Christmas and New Year interrupting their tour, Edgar and most of the cast then made the short jump to Santa Ana for a two-day booking. There, they had a grinding itinerary of three shows daily, which required Edgar to perform in a musical comedy starring the all-girl song-and-dance troupe he’d worked with in L.A.
Prior to his final tour dates in nearby Oxnard, where he was advertised as “a whole show in himself,” he fulfilled some solo engagements. These included a visit to a women’s club in Orange, at which he sang, played the piano, and spoke in favor of the campaign for citizenship to be granted to all American Indians. His appearance at the women’s club was probably what got him invited to a dinner party thrown by two society hostesses who claimed to have Cherokee ancestors “three generations back.”
* * *
—
Edgar and Burtha arrived in Portland, Oregon, which was enjoying intermittent spring sunshine. They made their way through the prosperous downtown area, where many new buildings had gone up and where statewide Prohibition had swept away the saloons. Clad in full regalia, the couple went into a huge, late-nineteenth-century hotel at Sixth and Morrison. They asked the desk clerk for a suite of rooms, their crisply enunciated English wrong-footing him.
Comparable disbelief was evident when later that day they presented themselves at the home of Emery Olmstead. A young, beaky-nosed, dark-skinned man who would have made a more plausible Cherokee than Edgar, Olmstead served as chairman of the Fifth Liberty Loan, a soon-to-be-launched federal government campaign aimed at raising money to fill the budgetary deficit created by the recently ended war.
Edgar’s cheerful demeanor offset the abruptness of his announcement that he was there to help with Portland’s contribution to the campaign. Ushered into the comfortable house, he swiftly established such a rapport with Olmstead that Burtha could have mistakenly assumed they were old friends. They were soon deep in conversation about the Liberty Loan campaign, their discussion powered by cigarettes.
Meeting the fundraising target set by the government would be a formidable task, Olmstead’s campaign staff had warned, because the public’s appetite for anything war related was dwindling. Edgar nonetheless assured Olmstead that the target was attainable so long as the campaign utilized the expertise he’d just offered. He and Burtha brandished their stack of testimonials. Among those, he had a forged letter of commendation from the authorities for working in a Californian hospital where he’d supposedly helped defeat an influenza epidemic, this latest recruit to his army of heroic stories about himself maybe inspired by the epidemic he’d only just avoided in San Francisco.
By the time he and Burtha said goodbye to Olmstead, they’d been engaged as fundraisers.
* * *
—
In the presence of his wife, that evening Edgar talked to a reporter employed by the Portland-based Morning Oregonian. “From the experience we’ve had with our own people, from the faithful service they’ve given—both in lives and money—we have come to feel that all are equal in this America of ours, and that all should be sharers in the liberty that our nation strives for here and overseas,” Edgar said. “It is our hope that someday our people may raise their heads and feel that they have a full share in that liberty.”
Cigarette in hand, he made emphatic gestures as he spoke, those gestures causing the bone and shell ornaments on his broad chest to jangle and the feathers in his headdress to shiver. He gave every indication that he was conscious of the many admiring glances directed at him.
“We are patriots, we Indians,” he continued. “If you question that, look at the records of our race in the war.” Backing this up, he said, “One small Indian community in this district gave thirty times its quota to a Liberty Loan. We think that compares well with the records of those who came here and took possession of our land.”
Garnished by the usual references to his service on the Antilles, his medical qualifications, and his achievements in college football, as well as new stories about Burtha’s wartime nursing service in France, and about them raising $1 million for the Red Cross, the resultant newspaper article was published first thing next day—Monday, April 14, 1919.
Later that morning, Emery Olmstead summoned his fellow Liberty Loan Committee members to a meeting at Edgar and Burtha’s hotel. Though the federal government wasn’t launching its nationwide campaign until the following week, Edgar consented to perform at a fundraising event in Portland the next day. But his plan soon hit its first obstacle.
* * *
—
The article in the Morning Oregonian caught the attention of staff at the Salt Lake Tribune. Before the day was out, they’d wired the director of publicity for Oregon’s Liberty Loan campaign. Their telegram, which provided an inventory of Chief White Elk’s recent criminal escapades, concluded with the line WE DISPROVED EVERY CLAIM HE MADE AND EXPOSED HIM.
Soon the district attorney for Oregon was involved. At the request of the local Liberty Loan campaign, he started looking into the Salt Lake Tribune’s allegations. When the Morning Oregonian got wind of those, someone was sent to question Edgar.
Face-to-face with the reporter, he brushed off the telegram from the Tribune as “a vicious and baseless attack.” To refute the claim that he hadn’t served on the SS Antilles, he showed the reporter his U.S. Army Transport Service documentation. He also sought to demonstrate his good character by fishing out his stash of testimonials praising his work and Burtha’s on successive government fundraising drives.
“If we are the impostors that these charges would make us,” he said, his voice replete with indignation, “why is it that the government has permitted us to work on all these drives, and why is it that we have scores of high-official letters of recommendation?” He even added, “We have decided to go to Salt Lake City and take action in court. There has been enough of this slander.”
His all-too-credible, point-by-point denial of the allegations didn’t preclude stories about him from circulating around Portland. Word had it that he wasn’t even a real Indian; that he hadn’t, as he maintained, been a student at Carlisle; that he was wanted by the police on charges of draft dodging.
Experience alerted him to the fact that the situation would only get worse, so he and Burtha decided to leave Portland. Resolutely protesting their innocence, he said that he and Princess Ah-Tra-Ah-Saun would be traveling to Salt Lake, where they’d be instituting legal proceedings against the Salt Lake Tribune. They stayed just long enough for Edgar to sing at the scheduled Liberty Loan event on Tuesday evening. Without explaining themselves to Emery Olmstead or any of the other people they’d come to know, Edgar and his wife went to the station and boarded the midnight train.
* * *
—
But Edgar had lied about where they were going. They weren’t on their way to Salt Lake. They were, instead, going north into Washington State, another supposed bastion of the mandatory teetotalism that nonetheless offered little impediment to the alcohol consumption of hardened drinkers like Edgar.
In and around Seattle, where well-lit streets sloped toward a long waterfront, bordered by mills, factories, and warehouses—the focus of a recent, exceptionally bitter five-day general strike—he picked up bookings as a guest speaker. At one of those, he posed the pertinent question, why are his people deemed good enough to fight for the United States yet not good enough to be granted the vote?
Over the fourteen months of his marriage, he’d transmitted the show business virus to Burtha, who contemplated launching herself as a solo performer. She got her big break when she was invited to appear as an “added attraction” at Levy’s Orpheum, the most prominent of Seattle’s theaters. Alongside the Folly Girls, a troupe of white chorus girls tricked up in faux Native American outfits, she’d be demonstrating “the native dances of her tribe.” Despite her commitment to remain in Seattle, Edgar—who wasn’t about to let marriage inter
fere with his own work—accepted an offer to join a summer lecture tour of Canada, organized by the promoter and talent spotter J. W. Erickson.
Tall and burly, dark hair retreating from angular features, Erickson was a kindly, energetic, and high-strung man who worked alongside his wife. They ran one of a number of companies dedicated to staging what were known as “chautauquas,” a name derived from Lake Chautauqua in New York State, where the concept had originated at a summer camp almost fifty years earlier. Rooted in democratic idealism and free speech, in the desire to eliminate bigotry and sectarianism, chautauquas had evolved into a thriving movement primarily oriented toward small towns in America’s rural provinces. Like vaudeville, chautauquas were based upon itinerant groups of performers, only in this instance performers were chosen for their ability to educate as well as entertain both adults and children. Unlike vaudeville, chautauquas were held in circus tents. And they were limited to the summer months, hence their self-proclaimed status as “the greatest summer school in the world.”
Ellison-White Dominion Chautauquas, the outfit run by Erickson and his wife, was in the forefront of expanding the movement into Canada. As Chief White Elk, Edgar became a late addition to the Canadian Six circuit, its title arising from the fact that six days were spent at every stop on the tour. He agreed to lecture on the afternoon of Day Five. His chosen subject was his fictitious experiences at the Versailles Peace Conference between America and the other previously warring nations.
* * *
—
Sporting a feathered headdress and flowing robes, Edgar arrived in the handsome port city of Vancouver on the evening of Wednesday, May 21, 1919. His apparent exoticism was tempered by the Chinese immigrants on the sidewalks and by the passengers from Japanese ocean liners. Since leaving Seattle, Chief White Elk had morphed into the dignified figure of Dr. Tewanna, survivor of the sinking of the Antilles, Carlisle graduate, college football star, Cherokee chief, and Olympic long-distance runner. Appended to this familiar résumé—which left him well-equipped to chisel cash from the gullible—were tales of how he’d campaigned for the various Liberty Loans and how he’d delivered a speech from the steps of the New York State Capitol.
He checked in to the Hotel Vancouver, easily Canada’s most palatial hotel, its amenities including a roof garden and a grillroom specializing in big game. At the hotel, he may have tasted the prevalent Canadian prejudice and discrimination toward non-Anglo-Saxons. While he was staying there, local newspapers ran numerous articles about strikes and threatened strikes in Vancouver and elsewhere in the country. Motivating this unrest were harsh working conditions and the refusal of employers to negotiate with unions. The newspapers carried parallel reports on massive strikes in America, potential strikes in England, and turmoil in Italy, where violent clashes had taken place between communists and supporters of the new fascist movement. Red flags were also reported to be flying in Paris. Even the most cursory flick through the papers would’ve given Edgar the impression that the revolution, which had already installed a communist government in Russia, would soon sweep the world. That impression was strengthened by the news of a forthcoming general strike in Vancouver.
But Edgar needed time to reach the rendezvous point for the chautauqua, so he’d surely left town before the strike got under way. He had a nine-hundred-mile train ride through a wild landscape for which the observation car was intended, views of mountains, lakes, woods, canyons, and waterfalls ultimately replaced by the seemingly endless wheat fields of Saskatchewan.
When passing isolated farmsteads, vaudevillians like him were in the habit of tossing unwanted magazines and newspapers out the windows—not because they enjoyed littering the landscape, but because they figured that the inhabitants of those farmsteads would relish news from the outside world. Tucked away on the inside pages was a story about Tom Longboat’s return to Canada after military service in France. No mention was made of Longboat carrying out his almost two-year-old threat to press charges against the man impersonating him. Evidently, Longboat was more interested in resuming his athletic career, so Edgar had nothing to fear on that score.
Edgar was scheduled to join the chautauqua by Friday, June 6, 1919, its penultimate day in the small town of Stoughton, Saskatchewan. Assuming everything went according to plan, he’d have been preceded in the tent that afternoon by Francis Hendry, a bushy-mustached, middle-aged impressionist whose act involved elaborate makeup and his wife’s piano accompaniment. The Hendry Duo was also slated to perform in the lamp-lit tent that evening, its repertoire encompassing dramatic readings and vocal solos, which weren’t exactly the most obvious warm-up for the day’s final event—a talk on “China’s Fight for Democracy.”
The talk was due to be given by Dr. Ng Poon Chew. Sometimes billed as “the Chinese Mark Twain,” he was a bespectacled and urbane former diplomat who had gone on to become a journalist and set up America’s first Chinese-language newspaper. Edgar would’ve had sufficient time to get acquainted with him and the Hendrys, because chautauqua performers assigned to feature on the same day routinely rode the same trains together and stayed at the same rooming houses and small hotels, where they became a rambunctious presence at the same dining tables.
In theory, Edgar and his three fellow performers had no alcohol to lubricate their acquaintanceship, Prohibition being on the statute books across every Canadian province save Quebec. Yet Edgar had only to visit the local drugstore if he wanted a drink. He could then purchase a bottle of Hostetter’s Bitters or one of the other patent medicines that had become a synonym for alcoholic beverages. Many of those were more than five times stronger than beer.
Though the chautauqua continued in Stoughton until Saturday night, Edgar and his companions were free to leave once they’d honored their weekly obligations. From Saskatchewan, they moved into neighboring Manitoba, their small-town destinations marked by grain elevators that spiked the flat landscape, across which an incessant, gritty wind blew, its invisible fingers tugging at the pegs holding up the chautauqua tent. People poured in from outlying districts, filling the makeshift, increasingly stuffy auditorium, numerous children swarming toward the front. These excited youngsters whistled and clapped throughout other people’s musical numbers, but they lapsed into an attentive hush during Edgar’s spellbinding lectures. And when he’d finished, everyone stood up and gave a hearty rendition of “God Save the King!” One of Edgar’s colleagues joked about having helped save the king so many times that he could sing the British national anthem backward.
Inevitably, Edgar would’ve had plenty of time not only to exercise his talent for painting and drawing, but also to meet the other thirty-five performers on the chautauqua. They were a varied bunch. Among them were a young, headscarfed Syrian woman; an Australian war veteran; a Japanese writer who had to coach people on the pronunciation of his name; a trio of vivacious and attractive female singer-instrumentalists; a husband and wife who lectured on the six years they’d spent in the Malayan jungle; a traditional Serbian tamburica band; and a young man who gave stagy readings from great works of literature.
Late that June, Edgar and the others headed west into Edmonton, Alberta, a burgeoning city reached by way of an absurdly slow, unreliable, and uncomfortable railroad service. The carriages rocked so much that the man who had spent years roughing it in the jungle complained about feeling seasick. Veterans of this route came equipped with a set of straps with which they tied themselves into their sleeping berths. To add insult to any injury sustained falling out of bed, all this discomfort wasn’t worthwhile, because there turned out to be little demand for chautauqua in Edmonton.
But Edgar had other things to take his mind off the sparse audiences. He visited a local children’s club, where he gave what was regarded as “a very fine address on the aims and aspirations of his people, making a deep impression on those present.” He was the star attraction at a big parade, designed to advertise the annual cat
tle roundup in nearby Neutral Hills—an event akin to a state fair. He appears to have rubbed elbows with everyone from cowboys to members of the Canadian government. Around that time, he also appears to have made a hollow promise to compete in a Toronto marathon due to feature Tom Longboat.
While Edgar was soaking up all this attention, his assumed identity as a Cherokee chief was further validated by a glowing reference in the latest edition of the American Indian, a quarterly journal promoting Native American culture and attainments, and the growing movement for Native American rights. In an article about the Liberty Loan, “Chief and Princess White Elk” were proudly but erroneously praised for selling more than $1.8 million worth of Liberty Bonds over a single week.
Through July and early August, Edgar and the rest of the chautauqua moved from one cattle town to another until they reached their final date in Briercrest, Saskatchewan, each day capped by a florid sunset that didn’t burn out until midnight. Burtha, meanwhile, had probably been sending Edgar the sort of long, chatty letters she liked to write. There was a lot for her to tell him about. She had, as planned, been appearing in the show at Levy’s Orpheum. Using the stage name Princess White Elk, she’d performed what was marketed as “the Bare-Footed Nature Dance.” Theatergoers had flocked to see the show, her act eventually earning top billing.
Her success appears to have led to her being approached by a prominent impresario who had worked with a lot of famous entertainers. She described him as “a wonderful talker, a wonderful man, a wonderful promoter.” He wanted to work with her on putting together a lavish dramatization of “the history of the American Indian,” starring an all–Native American cast. Burtha rated it “a great plan,” one that would advance her people’s cause as well as the show business career she now pictured for herself and Edgar.
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