King Con Page 10
In the ensuing collection, seventy dollars was raised—easily enough to cover the bill Edgar had run up at the Hotel Utah before the local Elks began picking up his tab.
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All around Edgar and his bride next day were signs of spring: warmer temperatures, a dusting of leaves on the poplars, budding lilacs, and the sight of road crews grading the city’s dirt streets. Imminent though the season of renewal was, Edgar’s current bonanza was closer to the end than the beginning.
Rumors reached the local sheriff that Chief White Elk was not who he professed to be. Early on the evening of Tuesday, March 19, 1918, Sheriff John S. Corliss started out for the Hotel Utah, where he meant to question Edgar. Newman found out about this, then phoned Edgar and warned him that Corliss was heading over to his hotel. Edgar appears to have hung up before Newman could explain why the sheriff wanted to speak with him.
Despite being due to address the congregation of a local church that evening, Edgar and Burtha quickly vacated the bridal suite. Feeding Burtha a story that played upon her well-merited sense of grievance about the unjust treatment of Native Americans by white society, he settled the bill for his previous room, said they’d be away for a few days, and dragged his wife nine and a half miles north to the small town of Bountiful.
He blamed their hurried departure on a “propaganda campaign” against him, waged by the Salt Lake Tribune. Burtha came to believe this stemmed from a time when her husband had stood on the back of a truck outside the army recruiting office and spoken about the Tribune’s “refusal to aid enlistments.”
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From Bountiful, Edgar phoned Newman later that evening and asked “what all the excitement was about.”
Newman explained that Edgar was suspected of posing as someone he was not. He said Sheriff Corliss had no evidence to corroborate these suspicions.
Edgar insisted that he really was Chief White Elk.
“Then, if there is no fake about it, meet me here and show that you are okay,” Newman replied.
So Edgar promised to meet Newman in his office at noon the following day.
Averse to relinquishing the stardom and luxury he’d acquired, Edgar did something he didn’t often do. He kept his promise. With Burtha in tow, he went back to Salt Lake the next morning.
One glance at the newsstands was enough to tell him that the atmosphere was no longer so favorable. The front page of the Tribune bore the headline CHIEF WHITE ELK VANISHES. SHERIFF SEEKS INTERVIEW. Not the type of coverage Edgar had sought when he’d complained to its editor….But the headline seemed adulatory in comparison to the article paired with it. Drawing upon information from the Laramie and Rock Springs police, the paper stated that the chief was an impostor whose real name was C. W. Ellis. It also revealed that he had, in the past, defrauded people and pretended to be the athlete Tom Longboat. Worse still, it declared that he’d never sailed on the Antilles and that his wartime exploits were fictional. It even went so far as to suggest that Princess Ah-Tra-Ah-Saun was not an Indian, either. Little wonder that so many people in the damp streets that morning were chattering about Edgar and his wife. Simply turning around and taking a train out of town was an enticing prospect for the couple, but they lacked the necessary cash.
True to his word, Edgar went with Burtha to Pantages for his noonday appointment at Newman’s office. When they got there, Edgar mustered the anger he required to play the role of the wronged man endeavoring to clear his name.
He had a brief discussion with Newman, who was plainly fearful about scandal tarnishing his own reputation and damaging his political aspirations. Newman then rang the Deseret Evening News and other Salt Lake papers. Their reporters were invited to his office that afternoon to put questions to Chief White Elk. Probably at the behest of Edgar, who had no cause to feel well-disposed toward the Tribune, its journalists were omitted from the guest list.
If Edgar could muster plausible answers to the press corps’ questions, there was a chance that he might be able to deter them from further probing his activities. That way, he and Burtha would be free to remain in the city and continue their charmed existence.
At the press conference, he faced accusations that he’d fled from the police.
“It’s no real crime, so far as I know, to leave Salt Lake City without notifying the sheriff,” he countered with customary sangfroid. He also clarified why he and his wife had departed with such apparently suspicious haste. Burtha had, he told the reporters, been afflicted by a “sudden illness.” He said he’d taken her to a friend’s house in Bountiful, where she could convalesce.
The Tribune’s story about him was, he blustered, “outrageous and criminal.” He insisted that he was a real Indian chief, that he owed money to nobody. Commenting upon the allegation about him profiting from his Red Cross and recruiting talks, he referred to it as “a deliberate lie” and “a damnable outrage” and said he’d be consulting his attorney. He added, “I have given sixty-two talks in the interest of recruiting and the Red Indians, and have never received a penny.”
In response to the Tribune’s accusation that he’d posed as Tom Longboat, he said that one time someone in the crowd at a Wyoming track meet had remarked to him that he looked very similar to Longboat. Edgar went on to say he’d either replied that he was as good an athlete as Tom Longboat, or else he’d joked that maybe he was Tom Longboat. And that accounted for how some people got the idea about him being the famous runner.
But he still had to contend with questions pertaining to the stories he’d told about making five transatlantic voyages on the Antilles. He answered using a clever ploy, demonstrative of honesty. He conceded that his stories had been “somewhat exaggerated,” in that he’d completed only a single round-trip. All the same, he maintained that he was on board the ship when she sank. Being an Indian, he submitted that the government wouldn’t initially allow him to join the ship’s crew. He said he’d been forced to register under the assumed name of C. W. Ellis, the name quoted in the Tribune. To confirm what he’d just told the reporters, he showed them his amended U.S. Army Transport Service discharge certificate.
Another of the Tribune’s central allegations—that he’d pretended to be a veteran of the Princess Pat Regiment—awaited a response. But once more, Edgar came up with a deft reply, cloaked in the illusion of frankness. He owned up to the reporters that he had given a lecture at a movie theater and that he had spoken about being one of the regiment’s seven survivors. Yet he said he’d only done so at the insistence of the Empress Theater’s manager, who had prevailed upon him to do it “for patriotic effect.”
Even under awkward scrutiny like this, Edgar comported himself with the easygoing courtesy that was taught by the staff at the reformatory where he’d been sent as a fourteen-year-old. “Courtesy is to business and society what oil is to machinery,” they’d asserted. In highlighting the career opportunities available to the courteous, Edgar’s teachers were unlikely to have anticipated his choice of career, which flouted another of their maxims: “Do not try to pass for what you are not.”
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After the press conference, Edgar and Burtha (who retained her belief in her husband’s tall stories) cabbed across town. They were heading for the First Ward Chapel, where an event in their honor was scheduled. En route, they saw lots of people who expressed support by clapping. At the chapel, Edgar and Burtha found a crowd so large that it flowed into the street.
The audience gave Mr. and Mrs. White Elk a rousing reception when they stepped onto the platform. Edgar started by pledging that he’d remain in Salt Lake until the allegations against him had been rebutted. Firecracker applause met the declaration that he’d continue to assist the Red Cross and various branches of government. He followed this with a long, patriotic speech, then played the piano and sang.
Requests to
speak at numerous other local venues came Edgar’s way. If he accepted these and remained in the city, he might be pushing his luck, so he turned them down. But he worried that people might figure he was “afraid to face the music.” To disprove that, he arranged with Frank Newman to return to Pantages and appear with Burtha at that evening’s show, which featured the usual miscellany of vaudeville talent, headlined this time by the jowly, moonfaced comedian and future movie star Harry Langdon.
Newman strode in front of the footlights and vouched for Chief White Elk’s authenticity. Then Edgar and Burtha made their entrance to hooting and frenetic clapping. Edgar assured the audience that he had no intention of running away, even though he’d been maligned and had his feelings hurt. Defending himself against rumors that he was wanted in New York State, he explained he was merely wanted as a witness, and that he’d left the state before he could be apprised of this.
“They were civil actions, such as any man might have, and not in any sense of a criminal nature,” he said. “If a man is wanted as a witness, for instance, that does not make him a criminal. If the New York or any other authorities want me, I am here and will go without the formality of extradition. My record is clear and I am going to stand pat until everything is put right.” And he went on to say how bitterly he resented the Salt Lake Tribune’s inference that his wife was not an Indian.
* * *
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The Tribune remained unceasing in its pursuit of the truth about Edgar. Its headline the next morning read IMPOSTOR HAD MANY ALIASES. Juxtaposed with that was a reproduction of a photo taken when Edgar was posing in Montana as Chief Harry Johnson. Beneath the picture were damning items of evidence against him, gleaned through dogged investigative reporting, which had involved the police departments in Rock Springs, Pueblo, and Laramie.
Since the Tribune had already contacted the police, Edgar must have figured that the paper would soon disinter the incontrovertible and inglorious truth about his time in Uncle Sam’s service. His safest bet appeared to be to come clean about most things and try to buy himself sufficient time to raise the money he and Burtha would need to leave town.
Before paying a visit to the Tribune’s offices, he seems to have confided in Burtha about the lies he’d be acknowledging. He probably justified those lies, however, with more lies, featuring some convoluted story about how he’d have to confess to things that weren’t true. So talented an actor was he that he made even the most far-fetched statements sound irrefutable. And that was without taking into account the otherwise bright and skeptical Burtha’s paradoxically naïve devotion to him.
Whatever he said to her, it worked. In a show of support, she accompanied him to the Tribune that morning.
On arrival, he was asked if he had anything to say for himself.
“Well, what you have printed in the paper is true,” he said as he scooped up a convenient copy. “But I can’t see why it should be printed.” He subsequently admitted that he hadn’t been among the survivors from the Princess Pat Regiment. “I have since learned that not one of those seven survivors is able to move around at all.”
“Were you ever on the battlefront in France?”
“No, I was not. I went across once, but the leave of absence from a boat for a seaman is very short, and I was never on the battlefront or in the trenches.”
“How about your story of the Antilles—that you were thrown from the crow’s nest when she was torpedoed and you lost five ribs?”
“That is a fake,” he replied. “I was not on the Antilles when she was torpedoed. She was sunk in October. I went across on her in August as a common seaman and left her when we got back to this side. The story about being thrown out of the crow’s nest, there’s nothing to it. You know, men who are in the show business exaggerate sometimes….”
His protracted confession even involved him conceding he wasn’t an Indian chief. He pointed out “almost every Indian is called ‘chief.’ ” The title tended to be nothing more than a derogatory nickname applied to most Native American men. “I just appropriated that title,” he explained contritely.
* * *
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In what remained of the morning, Edgar and Burtha went over to the U.S. Army Recruiting Office, where they told the soldiers on duty that they were broke and wanted to quit town. When the couple said they’d like to raise money by selling portrait photos of themselves, one of the soldiers took pity on them. He promptly went out and bought them a five-dollar street vendors’ license.
At midday Edgar and Burtha climbed onto the rear of the army truck parked near the recruiting office. Interest in them remained so feverish that a crowd soon clustered around the truck. After addressing the huge audience outside the capitol just eight days ago, this must have felt like going from Carnegie Hall to the back room of a saloon, yet Edgar still went ahead with his recruiting speech. Once he’d finished, a soldier joined him and Burtha on the rear of the truck, brandishing a sheaf of photos of them in their Native American regalia. The soldier peddled these for twenty-five cents apiece. Clutching similar photos, the remaining soldiers threaded their way through the crowd. They shouted, “Who wants to buy a picture of White Elk and his bride?”
But a reporter from the Tribune cut in and said, “Are those pictures being sold for the personal benefit of the chief?”
“Yes,” answered the nearest of the soldiers. His response did nothing to increase sales of the photos. Soon there were no more customers, leaving Edgar and Burtha to count the paltry takings. The couple now had to rely on the lecture Edgar had lined up that evening to generate the money they needed to escape from Salt Lake.
* * *
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During the hours leading up to the lecture at the Rio Grande Baptist Church, he and Burtha received a summons from Special Agent Bone of the Bureau of Investigation. They had little choice but to report to the U.S. Post Office, a titanic, five-story granite structure glowering through a neoclassical colonnade. The building filled the entire block next to the Newhouse Hotel, where Edgar and Burtha had been fêted by the local bluebloods not so long back. The couple entered via a broad flight of steps leading through massive bronze doors into the cavernous lobby, which sported the kind of marble and tile floors that registered every footstep.
Along with numerous other federal government employees, Bone had an office on the west side. He was a shortsighted forty-three-year-old whose austere taste in office furnishings extended no further than a desk, a typewriter, a rug, and a spittoon.
Uncharacteristically flustered, Edgar told Bone that he was striving to do good work, that he hadn’t violated any law, and that he wasn’t an impostor. In a show of guileful candor, he did, however, admit to having once been arrested in New York for impersonating a government officer. That matter, he added, had since been cleared up and now he was “trying to lead a proper life.”
He and his wife were warned by the agent not to break any laws in pursuit of their patriotic campaigning. So long as they followed that advice, Bone assured them, they would not be troubled.
Though the bureau had no intention of troubling Edgar and Burtha, the same certainly wasn’t true of the local press. Around when the couple emerged from their interview with Bone, a reporter working for Salt Lake’s Deseret Evening News asked Edgar about the time he’d been detained in Wyoming.
“Little misfortunes like that occur to nearly every man,” Edgar replied coolly. “And, in view of the work done in this city in the interest of recruiting and of the Red Cross, by myself and my wife, we think it unfair that they should be brought to the attention of the public, especially in so one-sided a manner.”
* * *
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His encounter with the reporter served to remind Edgar of why he and Burtha were so keen to get out of Salt Lake. Bankrolled, it appears, by his performance at the Rio Grande Baptist Church, Edgar and Burtha took the late
-night train to San Francisco, their hasty and well-timed departure coinciding with a fresh wave of gleefully unflattering newspaper stories about them. Now derisive rather than investigative, these were epitomized by an item posing the question, “Is Chief White an elk, or is Chief Elk a white?” But the localized nature of newspapers in those days ensured that Edgar could leave behind his problems with the Salt Lake press as easily as he’d left behind that suitcase at the Hotel St. James.
San Francisco, where Burtha had begun her nursing career and where she appears to have still had contacts, was nineteen and three-quarter hours and almost a thousand miles away by railroad. Each westbound mile through pasture, mountains, tunnels, deserts, and small towns hastened both the arrival of spring and the moment when they escaped from Prohibition and entered Nevada. Only now could drinks flow freely aboard the train.
Countless invigoratingly different sights and sounds awaited Edgar and Burtha in San Francisco. Lining its steep streets were rows of foreign stores and restaurants. Into the gaps between those buildings flooded views of faraway ocean liners and tall-masted schooners sliding under the Golden Gate Bridge. Flashing electric advertising signs loomed over sidewalks crowded with the city’s varied population, from turbaned Sikhs to Chinese waiters carrying trays on their heads. Nocturnal mists gave the place an eerie intimacy, the mournful sound of foghorns providing a requiem for the luxury and acclaim that Edgar and Burtha had surrendered when they’d fled Salt Lake.
Burtha’s past as a trainee nurse at the City and County Hospital probably gave her husband his next opening. Edgar landed an expenses-only fundraising job with the San Francisco County Nurses’ Association, which was attempting to purchase an apartment where nurses could recover from the traumatic experience of tending wounded soldiers in Europe.