He and his wife were now, as Burtha wrote in a letter to Big Foot, gearing themselves up “to start out again as entertainers.” Through her correspondence with Big Foot, she’d lately discovered that her friend had, just like she and Edgar, fallen out with Red Fox, affording her the opportunity to compare notes with Big Foot. “Be on your guard for you can’t believe a thing he says,” she warned her friend. Little suspecting that she shouldn’t believe a thing her husband said, either, she added, “He thinks he can break my confidence in my husband and have me turn against him—he can never do that under the high heavens.”
* * *
—
Near the end of August, Burtha and Edgar left the Soldiers’ Home. Probably via Big Foot, who had a sideline as an agent for Native Americans seeking employment as performers at rodeos and state fairs, they secured a booking for all six days of that month’s Montana State Fair, due to be held in Helena, two hundred miles to the southeast. Its organizer was delighted by the arrangement, even bragging to the Helena Daily Independent about obtaining the services of “the famous Indian Caruso.” The booking not only required Edgar to sing but also to supervise “tribal ceremonials and traditional dances” performed by thirty-five Native Americans.
About the time Edgar was negotiating this latest engagement, newspapers elsewhere in the country reproduced the photo of him taken a little before he sailed to France three years earlier. Each of the reproductions carried a caption wrongly identifying the handsome man in the picture as Tom Longboat. Alongside the photo was a story about the real Tom Longboat’s decision to retire from athletics and become a farmer on Canada’s western prairies.
Well out of reach of the man whose identity he’d stolen, Edgar was soon working with Burtha at the Montana State Fair, which was blessed by warm sunshine and blue skies. Around them were thousands of people, attracted by the exhibitions of livestock and farm produce, the carnival, and the extensive daily program of entertainments. In addition to the rodeo, there were concerts, races on foot and horseback, a beauty pageant, music, auto racing, aerobatic displays, balloon flights, and parachute jumps from the balloons. There were also novelty animal acts such as “Panhandle Pete and His Educated Mule.”
Fittingly, Edgar’s contribution to the state fair’s program was titled “Indian Fantasies.” It involved a group of young people from the Bitterroot Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai tribes—known to the white population at that time as “Flathead Indians.” Under Edgar’s supervision, they performed a sequence of trancelike dances every afternoon in front of the grandstand. Now and again he even led the dancing. Supplementing the “Indian Fantasies” show, Edgar and Burtha demonstrated a selection of two-person dances, which proved a great hit with the crowd. His song selections were more successful still, warranting multiple encores.
Visitors returned again and again to see “Indian Fantasies.” By Thursday lunchtime—the show’s fourth afternoon—the grandstand and both sets of bleachers were sold out. Press photographers stalked the crowd, hunting for evocative pictures.
At the state fair, Edgar and his wife were accosted by a stocky and forthright little woman named Mrs. Georgia Prest. She was a reporter for the Anaconda Standard, one of Montana’s leading newspapers. In her downtime, she worked as a stunt pilot for movies. She even had her own airplane, which she called Poison because, as she remarked, “one drop is fatal.” Three days earlier, she’d entertained the crowd with her aerobatics and wing walking.
She was deeply impressed by Edgar and Burtha, by what she saw as their unusual attractiveness, and by their outfits as well. “The chief was garbed in a most bewildering array of feathers, beads, and beaded jacket, which it is impossible for me to attempt to describe,” she wrote afterward, “but I will simply say it was one of the handsomest costumes I have ever seen.”
Aching to impress still further, Edgar seems to have reeled off his story about scoring the winning touchdown for Carlisle against Harvard in the famous football game.
* * *
—
The Flathead Indian Reservation was a lawless part of western Montana, where bootleggers operated numerous whiskey stills. At the heart of it lay an encampment of tipis and huts, scattered on either side of a railroad track and overlooked by a mountain range. Edgar—and presumably Burtha, too—was one of the guests at a Native American wedding on the reservation, to which they appear to have been invited by a dancer from “Indian Fantasies.” During the wedding party, Edgar had a movie camera pointed at him by one of the members of an eccentric group of travelers.
In charge of the group was a dashing yet diminutive Polish sophisticate with a strong accent and a grin that flouted even the rudiments of symmetry. He liked to dress in khaki, pseudo-military attire with leggings and a leather helmet. Titling himself Captain Walter Wanderwell, his name and rank as inauthentic as Edgar’s, he was addressed as “Cap” by the fluctuating team of four people who traveled with him and his wife in their beat-up Moon Six car.
No less idiosyncratic than its owner, the vehicle had a human skull and crossbones mounted on its hood. Its bodywork bore the names of many of the Mexican and American places through which it had driven, names abutted by signatures and messages in German, French, Spanish, and English. Within the space of just a few inches were the autographs of the governor of Oregon, the movie star Viola Dana, and the Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa. These had been acquired during the latest leg of what were designated the “Wanderwell World Tours,” through which Captain Wanderwell sought to nurture international understanding and world peace. As a means of financing the journey, he rented seats in the car. He and his team also hawked photos and screened home movies shot along the way. And that was why the man Wanderwell knew as Chief White Elk was currently being filmed.
Edgar and Burtha were probably there with the aging, dark-skinned Chief Little Bear, whom they’d befriended. Little Bear was the leader of the Chippewa-Cree, a tribe based on the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation in northern Montana. He didn’t speak English, but Edgar and Burtha could communicate with him through both Jim Dinney, his son, and Four Souls, his son-in-law. The chief was vocal about the material hardships confronting his people that winter.
Acutely sympathetic to the plight of the Chippewa-Cree, Burtha was likely behind Edgar’s decision to commit to a series of charity events for them across Montana. The weather—so mild that people dispensed with their topcoats—made travel a lot easier than it might have been. On the road with her husband, Burtha penned letters and poems, dominated by her desire to improve life for her fellow Native Americans. She also published a children’s story in a local newspaper.
Punctuating the charity events for the Chippewa-Cree were a range of other engagements that Burtha obtained for her and Edgar. The two of them were, in her words, “awful busy.” There were vaudeville shows, as well as performances in a church, at a Rotary Club dinner, at movie theaters, at a piano shop, and at a fancy-dress party where guests were encouraged to ape the film stars Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. Edgar even substituted for the regular vocalist with a local jazz band, made up of tuxedoed, pomaded young men who proclaimed themselves “Real Jazz Jammers” and marketed their band with the line, “We Play the Blues While You Dance Them Away.”
When Edgar and his wife hit the town of Bozeman, she had him sell a ring he’d given her, because she believed it brought her bad luck. He traded the ring for a pearl replacement. “It is a beautiful little ring, and I am glad to get rid of the other one,” she wrote to Big Foot, who had become her confidant. Now that she’d divested herself of her old ring, she announced, “I have crushed out most all the bad luck that has come my way for awhile.”
* * *
—
Aptly named, the Grand Hotel was a turreted, five-storied establishment. Edgar and his wife found accommodation there in mid-December after they’d breezed into Butte, streetcars a
nd electric lighting attesting to the city’s status as Montana’s commercial heart.
Courtesy of a Seattle-based film distribution company called Greater Features, Edgar and Burtha were poised to begin work at the giant Broadway Theatre. Burtha had gotten them a contract to perform at screenings of Before the White Man Came, the latest example of a breed of appreciably longer movies known as “feature films” because they were intended as the main feature of a movie program. Like the big stage show on which Burtha still hoped to work, the film had an all–Native American cast.
Before the White Man Came was being released as a road show—a type of release associated with prestige productions. For road show movies, only a limited number of prints were produced. These toured from venue to venue, ideally generating a frisson of excitement and exclusivity that would increase the prospect of wider distribution at a future date. Screenings of road show movies were structured around such overtly theatrical devices as musical overtures and intermissions. By splicing Edgar and Burtha into the program, Greater Features would be reinforcing the show’s theatricality and thus endowing their movie with a classy, educational aura more often associated with the stage than the screen. Employing them to appear at screenings would also—in theory, at least—promote the movie’s much-trumpeted authenticity.
Consistent with its title, Before the White Man Came—which told the story of an intertribal romance—was set in the era preceding European colonization. Edgar pretended he was one of the Native American actors who featured in it, some of them on-screen too briefly to identify. He likely told his wife that he’d worked on the movie before she met him. Fortunately for him, the acting credits at the start of the film were visible for only a matter of seconds—not long enough for viewers to read much of the closely spaced list, from which Chief White Elk’s name was absent.
But his name could not have been much more conspicuous in the advertisements for the movie, which started appearing in the Anaconda Standard. His wife was also given prominent billing: “Princess White Elk Is Considered the Most Attractive Indian Woman Appearing Before the Public.”
Leafing through the paper in search of the ad, she or Edgar may have noticed that the strikes and other apparent portents of revolution, which dominated the press just a few months earlier, had fizzled out. Proud of the ads, Burtha mailed a copy to her friend Big Foot.
At least once each day she and Edgar stepped in front of an audience that must have been enlarged by the prospect of leering at her. Edgar prefaced the screenings with some songs and a short lecture. He and Burtha followed this with a rendition of a war dance, during which he could wear one of two feathered bonnets purchased from Little Bear. The war dance and the rest of their act received such acclaim that Burtha gloated about her and Edgar “dynamiting” the city.
For their final three days at the Broadway Theatre, they drafted Little Bear and several of his compatriots into the war dance. It provided a piquant appetizer for the movie’s opening images: a long shot of a silhouetted horseman riding down a barren hillside, live music raising the audience’s sense of expectation.
* * *
—
Between sessions at the Broadway Theatre, Edgar squeezed in the finale to the charitable campaign in aid of the beleaguered Chippewa-Cree. On the day after Christmas, he and Little Bear, along with Jim Dinney and Four Souls, attended the religious service at the YMCA building, a comparatively new structure occupying almost a full block of West Park Street.
In the run-up to the service, Edgar sang several numbers from his repertoire of popular songs. Then he spoke to the congregation about the difficulties endured by American Indians. He explained that the majority of “full-blooded Indians” were attempting to farm the land they’d been allotted by the government, but they were being stymied by “the adverse climatic conditions of the last four years,” which had “put them in a bad way.” To deter questions about his own racial credentials and, perhaps, lord it over his mixed-race wife, Edgar fired off a few disparaging remarks about Indians who were not full-blooded. He said he had little sympathy for these so-called “breed Indians” because “most of them lease their lands and live in laziness.”
With Jim Dinney and Four Souls functioning as translators, Little Bear wished the congregation a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. “I am glad to see you,” he continued. “The reason I am glad to see you is that God wants us to meet here. Look at me—I cannot read or write. That is the kind of man that tells the truth. I am not going to tell you a lie. You people see me here today in fear. I wish you people here would help me and clear me of my fear.” He went on to say, “Many of us are hungry. Some have not enough clothes. I ask you people to write to the government and tell them of our trouble.”
A collection for his tribe was taken up afterward. It boosted the campaign’s total proceeds to more than $170, just below the average weekly wage for a skilled manual worker. Once the ensuing religious service finished, Edgar handed a peace pipe to the president of that chapter of the YMCA. Edgar joked about hoping the gift would ensure its recipient was “a good Indian all year.”
Very much against type, Edgar was endeavoring to prove that he, too, was a good Indian. On top of donating $100 to the fund for the beleaguered inhabitants of the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation, he and Burtha sent them more than 2,200 pounds of donated clothing, along with large quantities of candy for the children. Yet Little Bear complained because he’d expected a lot more. Burtha had come to resent his frequent grumbling. “Little Bear has grown very selfish and unappreciative of the things that are being done for him,” she declared. “The more you do for him, the more he expects, and when you are not in a position to do the things he expects you to do, he complains.”
Her husband’s efforts were better appreciated at the Broadway Theatre, where he’d proved enough of a box office draw for the management to program an additional matinee—without the movie. Likely deploying knowledge that he’d gleaned during a recent charity event at Butte’s Spiritualist Society, Edgar was set to garnish it with a supernatural component.
On the afternoon of what was advertised as “The White Elk Show,” the mild weather departed. A combination of a stiff breeze and heavy snow drove the pedestrians from the sidewalks around the theater. Edgar was nonetheless sought out by a sports reporter from the Anaconda Standard. The reporter had been tipped off about Edgar by Mrs. Georgia Prest, or perhaps some other colleague of hers who had spoken to him at the Montana State Fair. Happy to hold forth about his imaginary sporting exploits, Edgar provided the reporter with reminiscences of the athletes he’d encountered. But the reporter was most interested in the period when Edgar had been on the famous Carlisle football team coached by the great Glenn “Pop” Warner.
Edgar explained that he’d played under his Indian name, Tewanna, not the English name he adopted for the sake of his theater audiences. Between 1906 and 1910, he said, he’d figured in most of Carlisle’s games and been deployed by Warner as a running back. He admitted he wasn’t a spectacular player, but he was fast, which accounted for why Warner chose him for what the journalist remembered as “one of the most remarkable stunts in the history of the autumn sport.”
The journalist listened to Edgar’s version of what happened when Carlisle played at the Harvard stadium in late October 1909. Harvard scored first and then kicked off, the ball arcing downfield. Eventually it descended on the Carlisle ten-yard line, where it was caught by one of Edgar’s teammates. Instead of embarking on the usual downfield drive, every Carlisle player bunched around the man with the ball. Just as the Harvard team charged toward them, the huddle dispersed. Some of the Carlisle players calmly walked a step or two before standing still. Others ran in different directions. Yet there was no sign of the football.
Momentarily flummoxed, the Harvard players heard a loud hiss. Edgar was the source of this, audible from twenty yards. He was already sprinting for the Harvard
end zone, only the ball was still nowhere to be seen. Several of the Harvard players pursued Edgar. They failed to catch him, though, before he crossed the goal line. He then pulled the partially deflated football out from under his shirt, where he’d concealed it while he was in the huddle.
When Carlisle claimed a touchdown, Harvard disputed the legality of their tactic. Edgar insisted the ball had been punctured as he’d charged toward the end zone. After a lengthy argument, the officials declared a touchdown and the game resumed, Harvard going on to win 27 to 12.
People assumed that the hidden ball trick was the reason why the Carlisle versus Harvard fixture did not take place the following year, but that was, Edgar said, down to the failure to find a mutually convenient date. “It was not due to Harvard being stuck up, as is commonly supposed,” he added. “They treated us very finely off the field and were not a bit conceited or snobbish in any way. On the field they played hard, rough football and were out to win. I remember Wendell—then playing his first year for Harvard, and twice picked as an all-American half back—as the hardest-hitting, hardest-tackling man I have ever met on the gridiron. The way he put his head down and butted into you, he just couldn’t be stopped.”
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