* * *
—
Between Chico and Marysville lay mile after mile of orchards, as well as fields so large they were plowed by lines of up to forty mules. A series of massive levees protected Frank and Edgar’s destination, another picturesque yet busy little city, its prosperity evident from the goods in its many stores.
No longer constrained by his wife’s scruples, Edgar claimed he was a representative of the federal government. And he must have reverted to his old trick of wearing an eye patch, because he started telling people that he’d lost an eye in combat—“lost for the honor of your flag and my flag,” those words spoken in homage to a wartime hit song of that title.
He and Frank, who was happy to play along with Edgar’s blarney, passed much of the next ten days fundraising for the Red Cross, each of the duo apparently helping himself to some of the donations. Both men also took to the stage at concerts by the Oakland Boys’ Club Band, concerts at which Frank sang and Edgar gave recruiting speeches.
Previous U.S. Navy recruiting drives had never been successful in Marysville, but Edgar and Frank brought about sufficient enlistments to push the city beyond the midpoint of its quota. Yet Superior Judge E. P. McDaniel—who chaired the local county council of defense, one of a nationwide network of committees overseeing aspects of America’s militarization—suspected that both Chief White Elk and Frank Spaulding were crooks. He wired a complaint about their activities to Josephus Daniels, President Wilson’s secretary of the navy. Though Frank was working with the navy’s blessing, Daniels incorrectly assured the judge that neither individual held official status as a recruiter.
* * *
—
Without giving the judge a chance to take action against them, Edgar and Frank quit Marysville. Conceivably lovers by now, though that would’ve required extreme discretion, lest they be condemned as “sexual perverts” and reported to the police, they moved the better part of thirty miles east. Their destination was the mining town of Grass Valley, California, where Edgar ingratiated himself with the locals and spoke at a recruiting rally while kitted out in a U.S. Navy uniform.
Charlie Clinch, an enduringly influential former mayor of the city, and Thomas Ingram, a California state senator, meanwhile received notification that Chief White Elk was not an official U.S. Navy recruiter, nor was he an emissary of the U.S. government. These two self-appointed sleuths then summoned Frank Spaulding to a meeting on the morning of Thursday, July 25, 1918. Quizzed about Chief White Elk, Frank insisted that the chief was working on the recruiting campaign for patriotic reasons, even if he was “masquerading under false colors” and had been wearing a uniform he had no business wearing.
Ingram and Clinch next went round to see Edgar, who blamed “pro-German sources in Redding” for the allegations against him. Besides stressing that he’d been donating his services to the country for free, he said he’d never claimed to be a government-sanctioned recruiting officer. He added that he did nevertheless have a certificate from Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, authorizing him to sell War Savings Stamps. But he was still unable to convince Ingram and Clinch of his legitimacy—a rare failure.
Neither of his two adversaries had the legal right to force him to do anything, yet they ordered him out of Grass Valley right away. Leaving behind Frank and the rest of the recruiting party, Edgar acceded to their demands and took the midday train to San Francisco, his departure sparking front-page coverage in the local press. But he barely had time to reacquaint himself with San Francisco before Frank—who, clearly, didn’t want to be separated from him—discovered Edgar still had plenty of support in Grass Valley. This lured Edgar back from the coast.
In front of a big crowd, which had poured into the Strand Theatre, he offered his side of the story. A short time afterward two officers from the regional headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s recruiting service pitched up in Grass Valley. Their brief was to investigate Chief White Elk and Pharmacist’s Mate Frank Spaulding. Edgar—for whom loyalty remained an alien concept—vanished, and left Frank to field the inevitable fusillade of tricky questions.
* * *
—
Compelled to find another way of supporting himself now that his partnership with Frank was over, Edgar reactivated his dormant vaudeville career by landing dates in Modesto, California, and Reno, Nevada. In mid- to late September, he went back to San Francisco, where he would’ve had no trouble obtaining his favored narcotics from the illegal sources who were fueling a nationwide rise in drug dependency, which had seen the number of known addicts top one million. When he wanted morphine or cocaine, the latter nicknamed “joy dust,” he just had to sashay up to one of the curbside dealers and hand over about a dollar—the cost of several small packs of cigarettes. The dealer would then instruct him to walk down the street. As Edgar did so, a passerby would palm a sachet of his chosen drug into his hand. Known as “a deck” or “a bindle,” each of these sachets contained just enough powder for between two and four snorts.
Edgar was fixing to stay in San Francisco awhile, so he moved into the Arrow Apartments, a seven-story property only a block from the midsection of Market Street. Crossing this busy thoroughfare was seldom easy. Streetcars and automobiles sharked along it, heedless of jaywalkers. Its crowded sidewalks hosted prematurely aged, hoarse-voiced newsies; disabled men selling pencils; and grifters peddling sugar, horoscopes, suspenders, laundry soap, and even bottles of what was sold as the elixir of life. Crowds tended to collect around the grifters as they ran through the type of smooth patter Edgar would have used in his days hawking patent medicines.
Just off Market Street were the offices of I. C. Ackerman and Saul Harris, who ran a notorious West Coast vaudeville circuit. Performers nicknamed it the Death Trail, commercial rather than bodily death awaiting those foolhardy or desperate enough to appear on it. So widely spaced were some of the Ackerman and Harris Hippodrome Circuit’s theaters that its artistes would often struggle to break even, because they’d spend so much time and money traveling between engagements.
But Edgar was canny enough to avoid that pitfall by signing up for a short sequence of bookings that didn’t require inordinately long journeys. All of his engagements were nonetheless what were known as “split weeks”—badly paid three- or four-day gigs. He’d be part of the fluctuating cast of the Hippodrome Road Show, a nominally “all-star” production, supplemented by a short movie. Poverty or maybe overconfidence even led him to agree to perform in San Diego, where he had, only the previous year, employed his Tom Longboat shtick to defraud many prominent citizens. Mercifully for him, though, he wasn’t being sought by the city’s police department. Even after the San Diego Evening News had produced a front-page exposé of his activities there, none of his victims had been willing to endure the indignity of going to the police and reporting their losses.
With eleven weeks to go until the tour kicked off, he was at his apartment one Monday night when he received an unwelcome visitor—Special Agent H. H. Dolley from the Bureau of Investigation. Dolley had a federal warrant for Edgar’s arrest. It dated back to the period before America had entered the war, back to his time at Camp Harry J. Jones in Arizona, where the Twenty-Second Infantry Regiment had been training. Edgar was charged with encouraging American soldiers to fight the Germans by deserting and then joining the Canadian Army.
Press coverage of his arrest soon appeared not only in San Francisco but also in Salt Lake City, Oakland, San Diego, and elsewhere. Nowhere was his comeuppance greeted with more satisfaction than in Salt Lake, where he’d made so many people look dumb.
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The Bureau of Investigation’s San Francisco office received a message from Arizona’s attorney general. He revealed that the charges against Edgar had already been dropped for lack of evidence. Just over a day after being arrested—well before the presumed unavailability of alcohol or drugs would have turned the experience into a
n ordeal for him—Edgar was set free. He then left San Francisco and went north, narrowly escaping the lethal influenza epidemic that wreaked havoc on the city.
In the persona of Chief White Elk, he stopped off in Marin County and performed a couple of shows before continuing through a wilderness landscape that had scarcely changed since the arrival of the first European settlers. The scale of its mountains, rivers, and luxuriant forests of giant redwoods would have forced anyone with a smaller ego than Edgar’s to reflect upon his own insignificance.
That fall he rolled up in the port city of Eureka, California, where he was reunited with Burtha, whom he hadn’t seen for about three months. She’d probably been staying with her father and stepmother at 1557 Myrtle Avenue, a mile and a half from the waterfront. Accessible via a sharp flight of steps, their home was a pretty, slightly eccentric-looking shingled cottage with a turret in one corner. Burtha had first moved there with her white father and Native American stepmother when she was about fourteen. Previously they’d lived on a ranch much further north. Her father, Jim Thompson, was a sturdy Alabaman in his seventies. He had a gray mustache and a matching beard that flared out from his chin like the cowcatcher on the front of an old-fashioned locomotive. Ever since coming to California, he had been in the lumber business, though he’d still found time to play an instrumental role in educating Burtha.
Whenever Jim ventured down the street with Burtha’s stepmother, Che-an-wah Weitch-ah-wah—who also went by the name of Lucy Thompson—the two of them walked hand in hand. Lucy had a spruce European outfit, complete with handbag, fitted coat, and plumed hat. It was an outfit belying her inordinate pride in her Klamath background. Her potent sense of affiliation survived even being shunned by her tribe on account of her marriage to a white man. Approximately a decade younger than her husband, Lucy was a slim-waisted, straight-postured little woman with high-cheekboned, tan features. Her downturned mouth lent her a truculent and crestfallen appearance that didn’t chime with her starchy benevolence. Though her sister Nora—Jim’s first wife—was Burtha’s biological mother, Lucy had raised Burtha as her own.
If Burtha was hoping Edgar had used the time apart from her to wean himself off drugs—a word that, she declared, “haunts me like Satan in hell”—then she was destined for disappointment. She nonetheless restrained herself from confiding in friends or family about any of this. Despite all the anxiety to which her husband had subjected her, she still kept faith in him. She presumably moved in with him when he found accommodation at 1515 Dean Street, just a short distance from her parents’ place.
Through Burtha most likely, Edgar met the thirty-nine-year-old photographer Emma B. Freeman, an old friend of Burtha’s. Emma was a white Midwesterner with an elfin physique, blue eyes, gray-streaked hair, and a nervous yet playful manner that made people—men especially—relax in her presence. Close friends knew her as “Toots.” Willful and ambitious, she had a well-developed sense of fun and an offbeat taste in clothes that sometimes prompted her to wear a man’s hat with a rattlesnake-skin band around its crown. She owned a downtown studio, darkroom, gallery, and gift shop called the Freeman Art Company. In the gift shop, she used to sell traditional-style Klamath baskets made by Burtha. As Emma may have mentioned to Edgar, these were so beautifully woven that collectors prized them.
Over the eight months he’d been married to Burtha, Edgar would likely have heard many fond recollections of his wife’s friendship with Emma. It stretched back some five years, back to when Burtha had taken a job at a hospital in Eureka after training in San Francisco as a nurse. Nourishing their friendship was a mutual fascination with Native American culture. They were both outsiders, too—a status conferred by Burtha’s mixed race and by what was perceived as Emma’s scandalous behavior. Around the time Emma’s marriage collapsed following an extensively publicized fling with a former governor of Illinois, Burtha had joined Emma’s cheery, chattering coterie of young, well-educated, part-white, part–Native American friends. Burtha had meanwhile started modeling for Emma’s ongoing series of portraits of Native Americans.
Emma used deep shadows and soft-focus lenses to depict her sitters with appreciative lyricism, communicating her romantic notion of them as what she called “Nature’s monarchs of the wild.” One of her photos of Burtha ended up being reproduced on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. Burtha was also represented in a display of Emma’s Native American portraits exhibited at the city’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which the two women visited together.
So consistently enthusiastic was the response to her show that Emma went from being a bohemian outsider to a portraitist much in demand by the West Coast elite. Recently, she’d carried out a series of commissions for the U.S. military. These encouraged her to style herself as an “official government photographer” and to curry favor with the authorities by making public pledges to various wartime fundraising drives.
More than likely Emma’s current incarnation as a patriotic minor celebrity helped Edgar and Burtha to become fundraisers for the latest of Eureka’s Liberty Loan campaigns. In his familiar role as a famous Cherokee chief and American soldier, Edgar impressed the locals, who were soon able to celebrate Germany’s unconditional surrender.
He had cause to celebrate as well. Maybe drawing upon cash he’d skimmed from the fundraising campaign or by simply exploiting the excitement surrounding his Liberty Loan work, he acquired a Studebaker Touring Car, which retailed for as much as $1,695. It was a capacious vehicle that represented an upgrade from even the deluxe vehicle driven at his wedding. Now he and Burtha could motor into the wilderness around Eureka, the onset of seasonal rains and mist granting it an aura of spectral ambiguity.
For Burtha and Lucy, that landscape was dense with mythological associations and family tradition. Not too far beyond the city limits lay the tumbledown property where Burtha’s grandmother was born. Tribal legend taught that the house had belonged to the Wa-gas, a beneficent white superrace that had assisted the Klamath and then departed with an unfulfilled promise to return. The property’s link to the revered Wa-gas made it a place of spiritual importance for Lucy, whose own mother had vacated it almost twenty years earlier. Until recently, Burtha’s grandmother had made trips back to the area with the sole purpose of smashing the stone bowls, trays, and implements purportedly left behind by the Wa-gas. Lucy explained that Burtha’s grandmother didn’t wish these mementoes of the Wa-gas to be “ruthlessly handled and curiously gazed upon by the present-day white race.” Neither Lucy nor her husband, Jim, appear to have realized that Edgar belonged to that race.
Edgar’s Studebaker was not only convenient for sentimental journeys to places associated with Burtha’s family, but also perfect for trips out to the forests with Burtha and her photographer friend, who wanted to take more pictures of her. Joining the three of them on one such expedition was Bertha Stevens, another of Emma’s circle.
An attractive, fashion-conscious twenty-something with Native American blood, Bertha had formerly worked as Emma’s cook and photographic retoucher. She’d since married Fred Chamley, a tall, intelligent, strikingly handsome young part-Cherokee, employed in Emma’s darkroom. Expert at making an immediate connection with strangers, Edgar would surely have discovered that Bertha Stevens had attended Carlisle, his own supposed alma mater. If the two of them had then swapped recollections of their schooldays, Edgar would’ve needed to be cautious in talking about Carlisle, reliant as he was upon generalities, secondhand anecdotes, and his facility for ad-libbing.
Emma—whose own spontaneity didn’t extend to her working methods—paused to photograph Edgar and their two companions in front of a stand of redwoods. She also posed Edgar and his wife inside the forest, near enough to its periphery for the low, hazy light to penetrate. Until she was satisfied that her subjects were in exactly the position she wanted, Emma would maneuver them, like a child playing with dolls. In a composition expressive of
her romantic, somewhat mystical admiration for Native Americans, she had Burtha crouch on the ground at Edgar’s feet, almost blending into the scrub. Unsmiling, Edgar towered over his wife, his war-bonneted profile standing out against the dark trunk behind.
Convivial get-togethers with Emma and her circle were probably responsible for Edgar and Burtha’s conversations about how they envisioned making their home in Eureka. As tempting as that prospect was, they could not do so until the New Year. Edgar was, after all, committed to touring with the Hippodrome Road Show.
* * *
—
Once again parting from Burtha, he went down to San Diego, where his Cherokee chief’s disguise would have come in handy if he’d bumped into members of the high-society crowd whom he’d scammed during his previous visit. He began his return to vaudeville with a four-day run at Spreckels Hippodrome. Its nearly two-thousand-seat Baroque-style auditorium, modern facilities, enormous stage, and equally enormous onyx-lined lobby decorated with Tiffany stained glass gave him a tantalizing taste of the big time, though he may not have been too pleased that someone else was headlining the show.
Just a couple of days after taking his final curtain call, directly beneath a ceiling adorned by what would turn out to be a prescient allegorical painting of two angels emptying a horn of plenty, Edgar was in warm, rainy Los Angeles, where he had a Thursday-to-Sunday stint at the local Hippodrome. Despite being even larger than its near-namesake in San Diego, Edgar wouldn’t have found it anywhere as comfortably appointed as Spreckels. He and some jugglers, a pair of gymnasts, a whistler, a comedienne, a singer, and an eight-girl song-and-dance troupe billed as “the Beautiful Broadway Song Birds” had to make do with only nine dressing rooms between them.
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