King Con Page 33

  If he wanted to pursue a law-abiding career, though, Edgar would have faced other obstacles that had sprung up while he was away. Performing in chautauqua might have tempted him, but such a choice was unrealistic because these tours had gone into steep and terminal decline. Vaudeville was in trouble, too. And the arrival of talking pictures had sounded the death knell for combined theater and movie shows. Further decreasing Edgar’s chances of resuscitating his stage career was the toll that years of drinking, drug taking, and hard living had taken on his appearance, now gaunt, gap-toothed, and less than alluring. He also found himself hamstrung by changes in musical fashion, the availability of sensitive electronic microphones facilitating the emergence of a hushed and intimate style of singing that left baritones like him sounding risibly passé.

  Where he went and what he did in the months subsequent to his return from Europe remain mysterious. But his archival trail reappears in March 1930 when he was living at a hotel in Boston. Counter to what he’d told the reporters who had greeted him when he returned to America, he hadn’t mended his ways, embarked upon a conventional life, or engineered a reunion with Ethel and Leslie. He had, instead, surrendered to compulsion by donning the familiar identity of Chief White Elk. Under that name, he advertised for performers to accompany him on a touring radio show. HELP WANTED, the ad stated. TWO GIRLS, PROFESSIONAL DANCERS AND SINGERS, AND ONE MUST KNOW HOW TO PLAY THE PIANO.

  By the onset of summer, his tour—if it ever happened—was over. He then went back to Rhode Island, which he’d left more than a decade previously. His reappearance there courted the anger of his Pawtucket-based father, who had lately told a reporter, “If Edgar knows what is good for him, he will steer clear of Pawtucket.”

  Disregarding his father’s warning, Edgar headed for that city, and moved in with his widowed forty-seven-year-old French-Canadian cousin and her five children. One of them worked as a theatrical agent, possibly helping Edgar obtain salaried employment selling perfume at a vaudeville venue. Yet he or whoever filled out that year’s U.S. Census still provided the defiant reply “theatrical performer” in the section about his profession.

  Itinerant by nature, he was back on the road and in the guise of Chief White Elk just a few months later. Passing through New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York City, he spoke at a Kiwanis Club lunch, sang at a movie theater, and gave a couple of newspaper interviews about his experiences in Europe. “For a year and a half I was a prince and lived like one,” he told a reporter from the popular New York World. “Twenty-two servants, I had. A general for my secretary, perfumed baths, a maid to scrub my back. Well…now I haven’t had anything to eat for three days. I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight. I can’t get a job. All that trouble in Europe has ruined my prospects.”

  With mingled pride and regret (pride quickly gaining ascendancy), he reminisced about his time in Europe, about “the magnificent ball” he’d hosted, about “the splendid gifts” he’d presented, about what he’d said to Mussolini and what Mussolini had said to him. At one point Edgar gave a grand, sweeping gesture. When he caught sight of his rough, dirty skin, arthritic fingers, and broken nails, he sighed disbelievingly and said, “Ah, the women who have kissed that hand.” He went on to feed the reporter the biggest of all his self-serving lies about his royal tour of Italy. “I really began to feel it was true. I actually came to think I was a prince.”

  * * *

  —

  White America’s abiding fascination with the Wild West, sustained both by Hollywood and by the enormous popularity of Western Story and other such magazines, worked in Edgar’s favor. Cashing in on this pervasive interest, he returned to his well-tested trick of lecturing on Native American culture. His lectures were juxtaposed by demonstrations of traditional dances and chants, together with his song repertoire, which—somewhat incongruously—expanded to include “Ol’ Man River,” the show tune synonymous with the African American singer Paul Robeson.

  Edgar also campaigned to improve the conditions and legal rights of what passed for his brethren. Despite citizenship being granted to all U.S.-born Native Americans while he was in Europe, voting rights were still being withheld in certain localities, where state law took precedence.

  Calling himself Chief Louie Tewanna, his tribal affiliation fluctuating between the Choctaw, Tuscarora, and Sioux, he once again characterized himself as a figure worthy of veneration—a war hero, football star, surgeon, linguist, and Olympic athlete. He even juiced up his already overstuffed résumé by claiming to be the brother of the Hollywood actress Laura La Plant. Not content with all that, he awarded himself a PhD from Cornell University, a senior position within the American Indian Association, plus a list of acting credits in prominent movies starring the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and the young John Wayne.

  Between the closing months of 1930 and the summer of 1932, a grim period of widespread homelessness and poverty, Edgar swung through the Deep South on a coast-to-coast tour. He performed at screenings of Westerns. He addressed civic clubs, school classes, college students, and Boy Scout troops. He gave lessons in beadwork and other traditional Native American crafts, among them basket weaving, which Burtha must have taught him. He yarned about traveling through Europe and meeting King George V and the pope, as well as spending time with Valentino. All of this garnered him a modest level of hospitality and acclaim.

  Temporarily reverting to his Chief White Elk persona, he broadcast from a Kansas City radio station and sang the “Tantum Ergo”—a medieval Latin hymn—during mass at a Catholic church in Sedalia, Missouri. He also suckered a newspaperman into believing he planned to return there with his symphony orchestra as part of its world tour. The same journalist even fell for Edgar’s story of how he’d played football for Carlisle under a different name—Man Afraid (the name of a genuine Native American footballer, mentioned in the serialized reminiscences of the team’s coach).

  By July 1932 Edgar had pitched up in Oregon, where he began pulling a fresh con. He was now a sixty-year-old Native American and former Olympic star, who had run out of money en route to Los Angeles to attend the latest installment of the Olympics. His plight spurred residents to set up a fundraising campaign to help him get there.

  In a strange footnote to an already strange life, another grifter was meanwhile touring the country, posing as Chief White Elk’s younger brother. Edgar’s bogus sibling, who went by the name of Chief Eagle Feather, billed himself as the “world’s greatest American Indian tap dancer” and pretended to have played a starring role in The Covered Wagon. Stranger still, these two impostors wound up working together in Canada through the winter of 1932–33. They were part of an ostensibly all–Native American road show, featuring an amplified band and a troupe of salesmen, each pitching a specific product—soap, in Edgar’s case. And not just soft soap.

  From this period onward, the hitherto abundant documentation about Edgar grows scarce. The next recorded reference to him doesn’t appear until May 1934 when he cheated a family in Hopewell, Maryland. In exchange for a loan that enabled him to catch the bus out of town, he promised to arrange for some Native American friends to visit the family and drop off “two fine riding ponies.”

  As he faded from the public record, another impostor calling himself Chief White Elk came to national prominence. Likely galvanized by Edgar, Herbert R. Davis—a resident of Wilmington, Delaware—started dressing in Native American garb and masquerading variously as a member of the Sioux, Nanticoke, and Chinook peoples. Davis used this new identity to promote everything from a toy shop to a boat show. He even made a brief foray into the big leagues, formerly the province of Edgar.

  During the summer of 1936, by which time the ravages of the Depression had been alleviated by the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s economic rescue program, Davis was in the front row of the 100,000-strong crowd attending a rally in Philadelphia. The rally marked the pres
ident’s acceptance of the Democratic Party’s nomination for a second term. Before the speeches began, Davis stepped onto the platform and spoke to Roosevelt’s mother. His remark, supposedly made on behalf of the North Dakota Sioux, would attract substantial press coverage. “Your son has given our people a New Deal,” he assured her. And when the president later commenced the speech that declared “This generation has a rendezvous with destiny,” Davis removed his feathered headdress and waved it supportively in the air.

  * * *

  —

  Through the publication in 1935 of Getting Rich Quick, which anthologized history’s greatest con tricks, a modest number of readers were introduced to the story of Edgar’s Italian rendezvous with destiny. His health deteriorating, he was by then back in Pawtucket, where he eked out a living as—of all things—a church organist.

  He then surfaced in Montana in December 1937. Presenting himself as Dr. Dillon White Elk, a part–Native American, part-Inuit member of an Alaskan delegation traveling to Washington, DC, to protest illegal Japanese fishing in American territorial waters, this former embodiment of Roaring Twenties excess hustled several individuals, extracted money from a charity, and left behind an unpaid hotel bill.

  Perhaps as a legacy of long-term cocaine use, which damages the heart and cardiovascular system, he suffered a heart attack while passing through Flint, Michigan, just short of a year later. He was hospitalized in a ward for people without means to pay for their own treatment. Illness left his once-athletic frame so wizened that he was described as a “little Indian.” His cadaverous features topped by an enduringly dark shock of hair, which lent him the appearance of a sinister manservant in a horror movie, he moved on to Detroit. There, he was hospitalized again.

  Another heart attack struck him as he journeyed through Northern California in August 1939. He was found sprawled beside the Sacramento-to-Vallejo highway. The motorist who came to his rescue took him to Sacramento County Hospital, where he was admitted to the paupers’ ward. Incorrigible even under these circumstances, this pauper who had once lived like a prince entranced people with the story of how four years previously he’d led a team of nine dogsleds through the Alaskan wilderness. He said his objective had been to reach the crashed airplane in which the columnist, broadcaster, and Hollywood star Will Rogers had been flying. The Associated Press wire service picked up Edgar’s story, providing a conduit into newspapers up and down the West Coast.

  On being discharged from the hospital, there were reports of Edgar visiting Oregon, where he morphed into Dr. E. Warren La Plante, Chief White Elk, an inhabitant of Prince Patrick Island in the Canadian Arctic. His latest variation on his tried-and-untrustworthy persona involved him claiming to be a representative of “the Sons of the Land of the Midnight Sun,” a genuine organization open to the descendants of Norwegian settlers, its exotic-sounding name presumably taking his fancy.

  When he headed south into California, there’s a possibility that he achieved reconciliation with his twenty-two-year-old adopted Native American daughter, whom he had abandoned early in her childhood. After Burtha’s premature death, she’d been adopted yet again, this time by Edgar’s in-laws. They, too, had since passed away. Now she was living in the large Native American community within the Hoopa Valley, not far from Sacramento.

  Riding a bus through New Orleans in the summer of 1942, Edgar’s cardiac problems brought on what appears to have been his third heart attack. It was followed by a brief period of recuperation in the city’s Charity Hospital. Afterward he gave a long interview to the Times-Picayune, in which he reflected upon the vast amount of cash he’d given away during his Italian tour. But he didn’t even mention the cash he’d blown while he was in Belgium that year. The combined total, which had disappeared from his leaky pockets in the course of only twelve months, was as much as $58.9 million in 2018 terms. “I could use some of it now,” lamented Edgar, whose unbridled extravagance and audacious self-reinvention carry echoes of Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous character.

  To thicken his empty billfold, Edgar conceived a scam that entailed selling shares in new and nonexistent oil companies. Whatever money he pocketed from this had been frittered away by December 1943 when he found himself in the desert city of Phoenix, Arizona, where he passed himself off as Dr. White Eagle, native of the nearby town of Gila Bend and by implication a member of the Papago tribe, many of whom lived on the Gila River Indian Reservation. He’d probably gone to Phoenix with the intention of conning some of the thousands of tourists flocking there over the winter, during which the downtown streets acquired a cohesive flavor. While the storefronts displayed Native American blankets, silver, and turquoise jewelry, the busiest sidewalks served as market stalls for Native American women selling handmade pottery.

  Yet Edgar’s glory days as a grifter were far behind him despite him being just fifty-five years old. Flat broke and deprived of the attention and acclaim that had propelled him through life, the dual onslaught of pneumonia and bronchitis landed him in the Schmidt Haven of Rest, a south-side hospital catering not just to the impoverished elderly but also to the demented, their presence rendering questionable its credentials as a haven of rest. As he lay there over Christmas, memories of his glorious past offering some measure of insulation against his inglorious present, he may have realized that he wouldn’t be able to escape from the hospital as easily as he’d escaped from so many hotels. The unavoidable truth was, he had less than a month to live. If he’d been able to see into the future, though, he would surely have found solace in the knowledge that he hadn’t—contrary to present indications—been forgotten, and that his Italian adventures would decades later be commemorated in a collection of poetry, three novels, and a Swiss television drama.

  Weakened by illness, he succumbed to a fatal heart attack on Sunday, January 23, 1944. His demise went unreported by the press that had once upon a time contributed to his worldwide celebrity. Death ratifying the doctorate and Native American identity he’d long coveted, the Arizona bureaucracy registered him as “White Eagle, Dr., Indian male.” A subsequent inspection of his personal effects, which must have included some form of false ID, gave the authorities the impression that he was also known as Edward La Plante.

  For someone determined to live at other people’s expense, it was apt that the self-styled Dr. White Eagle should be buried on the Phoenix taxpayers’ dime. After nearly thirty-four rootless years, his wanderings carrying him from blue-collar Central Falls to the sumptuous hotels of Venice and Florence, the charismatic Edgar Laplante finally found a permanent home in the desiccated bleakness of the paupers’ burial ground at Maricopa County Cemetery.

  NOTES

  Abbreviations: NAL (National Archives, London); WSU (Washington State University).

  EPIGRAPH

  “Through others we”: L. S. Vygotsky, The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky: Child Psychology, Volume 5, p. 170.

  CHAPTER 1

  had a reputation: San José Mercury News, January 16, 1916, p. 4.

  “I’m sorry”: San José Mercury News, March 5, 1917, p. 6.

  “the big Indian”: Ibid., p. 2.

  he liked to: San José Mercury News, March 4, 1917, p. 20.

  “This is the”: San José Mercury News, March 5, 1917, p. 2.

  “I never heard”: San José Mercury News, March 4, 1917, p. 8.

  Tom said he’d: San José Mercury News, March 5, 1917, p. 2.

  For him, the: San José Mercury News, March 6, 1917, p. 3.

  “The thing to do”: San José Mercury News, March 5, 1917, p. 2.

  Tom suspected: San José Evening News, March 6, 1917, p. 3.

  he’d been drawn: San José Evening News, March 16, 1917, p. 2.

  smoking cigarettes: San José Mercury News, March 5, 1917, p. 2.

  seducing young women: San José Mercury News, April 27, 1917, p. 12.


  seducing young men: Spokane Press, November 27, 1909, p. 4.

  He would have been horrified: San José Evening News, November 3, 1917, p. 1.

  sure to be withdrawn: San José Mercury News, April 27, 1917, p. 12.

  To publicize his show: San José Evening News, March 5, 1917, p. 7.

  which led one: San José Mercury News, March 6, 1917, p. 3.

  he was happy: Ibid.

  Now he started: San José Evening News, March 6, 1917, p. 3.

  CHAPTER 2

  Snazzy hotels: Maurer, Big Con, p. 166.

  he gave his new: San Diego Evening Tribune, March 17, 1917, p. 1.

  Risk and reward: His well-documented behavior demonstrates his addiction to risk-taking, which is, to a lesser extent, prevalent among con men. See Maurer, Big Con, pp. 131–32.

  He told the journalist: San Diego Union, March 9, 1917, p. 8.

  For all his storytelling: L’Ouest-Éclair (Rennes, France), October 12, 1923, p. 2.

  where his debonair: San Diego Union, March 17, 1917, p. 2.

  “temporarily embarrassed”: Ibid.

  Flimflam merchants: Maurer, Big Con, p. 1.

  he began saying: Washington (DC) Times, March 12, 1917, p. 10.

  he pledged to: San Diego Union, March 19, 1917, p. 4.

  “Hopscotching”: Maurer, Big Con, p. 263.

  Edgar was asked to: San Diego Union, March 17, 1917, p. 2.

  “souvenir fiend”: Bisbee (AZ) Daily Review, January 17, 1917, p. 2.