King Con Page 3
From the pavilion, Edgar provided vocal interludes to an hour-long selection of opera and classical music played by a middle-aged English organist. In addition to singing the saccharine Victorian hit “Goodbye,” Edgar performed “Mother Machree,” his soundalike Chauncey Olcott faux-Irish number.
After the concert, Edgar was buttonholed by the owner of one of San Diego’s downtown stores. In recent days the two men had grown friendly. The store owner was due to buy Edgar dinner at a fancy hotel that evening, but their arrangement wasn’t what Edgar’s friend wanted to discuss. Instead, his friend mentioned the story on the front page of that day’s San José Evening News. It began, “The man who early this month attracted much attention in this city, explaining that he was Tom Longboat, the famous Indian runner, and that he had just returned from service with the Red Cross Corps in France, is a faker.”
Edgar’s friend asked whether there was any truth in the accusation. The phrasing of the question left no scope for evasion.
Poise, mental agility, and a poker face were Edgar’s key assets in situations like this. Sure enough, he achieved the seemingly impossible by ad-libbing a swift response that dodged his friend’s question. When they parted, the other man remained under the impression they’d still be dining together later on.
Around 5 p.m. Edgar phoned the Hotel St. James. Ostensibly leaving a helpful message for anyone who wished to speak with him, Edgar told the manager he wouldn’t be back until ten o’clock that night. If the police or the press came hunting for him at his hotel, this would buy him additional time. He also appears to have fed people a line about being on his way to Tijuana.
Even though he still had some clothes and a suitcase of possessions at the St. James, he didn’t risk attempting to collect them. Without settling the hefty bill that the hotel’s manager had permitted him to run up, he made his exit from San Diego. He had just enough time to get over to the Santa Fe Railway’s station and catch the 6:10 p.m. train, not south to Tijuana but north to Los Angeles, which was a little under four hours away, much of that spent tracing the shoreline, its passage marked by seaside towns, beaches, a concrete pier, and a rocky promontory. Seeing America spooling past like this was just a normal part of Edgar’s far-from-normal life. Over the past ten weeks alone, he’d ricocheted around Arkansas, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California.
His nomadic existence had started not long after his widowed father had remarried and transplanted their family from Rhode Island to the leafy boomtown of Springfield, Massachusetts, where his father had secured a job at the Highland Brewery. Quickly tiring of life as a day laborer in Springfield, Edgar cut loose from his family, then drifted to Coney Island via New York City.
And now he was in fast-expanding Los Angeles, where the broad downtown roads were made hazardous by so-called motormaniacs. Flanking many of those thoroughfares were continuous lines of billboards, large enough to hide all but the crowns of the palm trees beyond. The billboards—a relatively new phenomenon, symptomatic of the rapid growth in people’s spending power and the attendant emergence of mass-market consumerism—emphasized the surfeit of choice open to Edgar. Different products. Different forms of entertainment. Different lives. Of course Edgar had already succumbed to a number of the advertised temptations, among them cigarettes, available in upward of eight brands, ranging from Chesterfields to Egyptian Deities (“The Utmost in Cigarettes”).
Logic overridden by his compulsive flirtation with trouble, Edgar kept up his Tom Longboat scam. He’d netted a gig as the celebrity speaker at a Red Cross fundraiser. Slated for the Wednesday after his departure from San Diego, his role in the event was already advertised. It must’ve set people talking, because the Red Cross soon discovered that the real Tom Longboat was in Europe. So they contacted the downtown address Edgar had provided. Maybe because he’d been spooked by his close shave in San Diego, he’d taken the precaution of giving them a phony address.
If Edgar had any illusions about prospering in L.A., these would have been banished by the sight of a piece in that Friday’s Los Angeles Herald. It covered his dealings with the Red Cross and alerted people to the arrival in town of the “bogus Tom Longboat,” currently generating more column inches than the famous athlete whose identity he’d stolen. His prospects took another turn for the worse when the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times disclosed that the Bureau of Investigation had launched a hunt for the man pretending to be Tom Longboat.
The bureau, which represented America’s sole form of nationwide law enforcement, was an understaffed, nine-year-old precursor of the FBI, operating under the control of the Department of Justice. Edgar’s choice of crime placed him within the scope of the bureau’s severely restricted investigative boundaries. Amid escalating tensions with Germany, these had widened to include aspects of national security. The suspicion that the fake Tom Longboat’s involvement with both the Twenty-First Infantry Regiment and the U.S. Navy Reserve might be linked to espionage lent added impetus to the bureau’s hunt for him.
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Edgar promptly put hundreds of miles between himself and the City of Angels. His less-than-angelic instincts guided him east through Montana, where snowy mountains presided over livestock-sprinkled pastures and lonesome huddles of frame houses, lit by candles or kerosene. These vast open spaces offered a reminder of just how easily he could evade the short arm of the law.
As an extra precaution, Edgar began calling himself Chief Harry Johnson, a stage name he’d adopted the previous year when he was doing vaudeville down in Key West. To go with his new persona, Edgar—who understood the value of appearance in projecting an identity—disguised himself in a long black wig, a pale headband, moccasins, and buckskin pants decorated with beads. Around his shoulders he wore a dark, striped Native American blanket.
Dressing in a similar hodgepodge of Native American attire was nothing unusual for him in particular or white Americans in general. He’d first done it at least six years earlier, and white Americans had been doing it since at least the eighteenth century, latterly at the annual parades of quasi-Masonic societies, for which it was used as a token of patriotic pride. Due to the expansion of one such society, calling itself the Improved Order of Red Men, the practice of white people wearing what purported to be Native American costume had grown more extensive in recent years. By the time Edgar left L.A. and recast himself as Chief Harry Johnson, whites-only chapters of the Red Men and its women’s auxiliary, the Daughters of Pocahontas, were active in most states. Among the organization’s half million or so members was former president Theodore Roosevelt.
In Central Falls, where Edgar was raised, the Red Men had a strong presence. He’d likely been part of the crowds that cheered and lit red flares during the group’s parades past his family home. Those parades featured marching bands and floats depicting white America’s interpretation of Native American life. As many as one thousand members of the local chapter and its affiliates joined in, their faces daubed with war paint, heads adorned with feathered bonnets and long black wigs of the type Edgar had on now.
He seems to have first worn that style of getup during the summer he worked on Coney Island, where his employer kitted him out in a costume that followed the tradition of exotically accoutered white ballyhoo men. Talent-spotted that summer, Edgar had soon landed another job requiring him to impersonate a Native American. It was with Dr. W. H. Long’s Big Indian and Medicine Concert Company, which belonged to the flourishing breed of itinerant medicine shows. These sold quack remedies to customers lured by the prospect of as much as two hours of free—or at least very cheap—entertainment. A self-titled “Great Disease Detective,” the eponymous Dr. Long—who had died just before Edgar joined his outfit—claimed to be able to diagnose every disease just by gazing into someone’s eyes. Dr. Long’s Philadelphia-based troupe, which toured the eastern states, exploited the vogue for Native American–themed medicine s
hows, tapping into white Americans’ widespread belief that Native Americans enjoyed superior health.
Roughly two-thirds of such shows were given over to vaudeville—anything from eight to ten routines, from banjo solos to conjuring acts, from ventriloquism to quickfire exchanges of jokes between a blackface comedian and a straight man. Supplementing these were contributions by what were billed as “genuine Indians,” often pale-skinned African Americans. Two or three times a night, Edgar’s boss had him reprise his moccasined and feathered Coney Island role. He was, of course, well-equipped to take part in the vaudeville show. Between its constituent routines, the pretend Native Americans danced, chanted, drummed, and gabbled nonsense that the audience was meant to mistake for an authentic language. The resulting hubbub underscored a couple of lectures by a flamboyant “doctor,” whose bellowing, whooping monologues interspersed sales of soap and candy as well as patent medicines that promised to vanquish any disease. Appropriately for someone who was the personification of a misleadingly labeled product, Edgar helped pitch supposedly traditional concoctions like “The Great Indian Hair Grower”—concoctions no more Native American than him. Though he’d been hustling people since he was at least fourteen, his time with the medicine show appears to have provided his formal apprenticeship in the techniques of the professional con man.
“Ladies and gentlemen, some good folks devote their lives to saving souls, others to accumulating wealth,” ran the sales pitch for this sort of cure-all. “I am here this evening not only to entertain you but to relieve suffering humanity of its aches and pains. I call your attention to this bottle I hold in my hand, containing one of the greatest gifts to man. This famous Indian herb medicine is made from a formula handed down from generation to generation by my forefathers, who were chiefs of the Osage Indians. Did you ever hear of an Osage Indian having rheumatism? No, ladies and gentlemen, a thousand times no! It is written in the white man’s bible that three score and ten is a long life, but it is a common occurrence for an Osage Indian to live to be a hundred years old and never suffer a pain or an ache. How does he accomplish this wonderful feat? He does it with the aid of this wonderful medicine I now hold before me.”
Salesmen clutching only a couple of bottles of the stuff would then offer it to people in the crowd. “All sold out, doctor!” they’d chorus as soon as they needed to replenish their inadequate supply, thus conveying an impression that the medicines were even more popular than they were.
The specialty of Edgar’s show was a patent tapeworm killer. Hunger, insomnia, fatigue, and other ordinary complaints were presented as signs that someone harbored a giant tapeworm. The standard sales ploy involved a member of the troupe gesturing toward a long jar containing an enormous pickled tapeworm, purchased from a slaughterhouse but portrayed as living inside him until he’d taken Dr. Long’s patent worm killer. Available in the form of large pills, the cure was sold at the show or from an improvised surgery. Each pill contained a fake tapeworm or sometimes just a length of string that could be mistaken for a tapeworm, which would pass through the customer’s digestive tract, offering spurious proof of the pill’s effectiveness.
Medicine show doctors tended to promote that sort of product by recounting how its secret formula had come into their possession. The doctor would tell melodramatic stories in which he was, for instance, saved from certain death by a Native American who found him in the wilderness and took him back to a village where the tribal medicine man cured him with a homemade remedy. By smuggling some of this mysterious substance back to a chemist and having it analyzed, the doctor claimed to have created the miraculous patent medicine now on sale. Yarns like that probably taught Edgar just how far he could in the future push tales he told. He wouldn’t have to content himself with pretending to be a Native American. He could be a war hero and a famous athlete, too.
After leaving Dr. Long’s show, Edgar set up as a vendor of patent medicines, which he’d either have bought wholesale or mixed in hotel bathtubs. Still sporting a feathered headdress and tasseled buckskins, he pitched his merchandise everywhere from Boston to St. Louis. Unlicensed pitchmen like him, who learned to show their heels whenever a beat cop appeared, were nicknamed “T. and K. men” because they peddled their wares out of a “tripes and keister”—a tripod with a suitcase mounted on it. For them, no distinction existed between pitching and grifting, their sales patter enabling them to capitalize upon people’s simplicity and ignorance.
Along with patent medicines, Edgar sold what masqueraded as snake oil, later to become a synonym for fraudulence. The traditional Chinese version of snake oil, obtained from Oriental water snakes, had first reached America during the nineteenth century. Edgar said his oil—which he marketed as a form of sun cream—was made from snakes he’d caught himself, yet the bottles contained nothing but olive oil.
His career as a pitchman took him to Woonsocket, just eighteen miles to the northwest of his hometown, yet he didn’t bother getting in touch with his father, who had moved back to Rhode Island. A friend of Edgar’s had by then shown his father a photo of him in Native American costume—a photo that, his father said, “almost left me speechless.” Hearing that Edgar was performing a publicity stunt in the window of a drugstore, his father hurried over to Woonsocket, only to discover that Edgar had already moved on. And he’d kept moving ever since.
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Under the regulations recently enacted after the United States had declared war on Germany and her allies, Edgar—whose days as a patent medicine salesman were far behind him—should have been registering for military service on the evening of Tuesday, June 5, 1917. But instead he was riding a train through the rural Midwest.
Soon he’d be arriving in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he had speaking engagements. He was due to meet Thomas Goodale there. Formerly a big-name reporter on the Detroit Times, Goodale had become Edgar’s publicist. Borrowing from vaudeville, whose performers often hired their own press agents, Edgar had employed Goodale to represent his current alter ego: not Chief Harry Johnson but Chief Tewanna, who hailed from the Oklahoma branch of the Cherokee, his surname carrying more than a faint echo of the surname of the Carlisle-educated Olympic athlete and gridiron star Louis Tewanima.
Goodale had publicized Chief Tewanna’s arrival by circulating posters and placing an article in that morning’s Eau Claire Leader. The chief would, according to the article, be spending a few days in Eau Claire as part of a tour of the northern and eastern states, campaigning for “the right of the Indian to vote as well as fight for this country.” Edgar used the article to highlight other ways in which Native Americans suffered discrimination. And he claimed to be the designated spokesman for the Oklahoma Cherokee and Osage, supposedly on his way to Washington, DC, where he was due to meet President Woodrow Wilson, “the great white chief.” Relinquishing his previous pose as a peace campaigner, he now proclaimed that his mission was to volunteer the military services of an additional thirty thousand Cherokee and Osage who wanted “to show their white brothers that the red men are as loyal as any man or group of men.” All rather ironic in view of Edgar’s status as a draft dodger.
When Edgar rolled up in Eau Claire at 9 p.m., the city’s military registration office had—conveniently for him—just closed. Everyone at the railroad depot ogled him as he stepped off the train, wearing a feathered headdress over his braided wig. The headdress elicited numerous admiring remarks. Always cognizant of the way detail lent verisimilitude to fiction, he said it had been given to him by President Wilson. He made out that the gift was a token of the president’s appreciation of “his service in bettering the condition of the Indian.”
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Edgar’s latest persona positioned him to exploit white America’s long-standing fascination with Native Americans and the Wild West. This was, of course, a relationship freighted with tragic irony, given that it coexisted with systematic d
iscrimination against Native Americans, whose culture the government sought to eliminate through a policy of assimilation.
Nourishment for white America’s interest in Native Americans came not just from medicine shows but also from a broad span of mass-market entertainment. Much of it cast them as villainous adversaries to cowboys and white settlers, an approach epitomized by short, pocket-sized paperback “dime novels,” so named because they’d cost ten cents when they first appeared nearly sixty years earlier.
Yet a significant branch of popular entertainment provided seductive portrayals of Native Americans. Most famous of these was the by-then-defunct Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show, which depicted Native Americans as heroic representatives of a vanishing culture. Other alluring depictions of them featured in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Helen Hunt Jackson, and some of their contemporaries. There were even movies—typified by D. W. Griffith’s Ramona—that also portrayed them as heroes, as idealized embodiments of the natural world, set against the urban sleaziness of their white adversaries.
Some of that stereotypical nobility was annexed by Edgar, who had an appointment at Eau Claire High School the morning after his arrival. There, he gave a stirring address to the student body, arguing for Indians to be granted the vote. His mixture of oratorical flair and heartfelt passion earned an enthusiastic response (though his apparent sincerity was just another theatrical prop).
As he may have pointed out, denial of voting rights and full citizenship for Native Americans had its roots in the formation of the United States. Despite being the country’s original inhabitants, Native Americans were treated like members of foreign nations. Not until 1887 were they offered so much as limited citizenship—and even that was granted only on the condition they accepted ownership of just a portion of their land, renounced tribal allegiances, and took up what was presented as “civilized life.”