Newman joined the two of them onstage. Newman endeavored to bolster his own political aspirations by having Chief White Elk and Princess Ah-Tra-Ah-Saun present him with an American flag as a symbol of their appreciation of his patriotism and willingness to allow them to appear at his theater.
Presumably through Newman, Edgar met a couple of prominent local politicians—namely, Simon Bamberger, governor of Utah, and W. Montague Ferry, mayor of Salt Lake. Newman was also most likely responsible for introducing Edgar to the local lodge of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. An exclusive social club to which Newman belonged, the Elks granted honorary membership to Chief White Elk, whose name suggested kinship with the organization. It maintained a midtown clubhouse only a short stroll f
rom the Hotel Utah, where Edgar was staying.
Edgar reveled in the attention. By Saturday afternoon he’d taken a decision that promised to make him the focus of even more of it. Just two days after his chance meeting with Burtha, she’d agreed to become “Mrs. White Elk.”
Newman responded to this by suggesting they hold the ceremony at the recently completed state capitol, which housed Utah’s legislature as well as the offices of his friend Governor Bamberger, who went along with the idea. What made the wedding seem worthy of such pomp was that it would unite the chief and princess of two tribes, which represented “the incarnation of genuine Americanism.”
* * *
—
Fast becoming a double act, recurrent admiring references to them in the local newspapers garnering them citywide celebrity, Edgar and his wife-to-be positioned themselves on the corner of Main and Second South Streets that Saturday afternoon. Burtha wore a traditional Klamath outfit. She and Edgar were poised to speak on behalf of the nearby army recruiting office.
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