* * *
—
The next morning’s edition of the Anaconda Standard carried Edgar’s recollections. They were seized upon later that day by a rival Montana newspaper. It described his story about the hidden ball trick as “the best and wrongest yarn concerning football published in Butte in many a year.” The article proceeded to explain why that was the case: “Here’s the joke: but one such play was ever made between the two colleges. This came in 1903, when Dillon of Carlisle hid the football under his sweater and ran through the full Harvard team for 105 yards for the only touchdown of the game….Further, rule books show that in 1904, five years before the alleged feat of Dr. White Elk, the hidden ball trick was ruled out of the game and has never returned.”
As a result of the article, a representative from the Anaconda Standard was obliged to admit to being “victimized by a showman in search of publicity.”
* * *
—
Edgar would be in trouble if he stayed there for much longer. The newspapers were bound to start scrutinizing other aspects of his life, so he dragged Burtha from Butte to Great Falls, a city more than one hundred miles northeast, where people were unlikely to have seen the stories about him. Through the opening weeks of 1921, he performed at a movie theater there. Offering a fresh selection of songs and monologues, he featured in three different programs. Each of these constituted a familiar mixture of short supporting films, a comedy juxtaposed with a travelogue and an adventure serial, all leading up to the main attraction, marketed as “an exhilarating romance of the speediest two-gun wizard the West ever knew.”
Burtha and her husband were then slated to move on to Seattle and appear at screenings of Before the White Man Came. But those plans were kiboshed by the failure of Greater Features to persuade any of Seattle’s movie theaters to book it. News of this seems to have contributed to Burtha’s mounting frustration with theatrical life, with constant work that left her feeling as if they’d made “little headway” in the joint show business career she’d envisaged.
Potential salvation was presented to her by the producer of the big-budget theater show about Native American history first pitched to her at the beginning of the previous year. “He says he is going to stage something that has never been produced before on the stage—and the entire program will be Indians,” she wrote to Big Foot. “He will not tell us further than it’s going to be an entire Indian play, and I imagine it is going to be something very good when one gets it organized and working—at least I am trusting that some dreams will come true.”
Convinced the show would provide her and Edgar with a route into the big time—a glamorous tour of America and Europe—Burtha agreed to carry out unpaid preparatory work for it, which involved traveling across Montana to the Crow and Fort Belknap Reservations. Her task was to audition and then contract a half-dozen Native Americans who could begin rehearsals during late March. Though her mission proved a success, her resentment at the injustices perpetrated against Native Americans was deepened by the “rotten” conditions she saw on the reservations.
From Montana, she sent a letter to Big Foot in which she remarked, “I could tell some interesting things that happened in this free land of ours.” Those things included witnessing groups of schoolchildren being forced to march “up and down with long heavy irons on their backs in the bitter cold.” She added, “I expect to leave here in two or three days for Seattle. Won’t be surprised if I spend a day in Yakima on my way in, because I want to see you and Mrs. McWhorter awful bad before I leave for the east with our troupe of Indians.”
* * *
—
THIS NATIVE REDSKIN HAS A REMARKABLE VOICE, declared the advertisements for the show in which Edgar was meanwhile performing at the large new Winter Garden Theatre in rain-lashed Seattle. He featured on the same bill as a Buster Keaton comedy and music from a huge Wurlitzer organ.
Without Burtha’s levelheaded presence, his income from working at the Winter Garden and subsequently at small venues around Puget Sound was outstripped by his spending, much of it probably on drink and drugs. As compulsive as he was, he’d developed a raging addiction to morphine and cocaine, which were plentiful in Seattle, though the cheaper sachets of morphine tended to be cut with chalk. Pay more and he’d get slightly less chalk.
Burtha—who had now rejoined Edgar—could only watch while he became, as she wrote, “a slave to the most terrible demon I know.” But her pride discouraged her from talking about her husband’s problem to anyone, even Big Foot, her discretion requiring what she described as “terrible willpower.”
Edgar ended up owing money all over town. The situation grew so bad that Burtha felt compelled to place an ad in the Seattle Daily Times stating, “I will not be responsible for debts contracted by my husband, Dr. White Elk.”
Burtha had the consolation of knowing that preparations for the as-yet-untitled all–Native American stage show were going well. Its producer had already plowed several thousand dollars into constructing scenery and purchasing equipment. To help Burtha bridge the financial gap until rehearsals got under way, he arranged to hire Edgar to perform in a series of small towns in Montana.
Before that tour commenced, she and her husband played some dates in Washington State. When they visited the town of Chimacum, they were provided with accommodation on the farm owned by the Native American state senator William Bishop, whom Burtha tagged “the best-educated Injun I have met in a long time.” Spending a few days there lifted Burtha’s spirits. “It does my heart good to see some Injuns really progressing,” she wrote to Big Foot.
Yet her happiness had evaporated within a couple of weeks of returning to Seattle, where she and Edgar moved into a small house on West Barrett Street. In all likelihood alerted by Edgar’s discovery that his would-be employer had not only unilaterally reduced his salary but also failed to land him the promised dates in Montana, she grew suspicious. She then consulted an attorney about the contract she’d signed with the show’s producer. The attorney labeled it “the most one-sided affair” he’d ever read. He counseled her to renegotiate it or else “let the whole thing drop.” By the first week of April she’d plumped for the second option.
* * *
—
“The way things keep turning out, I guess I am doomed to die a little tramp Injun,” she confided in Big Foot. Close though her friendship with him had become, she withheld any reference to the financial and emotional damage wrought upon her by Edgar’s drug taking, about which she was growing increasingly bitter. She believed it had “crushed out all the happiness” from her life, and that it was undermining Edgar’s musical gifts.
He’d just gone back up to Washington State as part of a double act with Eugene Ferrio, a young French-Canadian who pretended to be his son, Eugene White Elk. Together they posed as representatives of a genuine Native American rights organization named the Society of American Indians. Onstage, the self-styled Dr. White Elk sang a few songs, told stories while playing the piano, and joined Eugene for a demonstration of what they called the “Bear Dance.” Eugene also performed a solo routine, billed as the “Dagger Dance.” But their act doesn’t appear to have prospered. Worse still, Burtha probably discovered that his relationship with Eugene was not purely professional, which would have accounted for her dismayed reference to her husband’s taste for “the strange and terrible vices” introduced to Native Americans by Europeans.
Fresh from giving up on the theater production in which she’d invested so much time, energy, and belief, Burtha wasn’t about to do the same with her marriage, so she fixed up concert bookings for herself and Edgar in Vancouver. She was perhaps influenced by a desire to put some distance between her husband and Eugene, as well as to take her husband to a city where drugs would be impossible to obtain. If those were her objectives, then she appears to have succeeded in only one of them. She got him away from Eugene, yet drugs were m
uch harder to evade. Cocaine and morphine turned out to be widely available across the border, especially in Vancouver. The big difference was that a sachet cost double the price Edgar would have paid on the streets of Seattle, easily absorbing whatever he earned and apparently compelling Burtha to sell her possessions to cover their other expenses.
Heavy cocaine use did nothing to diminish Edgar’s flights of fancy. In Vancouver, he promoted himself as “Chief White Elk, the famous Indian movie star.” From the beginning of May when he and Burtha were performing a vaudeville interlude at the theater on the corner of Dunsmuir and Granville Streets, they applied themselves to their work with unusual intensity. They hoped to catch someone’s eye and secure a touring contract for the upcoming summer. Presumably on the basis of their earlier contribution to promoting the American release of Before the White Man Came, they got to know Jimmy Finch, a veteran Canadian movie huckster. On behalf of a film distribution outfit called Select Pictures, Jimmy was about to supervise the release throughout western Canada of that very movie. He gave Edgar and Burtha a six-month contract to perform at screenings of it.
Just five days after the movie previewed in Vancouver, Edgar and his wife—who was possibly motivated by a desire to rescue their now unhappy relationship—made a life-changing decision. It entailed them adopting a fair-haired, black-eyed fifteen-month-old Native American girl. They called their adoptive baby Ethel Lolita White Elk. And they gave her a Native American name that translated as “Silver Star.”
In a letter to Big Foot, the jubilant Burtha broke the news. “Tell Mrs. McWhorter not to get too excited,” she wrote, “for she is going to see a wonderful Injun baby one of these days, perhaps soon.”
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Getting from Vancouver to the quaint fishing town of Nanaimo could take as long as seven and a half hours. The ferry steamed out of the harbor, past the wreck of another ship and toward the blue, densely wooded mountains of Vancouver Island. Edgar and Burtha traveled with their baby daughter wrapped in a traditional papoose that earned her many admiring comments. Silver Star had a way of ogling people that led Burtha to joke that she was their “baby vamp”—a seductress.
Edgar and his family’s tour started in Nanaimo. Coated in war paint, Edgar performed some Native American–style chanting as an overture to each screening of Before the White Man Came. He also gave a detailed talk, explaining significant yet potentially baffling aspects of the culture portrayed on-screen. Beneath the American Indian’s “conventional covering of beads, feathers, and paint,” he told his audience, were “highly spiritual” individuals, “possessed of a soul incapable of being conquered by the white man or any other race.” In sketching a vivid and reverential picture of “the real American Indian,” Edgar said they “saw something of the unseen forces of the universe in every tree, every animal, every bird and every inanimate creation.”
To prevent the audience’s attention from wandering, Edgar sprinkled his talk with humorous asides. Sometimes he even included a quiz about native life, “unique prizes” being awarded for the first correct answers.
He then sang “La Marseillaise” and other songs. When the last notes had faded, the movie began to roll. Now Edgar just had to kill time until he was due onstage to provide an epilogue. For that, he and Burtha performed an elaborately lit demonstration of Native American ritual dancing. Burtha recited a few of her poems as well, and she delivered a lucid, forceful lecture about her tribe.
Next on their itinerary was the genteel, attractive little city of Victoria, which necessitated a long but scenic journey down Vancouver Island’s coastline. Jimmy Finch was there already, ballyhooing the imminent arrival of the “Chief of the Oklahoma Cherokee Indians” and “the last princess of the Klamath tribe.”
Packed houses greeted each of their shows at the Victoria Theatre. Large throngs of disappointed people were turned away on a daily basis. Adding to the hullabaloo surrounding their tour, a local journalist remarked, “From the tip of the chief’s feathered headdress to his heavily embroidered moccasins, White Elk is a superb picture of an Indian chief.”
The customary relish with which the chief responded to the public may have been undercut by a sense of grievance. He and Burtha were, after all, chronically short of money, yet their work was netting sizable profits for Select Pictures and the movie theater owners.
All previous box office records at the Victoria Theatre broken, he and his family proceeded to the coal-mining town of Cumberland, where Jimmy had set up a three-day booking. Their visit to the town climaxed in what was advertised as “Ladies’ Night.” Scanning the women in the audience, Edgar picked the woman whom he regarded as the best-looking. Then he presented her with “a valuable and handsome souvenir.”
Directly after the screening, he transferred to the movie theater’s adjoining dance hall, where he moonlighted as an emcee and vocalist, fronting a four-piece band. His repeated boast that he could speak twenty-one languages spurred one of the townsfolk to inquire whether he spoke Scotch.
“No, but I can drink it,” he wisecracked.
* * *
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Edgar and family had to be back in Vancouver by Monday, August 1, 1921, when Before the White Man Came would be opening at the Columbia Theatre. To drum up attention for the movie, Jimmy started colluding with Edgar in portraying him as one of the stars of the film, and peddling him as “Chief White Elk with His All-Indian Drama.” Jimmy also deployed a battery of other promotional gimmicks. The most flamboyant of these involved a local theater manager and sometime vaudevillian chauffeuring Edgar through downtown Vancouver that Saturday morning. Their vehicle joined a lengthy column stretching up Granville Street’s gentle grade. Deep crowds stood along the sidewalks, ready for the parade to start. It was being held to celebrate the opening of the Caledonian Games—a big sports event saluting the city’s ties to the Scottish highlands.
Just past noon, a military band started playing, the parade began to move, and the sunshine burned away the clouds. Around Edgar, who cut an imposing figure, were other vehicles carrying dignitaries, including the commander of the visiting U.S. fleet and the lieutenant governor of Washington State. Convoying down the road ahead were the military band, three companies of American infantrymen, a troop of cadets, and, in the far distance, a scarlet-uniformed horseback detachment from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Edgar and the others glided past the Hotel Vancouver, where he’d stayed more than two years earlier. Then the parade wound its way across town, packed sidewalks flanking its route. Upward of ten thousand excited people had assembled at Hastings Park by the time Edgar was driven through the entrance. The spectators filled the grandstand and bleachers and spread across the grass, where the contestants in the Caledonian Games were waiting, a high proportion of them in kilts and other items of traditional Scottish costume.
* * *
—
For the remainder of August and the first half of September, during which the rain scarcely let up, Edgar and Burtha performed at screenings in Vancouver and neighboring towns where Select Pictures had arranged brief runs of Before the White Man Came. But they were playing to dwindling audiences. Seeing so many empty seats only added to the gloom haunting the smile Burtha felt obliged to display.
“This traveling and show business when you have nothing but small-time is getting to be hell, and no getting around it,” she wrote to Big Foot. She still hadn’t confided in him—or anyone else—about Edgar’s drug taking, yet she did admit to one thing: “I am awful homesick to see the good old USA again.”
Speculation about the impending bankruptcy of Select Pictures didn’t lift her mood. She took to crying herself to sleep and grieving over how far her husband had fallen, how he was a “Great Chieftain exiled as a tramp upon the face of the earth with his millions gone.”
Despite everything, she felt that her marriage could be salvaged, assuming she and Edgar we
re able to escape from the prison of low-level vaudeville. If Select Pictures really did go bust, the pair of them resolved to quit show business and settle in Yakima, where three of Burtha’s friends—Ben Olney, Big Foot, and his wife—lived. But Select Pictures didn’t go bust, so Burtha and Edgar persevered with their tour.
It next took them to the town of Blairmore, Alberta, accessible via an epic train ride through the mountains. For the remainder of the fall, they accompanied the movie to a roster of small prairie cities across southern Alberta, the remoteness of these engendering in Burtha a feeling that she’d been exiled from the “world of opportunities.” Her escalating depression fostered in her a sense of fatalism, a sense of being condemned to inhabit “the shore of darkness.” She could hardly have been less equipped to contribute to the “jolly good time for all” promised to the audiences attending screenings at which she and Edgar performed.
With every venue they checked off their tour list and every sachet of cocaine Edgar snorted, his avowed attainments grew still more overblown. He became not just “a noted Indian tenor,” “movie star,” and “war hero” who spoke twenty-one languages, but also someone who had “entertained kings, queens, tsars and presidents.”
* * *
—
One step forward and Edgar would be dead. He was standing at the tip of a large expanse of flat rooftop, his arms outstretched. The roof belonged to the Hotel Selkirk in Edmonton. If he turned his head to the left, he could see the rear of a giant sign advertising the hotel. Right in front of him was a three-story drop straight down to the intersection of 101st and Jasper Streets.
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