RUNNING THE REDWOOD EMPIRE: INDIGENEITY, MODERNITY, AND A 480-MILE FOOTRACE by TARA AINE KEEGAN A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of History and the Division of Graduate Studies of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2021 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Tara Aine Keegan Title: Running the Redwood Empire: Indigeneity, Modernity, and a 480-Mile Footrace This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the History Department by: Jeffrey Ostler Chairperson/Advisor Brett Rushforth Core Member Steven Beda Core Member Madonna Moss Institutional Representative and Andrew Karduna Interim Vice Provost for Graduate Studies Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Division of Graduate Studies. Degree awarded September 2021 ii © 2021 Tara Aine Keegan This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (United States) License. iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Tara Aine Keegan Doctor of Philosophy Department of History September 2021 Title: Running the Redwood Empire: Indigeneity, Modernity, and a 480-Mile Footrace Scholars have reexamined U.S. Indian policy in order to detail American genocidal efforts in the lands that became the United States. Others have studied the lives and influences of Tribes and Indigenous individuals who survived genocide and contributed their labor and creativity to modern enterprises. Rarely, however, are the two approaches combined in a single work that traces the mechanisms for survival in the face of nineteenth-century genocide and the survivors’ enduring legacies in a modern age of industry, technology, and reinvented popular culture. This dissertation utilizes archival sources and oral histories to study the intersection of traditional Indigenous and mainstream American cultures and reconstruct a timeline of genocide, survival, adaptation, and influence in Northern California from the Gold Rush to the growth of regional identities and economies in the late 1920s. Native people went from being the targets of genocide to key celebrities that projected Native modernity in the face of white supremacist backlash and “Vanishing Race” ideology that anticipated Native extinction. The central case study is the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon of 1927 and 1928—the first official “ultramarathon” in U.S. history. The story of this event provides the narrative arc and interpretive fulcrum of the dissertation. The marathon extended the iv 480-miles of the Redwood Highway, which also served as the racetrack. Boosters designed the event to showcase the highway and invited only Native men to participate, plus employed a Native woman as the event—and highway—mascot. These were the sites of intervention I discuss. The central case study is the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon of 1927 and 1928—the first official “ultramarathon” in U.S. history. The marathon extended the 480- miles of the Redwood Highway, which also served as the racetrack. Boosters designed the event to showcase the highway and invited only Native men to participate, plus employed a Native woman as the event—and highway—mascot. These were the sites of intervention. This project furthers studies of the Indigenous American experience and its intersection with mainstream American culture, colonialism, and evolving racism from the age of genocide through the turbulent 1920s. It documents a century-old revision of racial stereotypes and invites another today. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Tara Aine Keegan GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, University of Oregon Master of Arts, History, 2016, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, History and English, 2013, Muhlenberg College AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: United States History Sports History Native History Gender History PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Employee, UO Department of History, 2014-2021 Tutor, UO Services for Student Athletes, 2018-2019 Graduate Intern, Fembot Collective, 2015-2016 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Oregon Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship, University of Oregon, 2021 Beekman Endowment Scholarship, University of Oregon, 2020 Peggy Pascoe Graduate Dissertation Fellowship, University of Oregon, 2018 Friends of the Bancroft Library Study Award, University of California, Berkeley, 2018 vi PUBLICATIONS: Keegan, Tara and Jennifer Guiliano. “Sport, Indigeneity, and Native Identities,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society, edited by L. A. Wenner. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Keegan, Tara. “Tom Longboat” in The Encyclopedia of Canadian Sport, edited by MacIntosh Ross, 2020. https://encyclopediaofcanadiansport.org/tomlongboat/. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS An exhaustive list of all of the people who deserve my sincerest thanks for their help on this dissertation would run the length of the text itself, so I’ll paint here with broad strokes and reserve most of my commentary for personal correspondence. Several organizations believed in my project and funded my research. I am indebted to the Department of History at the University of Oregon, the Oregon Humanities Center, the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the American Historical Association, and the Beekman, Richard M. Brown, and Catherine Cornwall Funds. Thank you to the people at the many research facilities I utilized, including Karen at the Mendocino County Museum, Pearl at Save the Redwoods, the staff at the National Archives and Records Administration in San Bruno, California and Washington, D.C., and all the people who maintain the California Digital Newspaper Collection at the University of California, Riverside. I also received helpful clippings and articles from archivists at the Siskiyou County Historical Society, the Josephine County Historical Society, the Humboldt County Historical Society, and the Sonoma County Historical Society. I was delighted to be able to include images from collections at the University of Oregon, the University of Washington, Whitman College, the Wyoming State Archives, the New York Public Library, and the personal collections of Wayne Morrow and Dusty Whitney. I also benefitted greatly from conversations with the two aforementioned men, who really know their history and keep it well. My friends in my graduate program got me through the most demanding moments: John Bedan, Hayley Brazier, Emily Cole, Nichelle Frank, Lacey Guest, viii Rebecca Hastings, Steve Leone, Nicole Marsaglia, Christopher Smith, Kenneth Surles, Miles Wilkinson, and Olivia Wing. My friends outside of the program did just as much. The most special thanks go to Stephanie Harvey for giving me great hope during the pandemic, Ceili Brennan and Jesse Barden for being the best and also helping me with finer points of research, Colette Faust for making sure I ate, Sam Mayden for the memes, Fangor for all the fun, and my partner, Steve Chadwick, for literally everything a person can do to healthfully and thoroughly help another person. I’m fortunate to have a wonderful family. We were all remarkably unfortunate to lose my brilliant father, Dr. Bob Keegan, in 2017. The love and support of those of us left behind—my mom, my brothers, and my extended family in Ireland, and my adopted family (shout out to the Brennans)—got me through the darkest hours of dealing with that loss while in school, in poverty, and thousands of miles away from home. My dissertation committee was wonderful both personally and professionally. I enjoyed working with Steve and Brett in many different capacities. My advisor, Jeff Ostler, became one of my best and most trusted friends in addition to a superb mentor. My final “thanks” is to the descendants of the historical actors that populate this dissertation. Jim Berry, Buster Attebery, Judy Waddell, Chuck Sarmento, Adrian Gilkison, and others in Happy Camp and Yreka shared their family histories, their memories, sources they had collected, and their very homes with me. Nothing else made the dissertation feel so important as working with members of the Karuk Tribe that keep this history alive and know its great worth. This was never my story to tell, but they let me tell it and helped me at every turn. Yôotva. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 Dissertation Overview ........................................................................................... 1 A Note on Terminology ......................................................................................... 27 A Note on my Positionality in this Project ............................................................ 30 II. The Endurance of the Upriver People ..................................................................... 33 June 14, 1927 ......................................................................................................... 33 A World of Runners ............................................................................................... 38 Death and Life ........................................................................................................ 44 Killing Campaigns and Failed Efforts for Peace in the Klamath River Basin ....... 49 Survival Strategies ................................................................................................. 63 III. Vanishing and Visible Indians ............................................................................... 79 Tuesday, June 14-Thurday, June 16 ...................................................................... 79 Imagining Indians in Modern America .................................................................. 84 Indian Policy During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era ................................... 87 Taking a Closer Look at California ....................................................................... 92 Happy Camp as a Case Study ................................................................................ 104 (Re)imagining Indians in Sports and Entertainment .............................................. 112 IV. Indian Mascotry and Princess Mythology: Native Femininity and American Modernity ....................................................................................... 122 Monday, June 20 .................................................................................................... 122 Tuesday, June 21 .................................................................................................... 123 x Chapter Page Wednesday, June 22, 12:18 a.m. ........................................................................... 124 Beads, Fringe, and Feathers ................................................................................... 129 The Prevalence of the Powhattan Princess ............................................................ 131 Indian Princesses and Modern Femininity ............................................................. 135 The Princess in Perpetuity ..................................................................................... 158 V. Highways are Show Windows: Selling the Redwood Empire ................................ 163 After the Marathon ................................................................................................. 163 Pushing for Preservation ........................................................................................ 169 Paving the Way to the Wilderness ........................................................................ 181 Indians and Automobiles ....................................................................................... 187 The Marathon as an Accelerator of New Ideas ..................................................... 196 VI. From Vanishing to “Virile”: Native Masculinity and American Modernity ......... 198 Remaking Masculinity after the Turn of the Century ............................................ 213 Nuanced Masculinity in the 1920s ......................................................................... 215 Native American Manhood and American Ambivalence ..................................... 222 Indians and Automobiles ....................................................................................... 187 Sport as an Arena of Influence ............................................................................... 228 VII. Progress on the Line: White Supremacist Backlash in Sport and Society ........... 231 June 14, 1928 ......................................................................................................... 231 The Opening Stretch: That Afternoon and Evening .............................................. 235 The Broad Strokes of Racism in the 1920s ........................................................... 238 1928: The Issues on Display in Sports Spectacles ................................................. 241 xi Chapter Page Conclusion: The Basics of Backlash ...................................................................... 259 VIII. Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 263 IX. Epilogue: The Long Run ....................................................................................... 278 Sunday, July 7, 2019 .............................................................................................. 278 Inspiring Performances ......................................................................................... 282 Running for Public Health and Healing ................................................................. 285 Activism and Advocacy ......................................................................................... 289 The Long Road Ahead ........................................................................................... 293 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................. 296 A. STATEMENTS ................................................................................................. 296 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 298 xii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1.1 The Marathon extended the length of the Redwood Highway ........................... 2 2.1 Chochee and Melika, c. 1927 .............................................................................. 35 2.2 Reference Map of Geography North of San Francisco Bay ............................... 47 2.3 Reference Map of Indigenous Homelands in Northwestern California .............. 48 2.4 Reference Map of River Towns and Mining Camps .......................................... 48 2.5 Indian Population by County, 1860-1910 ........................................................... 76 4.1 Johnny “Mad Bull” Southard won the 1927 Redwood Highway Marathon ...... 127 4.2 Causeway Ceremony, August 22, 1926 .............................................................. 130 4.3 Jessie Jim crowned in Spokane, July 1926 ......................................................... 137 4.4 Esther Motanic as Round-Up Queen, September 1926 ...................................... 143 4.5 Motanic Family in Automobile ........................................................................... 148 4.6 Motanic Family in Automobile (2) ..................................................................... 148 4.7 Dorothy Allen, Indian Flapper ............................................................................ 151 4.8 Little Fawn and Mad Bull, Grants Pass, June 22, 1927 ...................................... 153 4.9 Jessie Jim ........................................................................................................... 154 4.10 Ester Lee Motanic ............................................................................................... 154 4.11 Dorothy Allen as Little Fawn ............................................................................. 154 5.1 “When Cloud Meets Cloud” ............................................................................... 191 6.1 Replica of REA Press Release, October 1927 .................................................... 198 6.2 The 1928 Zuni Racers ......................................................................................... 203 xiii Figure Page 6.3 Manual Cordova ................................................................................................. 205 6.4 Manual Cordova pictured with Vera Churchman and Geraldine Black ............. 205 6.5 Manual Cordova pictured Vera Churchman ....................................................... 205 6.6 Elder Barney, Dorothy Allen, and Jasper Grant ................................................ 206 6.7 John “Mad Bull” Southard, Coach William “Bill” Hayward, And Henry “Flying Cloud” Thomas .................................................................. 207 7.1 Runners start the 1928 Redwood Highway Indian Marathon ............................ 235 7.2 Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelley flagpole sitting ........................................................ 243 8.1 1928 Marathon postcard .................................................................................... 264 8.2 “Two Flying Clouds,” Oakland Tribune, June 24, 1928 ................................... 267 8.3 Klamath River near Ferry Point ......................................................................... 271 8.4 John Southard and Wayne Morrow, 1987 ......................................................... 272 8.5 Johnny “Mad Bull” Southard and Henry “Flying Cloud” Thomas ................... 277 xiv LIST OF TABLES Table Page 3.1 Labor Data from the 1920 Census, Siskiyou County, California ......................... 108 5.1 Town Populations in Redwood Highway Towns, 1920 and 1930 ....................... 183 xv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION June 14, 1927 It was not the first time Al Jennings had fired a gun. By his own estimation, he was a surefire shot. But on the morning of June 14, 1927, the lawyer-turned-train-robber- turned-actor stood before an enormous crowd and prepared to fire a pistol that was neither his trusted weapon in a raid nor a prop on the silver screen.1 Jennings represented a particular strand of “Americanness”—a Romantic outlaw turned against the justice system he had once served; a rugged antihero of the great “Wild West” of bygone days. He had avoided a lifetime prison sentence at the pardon of none other than Theodore Roosevelt, the very champion of American manhood. Jennings then became a silent film star and authored dime novels starring himself.2 Men like Jennings had defined the American West for a generation and would continue to represent Western history as a tale of gunslingers, vigilante justice, and the inevitable victory of the purebred white American male. Surefire shot he was not, according to those who knew him. But gun in hand, he was a guaranteed gambit for drawing an early-summer crowd to Market Street on this chilly San Francisco morning. 1 This opening vignette is an adaptation and expansion of a portion of my master’s thesis: Tara Keegan, “Runners of a Different Race: North American Indigenous Athletes and National Identities in the Early Twentieth Century,” Master’s thesis, University of Oregon, 2016, 2. 2 Cecilia Rasmussen, “A Badman Who Went Straight—to Hollywood: Outlaw Al Jennings was pardoned by President Theodore Roosevelt and ultimately helped shape the Western film genre,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1995. 1 Jennings was the guest of honor at the event taking place at the Civic Center. Newspapers had advertised his arrival and put his name in headlines, but he was merely a starter at a footrace about to begin—a footrace the likes of which the country had never before witnessed.3 It was to be a test of raw and extreme human endurance. It was to be a spectacle for a sports-crazed nation. The gunfire would signal the start of a 480-mile trek through Northern California towns and wilderness. The finish line awaited all the way in Grants Pass, Oregon, about forty miles north of the state border by way of the Redwood Highway, which would also serve as the racetrack. Figure 1.1 shows a map of the route. Figure 1.1. The marathon extended the length of the Redwood Highway: San Francisco and Grants Pass. Boosters had dubbed the counties along the coast in Northern California and Southern Oregon “the Redwood Empire.” Map by author. 3 “Former Bandit To Start Frisco-G.P. Marathon,” The News-Review (Roseburg, OR), June 10, 1927. 2 Harry Ridgway, the official referee for the race, waited near his LaSalle sedan for the top of the hour, knowing he would be doing a lot of sitting and driving over the week to come. The teams of volunteer support staff that would follow each runner with essential supplies also made their last-minute preparations. For a very special wing of the Grants Pass Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored four runners, preparing meant straightening scruffy wigs and brandishing elk bones in front of their Buick. They were the “Cavemen,” who took a theatrical approach to promoting travel to the caves outside of Grants Pass. The other organizers and sponsors—men donning boaters and pressed suits—hailed from the Redwood Empire Association, the Redwood Highway Association, and numerous local tourist agencies scattered throughout the coastal route. For months, they had planned the event, recruited the runners, and pressured contractors to finish constructing the highway in enough time to make the race possible. The proof would be in the pudding, but the excitement for the first-ever “Redwood Highway Indian Marathon” was palpable as the press swarmed, the police cleared the roads, and onlookers craned to see the participants. Dissertation Overview The 1920s represented a cultural transition from old to—for some—frighteningly new ideas. As city populations grew, so did the postwar economy, and everything from the census to consumer catalogs reflected a new era for Americans. The “roar” of it all has survived in the popular historical imagination of the era: short hair, short skirts, and a rather wet Prohibition era; Ford’s assembly line, Gatsby’s extravagance, and the age of jazz. 3 We remember the darker side, too: the Palmer Raids, workers’ strikes for humane employment, Klan marches, and immigrant quotas. As democracy expanded to include votes for women, Lady Liberty’s gates closed to droves of racial and ethnic groups cast out by white supremacist policy, and terrified conservative politicians and civilians aimed to halt progress in its tracts. And then, of course, it came crashing down with the worst economic depression in national history. It was also in the 1920s that a new class of national heroes emerged in the various shapes of Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Louis Armstrong, and Coco Chanel. The “Lost Generation” of writers, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, emblazoned images of disillusioned young men standing under tidal waves of modern decadence. Al Capone surely secures a spot on the list of contemporary influencers. The 1920s, then, were largely about celebrities and spectacle for the people watching from the streets and reading the newspapers. It’s no coincidence that some of the most remembered heroes and feel-good stories of the decade came from popular culture rather than, say, politics. American sports, especially, played a huge role in setting the scene for American society, and they help provide the context for this dissertation. Indeed, some of the biggest spectacles were athletic events, and some of the most famous icons were athletes. Take Charles Lindbergh, the young aviator who flew the first solo voyage across the Atlantic in 1927. He was also a white American jack-of-all-trades who had served in the military. His trip lasted over thirty-three hours and covered 3,600 miles. He won $25,000 and the Congressional Medal of Honor for his accomplishment, not to mention the hearts of white Americans young and old. 4 Lindbergh took his legendary flight only one month before eleven Native men took to a starting line in San Francisco to run the “longest endurance race in history”; a “long grueling grind over 400 miles” that took over a week to complete.4 It fit right in with the public demand for ballyhoo and seemingly impossible endurance sports. In fact, out of the eleven men who started the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon, only seven finished, the others sidelined by injuries and illness. The winner covered the 480-miles in seven days, twelve hours, and thirty-four minutes. Very few people know his name. This lack of awareness does not stem from the fact that people weren’t interested in running or its sister-sport “pedestrianism.” On the contrary, in the decades leading up to the Redwood Marathon, sports fans all across the Western world looked to the punishing marathon event to define the world’s manliest and most capable athlete. The marathon at the 1908 Olympics in London solidified the now standard 26.2-mile distance and produced the first-ever celebrity to be known around the world by his first name alone.5 Following that race was a “marathon craze” that swept the nation and consumed it for years to come.6 Viewers and readers avidly followed the Redwood Highway Marathon— the winner’s cash prize was even reported in pounds sterling in British newspapers—but 4 “Indian Tribes Will Participate in Great California Marathon,” Sausalito News, April 2, 1927; “Thomas Brown Here Regarding Indian Marathon in June,” Healdsburg Tribune, May 7, 1927. 5 That athlete was Dorando Pietri of Italy, who collapsed over the finish line after being helped, staggering along, by race officials. Though he crossed the line first, he got disqualified from the race for the aid that officials provided. The inspiring and frightening performance, however, made him a star. Queen Alexandra presented him with a special award for his bravery and determination. See David Davis, Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze (New York: Thomas Dunne Books of St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 1-2, 170. 6 See Davis, Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush. 5 it faded into memory more quickly and completely than other comparable sports spectacles. The Redwood Highway Indian Marathon was what we would now call an “ultramarathon,” an endurance footrace with a distance that well exceeds the standard “marathon” distance of 26 miles, 385 yards. Distances of 50 kilometers, 100 kilometers, and 100 miles are the most commonly contested ultramarathon distances today, though with the term being so vague, endurance athletes set records at much longer distances as well.7 The 1927 Redwood Highway Marathon was the first official ultramarathon ever contested in the established American sports scene.8 It was not the first time that a cast composed entirely of Indigenous people fielded a starting line under the auspices and gaze of Anglo-America at large, though it was the first time such a scenario took on a decidedly modern structure and objective. Organized by the Redwood Empire Association and the Redwood Highway Association, booster organizations committed to the growth and development of California’s north coast and Josephine County in Oregon, the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon aimed to attract visitors to the Redwood Highway from San Francisco to Grants Pass. Via the new Redwood Highway, which officially described U.S. 101 in Northern California and U.S. 199 into Oregon, newly automobilized American tourists could vacation or permanently relocate to the scattered towns throughout the Redwood forest. 7 For example, famous ultramarathoner Scott Jurek set the thru-hike record for the 2,189-mile Appalachian Trail. He finished the course in 46 days, 8 hours, and 7 minutes in 2015. 8 Many long footraces, far above 26 miles, had been contested on North American soil for centuries, though not recognized as sports entertainment events contested for prizes, or recorded as achievements worthy of documentation and recognition for athletic records. 6 The rules were simple. Contestants had fifteen days to follow the Redwood Highway into Grants Pass. That route brought them from the very bottom to the very top of the so-called “Redwood Empire.” They could run, walk, stop, and sleep as they pleased, but if they left the road, they had to return to their point of exit to resume racing. No lifts allowed. Runners were to cover every inch of the highway, as fast as possible, on foot. They did, however, each have “caravans” with supplies and personnel following them on the highway. This close proximity could be hurtful rather than helpful, as many runners ended up choking on exhaust fumes from cars or even getting bumped by them. All of the action and all of the attention was quite literally on the highway. Promotors extended eligibility for entry to “any runner known to be of the Indian race…regardless of whether he lives in California or Oregon. He may come from any of the other states of the Union, from Canada, Mexico, or elsewhere.”9 Despite casting such a wide net, entrants in the 1927 marathon came from just a few rural communities dozens of miles inland from the coastal highway and one contingent came up from New Mexico. Diversity in entrants significantly increased in the 1928 rematch. Organizers considered one-fourths Indian blood quantum the bar to meet for eligibility. Generally, this condition meant that a single grandparent had been a “full-blooded” Indian in state enumerations, though of course the finer details of ancestry, ethnicity, and identity varied among the entrants both years. Athletes completed the race “under the colors” of various organizations in the many towns through which the race passed.10 Local sponsors included the Grants Pass 9 “Tentative Plans Announced for Indian Marathon Over Redwood Empire Route,” Sausalito News, May 7, 1927. 10 Ibid. 7 Cavemen’s Club, Marvelous Marin (Marin County’s booster club), and towns such as Eureka in Humboldt County and Willits in Mendocino County. These sponsors had to cover travel expenses, “equip and condition their entrants, take them to San Francisco and provide a car to trail each runner throughout the course of the race, providing food, lodging and attention.”11 The runners accepted the sponsorships in exchange for promises of inflated publicity in whichever place adopted them as honorary hometown heroes. Other local moguls acted as coaches, though in many cases, with no personal history of running or seemingly any knowledge of the sport’s most effective training methods at all. Credentials for runners themselves may have been strict, but on the larger team of boosters, it seemed as though any old boy could get involved and stand to benefit without even knowing his onions.12 The big promotional stunt revealed the contours of a new regional identity that promoters aimed to sell to outsiders. California’s northwest coast was a place where an ancient-and-traditional-meets-modern-and-comfortable experience was the region’s biggest draw. While the organizers perpetuated stereotypes about imagined Indian authenticity and white fans expected to see runners in “feathers and buckskins,” the Native participants in this project made visible the presence of Native people in settings removed from these types of confines that most Americans mentally constructed for them.13 This proof of survival and relevance flew in the face of enduring notions about white supremacy and Native unfitness for life in modern America. It forced observers to 11 Ibid. 12 This is 1920s slang. Knowing one’s onions means to be knowledgeable. 13 The quoted expectation comes from an interview cited in Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2001), 117. 8 rethink the popular idea that Native people were vanishing from the face of the earth, relics of an ancient world at its bitter end. This was especially significant in California, where white settlers had carried out genocide only a half-century prior.14 In this way, the context of sports and the Redwood Highway Marathon specifically allowed for an emergent space in which Native people could remain visible and relevant, and in which observers would, in some ways, acknowledge their presence and importance. With these progressive possibilities came perils of defensive white supremacy. Anxieties emerged—actually reemerged—surrounding inherent racial athletic capacity and basic tenets of the race rendered it exploitative and objectifying for the men competing. This race and its major participants provide a vantage point from which to examine a story that begins in earnest with the California Gold Rush and extends a half century into an utterly changed world. Central to the story is California’s history of genocide, launched in the northern part of the state by miners following the 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. Alongside legacies of this violence, the story herein reveals the contours of Native survival, community-building, and widespread cultural influence that local Indigenous peoples exerted in the face of an ongoing struggle against white supremacy and the racist myths it promulgated. This dissertation interrogates these subjects and argues that Native public figures forced public revisions of demeaning stereotypes and carved out new spaces for cultural assertion, particularly in post-genocide Northern California. Despite white supremacist backlash, archival and oral histories suggest that these individuals enticed a sports-crazed 14 See Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 9 public to, in key moments, shift regional dialogues from the familiar trope of a “vanishing race” doomed to extinction to a narrative of Indian endurance, all the while shaping the modern sports and entertainment industries in this country’s first official “ultramarathon.” To make this point and explicate the context in which these historical actors operated, I also devote a lot of time and attention to the media representation of both Indianness and of the individuals at the center of my analysis. Their impact is palpable in the realm of representation, though their long legacies are perhaps more important within their own Tribal communities. This dissertation considers the intervention the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon forced in the late 1920s, and to a lesser but no less important extent, the lasting impact it has had in community memory. The project is at once a study of colonial violence, Indigenous survival, economy, emergent regional identity, American modernity, and sport. I also seek to provide a corrective to cultural studies of the 1920s. While scholars have studied race, gender, and popular culture to better understand the turbulence of the decade, they have routinely overlooked Native women and men in their examples and analyses when the scope of subjects at stake extends well beyond the immediate parameters of Indian Country. At the broadest level of analysis, I utilize the framework of settler colonial studies, a field that distinguishes a form of colonialism in which colonizers seek to eliminate, rather than exploit, the indigenous population.15 In cases of mass murder, this structure is easily discernable. Settler colonialism, however, has many mechanisms and leaves behind insidious legacies of violence when elimination is not achieved (as in the 15 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 10 case of nineteenth-century U.S. expansion). Most of the dissertation focuses on these enduring effects, such as stereotyping and silencing. Modern society remained organized by a structure that settlers had enacted centuries beforehand. This theory is central to my interpretation of California in the 1920s. The social world of Northern California had transformed nearly beyond recognition between the crowded and violent Gold-seeking days of the mid-nineteenth century and a quieter series of rural, wooded, mountainous communities at the turn of the century. Despite the new face, however, legacies of settler violence and worldviews still rooted in ideas of Manifest Destiny continued to shape the way Anglo society aimed to integrate or exclude Native people. Many authors have described this settler colonial process at work in the United States and explored the “Vanishing Race” myth that it produced.16 The mythology that hung over the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon in the late 1920s that alluded to “fast- vanishing tribes” was part of the settler colonial ideal introduced centuries prior. Many non-Natives believed that Native people would naturally die out, even after military and settler-driven wars and extermination campaigns failed to achieve the erasure of Indigenous populations. Novels, portraits, and motion pictures articulated this mythology to the public (Edward Curtis photographed “The Vanishing Race,” which depicted horse- mounted Navajos walking into the distance, in 1904; a periodical published Zane Grey’s “The Vanishing American” in 1922; Famous Players-Lasky Corporation made Grey’s novel into a silent film in 1925). 16 For a description of the process by which Americans constructed vanishing race ideology, see Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Of course, prior academics had actually helped promulgate it. The Wounded Knee massacre of Lakotas in 1890 and Frederick Jackson Turner’s declaration of a concomitantly closed frontier and definitively settled American West solidified the idea that the last decade of the nineteenth century was all but a bookend in Indian history. 11 I also trace ways in which Native people adapted and resisted settler violence, occasionally finding opportunities amid oppressions for personal gain and community visibility. To help me understand these resistance and survival strategies, as well as the longer trajectory of Karuk history within certain family lines, I turned to several members of the Karuk Tribe, including Tribal Chairman Russell “Buster” Attebery, who like several others I interviewed, is a descendant of one or more marathon runner. At Chairman Attebery’s invitation, I presented my general project to the Tribal Council, who were exceedingly kind and helpful in propelling me down helpful paths and connecting me with the people and resources at the People’s Center and Museum in Happy Camp. The work of Native scholars that explore Native people and communities in modernity provide some of the best methodologies for this type of project. Philip J. Deloria’s work on Indians in modernity traces the participation of Native historical actors in modern enterprises that are essential to this dissertation. Deloria discusses many distinct modern settings from which Native people are imagined by mainstream society to be exempt, excluded, incompatible, or at the very least, unexpected in Indians in Unexpected Places. Among these categories are athletics, beauty salons, and automobiles.17 All of these categories are relevant to this work, as the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon deliberately put Indigenous racers and their supplies caravans on a nearly-500-trek and hired a local beauty to star in the publicity. Deloria’s wider body of work on Native identity and history shape many of the dissertation’s baseline assumptions and theoretical frameworks. 17 Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). 12 An important component of the dissertation is modernity in a California-specific context. Historian William Bauer Jr. has led the charge on these lines of investigation. His work on California Indians and Native points of view in recounting history has enriched accessible histories of Native California beyond well-known and problematic examples.18 History focused on so much death, from the Gold Rush genocide to myths of vanishing California Indians in the twentieth century, can obscure Indian survival when not supplemented by histories that trace the mechanisms of survival and detail the continuities and evolution of modern Native communities.19 Bauer’s work and the example he sets addresses this possible byproduct of scholarship. Modernity following nineteenth-century violence is a growing field of inquiry for scholars of Native history, particularly in histories of early-twentieth century Native history.20 Bauer’s new book, which he wrote with Damon B. Akins, came out in print just in time to help ground this dissertation. We Are the Land: A History of Native California offers a comprehensive history of “both [the] place…and [the] idea” of California with Native people at the center of every major era of its history.21 The authors’ identification and interpretation of 18 Bauer opens his first book with a recounting of the story of Ishi, “the last wild Indian” on the continent, who wandered out of the California wilderness and into an industrial society where he quickly contracted tuberculosis and died. Ishi’s story, Bauer says, “casts a looming shadow over California Indian History” in the way it suggests the fundamental incompatibility of California Indians and modern society. William Bauer, Jr. We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), xi. 19 This is especially true in light of recent historiography that has popularized and detailed the genocide, such as Brendan C. Lindsay’s Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012) and Madley’s An American Genocide. 20 In fact, Yale University Press now publishes the Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. 21 Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer Jr., We Are the Land: A Native History of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021), 3. 13 those eras are essential for anyone else trying to imagine and tell histories of the state. Akins and Bauer stress survival, community-building, labor, resistance, and several other crucial areas of analysis that I consider throughout the following chapters. It was in the 1920s that Americans started visiting or relocating to California not with dreams of striking it rich with gold but instead with a newfound ability to drive there, on roads, in cars. For this reason, I specifically consider the context of the emerging tourism industry as a significant and rapidly developing component of modern Northern California’s economy. Studying the tourist economy involves a consideration of labor, infrastructure, and constructed and advertised regional identity. Since tourism in Northern California was (and is) so dependent on nature and the idea of “wilderness,” literature on preservation and conservation provides a relevant frame of reference, particularly David Louter’s Windshield Wilderness, which interrogates the concept of “untouched” or “wild” nature experienced via automobiles, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.22 Lacking from that work and scarcely showing up in others is any sizeable conversation about the role of Native people in Northwest tourism and the related market economy. In some specific cases, we know the story: Indians and other “foreign” or “primitive” communities were put on display at World’s Fair expositions and Pomo basket makers supplied Indian curio trade markets.23 The Redwood Highway Indian 22 David Louter, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 23 For an overview of World’s Fairs and these types of exhibits, see Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For an in-depth look at these types of public Native performances and their implications in the Northwest, see Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Also see Susan Brownell, ed., The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism 14 Marathon, however, was more than a live performance and was rooted in the field of advertising. This dissertation examines how and where booster agencies used Native people or images as gambits to sell the region, and also what Native participants’ agency in these affairs meant for Native communities and society at large. In some examples, however, historical Native perspectives are hard to deliver. I cannot fully reconstruct the mental worlds or motivations of participants in this history even by consulting their descendants and thinking through politics of historical memory. Much of my consideration of the tourist industry centers on boosters organizations and the media, using the printed and archival sources they left behind. Oral histories supplement these stories to suggest ways in which Native people exercised their own desires and goals while in front of cameras. The race, of course, located tourist efforts in the realm of sports. Recent works in sports history use sport to study politics, culture, economy, intersections of race, gender, and class in society, and histories of globalization, including imperialism. The work on American sports and imperialism fleshes out the power dynamics at play when the U.S. aimed to culturally influence people of color that Americans met on foreign soil at the same time Americans employed sports and other institutions (like Western education) to “Americanize” immigrants at home.24 That sports also provide examples of cultural appropriation by now is a given—one need only think about the ongoing controversies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008); Otis Mason, “Aboriginal American Basketry: Studies in a Textile Art Without Machinery,” Annual Report of the U.S. National Museum, Smithsonian Institution (1902): 173-548. Reprinted as Aboriginal Indian Basketry (Glorieta, N.M.: The Rio Grande Press, 1970), cited in Sherrie Smith-Ferri, “The Development of the Commercial Market for Pomo Indian Baskets,” Expedition Magazine 40, no. 1 (1998): 15-22. 24 The most notable title is perhaps Gerald Gems, The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). 15 surrounding Indian mascots or the history of how the Indigenous sport of surfing became synonymous with white California beach culture. Surfing, however, is one of the few sports topics that commentators routinely utilize to look inwards at settler colonial history within the United States, rather than outwards at overseas imperialism.25 In many ways, white Anglo-Americans encountered Native Americans as foreigners, and literally recognized them as members of separate nations at various times in U.S. history. There are a few historians who have utilized lenses of colonialism to approach and tell stories about Indigenous sports and draw out themes of assimilation efforts (very similar in nature to overseas actions) in athletic programs at government-operated “Indian boarding schools.” These works have revealed how such efforts could backfire and actually help to enforce a Native identity within and in contrast to Western sporting institutions. This, again, is very similar to the effects of sports imperialism abroad. American sports have the ability to enforce either imperialism or settler colonialism at the same time they provide the ability to undermine them. Several monographs focus on the Indian boarding school sporting experience and celebrate notable Native athletes in those settings—including but also beyond the famous Jim Thorpe of Carlisle Indian Industrial School.26 In a wider study of Indians in modernity, Philip Deloria Jr. uses athletics as an example of widespread and meaningful Indian participation in modern institutions. Sports, he says, played a key role in identity formation for many Native participants. In the case of his grandfather, he “used his love 25 For example, see Scott Laderman, Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 26 Joseph B. Oxendine, American Indian Sports Heritage (Champaign, Ill: Human Kinetics Books, 1988); John Bloom, To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sports at Native American Boarding Schools (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 16 of sports to integrate himself personally, socially, and spiritually into his community.” That “sports experience,” says Deloria, “became intertwined with his personal sense of spirituality and his place as an Indian in America.”27 The relationship between sports and Indian identity continues to fuel timely interrogations of Indian mascots’ effects on both the psychological and social wellbeing of Native sports fans and also the broader societal impact these images and performances have in the way of perpetuating harmful stereotypes of Indigenous people and communities.28 But participation in sports has provided senses of self and belonging to both Native and non-Native athletes. Fewer inquiries have been made about modern Indian sports outside of schools or other Western settings like professional leagues or the Olympic Games. The exception, and relevant to this study, are histories of running cultures in the American Southwest borderlands. These works have ranged from the best-selling Born to Run by journalist Christopher McDougall to the recent scholarly monograph Hopi Runners by Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert. McDougall’s celebrated work of journalism helped launch a “barefoot running” movement that derived part of its evidence base from the incredible sandal-clad runners of the Rarámuri (a name that translates to “The Running People” or something similar) in Northern Mexico. Born to Run remained on the New York Times Best Sellers List for four months after it came out in 2010. The author has a TedTalk on the book, and there is supposedly a film adaption in the works. The more-than-three- 27 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 134. 28 There are many twenty-first century works that tackle this issue. Some recent examples are Jennifer Guiliano, Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), James Fenelon, Redskins?: Sports Mascots, Indian Nations and White Racism (New York: Routledge, 2017), and Andrew C. Billings and Jason Edward Black, Mascot Nation: The Controversy over Native American Representation in Sports (Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 17 million people who read the book agreed to look to the Rarámuri (often called the Tarahumara) for answers on athleticism. McDougall skirts the line of accidently casting the Rarámuri in a sensationalized light, despite his good intentions. They seem to lurk in hidden caves deep in the canyon, and simply run away from modern Mexican encroachment rather than engage with it. In emphasizing their athletic aptitude, McDougall made the tribe almost magical and missed some of their humanity and societal struggles with poverty and scarce resources, even while depicting the Copper Canyon setting as overrun with drug lords and myriad dangers. What was really missing was more history and context for the tribe’s modern running, which doesn’t necessarily look like their running three-hundred years ago. The popularity of the book proved how fascinated a popular audience was in the general topic, but there is a much more complicated and interesting story of indigenous running than McDougall presented, and one can tell that story without losing the popular draw of action-packed sports history.29 Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert’s Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain between Indian and American traces intersections of boarding school and reservation sports, ancient tradition and modernity, and makes an argument that I have observed in my own research: Indian participation in visible races forced Americans to reconsider their preconceived notions about “primitiveness” and “Indianess.” Gilbert studies this phenomenon in the case of the Hopi, a large nation with their ancestral homelands (and reservation) in modern-day Arizona. Many talented individual Hopis gained fame and even some fortune running for boarding schools or in city marathons. Many other talented Hopis remained at home, running on the reservation and among the mesas for 29 Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2010). 18 very different purposes, never mind with the ability to beat even the most accomplished off-reservation Hopi runners. The author is a member of the Hopi Tribe and communicates the Hopi perspective of running and history as he also explores larger society’s perceptions of Hopi athletes. 30 The Karuk Tribe, the central study of this dissertation, is not, so to speak, a “running nation” like the Hopi, the Rarámuri, or their neighbors in the American Southwest. I do not mean to suggest, however, that running played no part in Karuk creation myths, worldviews, and ways of life. Running is a universal, fundamental human activity for the able-bodied. California was no exception. Running was and remained a rural necessity long before and long after the arrival of non-Native outsiders to the region. Also unlike the Hopi, Karuks did not (and still do not) have a reservation, and therefore can be hard to locate in archival collections from individual agencies, such as the Sacramento Agency, or from the various reservations on which Karuk families may have lived, such as Round Valley and Hoopa Valley.31 Many Karuks avoided reservations entirely and lived in homesteads throughout the Siskiyou Mountains come the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite being the second-largest Indigenous nation in California today, Karuk histories do not show up in historical and anthropological archives to the extent others do. I focus on the Karuk Tribe, in particular, because so many Karuk individuals participated in the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon and because their historical conditions reflect the great diversity in the Indigenous experience—diversity that is occasionally flattened in histories of Indian 30 Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain Between Indian and American (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018). 31 The nation holds several tracts of land in trust and fee simple agreements. 19 Country or American governmental policy. The specific avenues I explore are largely dependent on the families in the case studies and what descendants shared. In 1927, eight Karuk men raced against three Zuni men. Zuni modernity quite literally looked different than Karuk modernity at that time. This was something that audiences noted and even enjoyed, identifying in the Zuni visitors a more expected image of Indianness, complete with long hair and sandals. In 1928, other Native nations from both California and the Southwest sent runners to the event: Hopis, Navajos, Pomos, and Tolowas, for example. I occasionally talk about some of the main differences that, in general, differentiated northern coastal California and the American Southwest, including particular elements of regional Indigenous culture. In several of my key subjects, there is considerably more known about the Southwest than California.32 For example, several authors have examined the place of Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo cultures and people in tourism. Anthropological and historical sources also construct a much more complete picture of the way running functioned in daily, recreational, and spiritual life in the Southwest. I do not do much close analysis of regional comparisons. It may be a useful avenue for further research, but it is a step beyond what I found the time and space to take on here. While concentrating centrally on Karuk stories, many of my findings overlap or relate in very specific ways to other Indigenous groups in Northern California. Sources pertaining to or produced by the Karuk Tribe’s closest neighbors and fellow- Klamath River peoples, the Yurok and Hupa, aid in the reconstruction of the history I tell. While every Tribal history is unique, shared experiences confirm the specific contours of 32 Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1997); Eliza McFeely, Zuni and the American Imagination (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Kurt M. Peters, “Continuing Identity: Laguna Pueblo Railroaders in Richmond, California,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22 (1998): 187-198. 20 regional iterations of colonialism. California experienced a particularly nuanced and important iteration of colonialism. One of my main goals in this dissertation is explicating that particular context, as opposed to more general or comprehensive insights. The history of the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon and its larger context provides a package that grants insight into intimate worlds in the half-century spanning from the California Gold Rush up to the eve of the formative years of the Great Depression and Second World War. This package includes not only individual racers and their biographical history, which connect larger histories of labor, religion, and community, but also the response to the event as told by sports media and organizers at the time and told by runners’ families and their nations today. The marathon is an entry- point for this much larger social and cultural history of a region in the throes of modern development, aiming to put behind a horrifically gruesome past and move into a productive, lucrative future. The first part of the dissertation uses the 1927 marathon as its driving narrative focal point and explains the implications of such an event and related concerns in California. Chapter II explores some Karuk ethnohistory and examines the Gold Rush genocide in Karuk homelands using anthropological sources, settler accounts, a curated swath of the detailed history reconstructed by Benjamin Madley in An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, and limited oral history from Karuk Tribal members who can speak to the history their ancestors experienced in the mid- and late-nineteenth century. In addition to outlining Karuks’ and their neighbors’ direct confrontations with violence, it traces some contours of survival that regional Native peoples employed to escape murderous settlers and state agencies. 21 There is also a symbolic purpose of this chapter. Many stories of California Indians end with Gold Rush violence; my study opens with it. This approach suggests that the catastrophe is not merely a bookend, but can instead serve as a useful starting point for explorations of Indigenous communities and subtler racism in more recent history. I connect this early story of Karuk homelands to the marathon by paying particular attention, when possible, to the Southard family, whose patriarch migrated to the region as a “forty-niner,” married a Karuk woman, and started a family line that would produce three participants (and one champion) in the 1927 and 1928 races.33 I balance the microhistory with the larger history to prove that violence and survival were both intimate and also systematic institutions. I do regularly talk about “survival,” although as the dissertation persists, that term and framework refer less and less to immediate strategies focused on resisting and outliving targeted violence. Indigenous scholars make good use of the concept of “survivance,” which Gerald Vizenor popularized to articulate the active and empowered presence of Native peoples and cultures, lest “survival” seem passive or entirely related to status as victims.34 I hope that this dissertation illustrates how active Karuk survival has been, and to what extent the Tribe has carried on its own priorities and priorities distinct from its ongoing resistance to colonialism. I do not, however, stick to the vocabulary produced and negotiated by scholars in fields related to Native American and Indigenous studies. In this particular matter of terminology and others, I aim to define 33 I reconstruct this story through Methodist records and oral histories conducted with the family. 34 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Matters: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 22 key terms and be specific without engaging in theory-heavy debates about vocabularies produced and negotiated by experts in their respective fields. Chapter III begins to explore the historically uneasy coupling of Indigeneity and modernity. It discusses the prevalence of Vanishing Race ideology in non-Native perceptions of Native people and explains in what specific forms federal Indian policy took hold in remote Northern California. I examine both popular culture sources, like newspapers and literature, and government policy expressed in laws, the correspondence of agents, and the records of a few wayward field matrons who worked for the Indian Office. In order to understand how Karuk people intervened in the established norms of imaginings and treatment of Native people, I discuss sports—one of many popular culture topics that would likely work for analysis of Indian modernity and cultural assertion in the public sphere. The work of Deloria and Bauer influence my framing and discussion of Indian modernity. Mainstream American society has overlooked important contributions by American Indian individuals and communities in shaping modern institutions, and sport is no exception. Native people did not only participate in Western sports; they shaped them. American conversations about sports were so high stakes, however, that participation by any people of color held huge implications for American society in the vast symbolism connected to athletic competition. Chapter IV continues to trace themes of Native modernity connected to the race. The event mascot, Princess Little Fawn, Miss Redwood Highway, rewrote gendered stereotypes within a new, modern framework. These revisions shaped emergent regional identity in the Redwood Empire as it became a major tourist destination. Even as some commentators continued to employ old language and images of Indian “braves” and 23 Pocahontas as stand-ins for Native men and women, others reflected on the proven relevance of Native people in modern society. The resulting dialectic reflected stubborn legacies of settler colonialism pinned against modern realities. My most important sources in this chapter consist of newspaper coverage and an interview with Miss Redwood Highway’s niece. The dissertation, because of its reliance on the history of the Redwood Highway Marathon in its framework, is heavily focused on men. Even within the male-dominated sphere of athletics (and the male-centric enterprises of professional boosterism and journalism), women’s stories and accomplishments shaped history. I argue that Little Fawn’s—really, Dorothy Allen’s—participation and visibility represented a new, radical image of modern Indigenous femininity—an image that she definitely helped construct herself. Chapter V considers some issues particularly pertinent to the place where this history happened—not just California, but the actual redwood forest, including the Redwood Highway. In the case of the marathon, sport was inexorably connected to tourism, and tourism centered on trees. Trees were hot topics in political and public debates about wilderness, recreation, and resource extraction. Boosters advertising the region constructed very specific descriptions that reflected and created particular destinies for the land and for Native people. These narratives were standard in 1920s America. I consider both tourism goals and environmental preservation/conservation goals and discuss how those goals represented and impacted Native people by and large. My sources come mostly from boosters, preservationists, and conservationists, though I try to reiterate in this chapter the space that emerged for Indian people to assert influence despite their structural exclusion. All of these issues and goals were on display in the 24 completion of the Redwood Highway and its advertisement. For that reason, I also draw from the California Department of Transportation Library to discuss the highway itself. The Redwood Highway Marathon essentially “broke in” the road for tourism and travel. That event, however, disrupted the usual lines of demarcation around its constituent parts: Indians, wilderness, industry, and roads/automobiles. Every part of building, advertising, and using a road like the Redwood Highway—both practical and scenic—was drenched in symbolic meaning and racialized assumptions, but the particular flavor of the emergent tourism industry in the redwood forest (one, as noted, that was, in part, shaped by Indian historical actors) as a place where the old met the new created a space in which the interventions discussed in the first three analytical chapters were most likely to occur. I wanted to first focus on the Native protagonists and tell the story of the marathon in those early chapters. Then, I return to the racecourse itself to think in more detail about the almost exclusively white, male boosters that planned the operation and what went right, wrong, and wayward in the first year that the race took place. Chapter VI opens the second part of the dissertation, which moves on from the first race and starts to examine both the 1928 rematch (including its off-season promotion) in its narrative grounding. The event was much bigger in its second round. The coverage of the second marathon indicates the impact that came from the first. In particular ways, hints of new narratives had definitely emerged that represented Indian modernity even as persistent myths continued to circulate. Newspaper coverage therefore constitutes the largest body of my primary source material. Beyond general coverage, though, I focus on the particular issue of Native masculinity. This was one discernable zone of influence that the race permeated. Chapter IV discussed modern Native 25 femininity. This chapter discusses modern Native masculinity, a realm in which significant change in public discourse, born of the first race, was visible. I encountered somewhat of a dearth of sources to draw from on this critical issue, however, owing in part to COVID-19 restrictions. I do some work in comparative masculinities to reconstruct important aspects of gendered discourse in the 1920s and examine Native masculinity with insights from descendants of the marathon runners and by thinking about the impact of World War I, a major historical event in which a disproportionate number of Native men participated. Despite what one might call progress on these fronts (though measured), the 1928 marathon also warrants a conversation about white supremacist backlash. White people were loath to accept the dominance of any people of color in corners of society as important as sports. What did it mean for white men if Native men were the best athletes in the nation? Just before race day, Shell Gasoline sponsored a white athlete to unofficially compete in the event to weigh athleticism based on race. This act largely corrupted early press coverage into a sensationalized narrative about Indians on the warpath and decentered Native people in the publicity. Given the importance placed on sport—particularly contests of extreme endurance—that whites needed not to just govern but also to dominate the contest is perhaps unsurprising. It is in the final analytical chapter that I consider the broader context of these endurance sports and the relative space available for Native athletes and other athletes of color in 1920s American sports culture. The Redwood Highway Marathon was, after all, only one event in the droves of other sporting spectacles defined not just by sport and by spectacle, but by exclusion, racism, and in some cases, outright violence—all under the veil of entertainment and fair 26 competition. I again examine national news and utilize a framework provided by Philip Deloria to think about racialized spaces and relative influence and acceptance in mainstream American culture and society. An epilogue traces the dissertation’s many central themes through the present with special attention to the enduring Karuk legacy and their enduring struggles in California. Failing federal policy still harms Native homelands and denies tribal sovereignty. Resistance, survivance—these things continue in ever-changing, creative, and nuanced ways. To examine some of these currents in a manageable packet, I stick to running. In the ancient days of hunting and traveling, in the centuries-long efforts to resist colonialism, in the 1920s wave of sporting spectacle, and throughout Indian Country today, there remains a lot more than athletic victory on the line when Native people run. A Note on Terminology Terminology is problematic in this field, as in many others. Authors tend to write notes (like this one) that acknowledge and outline the inherent drawbacks and politics of terms like “Indian” and “Native American.” I use various terms to describe the Indigenous people that populate the history. Where possible, I use Tribal names to specify the Indigenous community central to examples. The tribe that shows up the most is the Karuk Tribe, and I often discuss their neighbors on the Klamath, the Yurok and the Hupa. I use the term “Indian” both within the context of primary source materials and as a term that captures the settler image and perspective, since representation, policy, and popular culture are all at stake in the dissertation. Indigenous people have, of course, adopted the term “Indian” in their own circles and to describe their own identities. Not everyone agrees on these matters, but certainly, regular usage of the term “Indian” in 27 practice and in scholarship makes it a useful term, despite its invention as an utter inaccuracy about the people that Europeans encountered on a continent that, among other things, was not the Indies. “Native American” appears a few times, which I use more or less as another synonym for “Indian,” but it’s a synonym that works well when discussing the advent of universal Indian citizenship and/or American identity. Most regularly, I use the terms “Indigenous people” and “Native people” with that capitalization. In We Are the Land, A History of Native California, authors Damon Akins and William Bauer Jr. explain that they use the terms “Indigenous People or People” to discuss the historical actors in the time period before the formal founding of the place called “California.” They explain that those terms reflect a tendency in Native communities to self-name with some variation of people.35 Indeed, “Karuk” roughly means “Upriver People;” Yurok, “Downriver People.” The capital “P” captures the proper-noun Peoples—nations—indigenous to the continent, but I often use the lower- case people to talk about a group of individuals that do not constitute their full nation. Akins and Bauer use “California Indians” to reflect the fact that they were and are “a critical part of the state’s identity.”36 These decisions seem careful, fair, and good to me, so I follow that model in my own vocabulary where relevant, noting, as other authors do, that terminology is both powerful and problematic. I refer to the main case study either as the “Redwood Highway Indian Marathon” or the “Redwood Highway Marathon” for a slightly shorter title that doesn’t drop to the 35 Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 10. 36 Ibid., 11. 28 level of an additional acronym that burdens the reader. RHIM would not be a recognizable abbreviation like, say, the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), which is already well-known. I try to avoid calling the marathon a “race,” as race as an identifying category is centrally at stake in the analysis and the play on words would quickly become more confusing than clever if invoked too often. I regularly refer to “the marathon,” because that is the term that organizers and the media used. “Ultramarathon” is anachronistic and is not reflected in the primary sources. I use the Karuk athletes’ real names when I talk about them in most circumstances, but they ran with fake “Indian names” both years. I typically refer to John Southard as “Johnny,” because that is how his descendants tend to refer to him and how I, as a researcher, came to know him through his family. When I use the fake marathon names—“Flying Cloud,” “Mad Bull,” and the like—it is either directly from a source, to illustrate a particular point about media representation, or to deliver the narrative story of the marathon in language that reflected its spectacle. I occasionally use the term “Northwest” to describe relevant geography to this dissertation. My Northwest is Northern California (above San Francisco Bay), Oregon, and Washington. My emphasis is usually on the mountainous and forested regions within those states, as well. This is not, perhaps, a conventional usage of the term in disciplines related to history and anthropology. The redwood region is my most immediate context in most instances: an ecosystem located in modern-day coastal California and Southern Oregon. Those regions also have an overlapping history of settler colonialism and genocidal violence, which I discuss in Chapter II. State borders both do and do not matter in ways that I explain later. Occasionally, work on Washington or examples from 29 Washington inform my study. Even though the temperate rainforest that encompasses the western portions of these states extends north through British Columbia and to Alaska, those locations are outside the scope of this project, and so the “Northwest” also does not refer to the whole wet-season region that came to be known—with varying borders—as the “Pacific Northwest.” That term also occasionally includes drier regions in Idaho, which is also outside my scope. Clearly, terminology is as much of a challenge in this dissertation as it is across its relevant fields and the wider world of literature. I aim for accuracy, manageability, and respect. A Note on my Positionality in this Project I had (and have) a tremendous amount of anxiety discussing the pain and enduring trauma of some of the history at stake in this dissertation. Throughout the research process, I spoke to many Karuk people who volunteered lots of valuable information and expressed a desire to disseminate it, and others who either declined to participate or openly reflected on the (very reasonable) hesitation that some Native people have about sharing their histories with outsiders to their community. I am not Karuk. I am not Indigenous. My family history is rooted almost entirely in Ireland and in a few fairly recent migrations from there to the United States. Irish families and families of the Irish diaspora feel the currents of colonialism—some of these currents are a few mere decades old, following the “Troubles”—but it is a very different history with markedly different implications compared to those involving Indigenous people of the Americas. Some authors have compared the two colonial scenarios. I think these works are interesting but little more than that. 30 A good research process that incorporates Tribal communities takes a long time. Anything that requires not just building trust but continually maintaining it does. I had about five years to do a little talking and a lot of listening. I think it was time exceptionally well-spent and it was enough to get many ideas about the importance of the history and its legacy, plus permission to talk about it. More time will undoubtedly lead to more, and more evolved ideas. What follows is therefore an approach that reflects my own learning process about doing culturally sensitive work and utilizing both settler and Indigenous sources to reconstruct a history. By volume alone—like how many stacks of paper reflect each avenue of research—the settler sources outweigh the Native voices and perspectives. The settler sources tell us a lot about representation, racism, and society. The Native source material, amounting to a smaller pile by volume, completely shaped my thinking about all of the history, and is invaluable for its insights. The conversations and transmissions of information were gifts from people willing to share and wanting to assert their own knowledge of histories that belong far more to them than to outsiders like me. Then, there’s the added layer of context that comes from my connection to Academia. White academics functioned as intellectual wings of colonialism for a long time. My outsider status has been compounded by my status as an academic, though formal higher education, like government, like politics, like everything, is also an institution shaped by and shared with Native people. It’s all quite complicated, and as a society, we talk about these intersections more than ever, but they’re difficult conversations with conflicting outcomes. 31 I know I can’t please everyone, but I’m also a woman, which means society has projected onto me since my youth a commitment to try to do exactly that. On that particular front, resistance is the best way forward for women. In the context of my field of research, however, listening and learning are the best ways forward. Thank you to all of those who talk on these topics from informed perspectives, so that I may listen and learn, and then take a crack at the talking myself. 32 CHAPTER II THE ENDURANCE OF THE UPRIVER PEOPLE June 14, 1927 The runners warmed up at the steps of San Francisco’s Civic Center steps. Among the small pool of contestants, the three Southard brothers stretched out their muscles and breathed salty bay air and chilly fog into their lungs as they attempted to tune out the bustle of the city and mentally prepare for the start of the epic footrace. San Francisco offered very different running conditions—not to mention sights and sounds—to behold than their forested hometown on the Klamath River. These men were Karuk Indians, “Upriver People” hailing from the small town of Happy Camp. They had spent months running daily marathons in preparation for the big show. Of course, this footrace was not going to be like running in the rocky hills of the Siskiyou Mountains. At the moment, tall buildings replaced the view of mountaintops; pavement lined the ground instead of forest paths. The brothers had never before ventured this far from home, and the urban experience came with a healthy dose of sensory overload, but neither Johnny, nor his younger brothers Gorham and Marion, were there to sightsee. In fact, they weren’t even there as “Johnny,” “Gorham,” and “Marion.” Race promoters had determined their birth names to be too common and inauthentic to match the spirit of the event. So, they invented fake “Indian names” to make up for the deficit of stereotypes. Gorham became “Rushing Water,” Marion became “Fighting Stag,” and Johnny became “Mad Bull.” The latter name, in particular, did not quite fit its recipient. By all accounts, Johnny Southard was mild and polite. He smiled often and cared deeply about his family. 33 Petite even in a line-up of men that averaged little over five-and-a-half-feet tall, he was humble, handsome, and far from bull-like in stature or demeanor. A name like “Mad Bull,” invoking something a bit more fiery, might have been better suited to Henry “Flying Cloud” Thomas, another Karuk racer. Thomas, or “Cloud,” as he’d later be called, was a fierce rival to contend with. He did some last-minute stretches wearing a dark sweater, furrowed brow, and look of utter focus on his visage.37 Seven other Native competitors completed the field. There were four other Karuks, including James “Big White Deer” McNeil, Elder “Thunder Cloud” Barney, David “Falcon” Huey, and the largest so-called “husky brave” of the group, a man the papers dubbed “Sweek Eagle.”38 Opportunity had called to these young men who lived and worked in demanding enough conditions to render such an undertaking as the looming marathon possible. Rural work in Northern California, like farming, sawmill labor, and carpentry, often needed to be supplemented by individual gold mining and hunting to provide adequate food and supplies for families.39 These necessary skills had prepared the entrants for tough physical labor in the hopes of potentially huge payoff. In the next week alone, all of the men embarking on this marathon would have the opportunity to win over $1,000 in prize money (about $15,200 in 2021), an amount that far exceeded any other seasonal labor they were likely to encounter. The remaining three competitors were Zunis, invited into the Golden State to prove their legendary running talents against local California Indians. The newspapers 37 San Francisco: newsreel, 1927, converted to DVD in 2003, Mendocino County Museum. 38 Sweek Eagle is the only Karuk racer that I have been unable to identify by name. 39 Pauline Attebery (Karuk elder and cousin to John, Marion, and Gorham Southard), in discussion with author, December 2017. 34 wrote of the Zunis’ journey to California by train, their inability to speak English, and positively gushed over their “picturesque” appearances, for they showed up in sandals, blankets, and headbands. A man named Jamon was the youngest Zuni entrant. Chochee was a bit older. And then there was Melika. Melika caused a particular sensation. At fifty-five years old, he was the oldest man at the starting line, although he did not seem to take any notice. Despite the fact that he chain-smoked cigarettes when he wasn’t running, he was at the pinnacle of fitness and came bearing some name recognition in the sport from a running career already underway in the American Southwest. For onlookers, he and his compadres were instant celebrities of another time and place, marked by visual and linguistic differences that aligned them with images of primitive Indigeneity. Figure 2.1 shows the two Zuni brothers. Few other professional runners have paired foot rubs and cigarette puffs. Figure 2.1. Chochee (left) and Melika (right), c. 1927. This image circulated in the press and has since been published more widely on the Internet. The Karuks, on the other hand, wore the standard running attire of the day, had short haircuts, and spoke English. The father of the three Southard brothers had even 35 frequented the city over the years to sell his elk jerky, the urban profits being well-worth his trek.40 Though they might have felt worlds apart to travelers roving Northern California, the city and the countryside were intimately linked. Tradition and modernity had met and were, together, shaping society. This particular troupe of runners had been invited for misguided reasons. Boosters wanted to utilize quintessential Indian stereotypes, like warriors and Indian Princesses, to sell the event. Nonetheless, the runners showed up to partake in an ultra-modern sporting spectacle worthy of international press and enduring impact, and they weren’t going to do it wielding tomahawks and saying “How.” The road ahead would provide an opportunity to force revisions of commonly- held stereotypes surrounding Indigenous people. In the past, Indians visiting cities had invited narratives of an insurmountable divide between the “primitive” customs and traditions of Indian nations and the perceived sophistication of modern technologies.41 Americans had, by the 1920s, made a long-standing habit of imagining North American Indigenous societies and North American settler societies to be incompatible, the latter inevitably rendering the former obscure, obsolete, and soon-to-be extinct. The eleven Indian men preparing to dash down the road could not entirely overcome these stereotypes, but they could upset it—particularly the Karuks, who, from the beginning, remained well outside the realm of “picturesque.” 40 James Berry (Karuk Tribal Member and Southard descendant), in discussion with author, June 2019. 41 Coll Thrush discusses numerous historical examples of this pattern in Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007) and Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 36 The starter called the runners to attention and they lined up on the steps of City Hall after a few last-minute stretches. Little more than a half-century beforehand, white settlers implored the government to aid in disarming Karuks, their neighboring Yuroks, and others, so that miners could pillage the lands less encumbered by resistance. Where the state failed to intervene, settlers launched a killing campaign. But the droves of violent settlers looking for an El Doradoan stream of solid gold had slowed. Frightened pioneer communities no longer sent pleas to the state to quash Native manpower and stave off armed resistance. Now, paperwork concerning visiting Indians confirmed their warm reception and promotion at the opening of a grand tourist event. After final adjustments of sandal straps and boxing shoe laces, the field stilled. Al Jennings raised a pistol to the sky. All eyes were upon these fascinating new celebrities, technically “American” with their recently-granted citizenship, but not rough-and-tough- gunslingers like Jennings, not technology-wielding, American-flag-brandishing veterans like Lindbergh. The clock struck ten. They leaned forward in that short eternity every runner knows between the “get set” and the “go.” Each man wore a racing bib across his abdomen that displayed his entrant number. One: Rushing Water. Two: Flying Cloud. Three: Fighting Stag. Four: Falcon. Five: Mad Bull. Six: Thunder Cloud. Seven: Sweek Eagle. Eight: Big White Deer. Nine: Jamon. Ten: Melika. Eleven: Chochee. The crowd quieted. Finally, the gun went off. 37 A World of Runners A Karuk myth tells the story of how Coyote brought fire to the People. Cunning and clever, he plucked it from a guarded source atop a mountain and sent it through a running relay of animals to those living upriver on the Klamath. Each animal received the fire and dashed onward, barely outrunning their pursuers, the original guardians of the fire, who wanted to keep it for themselves. The heist was dangerous. The selfish fire hoarders clawed at the animals as the fire scorched them. This legend places the origins of the stripes along a chipmunk’s back and the loss of a tadpole’s tale with their flight down the mountain and close encounters with those giving them chase. In the end, the runners succeeded in igniting a piece of willow. This marriage of wood and flame would enable the People to forevermore create and access its warmth.42 The moral of the story isn’t really about running, though there’s a lesson in there about the resourcefulness of quick movement and relay races. The mountains, the river, the trees, and the creatures that live in and around them shape Karuk mythology and history. Subsistence, including the consumption of woodland game and salmon, historically depended on movement cultures both on land and by water. Dug-out redwood canoes were likely as important as feet in transportation. Coyote’s “fire race” recalls the 42 Several prominent Karuk myths feature Coyote, one of the Ikxareyavs that inhabited ancestral homelands before the Karuk. For an illustrated and published account of this myth written and edited in consultation with a Pomo/Miwok storyteller and a Karuk scholar, see Johnathan London, Fire Race: A Karuk Coyote Tale (San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 1993). Anthropologists recorded alternative versions of the myth in various visits to Karuk country. See Stephen Powers, Tribes of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 38-39, reprinted from Contributions to North American Ethnology, Volume III. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, J.W. Powell, in charge (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887); “How People Got Fire by Mary Ike,” 1939, Ethnological Documents of the Department and Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, BANC FILM 2216, container 146, microfilm. 38 importance of an earlier generation of living creatures and highlights the value of teamwork in a story set in sport.43 Other running myths permeated the region along the Klamath as well. Nearby Yuroks passed along another Coyote myth in which he and several men from Klamath villages— Knäwi (Tolowa), Rekwoi (Yurok), Kohtel (Hupa), Seqwu’ (or Katimin in Karuk)—compete against Water in a footrace for the right to bring him to the whole world and provide the People with his streams. Several men fail in their attempt before Coyote succeeds on a course upstream. This was among the stories that the informant Lame Billy of Weitspus (Yurok) provided famous anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber in his visits to Yurok Country between 1901 and 1907.44 Yuroks understood running as a sacred power. Wanton sorcerers known as “devils” could potentially run at great speeds over long distances at night, when they did their evil bidding, casting bad medicines that could harm or even kill unsuspecting victims. Other stories cast the devils as creepy mischief-makers working in the shadows and casting several of their own. (These figures would have been the apurúvan to Karuks and t’å’na:gi, “night travels,” to Tolowas.45) The trance-induced super-running ability is alternatively understood to be either intrinsic or born of a special anklet (a “foot”) that anyone could obtain. Coyote borrowed such a device in his contest with Water, according to the telling documented in Kroeber’s notes. Elders along the Klamath report certain 43 For a comment on this myth from a member and storyteller of the Karuk tribe, see Julian Long, “Afterward,” in London, Fire Race, 31. 44 A. L. Kroeber, Yurok Myths (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 134-139. 45 Philip Drucker, “The Tolowa and their Southwest Oregon Kin,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 36, no. 4 (October 1937), 259. 39 locations that are historic hotbeds for devils, including the ancient and important site of Pecwan on the lower Klamath in modern-day Humboldt County.46 Anthropologist Thomas Buckley conducted field research in Yurok Country throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, which he consolidated in Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990. That work discusses Yurok running. Apparently, night running was not the purview of devils alone. “The whole matter is further complicated,” says Buckley, “by the fact that running training—sometimes at night—is also associated with the warrior’s and others’ training regimens.”47 In fact, a lay person could train to catch a devil in their mischief, and holding one captive for a full night could make a man rich. Yuroks who spoke to Buckley about the matter told him that people trained “just like football players” to beat the devils at their own game.48 Of course, running is also an effective approach to physical fitness, and needed for hunting, preparation for ceremonial fasting, communicating over distances, combat, and many other demanding facets of historical Indigenous life along the Klamath. Coyote’s running in regional myths provided a means to various celebrated ends. In fact, the tools acquired through his races—fire and water—were elemental. Running was at the heart of the creation of inhabitable lands on North America’s western coast. Beyond the mountains and rivers of Northwestern California, there was even greater importance placed on running in Indigenous mythology and history. The Zunis waiting at the starting line in San Francisco, for example, came from a culture rooted in 46 Buckley, Thomas. Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 129-131. 47 Buckley, Standing Ground, 131. 48 Buckley mentions conversations with Antone Obee and Ella Norris, both Yurok, in Buckley, Standing Ground, 131-132. 40 running, not to mention a tradition of running excellence on reservations and in organized American athletic contests. The activity was spiritually, ceremonially, and practically important for centuries of life in the southwestern mesas. The Zunis and their neighbors—the Navajos, the Hopis, and others—had long revered it. Zuni trails predated the sixteenth century and became major roads for Spanish and Anglo-American colonizers in the centuries following. They had been the sites of running pilgrimages and a vast communication network.49 Zuni running was important to culture even beyond these objectives. For one, Zuni girls ran for ceremonies and recreation; it was not a male-only activity like in so many other places, though different running-related activities and their resultant spiritual importance were certainly gendered. Ancient Zuni oral traditions told of great games of kick-stick among boys and men: races in which teams progress by kicking a small stick and giving chase. Involving prayer, competition, and community, these contests were intended to invite rain to assist crops in the spring.50 Other stories tell of kick-stick races to determine important marriages. The latter would have been a rare instance where a prize beyond the promise of rain was available for a recognized winner.51 Winning did not bear the weight in ceremonial practices that it would later in mainstream organized competition. Navajos and Hopis had similar “kickball races” and ceremonies.52 49 Peter Nabokov, Indian Running (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1981), 106-107. 50 F. Webb Hodge, “A Zuni Footrace,” American Anthropologist 3, no. 3 (July 1890): 227-232; William A. Dodge, Black Rock: A Zuni Cultural Landscape and the Meaning of Place (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 124. 51 Nabokov, Indian Running, 110-111. 52 Michael Sandler, Barefoot Running: How to Run Light and Free by Getting in Touch with the Earth (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010), 122; Gilbert, Hopi Runners. 41 Running abilities came from ancient traditions rooted in foundational creation stories. The Hopi Snake Dance, which involves dancing and long-distance running, is a sacred ritual that lasts several days. When outsiders caught wind of its proceedings (which in addition to impressive feats of running features songs and interactions with live snakes), it captivated voyeurs.53 Clan races, common throughout the Southwest, embodied essential qualities of spiritual running. Runners ran with “good” or “happy” hearts, committed in mind and body to the awesome task at hand and understanding their important role in a larger communal network. Running was symbolic; it was competitive; it was powerful, practical, and joyful.54 Running maintained those deep meanings into the modern era, when Southwest Indigenous runners went beyond the mesas and shaped mainstream competitive running culture in the sports craze of the early twentieth century. Historian Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert’s Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain Between Indian and American explains how Hopi runners in the early 1900s competed in American and international running circuits that not only displayed their remarkable talents in endurance running, but also transmitted a cultural identity that “challenged white American perceptions of Natives and modernity and placed them in a context that had national and international dimensions.”55 Observers, often struck with awe, had to contend with Hopi runners (often, though not always hailing from famous Indian boarding school athletic programs) as successful modern athletes. Running for schools and in cities, Hopis and other Native 53 See for example Theodore Roosevelt, “The Hopi Snake Dance,” Outlook 105 (October 1913): 364-373. 54 Gilbert, Hopi Runners, 26-27. 55 Ibid., 15. 42 athletes shaped the competitive running circuit that emerged throughout the United States’ “Golden Age of Sport” and provided some well-known celebrities. Certainly, the three Zunis who showed up for the first Redwood Highway Indian Marathon fit this last category; Melika and his brother had impressed in more local events and went to California with Mike Kirk, a famous trader in Indian goods near Gallup, New Mexico. Kirk also trained many Indian runners and widely publicized their running prowess, promising their domination on huge competitive stages and aiming to remain at the center of the action.56 Across Indigenous North America, Native communities had long employed runners to coordinate resistance and facilitate survival. Messengers distributed knotted string-calendars across pueblos to organize the successful Pueblo Revolt in 1680 that temporarily ousted Spanish colonizers and missionaries in the Southwest borderlands.57 Nearly a century later, messenger runners facilitated the planning and execution of another massive defensive stand, the war known as “Pontiac’s Rebellion” in 1763, that in part grew out of the imperial struggle between the British and the French during the Seven Years War.58 A larger history of Indigenous running, both ancient and modern, spans the entire globe. When Spanish conquistadors reached the Inca Empire, they observed the chasqui runners, a trained force of messengers who delivered communications via relays across 56 Brian Wright-McLeod, “Songs of Transformation: Music from Screech Songs to Hip Hop,” in Robert Warrior, ed. The World of Indigenous North America (New York: Routledge, 2015), 277. 57 Matthew Liebmann, Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2012), 56-58, 79. 58 Carl A. Brasseaux and Michael J. LeBlanc, “Franco-Indian Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley 1754- 1763: Prelude to Pontiac’s Uprising?” Journal De La Société Des Américanistes 68 (1982): 63. 43 thousands of miles of roads, even equipped with durable rope bridges. The network endured for multiple centuries and the runners easily outpaced the Spanish postal system, which depended on horseback deliveries.59 The Greeks ran to honor the gods in a grand athletic festival. Chinese folklore tells of a young boy’s running pursuit of the traveling sun—a failed endeavor that nonetheless delivered nature’s bounty to the people on Earth. Tibetan and Japanese monks ran in religious rituals. Sub-Saharan Africans ran in persistence hunts long before Africans entered the (Western) international running circuit and quickly earned reputations as perennial top contenders. In the twentieth-first century, public interest in the Indigenous Rarámuri (Tarahumara) runners of the canyons of Northern Mexico resurged after journalist Christopher McDougal published his international bestseller, Born To Run. This is all to say that a rich global history of running spans millennia, characterizes every pocket of the globe, and has defined cultures and permeated human life.60 Death and Life The violence of colonialism that remade the land that came to be known as California would not entirely unmake the land of Klamath Indians’ origins, ceremonies, or even their night-running devils. To be sure, death came in astounding numbers. A pre- contact population in California may have been upwards of 310,000. On the eve of the California Gold Rush, that number had already dropped to perhaps 150,000 due to 59 Rebecca M. Seaman, “Chasquis” in Seaman, ed., Conflict in the Early Americas: An Encyclopedia of the Spanish Empire’s Aztec, Incan, and Mayan Conquests (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2013), 77. 60 For dozens of examples, see Thor Gotaas, Running: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). 44 violence, disease, and famine. In little more than two decades following the initial discovery of gold, settlers and soldiers killed anywhere from 9,492 to 16,094 Native individuals while more than 100,000 more succumbed to disease and starvation. These devastating numbers are difficult to comprehend and impossible to dismiss.61 Studies of California history have greatly benefited from scholarly analysis of the death toll and characteristics of a genocide supported by local and federal state agencies. The most notable work is Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe which makes a clear case for defining the violence as a genocide and chronicles dozens if not hundreds of local examples that condemn the actions of even notable pioneers and state officials. This is necessary work. When we focus solely on the violence and wrap up narratives when the mass killings slowed and largely stopped, however, we can accidently produce a type of ‘bookend effect’ that suggests a declension narrative for Indigenous nations. That pattern is visible in well-known moments in Indian history. John G. Neihardt’s famous Black Elk Speaks recounts that after observing the death and destruction wrought by soldiers at the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, Black Elk and fellow Lakota warriors were forced to make peace at gunpoint. “A people’s dream died there,” Black Elk allegedly said. “It was a beautiful dream.”62 This is also the last scene 61 These figures come from Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide, 14. Madley’s population estimates revise earlier ones. He makes it clear that they dwarf the suspected amount of murders estimated by demographer Sherborne Cook’s, whose work on the subject of California Indian population was first published in 1943. Other important works include: Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 1-3, 100- 124, in which Hurtado uses Cook’s numbers but provides comparative regional analyses. 62 John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 169. 45 of the book. What Black Elk actually said at the end of that interview, according to transcriptions, was, “Two years later I was married.”63 Though the massacre at Wounded Knee was devastating and decisive, it was not the end of the Lakota people, yet it has been written with a rhetorical air of finality by commentators ever since.64 We can provide a corrective to this bookending when we emphasize survival and include a longer timeline of Native history beyond the era of extreme violence. Survival narratives emphasize the enduring impact that Native communities continued to have on the larger world despite their demographic losses. The maps below illustrate specific aspects of the geography and social world of Gold Rush California. Figure 2.2 highlights rivers and mountains, both essential to the movement and settlement of peoples in the region. Figure 2.3 approximates Indigenous national boundaries in the northwest corner of California at the time it became a state in 1850. The blury boundaries illustrate the fact that these types of borders were not as fixed as state lines would be. Figure 2.4 shows towns at that time, as well. Many of these towns, suddenly occupied by miners and pioneer families, were at or near sites of spiritual significance for nearby Native communities. The geopolitical conflict and struggle for survival engaged these towns, rivers, mountains, and peoples. 63 Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 282. 64 Consider Ralph Andrist, The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indian (New York: Macmillan, 1966), and, as Philip Deloria also references, “almost any television documentary, especially Kevin Costner’s 500 Nations.” Deloria, Indians In Unexpected Places, 261n4. Nick Estes makes this point about Black Elk Speaks in Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019), 17-18. Indeed, Estes’s work is about survival after Wounded Knee, into the twenty-first century. 46 Figure 2.2 Reference Map of Geograph y North of San Francisco Bay. By author. 47 Figure 2.3. Reference Map of Indigenous H omelands in modern-day Northwestern California and Southwestern Oregon. Map is not exhaustive. By author. Figure 2.4. Reference Map of River Town s and Mining Camps in Northwestern California. By author. 48 Killing Campaigns and Failed Efforts for Peace in the Klamath River Basin Regional histories cite early colonial conflicts among fur trappers and Shastas in the 1830s.65 Confrontations included targeted murders of both Indians and whites and persisted through the 1840s.66 The Gold Rush, however, launched a new level of violence. White exploration up the Klamath from the Salmon River began in earnest in 1850. Indigenous people drove back early parties from what would become the Happy Camp area by threatening attack. “The party of Rufus Johnson,” according to the 1881 History of Siskiyou County, “[became] involved in difficulty with” Indians along the Klamath, “lost all their animals, and returned to Salmon river.” Subsequent parties, anticipating this reception, managed to avoid trouble and “[pass] on unmolested, their numbers probably inspiring the Indians with a degree of respect.”67 Whether or not “respect” is the most accurate descriptor, uneven power of arms and careful calculations about when to confront invaders would continue to be factors in facilitating white settlement as long as both guns and ammunition remained in ample supply for the probing settlers.68 65 This periodization is relevant to the colonizing powers that would participate the Gold Rush but ignores the brief era of Russian colonization in the Fort Ross area. For descriptions of the abuses and coercion perpetrated by Russian colonizers, see Madley, An American Genocide, 36-37. 66 Harry L. Wells, History of Siskiyou County, California, Illustrated with Views of Residences, Business Buildings and Natural Scenery, and Containing Portraits and Biographies of its Leading Citizens and Pioneers (Oakland: D. J. Stewart & Co, 1881), 121. 67 Wells, History of Siskiyou County, 121. 68 Owen C. Coy, The Humboldt Bay Region, 1850-1875 (Los Angeles: California State Historical Association, 1929), 137; Madley, An American Genocide, 199. 49 By the summer of 1850, however, white settlers were burning villages along the Salmon River and Indigenous People had clearly recognized an agenda of permanent dislocation or worse from the newcomers to the region. Native people mobilized to resist when possible, but Indian killers were increasingly galvanized in their murderous pursuits.69 In fact, the state intervened that year to legalize the corporal punishment of Indians with the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.70 That act also made it possible for whites to effectively buy Indians as indentured servants or exercise “de jure custodianship of Indian minors” in similar unfree labor scenarios. As William Bauer and Damon Akins state, “this act did more governing than protecting.”71 Laws left Native people without meaningful ways to defend themselves in the legal system, essentially denying them due process and the legal status to testify on their own or others’ behalves.72 Clearly, the two-pronged system of settler violence backed by state sanctioning was underway even in the early years of overland migrations to California. Things only continued to escalate from there. In 1851 and 1852, years that Madley describes as the “Rise of the Killing Machine,” violence continued on the ground and in the legal system even as a party of agents sent by Millard Filmore went to negotiate treaties with California Indians and 69 Coy, The Humboldt Bay Region, 137. 70 Madley, An American Genocide, 159. 71 Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 141. 72 Madley, An American Genocide, 158-159. Madley discusses the role of local territorial and state politics and resultant legal system in the years 1846-1853, a period in which “a protracted process by which military and civilian lawmakers, law enforcement officials, and judges stripped California Indians of legal power and rights, excluded them from colonial society, deprived them of their land, denied them protection, legalized their exploitation…and ultimately all but erased legal and cultural barriers to their abuse and murder.” See Ibid., 145-172. 50 scope out locations for new military forts. The negotiators drafted eighteen treaties under which a vast majority of California land would be ceded and treating Indian parties would each receive a reservation; three such reservations were in or on the borders of the Northern goldfields, encompassing many river and mountain locations that had long been important to Indigenous people there. Some of these negotiated areas, such as Yreka, had even become valued settler spaces.73 Travelers in those treaty negotiations kept diaries on their expedition that detailed the landscape and peoples they encountered. One particular account, recorded by translator George Gibbs and submitted and preserved by the Office of Indian Affairs, captured the impression of treaty negotiators throughout Northern California. Much of the detail on language groups and community borders was likely false, and the visitors brought a colonial lens that judged Indigenous people as subpar in many ways.74 But their accounts document important events and observations. The Indian Office party heard from Native people directly about violence with settlers. The expedition met Native people living along the Klamath and Trinity Rivers as the party made its way north from Clear Lake and the Eel River. In one meeting, a “chief [unspecified], with great formality, displayed a bone, marked on one edge with twenty- six notches, being the number of white men admitted to have been killed upon the Klamath; while the other side of it contained twenty-seven, as the number of Indians killed by the whites.” When all was said and done at this meeting, the treaty party offered 73 See Ibid., 168-169. 74 See notes submitted by former Karuk Tribal Council Member and tribal historian James Waddell to members of the 2009 Tribal Council for one modern Karuk interpretation of Gibb’s geography and demography, December 21, 2009, www.klamathbasincrisis.org > tribes > karuk > hist09waddell. 51 blankets, axes, and other provisions as reparations for the unbalanced death toll, the burning of local villages by settlers, and as an incentive to sign treaty drafts.75 Clearly, Indigenous people were keeping records of violence and demanding compensation. Local historians have long attested to 1851 being a year in which “the trouble between the Indians and the whites became more acute,” and even referenced this bone-marking incident as an impressionable moment that indicated escalating conflict.76 The expedition included enough of these significant and educational encounters to sway McKee’s opinion in favor of the Native people he heard from. In 1852, McKee reported to California governor John Bigler that violence was largely the fault of whites, and outright called settler efforts “a war of extermination.” He even attempted to spread this message via public printed letters, citing examples of mass slaughter in Karuk and Shasta territory.77 McKee’s summation was accurate. While the treaty mission was underway, violence spread and worsened in the broad region that encompassed the Northern mines. The Hupa, Karuk, Yurok, Wintu, Tolowa, and others suffered from both a continued influx of settlers and changing laws that protected white interests while increasing Indian vulnerability. A pattern of violence became discernable very quickly: settlers countered relatively small offenses committed by Indians in defense of homelands with disproportionate and devastating violence. More serious forms of resistance would be 75 George Gibbs, “Journal of the Expedition of Colonel Redick M’Kee, United States Indian Agent, Through North-Western California, Performed in the Summer and Fall of 1851,” in George Gibbs’ Journal of Redick McKee’s Expedition Through Northwestern California in 1851, ed. Robert Heizer (Berkeley: Archaeological Research Facility, Department of Anthropology, University of California, 1972), 145. 76 For example, see Coy, The Humboldt Bay Region, 138. 77 Madley, An American Genocide, 205. 52 countered by still more serious settler “retaliation,” if one can even use that term to describe such vicious killings against people fighting an invasion. By mid-1851, for example, Native people had killed several settlers near Happy Camp; whites responded by slaughtering a village.78 Around the same time, citizens from Trinidad Bay demanded bolder and quicker action from McKee that could usher in peace (and free lands for settlers). They threatened to petition the governor to call volunteers for an extermination campaign if he failed to organize the territory with new forts and reservations. McKee’s task grew more daunting and impossible as he requested funds that Congress steadily denied.79 Henry Wells chronicled another summer attack in Karuk homelands in his 1880 History of Siskiyou County. In his words, Shasta, Modoc, Karuk, and Yurok “savages,” initiated the “Fight at Lowden’s Ferry” in the summer of 1851 in Happy Camp. Wells reported that the founders of the town built a central cabin for stores while most of the men in town “scattered along the river” to mine. “About twelve miles up the river,” Wells said, “was a rancheria of Indians, and they were greatly annoyed by the occupants who came down to the cabin.” The story continues: It was feared they [the Indians] would do some damage if permitted too much freedom, and they were ordered to keep away entirely. These Indians had murdered two prospectors…but a short time before, and the miners were afraid to trust them. The injunction to keep away from the cabin was not heeded, and one of the Indians was shot.80 78 See Ibid., 234, 197. 79 Chad L. Hoopes, “Redick McKee and the Humboldt Bay Region, 1851-1852” California Historical Society Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Sept. 1970): 213-219. 80 Wells, History of Siskiyou County, 127. 53 The fear among the growing number of miners led to an expedition of armed settlers pursuing the nearby rancheria and “killing every buck there.”81 Furthermore, the suspicion of future violence on the part of Indians fueled preemptive violence on the part of settlers. These patterns—disproportionate retaliation and murder based on suspicion— are patterns that Benjamin Madley stresses in An American Genocide, particularly in the early stages of the Gold Rush when miners came down from Oregon, a region already steeped in a tradition of fear and preemptive retaliation.82 In fact, he explains that whites perceived any resistance to colonialism as “intolerable,” and then responded with disproportionate attacks.83 The more settlers came into Indigenous lands in Northern California, the greater these threats crept into the lives of Native people already aware of overland migrations that could prove devastating to their communities. The situation failed to improve throughout the mid-1850s. Millard Filmore again addressed the crisis in Northern California in 1853 in response to “the Senate not having thought proper to ratify the treaties which had been negotiated with the tribes of Indians in California and Oregon.” He reported that relations remained “unsatisfactory,” blamed white settlers and the state government for the “evil” of not recognizing “the exclusive right of the Indian to any part of the country,” and implored Congress to promptly act on suitable alternatives if they would not ratify McKee’s treaties. One alternative included a plan to fully remove Indians from the proximity of settler towns.84 The next month, 81 Ibid. 82 Madley, An American Genocide, 83-84. 83 Ibid., 12. 84 “President’s Message,” Daily Alta California, January 7, 1853. 54 California Governor John Bigler praised volunteers in Siskiyou County for “protecting citizens of Siskiyou and the adjoining counties from Indian aggressions” in “the absence of that defense which the General Government should have afforded.”85 He did not offer details, but Governor Bigler had already and would continue to favor total expulsion and genocide as viable solutions to Northern California’s “Indian Problem.”86 The treaty efforts, as it turned out, were wasted. Bauer and Akins explain, “The confusion regarding treaty making, as well as statewide opposition to granting Indigenous People land titles, undermined the federal government’s role in California and opened the way to ethnic cleansing.”87 The U.S. Senate rejected all eighteen treaties during “a secret session and prohibited their reproduction, essentially burying them in the Senate archives.”88 They would eventually surface, but not in time to intervene in the mounting violence of the 1850s or force settlers to recognize tribal sovereignty as they fought to control land. Other observers and governmental officials continued to stress that the fault rested with whites and wrote to California Indian agents or higher-ups at the Department of the Interior to offer their observations. Despite describing local Indians as “wayward children of the forest…incredulous, vindictive, and stubborn,” for example, a Dr. J. Rutherford Worster reported to the Secretary of the Interior that Pacific Coast Indians, “particularly 85 Gov. John Bigler to the Senate and Assembly of the State of California, February 16, 1853, in the Journal of the Fourth Session of the Legislature of the State of California (San Francisco: George Kerr, State Printer, 1853), 119. 86 See Madley, An American Genocide, 204-205. 87 Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 144. 88 Ibid., 146. 55 of California,” received “villianous treatment…at the hands of the whites.”89 Similar reports came from just north of the state border, calling for protection for “peaceably disposed Indians against the outrages of lawless whites,” whose crimes were, by the springtime, also “of constant occurrence in the State of California, particularly in the northern part” and stemmed “from apparently no motive but wanton cruelty.”90 In an attempt at benevolence, the California Indian Affairs Superintendent suggested “speedy removal” to “save them from entire annihilation” in the Upper Sacramento Valley.91 Even as agents in the state scrambled to establish new reservations and relocate Indians there (to Nome Lockee, one of the only reservations in the state, in the aforementioned region), settlers and Native people alike utterly distrusted the government, the latter by that point very unlikely to voluntarily move without being forced.92 Even in the eyes of the government, relocation to the few recently-established reservations was an imperfect solution. In fact, Akins and Bauer explain that these early reservations were intended to be temporary.93 89 J. Rutherford Worster to the Secretary of the Interior, April 30, 1854, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881, California Superintendency, 1849-1880; 35 mm microfilm, Reel 33, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. 90 George McClelland to George W. Manypenny (referencing reports from John E. Wool, G. J. Rains, and A. J. Smith), May 9,1854, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881, California Superintendency, 1849-1880; 35 mm microfilm, Reel 33, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. 91 Thomas Henley to George W. Manypenny, September 13, 1854, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881, California Superintendency, 1849-1880; 35 mm microfilm, Reel 33, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. 92 William M. Gwin, James B. Weller, J. W. Denver, M.S. Latham, P.T. Herbert to the Secretary of the Interior, September 29, 1854, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881, California Superintendency, 1849-1880; 35 mm microfilm, Reel 33, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. 93 Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 147. 56 Violence in Karuk territory reached its apex in the winter spanning 1854 and 1855 in what is alternatively known as the “Red Cap War” and the “Klamath War.” This conflict engaged both settlers and soldiers as well as Karuks, Hupas, and Yuroks on the lower Klamath, from about Orleans Bar to the coast. Nineteenth-century historian A.J. Bledsoe insisted that “every indication pointed to an approaching outbreak” in 1853 and 1854, following the departure of the McKee expedition and no sign of its return to bring provisions and secure the promised reservation boundaries.94 Madley cites the beginning of the immediate conflict as a December 10, 1854 rape attempt perpetrated by a white man against a Karuk woman and the murder of a Karuk man who may have intervened. Some angry Karuks killed an ox belonging to the white criminal, prompting others to offer payment for the ox and prioritize skirting a burgeoning conflict that would likely manifest in a genocidal campaign against indiscriminate Karuk families.95 Indeed, some miners immediately displayed genocidal intent. Instead of launching a coordinated killing spree, however, a party first met at Orleans Bar (Karuk name: Panamnik) on January 6 to draw up resolutions for a new local Indian policy. The Weekly Humboldt Times published the resolutions the following week. The meeting stressed the disarmament of regional Indians and drew up punishments for Indians failing to comply as well as for whites who aided Indian mobilization through arms sales. The first two resolutions read: Resolved, That we, the undersigned, believing that the sale, gift, repairing or loan of firearms or ammunition of any description to Indians, is pregnant with 94 A. J. Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest: A California Sketch (San Francisco: Bacon & Company, 1885), 163. 95 Madley, An American Genocide, 234. 57 danger to the white inhabitants of this place; do hereby pledge ourselves to do all in our power to stop said traffic, repairing, or loaning of arms and ammunition. Resolved, That all persons detected in said traffic, will be punished as follows: To have their heads shaved; to receive twenty-five lashes; and afterwards be driven from the river.96 These measures obviously exercise jurisdiction over non-Native people living in and around Orleans. They were also consistent with state policy, namely the 1854 Act to Prevent the Sale of Fire-Arms and Ammunition to Indians.97 The repercussions were severe for whites willing to aid or arm Indians rather than ensure the security of their white neighbors against armed Indian attack. A final resolution pledged to deliver an ultimatum to Indians. Apparently, “the headmen of the rancherias in the neighborhood were notified that non-compliance would be visited with death to any Indians carrying weapons.”98 Many of these local warnings likely went to Karuks.99 Armed Indians had until January 19 to surrender their weapons. Unsurprisingly, some did and some did not. The conflict intensified when whites attempted to seize guns from “Red Caps,” or Yuroks and Karuks on the lower Klamath, and met defensive fire.100 After that, miners asked authorities for help. US Army Captain Henry Judah and a company of soldiers came to quell the conflict as Humboldt and Siskiyou counties raised five volunteer companies to snuff out Indians. For months, inconsistent and disorganized 96 “Meeting of the Citizens of Orleans Bar,” Weekly Humboldt Times, January 13, 1855. 97 Akins and Bauer note that this law remained in effect until 1913. Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 138-139. 98 Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest, 164-165. 99 Madley, An American Genocide, 235. 100 The origins of the term “Red Caps” is unclear. 58 federal and state leadership prolonged conflict and opened the door for continued slaughter. The volunteers, apparently fearing an estimated 3,500 mobilized Indian warriors, killed Indians indiscriminately on several occasions.101 These were assuredly not official orders. Disagreements between regional miners, armed volunteer militiamen, and Army officers ensued, the central issue being the desirability of an extermination campaign. Many miners vociferously pushed for such an effort in no uncertain terms. When February came, Captain Judah had to stamp out a genocidal attack on the mouth of the Salmon River, and, “Partly through the efforts of Captain Judah, and partly through the protest of the Salmon River miners, the Klamath miners were prevented from inaugurating a wholesale massacre of the friendly Indians along the river.”102 Resistance continued; slaughter ensued. On February 4, “mounted volunteers” under the order of Captain F. M. Woodward “went to Cappell and Moreo rancherias on a tour of inspection” and learned that Red Caps hid nearby. During Woodward’s effort to locate them with an unarmed Indian guide, Red Caps fired, the militiamen perceived the situation as an ambush, Woodward immediately killed the guide, and the militiamen tried but failed to return fire and take Red Cap casualties. They renewed their effort the next day, to misdirected but, to them, great effect. Choosing to target the rancherias instead of the concealed armed Karuks and Yuroks, the company killed over two-dozen Indians and took another two-dozen prisoner. Volunteers continued their bloodlust through February, chasing down Indians trying to escape their vulnerable homes along the river. Settlers killed nearly one hundred individuals outside of any engagement that might have been 101 Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest, 166; Madley, An American Genocide, 235. 102 Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest, 168. 59 considered a “battle.”103 (Note: even in battle, Karuks, Yuroks, and other Indigenous allies were fighting a defensive war.) March ultimately brought little change. Many non-Native miners, their work seriously disrupted as they congregated in fear, continued to push for total annihilation of Indians living along the river. Unclear and competitive leadership among militia units increased hostile sentiments among volunteers and prevented the conflict from winding down.104 Unwilling to simply watch the stalemate and likely anticipating a displaced massacre targeting their communities, Hupas and Weitchpecks reportedly offered to help entice the surrender of holdout warriors and put an end to the sporadic warfare. In the tried-and-true method of regional communication among local Native communities, “runners were sent above and below to inform the other tribes of the proposition made by the Hoopas.”105 The coordination, vis-à-vis these runners, was well underway when Native leaders called off the operation; apparently, whites in the vicinity of the Hupa volunteers threatened that “if [the messengers] left Hoopa they should never return to their homes again.”106 Settler fear was evidently too great to accommodate Indian allies. And so another month passed without tangible progress, all the while leaving Indigenous people vulnerable to attack under the guise of miner necessity and safety. The conflict finally wound down when Captain Judah dismissed the trigger-happy volunteers from their service. He then sent another wave of runners to entice Native 103 Madley, An American Genocide, 236. 104 Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest, 171-172. 105 Ibid., 173. 106 Ibid. 60 parties to meet not as a militia unit of their own but for diplomatic efforts to end the war and designate contested spaces between communities.107 Government agents decided to ask “Red Caps” to surrender and relocate to the recently established, narrow Klamath (River) Reservation. Perhaps seeing this development as a victory, perhaps exhausted with dwindling resources, many Native people agreed, and the Klamath Indian Reservation, created by executive order, became a new home that would come to be characterized by brutal incarceration and starvation.108 It was also bad land. The reservation did not, therefore, truly resolve the issues at stake, even if it was, more or less, the culminating event in thus particular war on the Klamath. In the broader geography, casualty rates did not suggest that warfare had ceased at all. In the summer of 1855, violence shifted to the upper Klamath and targeted Shastas in the “Humbug War,” which Madley defines as “a genocidal ranger militia campaign.”109 The next year, he says, “was only somewhat less” violent.110 The U.S. government continued to fund militia campaigns. One of the largest funding bills came in 1857.111 Hunger and exposure (both caused by colonizers, lest they be understood as unintended consequences of more official colonial disruption like relocation) drove Native people to raid for survival. Retribution for these raids often took the form of execution. Killings 107 Ibid., 174-175. 108 Ibid., 175-176; Madley, An American Genocide, 237. Also note that this is a Klamath “River” Reservation in California, not to be confused with the larger Klamath Reservation of Southern Oregon near Chiloquin and Klamath Falls. 109 Madley, An American Genocide, 241-242. 110 Ibid., 244. 111 Ibid., 253-254, 354-355. 61 expanded to sport by the end of the decade. The desire to eradicate all Native people remained with armed mining communities, and with few actual ramifications to fear, settlers killed Indians wantonly. Karuks alone suffered massacres in 1856, one near Happy Camp on April 20, and again later in the month. In these attacks, vigilantes killed at least seventeen people.112 Even though state politics and personnel mattered in shaping the genocide in California, the scope of immediate violence of the Gold Rush era extended beyond state borders. Siskiyou County and its surroundings would continue to be a home for largescale violence for decades to come, not always on the contested banks of the Klamath, but certainly on other rivers, in valleys, and famously, in jagged cracks and crevices and hidden caves hewn from volcanic rock in the Lava Beds during the Modoc War.113 Several scholars have examined ways in which patterns of vigilante violence in Northern California and Southern Oregon share timelines, tactics, and even perpetrators. In fact, warfare on the Rogue River directly fueled warfare on the Klamath River just south, and vice versa. Early warfare on the Rogue “inspired a new surge of annihilationist violence that soon swept through Northern California.”114 Whites in Yreka alone likely pursued Karuks, Yuroks, Modocs, and Rogue River Indians in their fear of a general 112 Ibid., 244. 113 Madley recalls the Mounted Volunteers of Siskiyou County Expedition of 1857 in An American Genocide, 254-256. He then recounts the Second Klamath and Humboldt Expedition (“Wintoon War”) of 1858-1859 in An American Genocide, 263-265. The Modoc War, 1872-1873, became the most well-known regional conflict. It took place over county and state borders in Northern California and Southern Oregon. See Boyd Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Jeff C. Riddle, The Indian History of the Modoc War and the Causes that Led to It (San Francisco: Marnell, 1914); Robert Aquinas McNally, The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017). 114 Madley, An American Genocide, 221. 62 Indian war—pursuits that spanned the state border, given that such borders had merely been imposed over standing Indigenous geopolitical systems.115 As warfare progressed, “the pattern of first attacking and pacifying tribal villages, followed by forcing the removal of the survivors, was true to both the northern California and southern Oregon coasts.”116 The Modoc War, which ended in 1873 with the execution of Modoc warriors and the forced relocation of other bands of the Modoc Nation to Oklahoma, was “one of the last efforts, of many, to exterminate Indigenous People.”117 In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Northern California transformed greatly from the shape it had taken during the Gold Rush. Akins and Bauer note, “By the 1880s, settler violence shifted from overt assaults on Indigenous bodies…to assaults on Indigenous People’s relationships with land, water, and culture.”118 Indigenous People navigated and survived all of these phases of violence, often by rather ingenious strategies that required Indigenous knowledge that settlers simply did not possess and could not replicate. Survival Strategies Systemic violence devastated communities and homelands, but it did not end them entirely. In what became Siskiyou County (which contains the Karuk communities that would eventually produce Redwood Highway Marathon runners), Native people 115 Ibid. Also see Gray Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 16, 205- 210. 116 David G. Lewis and Thomas J. Connolly, “White American Violence on Tribal Peoples on the Oregon Coast,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 120, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 373. 117 Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 128. 118 Ibid., 179-180. 63 employed various survival strategies that, to a large extent, were successful. Many of those strategies demonstrated a keen knowledge of the local landscape beyond the mental world of settlers’ concerns for gold dust and arable land. Native people throughout the entire state undertook resistance efforts that enabled survival through and long beyond the genocidal years of the Gold Rush. These efforts deserve recognition, particularly for their endurance and adaptability. Avoiding death in the 1850s and 60s transformed into strategies for land protection and cultural persistence in legal and social channels into the twentieth century. Adjacent Native communities along the Klamath had long developed ways to communicate and coordinate in the face of enemy attack. White settlers did not impose the initial need to mobilize communities and protect families. The government treaty party that came with Redick McKee in 1852 witnessed infrastructures that already facilitated survival throughout the region. The treaty party typically spoke in the expected, evaluative language of “civilized” outsiders encountering unfamiliar Indigenous nations. They insisted that Indians relying on abundant salmon “were all fat. They [were] generally repulsive in countenance as well as filthy in person.” White commentators also described the first dug-out canoes they encountered as “rude and clumsy.”119 Occasionally, however, the insult-prone commentators actually took note of the sophistication of subsistence and communication technologies that sustained and linked communities during increasingly dangerous times. These infrastructures, ranging from submerged fishing nets and traps to messaging systems by land and by river, were some of the myriad ways Klamath River Indians organized and protected their 119 Gibbs, “Journal of the Expedition of Colonel Redick M’Kee,” 125. 64 communities. When passing through Yurok and Karuk territory, the journal-keeper Gibbs mentioned “signal or ‘telegraph trees,” highly visible landmarks from the bank that stood near individual villages. “In time of danger or of death,” Gibbs reported, “A fire kindled beneath them…informs the neighboring tribes of the necessity or misfortune of its occupants.”120 This beacon relay united villages via the natural resource that grounded, or more literally, watered human life in the region—the Klamath River. Despite their initial negative characterization of Native canoes, the treaty party eventually traveled with local Native guides in them and readily admitted the boatmen’s aptitude and skill, navigating river rapids with “singular dexterity.”121 The river had run through the heart and soul of local life for centuries, its influence written into the contours of everyday life and survival strategies that would remain relevant in the age of American settler colonialism starting in earnest in the nineteenth century. While attempting to gather Indian authorities for treaty meetings, Indian Office agents utilized another local communication system that had long facilitated communication and coordination throughout the continent and world: they sent out Indian runners. These runners were deployed as part of an effort to assemble tribes from the Shasta Valley and along the Klamath and Scott rivers—an area encompassing some hundreds of square miles decorated with mountain ridges and deep valleys. Of course, running was part of standing Indigenous diplomacy, not invented or utilized for the benefit of white visitors. Akins and Bauer discuss the importance of runners in We Are the Land. “Native runners,” they explain, “possessed several advantages, which enabled 120 Ibid., 150-151. 121 Ibid., 176. 65 them to influence the treaty process. They knew California’s physical geography better than the agents. Runners understood where it was safe to travel and where it was not. They also understood California’s social and political worlds…[they] also knew California’s varied languages.”122 These skills came from centuries of cultural practice. Indigenous diplomacy and communication systems enabled efforts that required regional coordination in times of war and peace. Akins and Bauer’s assessment also calls attention to another important fact of survival: negotiating treaties was an essential means of maintaining control over continued diplomacy and land use. They explain, “Treaty making in California followed a formula—part Indigenous, part American,” which involved dances, feasts, speeches, gifts, and other old practices “common to treaty negotiations since the American Revolution.”123 Furthermore, Indigenous leaders at the treaty table had a potential ally in McKee, who was sympathetic to the suffering of Native peoples at the hands of violent miners. In fact, white Californians hated McKee for his willingness to draw up treaties that left Native people with so many crucial sites and rights that they wanted. The Senate refused to ratify the treaties, but Indigenous and white American diplomats had drafted them in good faith. Native people were always active players in that process, using this avenue of diplomacy to maintain control over important aspects of their lives and homelands. Community divisions and demography changed very rapidly as more and more settlers penetrated the river system. As not all miners came with pointed rifles, it was not 122 Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 146. 123 Ibid., 144-145. 66 altogether uncommon for newcomers to forge relationships with Native people and enter into partnerships from the first generation of contact that would blur the lines of division and inclusion through the era of interracial violence. These types of relationships may not have been constructed with the express desire to seek protection from either partner’s racial community, but interracial relationships certainly facilitated survival. In fact, shared family ancestry among Native and white communities would shape the lives of many families through the bloody late-nineteenth century. This was the situation for the Southard family that sent three runners to San Francisco in 1927. A Southern Methodist from Louisiana named John Wesley (after the founder of Methodism himself), “sought his fortune far down the Klamath River” in 1849.124 This patriarch was the first John Wesley Southard in California. He married a Karuk woman, Yoch Chan, usually referred to as “Jane,” and their first son was Robert Lee Southard, apparently named after the most prestigious Confederate, General Robert E. Lee.125 His oldest son who lived past infancy was the next John Wesley Southard, and Marion and Gorham soon followed (among other siblings). The names alone imply a continued commitment to the branch of family history rooted in Southern Methodism, but the family remained in and around both gold mines and Native communities over the years. In fact, Robert Lee Southard became a Justice of the Peace and School Superintendent at Ferry Point outside of Happy Camp. The site was important to Karuks, 124 Leon L. Loofbourow, In Search of God’s Gold: A Story of Continued Christian Pioneering in California (San Francisco: The Historical Society of the California-Nevada Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, 1950), 212. 125 James Berry, discussion. 67 and the school would house children whose surnames surface in current and past Tribal Councils. Of course, biracial families were not necessarily safe; one would not, in some places through these decades of violence, have wanted to publicly identify as Indian and potentially become a target of miner suspicion and aggression, whatever their regular contributions to mining towns might be. Silence was supposed to buy safety; this is why even in official policy, orders would distinguish between “good Indians” who silently complied with government programs and “hostiles” who pursued autonomous community goals. Miners and volunteer militias, however, could easily ignore these attributed divisions and feel emboldened to attack and destroy rancherias without a preliminary study of arms or military goals among their inhabitants. Living under the radar of murderous neighbors certainly extended many family lines. Akins and Bauer attribute the recorded decline of Indigenous populations at the end of the nineteenth century in part to “intentional disappearance into other populations,” as well as factors that had truly claimed lives rather than hidden people.126 Ashley Riley Sousa has discussed the strategic ties between Native Hawaiians and California Indians in the Sacramento Valley to make a similar point about fluid racial and ethnic identities offering protection. Indigenous people from California and Hawai¢i established new kinship networks in the era of genocide through which they could navigate and even “transgress ethnic, racial, and national borders at a time when such boundaries were strictly defined and reinforced in the United States,” capitalizing on white uncertainty about their identities. These networks revitalized Indigenous 126 Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 176-177. 68 communities already decades-deep in colonial displacement and population decline born of violence and disease.127 When settlers wrought such chaos following the discovery of gold at New Helvetia, massive efforts had to be coordinated among California Indians to defend homelands, and new survival strategies had to emerge alongside practiced ones to give the targets of violence the opportunity to outlive the onslaught. Native people could delay or redirect miner influence by disrupting their economic activity. Certainly, miners did have reason to fear Indian attack, though their sources frame encounters as “murders and robberies” unrelated to a genocidal colonial war that targeted Native communities from every angle.128 Gibbs noted that “several whole trains had been plundered [by Indians] reducing their owners to actual ruin; and a large amount of property stolen from time to time, in blankets, tools, provisions, and animals upon which the miners depended for their subsistence.” Incoming miners on the Upper Klamath did not congregate in large enough numbers to resist these attacks, as the general mining enterprise in the area consisted of “the scattering of detached parties or individuals through the hills.”129 As tensions boiled over in the winter of 1854/55, “So great was the excitement and anxiety created…that miners deserted their claims and congregated at the different trading posts…”130 The consequences of their loose social organization and the success that small 127 Ashely Riley Sousa, “Unsifted: Hawaiian Indian Coalescence in Central California, 1864-1970,” in Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the past and Engaging the Present, eds. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Jeffrey Ostler, and Joshua L Reid (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021), 117-138. Quote from page 119. 128 Gibbs, “Journal of the Expedition of Colonel Redick M’Kee,” 156. 129 Ibid., 162. 130 “Threatened Hostilities with the Indians,” Humboldt Times, January 13, 1855. 69 groups of mobilized Karuks and others had in halting miners’ advances convinced miners that extermination or removal would be their only options for surviving and securing lands. Native families had to decide to try to peacefully live in close proximity to non- Native settlers, continue the fight, or avoid the threat of violence altogether. Many Native individuals reasoned that they should keep their weapons or obtain new ones. The Senate’s failure to ratify treaties left Indian families in limbo. A white commentator in the decades following the height of the Gold Rush suggested, “the Indians concluded that they had been wantonly deceived by [McKee],” and suspected that his claims of the number of incoming whites must have been overexaggerated to intimidate them. The author then qualifies that “it must be remembered that the Indians at the time had no correct ideas regarding the numerical strength or warlike power of the whites.”131 Indeed, it would have been difficult to anticipate the behavior of the American settler apparatus that made promises and threats alike. Pursuing justice through arms was a fringe yet effective strategy for several years. The Yurok Tribe holds that the war “nearly brought a halt to the non-Indians settlement effort.”132 Violence between settlers and Indians in the region erupted as soon as settlers started flocking to the Northern Mines by the end of 1851; the so-called Red Cap War ended four years later. Papers reported that Indians broke into residences and stole weapons. Once armed, they were able to purchase, “it is said, as much as fifty pounds of powder at a time.”133 Settlers expressed great anxiety over the “white brother-in-laws” aiding Indian 131 Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest, 160-161. 132 Yurok Tribe, 2007, 7 http://visityurokcountry.com/content/uploads/2019/09/Yurok-History.pdf. 133 “Indian Hostilities—Three Men Killed” Humboldt Times, January 20, 1855. 70 mobilization by supplying ammunition. These open channels of supply, facilitated so regularly by “unscrupulous traders,” caused settlers in Orleans Bar to first and foremost address white suppliers in their January 1855 resolutions.134 As ongoing warfare frustrated settlers, they particularly blamed white informants reporting to Indians rather than accept that Indians could resist them with their own ingenuity and maneuver capitalist markets to their own advantage.135 On the other hand, there were many reasons why Native people might have come to see voluntary disarmament as a strategy for survival and even eventual peace, especially when tensions mounted at the mid-decade mark and the outlook for resistance may have seemed bleak. The Orleans Bar meeting revealed the centrality of Indian militarization in settler anxieties. Many Native families did volunteer guns, especially under threat. It was routine for officials to promise peace and provisions in exchange for “good” behavior. Reservations in ancestral homelands could safeguard lands and customs for families and future generations and were therefore worth pursuing in earnest. In the case of McKee’s proposed reservations, Congress balked precisely because settlers perceived the designated lands as entirely too valuable for Indian use. Settlers coveted that land and felt entitled to it.136 Families or individuals pursuing nonconfrontational strategies for survival often relocated entirely, not risking unprovoked attack or the consequences of directly 134 Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest, 164. 135 For example, commentators in Humboldt County reported that Indians held out at a particular confrontation and escaped defeat solely “thanks to their white friends.” “Threatened Hostilities with the Indians,” Humboldt Times, January 13, 1855. 136 Hoopes, “Redick McKee and the Humboldt Bay Region,” 208-209. 71 coordinating the Red Cap resistance movement. A popular strategy was to seek refuge in the nearby (and, to Indigenous families, intimately well-known) mountains. Others migrated through the mountains to consolidate with other Native communities slightly more removed from the brunt of the genocide, utilizing or creating extended kinship networks. White observers frequently took note of this tactic but could offer very few details on it. Once Indians went into the mountains, it seemed, they were entirely outside the settler world, even if murderous miners wished to pursue them. When the McKee expedition passed through Karuk territory near Happy Camp, they saw that groups of Indians were already relocating to mountain villages because of early miner attacks.137 A “miner’s code” disseminated along the Klamath River the next year outlined proper punishments for addressing Indian crimes against settlers. A white death, according to this code, warranted “the destruction of the ranch to which the criminal belonged and its inhabitants if known. If not known, by that of those nearest the spot.”138 Up against the threat of indiscriminate and mass retaliation by destruction, Karuks moved vulnerable family members and valuable property into the Marble Mountains. Soon it became clear that the mountains provided the best defense against mounting white hostility, and people likely relocated in droves.139 137 Gibbs, “Journal of the Expedition of Colonel Redick M’Kee,” 156. 138 George Gibbs, J. A. Whaley, C. Woodford, J. W. Holt, Chas. Liscom, R. Wiley, and Edw. Kingwood to the governor of California, June 27, 1852, Indian War Papers, California State Archives, quoted in Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, 119. 139 I make this claim not only because of casual conversations with Karuk contacts, but by reading Hurtado’s account of mountain migrations and his population estimates about regional Native populations, including Karuks. See Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, 120-121. 72 By November 1854, special agent C. Wheeler reported that efforts to assemble Indians and remove them to reservations required actually going into the mountains with Indian guides. Though this effort made their mountain encampments seem easily enough locatable, advancing miner parties usually abandoned their efforts to pursue Indian escapees across the threshold into the mountains—this had been the case for awhile. As Indians “retreated to the recesses of the mountains, beyond the reach of an avenging arm” near Happy Camp in 1851, pursuing miners had let them flee.140 When the war with the Red Caps began, the mountain refuge was part and parcel of their strategy. Emptying rancherias throughout the region meant fewer obvious targets for white attackers. Indeed, soldiers sent to the Klamath as reinforcements also noted the vacancy at the riversides of the Trinidad, Mad, and Little Rivers.141 Women and children occasionally took extra arms and ammunition into their hideouts for future usage.142 The strategy, while so heavily implemented by and large, was not available to all groups. A group of “Valley Indians” (it’s hard to determine who they might have been, though perhaps Sinkyones) had told the McKee party that “they were always whipped back when they attempted to penetrate the mountains” even before the increased threat of settler violence, as other Indigenous groups controlled the territory.143 Hurtado also notes, “Around Humboldt Bay about eight hundred Wiyots [just north of Gibbs’s encounter] remained in their rancherías. At Fort Humboldt, Colonel Robert Buchanan attributed their 140 Wells, History of Siskiyou County, 127. 141 Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest, 165. 142 Ibid., 164. 143 Gibbs, “Journal of the Expedition of Colonel Redick M’Kee,” 120-121. 73 peacefulness to laziness. In truth, they had no place to go because the mountain Indians were their enemies. The Wiyots had to take their chances with whites.”144 Though the settler disruption to power dynamics in the region altered an Indigenous world, it did not overrun all standing historical alliances and animosities. If a common enemy provided opportunities for new intertribal kinship networks, competition for scarce space and survival resources put Indigenous groups in competition.145 Just along the Klamath, Karuks, Yuroks, and Hupas both formed and denied alliances in particular moments. Akins and Bauer note that in the so-called Red Cap War, Hupas “supplied the insurgents with arms and food and hired mercenaries to fight for them” without “overtly participating in [the] battles.”146 Hupas attempted to coordinate resistance to government efforts to remove them the following decade. When “Hupa runners failed to convince Ca-pekw (or Hrkwr), a Yurok town at Stone Lagoon, to join the war against the settlers,” Hupas and other allies destroyed the town. Akins and Bauer explain this attack as “displaced violence [against] their Yurok neighbors, who attempted to remain neutral in the Civil War-era battles.”147 Other Yurok and Karuk leaders also refused to coordinate in armed resistance. With sustained pressure on miners and resistance to government policy, however, the Hupa did manage to “[secure] a measure of control over the valley” by establishing a reservation in their homelands and maintain 144 Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, 122. 145 Reorganization of kinship networks was already a standing historical practice by this time. Disease and famine ravaged the lands that became California when earlier colonizers, like the Spanish, arrived. One survival strategy amidst these perils was joining new networks. See Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 5; Sousa, “Unsifted.” 146 Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 151. 147 Ibid., 153. 74 fishing, hunting, and gathering rights there.148 From far upriver to sites along the coast, Klamath River peoples employed resistance and survival strategies that kept many of them in their homelands, albeit an altered space and one that they would need to share with settlers moving forwards.149 The movement and escape of Indigenous families was written into the subtext of early state records. Census data was so seriously fraught in part because so many Native people periodically moved outside of zones of enumeration. In the settler imagination and mapping, regional Native populations were vanishing as settler towns grew. The numbers on their surface tell a grim tale about the destruction of Native communities and the rise of settler society. While settler society did disrupt and damage Native communities so severely, a hidden narrative in the data remains: the story of thousands of Native people successfully outmaneuvering whites committed to genocide. As Akins and Bauer say, “At times, California Indians hid to survive, but they never left.”150 County data is all but useless to compare from 1860 to 1910 because boundary lines changed so many times, but it is easiest to collect in that form, and the outer boundaries of these counties as a whole did not fluctuate like their subdivisions at the county level did. Figure 2.5 charts changes in enumerated Indian populations by county, and the total number of Indians 148 Ibid., 154. 149 Some of these very same survival strategies saw Native people in Southern Oregon through their share of the “wholesale murder” happening throughout the region. Mark Tveskov explains that “American Indian identity persisted in southwest and western Oregon” largely because families were able to “[maintain] tenure within ancestral landscapes” off of reservations. Immediately confronted by violence, many families used their keen knowledge of their homelands to evade it. Of course, many also willingly relocated to reservations after other options seemed to disappear or intermarried with white men to create biracial generations that, though marginalized, would uphold many important indigenous traditions and knowledge. See Mark A. Tveskov, “Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 3 (September 2007): 438. Gray Whaley also discusses intermarriage in Oregon and Collapse of Illahee, 220-221. 150 Ibid., 3. 75 enumerated in the census during that time period—the top-most, black line—illustrates a general trend of reemergence of Indian residents at the end of the nineteenth century. That trend matches the currents of violence and survival migrations previously discussed in this chapter. Figure 2.5. Indian Population by County (as enumerated in the US Census), 1860-1910. By author and consultant Steve Chadwick. When miner-related violence died down, Native families faced new perils and possibilities. Some, especially multiracial families, integrated into a new generation of working-class Californians. They shaped society as it molded into the modern era. But survival also meant keeping Indigenous cultures alive through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, when the government pursued cultural genocide through forced schooling and assimilation in the wake of physical genocide through manhunting. These are issues central to the following chapter. 76 In 2007, the Yurok Tribe published a booklet designed to chronicle “the numerous threats the Tribe has survived and [provide] a glimpse into what the Tribe has overcome since initial contact began.” The booklet notes that elders in the early twenty- first century often recalled their forced schooling at Chemawa Indian School in Oregon and Riverside Indian School in California as “horrifying experience[s],” recollections consistent with thousands of other former students of these and other off-reservation boarding schools. Some Yurok elders ran away, “traveling hundreds of miles to return home to their families,” whereupon “they lived with the constant fear of being caught and returned to the school.”151 This horror was so systematic because so many Yuroks lived on reservations after 1855 when the government established a reservation on the lower Klamath. Many families then relocated first to the Smith River Reservation and eventually to the Hoopa Valley Reservation.152 Agents could easily pull students from these sites. Karuks never had a designated reservation, nor did they consolidate on other reservations to the same extent that their neighbors did. The Karuk struggle to move on from the era of genocide similarly included this type of engagement with schools, but it also involved navigating ongoing land conflicts with settler society, dealing through agents who seldom ventured into Karuk Country, and maintaining livelihoods in and around their homelands. The eight Karuk runners that raced in 1927 had rural upbringings and manual labor jobs. They lived in former mining towns and still mined gold for supplemental income. Mainstream American society misconstrued Indigenous 151 Yurok Tribe, 2007, 10, http://visityurokcountry.com/content/uploads/2019/09/Yurok-History.pdf. 152 Yurok Tribe, 2007, 8, http://visityurokcountry.com/content/uploads/2019/09/Yurok-History.pdf. 77 cultures and their relationship to modernity in ways that ignored the basic realities of Indigenous and multiracial families within the larger social fabric. The next chapter explores post-Gold Rush society. 78 CHAPTER III VANISHING AND VISIBLE INDIANS Tuesday, June 14-Thursday, June 16 Even the best sprinters in the world reach peak velocity and start to fatigue within 100 meters, on a rubber track, in ideal race conditions. When the gun went off in San Francisco, the marathon runners bolted off the steps of the Civic Center and hammered down Market Street. They whizzed past the storefronts and spectators watching the commotion through thick, gray fog. Mile One was the fastest of 480. The group progressed towards the docks at the north end of the city. Faster strides yet. The longest belonged to “Sweek Eagle,” who stood at 5 foot, 11 inches and weighed just over 160 pounds. He was the Goliath of the group; some of his competitors barely reached his chin.153 A shorter, “sturdy” physique characterized Indian runners in the public imagination. Spectators and journalists routinely commented on Indian runners’ short, “choppy” strides that were unlike the textbook techniques promoted by white coaches across the Western athletic world—long, reaching strides on the balls of the feet.154 “Sweek Eagle,” at least, must have looked like a hurdler by comparison. They bounded towards the Bay. Then, they stopped. Winded from their sprint, the runners had reached the top of the city’s peninsula. In 1927, no Golden Gate Bridge existed to span the strait that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific. Though major items on state agendas, bridges 153 “Indians Train Hard for Long Distance Run,” The Anniston Star, June 16, 1927. 154 “The Natural Athlete,” The Daily Iowan, May 20, 1927; “Tarahumaras to be Taught Modern Running Methods,” Borger Daily Herald, Tuesday, April 19, 1927. 79 and paved roads weren’t yet ubiquitous even in heavily traveled areas. The interruption was further proof that roads would increase life’s efficiency on the West Coast. The men shuffled onto a ferry and caught their breath as the boat carried them north. San Francisco shrunk into the distance, the Zunis creeping ever-further away from their Southwest home, and the California Indians beginning their treks back into familiar territory along an unfamiliar route. This was the one and only time the racers would be permitted to advance by any means other than foot. The race resumed in Sausalito. Officials started the race clock there at 11:22am. The runners filed out, the fields of Marin County serving as a backdrop for the ten-or-so mile hike to San Rafael. There, the first cash prize would be awarded to the frontrunner at a checkpoint in town. Sirens sounded as the runners approached. Last-minute jostling left the youngest Zuni entrant, thirty-two-year-old Ernest Jamon (strictly referred to as “Jamon” during the marathon) in front at the checkpoint. Town representatives promised a purse of $100 to be collected at the race’s completion should he make it that far. Running into town first was an investment for this reason: runners had to balance the allure of a cash prize for speed with the need to endure hundreds of miles of hills and a week’s worth of summer conditions ahead. It was a real concern. Surely it was exciting for the viewers in Marin County to watch Jamon, who the county had chosen as its representative, put his name in contention for a lead spot so early in the race. But any competitive runner knows the peril of running in front. It’s really hard to stay there. 80 Just north of San Rafael, Henry “Flying Cloud” Thomas took over the lead.155 After logging over fifty miles for Day One, Jamon’s blisters got the better of him and he temporarily dropped out of the race at Santa Rosa. He hoped to recover but the injuries ultimately hindered him so much that he left it to his two fellow Zunis to take on all the California Indians through the hills and forests that stretched over the next four-hundred miles. This wasn’t Zuni desert running through familiar mesas. As the marathon wore on, some competitors slowed to a walk. Others after Jamon had to delay their progress on doctor’s orders or call it quits at the risk of serious injury. The course doctor (who, by the way, was the cousin of President Calvin Coolidge) ordered Karuk entrant Thunder Cloud to pause for foot injuries in Petaluma. Mad Bull Southard pulled ahead on the second day of the race and maintained a small lead over the determined “Cloud” by 8:00 the next morning. Rushing Water, the youngest Southard brother, trailed in third, and the two remaining Zunis, brothers Melika and Chochee, ran together in fourth while Jamon recovered, now 30 miles back in Cloverdale. Even with a dwindling field, the runners that came through towns found themselves unwitting stars in parades and portraits in the local press from beginning to end. In the dead of night or early morning, residents of the towns along the route came out to see the marathon and cheer on the runners. “Eclipse Shares Honors with Marathon Runners,” announced the Healdsburg Enterprise after the first night of the race. There 155 “Indians Start 480 Mile Run Here Tuesday,” Sausalito News, June 18, 1927; Lee Torliatt, “Indian Marathons 1920’s Runners Go for Cash and Glory,” The Journal of the Sonoma County Historical Society 2 (1999): 6-9. 81 were “two star attractions” on display, as people eagerly awaited the runners on the road and got to witness a total lunar eclipse above.156 Enthusiasm was especially pronounced when, like in the case of Jamon running into “Marvelous Marin” County, a runner came through the county or town in which a chamber of commerce had claimed sponsorship. By the time the runners filed through Willits, nearly 200 miles north of the starting line, Chochee and Melika had moved into third position. Melika was Willits’ adopted hometown hero and when he came into view, a roaring crowd gave way to the sound of the town band that marched out to meet him. While all eyes were on him, he grabbed some dust from the ground, threw it into the air, and performed what appeared to the audience to be a type of ceremonial prayer—“a tribal dance to implore the gods for success” in which “he muttered incantations, and chewed and spat berries,” one observer said.157 Indeed, the papers eagerly reported any “weird [read: non-Christian] religious ceremonies.”158 Was the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon a last opportunity to see genuine American Indians in action, people wondered? Certainly the promotional materials suggested as much: “Out of this race,” the marathon committee chairman, Harry Lutgens, declared, “Will come a keener and more personal interest in the fast-vanishing tribes of Indians who still cling to the haunts of their ancestors.”159 156 “Eclipse Shares Honors with Marathon Runners,” Healdsburg Enterprise, June 16, 1927. 157 Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire, 116. 158 “Indian Tribes Will Participate in Great California Marathon,” Sausalito News, April 2, 1927. 159 “Tentative Plans Announced for Indian Marathon Over Redwood Empire Route,” Sausalito News, May 7, 1927. 82 But were the Karuks in boxing shoes real Indians? They didn’t look like it, as one disappointed nine-year-old would lament. What did it even really mean to be an Indigenous American in the late 1920s? And what did it mean for a committee of middle- class white men to design a stunt that would render these “vanishing” Indians visible? Finding the answers to these questions, as well as the reasons for their complexity, requires an investigation into both federal Indian policy in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and into social conceptions of Indianness that prevailed during that period. The Highway Marathon runners performed for white Americans who had very specific and ill-informed ideas about Native people and the destiny of their communities and cultures. In California’s so-called “Redwood Empire,” as with the United States more broadly, there was already a historically uneasy coupling of Indigeneity and modernity, categories long (and often still) considered to be an oxymoronic pairing. Because of the endurance of this perceived disconnect, mainstream American society has routinely overlooked important contributions by Native individuals and communities in shaping modern institutions. Native people influenced developing society amid the warped expectations and ongoing oppression delivered to them by settler society. In the marathon and the Redwood Empire, for example, Native people helped build the entertainment and tourist industries of the emergent modern region, as well as the regional identity that embodied those industries and others. In order to do that, they had to navigate the specific politics and society that defined the moment. This chapter sets mainstream expectations and government mandates alongside regional realities; what boosters sold—what the Bureau of Indian Affairs espoused— what white residents envisioned—versus how Native people in California actually lived, 83 and how all these people built their shared communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This foray identifies the racism that built post-Gold Rush Northern California, particularly in rural communities, and also the survival and cultural assertion of Native peoples who continued to live in and shape the economies, cultures, and environments of their ancestral homelands in the face of stereotypes that sought to police Indian authenticity and lament its apparent passing. Perhaps the most important point to be made about the assimilation era in question is that it failed. The settler colonial mission to erase Indianness through total assimilation never came to fruition, and the advent and ingenuity of Indigenous modernity should not be confused for total assimilation. This point is not meant to downplay the damage of assimilationist policy or suggest that cultural erasure did not result from it. It is also certainly not meant to suggest that Native people were monolithic about legislation, incentives, or modernity in general. Examining a set of specific policies and considering an on-the-ground example in the context of sports allows for a manageable vantage point into these expansive and important issues. Imagining Indians in Modern America Central to the settler ideology that excluded Native people in imaginings of modern American towns and cities was the myth of the “Vanishing Race.” Popular conceptions held that even without intentional, widespread extermination campaigns designed to systematically wipe out Indigenous communities through violence, Native people and Native ways of life were simply doomed to extinction by virtue of their “primitiveness,” so fundamentally incompatible with the technologies and social institutions of American modernity. In truth, expectations of passive and impending 84 Indian extinction had circulated in American literature and popular culture since the colonial era. English Captain Thomas Dermer wrote of the famous “Squanto” as the last of his people in 1619.160 One of the most famous “last of” stories came two full centuries later in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), followed for another century by similar titles. The myth gained even more ground at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly following the largest “Indian wars” and the Wounded Knee massacre.161 As mentioned in the Introduction, photographer Edward Curtis staged the famous “The Vanishing Race” photograph of Navajo people on horseback walking into southwestern mesas in 1903 and dime novelist Zane Grey published The Vanishing American in serial periodicals in the early 1920s. The long timeline of the process never seemed to discourage people from invoking it to explain present circumstances, so in the early twentieth century, non-Native Americans had generations of practice imagining Indian death and ascendant, exclusionary modern civilization. Iterations of the myth targeting California Indians specifically picked up in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, characterized by voyeuristic documentation efforts and salvage anthropology for Native artifacts and crafts. White Californians took particular interest in the woman named (in Spanish) Juana Maria, also known as the “Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island,” and the “Last of the Nicoleño,” when government 160 Thomas Dermer to Samuel Purchase, “Letter of Thomas Dermer, Describing His Passage from Maine to Virginia, A.D. 1619, from Purchas’s Pilgrims, London: 1625,” (New York: New York Historical Society, 1841), 343-353, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdclccn.11022272/?sp=11&r=- 1.178,0.741,3.356,1.523,0 161 For more on Vanishing Race ideology, see Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting; Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Book, 1979); “All The Real Indians Died Off” and “The Only Real Indians Are Full-Bloods, and They Are Dying Off” in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, eds., “All The Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths about Native Americans (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 7-13 and 76-81. 85 agents removed her from the off-coast island to the Santa Barbara Mission in the 1850s. Even more famous was “Ishi,” often described as the last “wild” Indian, period. He survived the Gold Rush genocide and, according to the stories, emerged from the forest and into modern civilization, never having seen it before, in 1911. The kinship network to which he belonged (primarily the Yahi) reportedly suffered and fled settler violence and lived for many years in hiding in the Sierras—another instance of successful mountain migration in the face of genocide. The Butte County Sheriff eventually encountered and arrested Ishi, by which time he was the only remaining member of his encampment. Berkeley anthropologists then studied and housed him in San Francisco before he died of tuberculosis in 1916. Historian William Bauer Jr. discusses the pervasiveness and “looming shadow” of the Ishi story in enduring conceptions of California Indians and California Indian history. “[Ishi’s] death in San Francisco,” says Bauer, “confirmed that California Indians could not adapt to modern America” in the minds of non-Native Americans.162 School children in the state began learning about “the last wild Indian in North America, a man of Stone Age culture,” who died in the city.163 They accepted the story as proof of the Vanishing Race thesis. Photographers like Edward Curtis, anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber, and collectors and buyers in market economies all worked to “salvage” vestiges of Native cultures before they ceased to exist. This type of effort was, as Terri Castaneda says, the 162 William Bauer, Jr., We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here, xi. 163 The popular source on Ishi was Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America, written by Theodora Kroeber, the wife of the famous Berkeley Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who studied and reportedly befriends Ishi in San Francisco. This quote comes from that book: Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 196), 10. 86 “very public handmaiden” of colonialism.164 Scholars collected photographs, stories, and artifacts as tourists sought Indian crafts like pottery, blankets, jewelry, and, most prominent and valuable among Klamath River Basin nations, woven baskets. For white people, these were all recognizable accoutrements of Indian existence and reflected patterns of expected Indian behavior, from crafting to slowly dying, or its celebrated cousin, full assimilation, which would similarly render Indian culture extinct. Cultural disappearance through assimilation complemented the perceived natural loss of Indigenous life to ensure full-scale Indigenous erasure. Traditional Western and vocational education, religious conversion to Christianity, land seizure, and forced adoption of the English language and American customs aimed to eradicate Indianness and complete the American surge towards modernity. But, again: settler colonialism failed. Indians, in California and across the continent, did not vanish or cease to be Indian. With great dynamism, they shaped the broader economy and culture of post- genocide Northern California. The familiar stereotypes plagued California Indians even as they steadily entered the workforce, often in remarkably similar capacities to their non- Native neighbors and created multiracial families. Many of the challenges they faced stemmed at least in part from federal Indian policy. Indian Policy During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Policy and public perceptions of Native nations created an imagined mental world of Indian pasts, presents, and (limited) futures. The government, come the final decades of the nineteenth century, adjusted its strategies to cope with the “Indian Problem” as it 164 Terri Castaneda, “Salvaging the Anthropologist-Other at California’s Tribal College,” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Spring, 2020), 308. 87 existed at that time. Largescale acts of coordinated violence against Native people marked the end of the century. That violence ultimately gave way to misguided humanitarian efforts to “civilize” and “assimilate” Indian people by various means on and off reservations, though these processes also continued settler colonial objectives to obtain Indigenous land and erase Indianness by and large. Land, of course, remained a central issue. As outright warfare died down across the West, the U.S. government moved to reorganize Indian lands and make arable portions of it available to white settlers through protected legal channels. Treaty-making and consolidation onto reservations (and war, which should be understood as policy) gave way to eradication of tribal cultures through assimilation. The General Allotment Act (“Dawes Act”) in 1887 set up the system of allotment through which the government surveyed reservation lands and allocated private plots in trust to Native individuals and families. People from tribes without reservations selected “any surveyed or unsurveyed lands of the United States not otherwise appropriated” for their plots. Those that accepted, selected, and resided on the entrusted plots also received American citizenship—an effort to override Indigenous identities with the pride (and in the eyes of the government, promise) of the American yeoman farmer or independent rancher. Indians who could then prove themselves “competent” in American lifestyles and property ownership (a status decided by the Secretary of the Interior), officially obtained the fee simple deed to their allotments and could keep or sell them as they pleased. Other lands from tribal holdings passed to the government, which made them available to “actual and bona fide settlers.”165 In effect, Indian landholdings shrank by over 62% (138 165 The General Allotment Act of 1887, 25 U.S.C. § 331 (1887). 88 million acres to 52 million acres) while the Dawes Act remained policy between 1887 and 1934.166 To influence daily happenings within homes, the Indian Office started sending out “field matrons” in 1890. These young, almost exclusively white women were supposed to offer domestic education and encourage middle-class, Victorian gender ideals among Native girls and women.167 The fieldwork largely mirrored Christian missionary efforts. The program design came from a proposal produced by the Religious Society of Friends and many field matrons began their careers with the Indian Office as missionaries.168 The Women’s National Indian Association, a society that emerged from a Baptist mission support group, also involved themselves in on-reservation domestic education and field matronage.169 Field matrons conducted a wide range of labor including instruction in cooking, housekeeping, and religion, and assistance in other chores and home improvement projects. 166 Janet McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-1934 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 167 A specific class of “outing matrons” did similar work in urban places to oversee young Indian students or adults working under employment in white homes. For more, see T. J. Morgan, “The ‘Field Matron’ Work Among the Indians,” Friends' Intelligencer (1853-1910) 47, no. 48 (1890): 765; Lisa Emmerich, "'To Respect and Love and Seek the Ways of White Women': Field Matrons, the Office of Indian Affairs, and Civilization Policy, 1890-1938," (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1987); Lisa Emmerich, “‘Civilization’ and Transculturation: The Field Matron Program and Cross-Cultural Contact," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 15, no. 4 (1991): 33-47; Victoria K. Haskins, Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson, 1914-1934 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2012). 168 The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Methodist-Episcopal and Baptist “Home Missionary Societies,” the Women’s Baptist Home Missionary Society and other religious groups contributed the earliest field matrons. Lisa E. Emmerich, “Promoting Homemaking on the Reservations: WNIA Field Matrons” in The Women’s National Indian Association: A History, ed. Valerie Sherer Mathes (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 84-101. 169 For more on the Women’s National Indian Association, see Mathes, The Women’s National Indian Association. 89 The assimilationist push, of course, did not end with property and homes. Government officials rounded up and sent Indian children to government-operated day schools and boarding schools all throughout the country to deliver gendered, Christian, “civilized” educations to Native youths outside the home. Students studied English and Christianity. They learned about the United States and U.S. government through a romanticized, racist lens. Boys learned industrial skills; girls learned domestic ones. The end goal was to force individuals to denounce tribal traditions and identities and instead embody the ethos and patriotism of good American citizens. They would return to their reservations and spread the word of God and Uncle Sam. The mission failed, but the effort was in full swing by the 1880s.170 On-reservation day schools provided a similarly-designed though less immersive experience focused on youth assimilation. Government administrators increasingly discouraged on-reservation schooling because the kids remained so close to and influenced by their unassimilated parents and community members on a daily basis. 170 We know from the many nuances and contradictions in published accounts and oral histories of boarding schools that there was no simple or universal consensus on the value or effect of the enterprise, though we do know that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada found their (quite comparable) residential school system harmful enough to constitute cultural genocide. (See “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” at http://www.trc.ca/) Boarding Schools in the U.S. similarly unleashed institutionalized abuse on students. Families suffered from seeing their children kidnapped and relocated, or possibly die while away from home, while other students largely enjoyed their experiences. They might strike up friendships that fostered inter-tribal networking, learn vocational skills and new academic subjects, and discover a passion for music or sports. In various and creative ways, boarding school students resisted assimilation and forged new elements of Indian identities very much at odds with schools’ missions. The most familiar stories of forced relocation to boarding schools come from reservations across the Great Plains and Southwest, such as the published accounts of Luther Standing Bear at Carlisle Indian School in its early years, and Zitkála-Šá who wrote of The School Days of an Indian Girl in reflection of her 1880s education at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute. There are many published case studies of individual schools or specific school activities like sports or manual labor (listed in bibliography). For analyses of the boarding school system and student life, see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, eds., Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000 (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 2000); Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, eds. Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 90 Enrollment in boarding schools over day schools and off-reservation schools over on- reservation schools increased drastically into the twentieth century to combat these structural obstacles to total institutional control.171 More and more children journeyed away—sometimes far away—from their homes and homelands to receive anti-Indian educations. The last major assimilation effort worth noting in the immediate context of this story is a development that came on the eve of the Redwood Highway Marathon: the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which conferred American citizenship to all Indian people “born within the territorial limits of the United States.”172 In part, this extension of citizenship acknowledged the thousands of Native servicemen who aided the American effort in World War I as members of the Armed Forces. In effect, however, the voting rights that it extended to Indian men became hard to enforce at the local level, and the official stamp of citizenship could be used to veil more covert forms of racism. It was another example of, as Philip Deloria describes it, “a rhetoric of conquest and insufficiency…paired with one of inclusion.”173 Indeed, scholars note the ambivalence of Indian citizenship. It was both a tool for enfranchisement and increased rights and an affront to Indian sovereignty. Legitimate viewpoints note both progress and problems in the Act.174 I discuss Indian citizenship in more detail in a later chapter. 171 Adams, Education for Extinction, 58. 172 The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, 8 U.S.C. § 1401b (1924). 173 Phillip J. Deloria, Jr., Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 234. 174 For an overview of the policy and ambiguities, see Frederick Hoxie, “Redefining Indian Citizenship” in A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 211-238; Tom Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). For recent challenges that center Native historical actors, see Thomas Grillot, “Patriotic Rewards, New Freedoms” in First Americans: U.S. 91 Though contradictions abounded, non-Native commentators noticed small instances of what they recognized to be the proof and power of assimilation circulating by the end of the 1920s. More and more graduates of Indian boarding schools took up jobs in the Indian Service, sometimes teaching at their alma maters or at reservation schools (though, they perhaps secretly subverted the Americanizing goals of their employer and delivered more empowering educations while there).175 Across the office’s programming, Indian people represented an obvious choice for laborers: their work would seemingly confirm commitment to assimilation within Indian circles and the office would not feel pressured to pay them equal to white workers. Capitalizing on opportunities for reliable work and wages, thousands of Native individuals worked on reservations and in cities for the Office of Indian Affairs.176 No shortage of white commentators insisted that things were going according to plan, and that federal policy by the end of the Progressive Era provided a promising future in which Native people enjoyed full immersion in mainstream American society. Taking a Closer Look at California Despite what policies existed on paper, government agents delivered assimilationist efforts unevenly and with great variety across Indian country. Non-Native Americans maintained clear images of the stock Indian character largely derived from Patriotism in Indian Country After World War I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Phillip J. Deloria, Jr., "American Master Narratives and the Problem of Indian Citizenship in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era," The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015): 3-12; K.T. Lomawaima, "The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherit America" American Indian Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2013): 333-35. 175 Cathleen Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 104. 176 Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 104. 92 popular culture. Traveling Wild West Shows stretched into the twentieth century and continued to depict such battles as the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn (“Custer’s Last Stand”) during which Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors defeated the Seventh Cavalry. These were household names, along with the names of other Indigenous nations that had launched large-scale resistance efforts with or without direct violence, like the Cherokee, Seminoles, Iroquois, and Apache (who, come the era of Cowboy and Indian celluloid, all but became the universal Native enemy).177 Nations in the lands that became Northern California did not have this same type of cultural capital (albeit problematic), besides perhaps the Modoc, who carried out the widely-commemorated “Modoc War” in 1872 and 1873. Tribes along the Klamath River had cultures rooted in the river, its salmon, and ceremonies for World Renewal. They surely resisted—in the ways discussed in the previous chapter and more—but those stories did not translate into the standing romanticism of eagle feather headdresses, horseback bison hunting, and large tipi camps over rolling plains. Nor did they mirror the woodland warriors of yore, or the famed snake dancers of the Southwest. Official policy and American folklore created imaginary starting points for perceptions of and plans for Native people, but reality happened on the ground. Invented channels of legal land seizure started in Northern California during the Gold Rush, rooted in policies like the Act for the Government and Protection of the Indians in 1850. Terminology that acknowledged Indigenous land claims “from time immemorial” and plans for limited Indian suffrage and requisite Indian justices of the 177 Janne Lahti, “Silver Screen Savages: Images of Apaches in Motion Pictures” Journal of Arizona History 54, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 52. 93 peace had evaporated in the drafting process.178 The law as it passed acknowledged only white proprietorship, codified systems of Indian indentured servitude to white settlers, and temporarily granted Indians the right to live on “private” lands until “otherwise provided for.”179 Allotment policy established the Klamath Reservation and the Hoopa Valley Reservation, discussed in the previous chapter. In Karuk Country, subsequent changes to others’ reservation boundaries and tribal jurisdictions left the Tribe without a reservation of their own (owing also to the failure of Congress to ratify any of the treaties outlined in the McKee negotiations, discussed in Chapter II). On more local and individual levels, allotment throughout the region varied greatly case by case and also in comparison to the better-known stories of allotment that more closely mirrored the plan outlined in the Dawes Act itself.180 Records indicate that about sixty-three Karuk individuals received titles to allotted homesteads that averaged eleven acres each.181 That’s eleven acres compared to a suggested eighty or 160 in the language of the law depending on the circumstances, and the allotments went, according to the Tribe, “to individual Indians who knew to file a claim.”182 This was the pattern throughout the larger region, as well. As William Bauer explains, “California allotment 178 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 129-130. 179 An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, California Statutes (1850) reproduced at http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/tcthorne/notablecaliforniaindians/actforprotection1850.htm; Also see Hurtado, Indian Survival, 129-130. 180 See Hoxie, “The Emergence of a Colonial Land Policy” in A Final Promise, 147-187; Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982); D. S. Otis and Francis Paul Prucha, ed., The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973). 181 “Karuk Department of Tribal Lands Management,” The Karuk Tribe, https://www.karuk.us/index.php/departments/land-management. 182 Karuk Tribe newsletter (Fall 2005), 20, https://www.karuk.us/images/55573_Karuk_Fall_15.pdf. 94 agents deemed arable reservation land insufficient” for the proposed acreage. As a result, “Most California Indians received allotments of less than 10 acres” with the average on the Hoopa Valley Reservation, for instance, being a mere 6.5 acres.183 Land loss did not stop after the early stages of allotment. When trust periods ended and individuals held their land titles in fee, those new property owners started owing taxes—another unfamiliar and unanticipated (sometimes even unknown) development of their relationship to the American land they lived on. Throughout the region, as in the West more broadly, families often sold their allotted properties for cash. They no longer had access to government protection or resources, having achieved status as Americans “subject to the laws, both civil and criminal, of the State or Territory in which they may reside.”184 This trend accelerated Indian land loss after the initial wave of allotment. The Bureau of Indian Affairs oversaw these types of land transactions, either facilitating or denying them. That agency, however, was not the only federal office with business in this particular swath of Indian Country. Land in the Klamath River Basin was rich not only in gold flecks but also in timber, which complicated the allotment scenario all along. Allotment law ran up against the fact that the available land for many Native individuals was forested; the Dawes Act aimed to create “yeoman farmers, not foresters” who would sell timber for profit in private markets.185 Emergent scientific forest 183 William Bauer Jr., “Native Californians in the Nineteenth Century,” in William Deverell and David Igler, eds. A Companion to California History (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 204-205. 184 The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, 8 U.S.C. § 1401b (1924). 185 Theodore Catton, American Indians and National Forests (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 24. 95 management steered away any version of Native ownership and management of forestland.186 For a while, the Forest Service and the BIA wrestled over the management of Indian forests. Along the Klamath, the Forest Service largely won out, and established the Klamath National Forest in Siskiyou County, California and Jackson County, Oregon, in 1905. Not only did the forest boundaries contain Karuk homelands, but a ranger station and lookout popped up in Happy Camp, forevermore establishing a governmental presence focused on forest management and, eventually, public recreation. The Karuk Tribe report that the designation of their territory as public lands included “117 recognized villages and associated hunting, gathering, and fishing areas along the middle portion of the Klamath River.”187 The Forest Service, then, represented yet another invasive government entity that forcibly consumed official control of Indigenous lands.188 Agency papers from Sacramento and Hoopa in the 1910s and 20s (housed in the National Archives in San Bruno, California) contain substantial correspondence between government officials, Native people and agents, and between white community members and the agencies. Considered as a collection, this correspondence tells a nuanced story of both by-the-book and seemingly genuine concern for (what agents evidently thought was) fair play in land transactions, punctuated by moments of capitalistic drive to open Native 186 This shift in management also wrought environmental damage. For an example of this process in Yurok lands, see Lynn Huntsinger and Sarah McCaffrey, “A Forest for the Trees: Forest Management and the Yurok Environment, 1850 to 1994,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19, no. 4 (1995): 155- 192. 187 “Karuk Department of Tribal Lands Management,” The Karuk Tribe, https://www.karuk.us/index.php/departments/land-management. 188 It is worth stressing how devastating forest management would remain in this region. Karuks and their neighbors had practiced methods of controlled burnings, and without the modern application of that knowledge and routine, Northern California suffers more and more devastating burns during fire season. 96 lands for the timber industry and familiar language of infantilization towards the Indian people living under their jurisdictions. One of the main topics was land inquiry. Many letters either came from hopeful land prospectors asking about deeds and ownership. Others came from lawyers or authors somehow writing on behalf of allottees who wished to sell their land or timber for profit. There is evidence that the Indian Office did its research on sought-after plots. For instance, an agent at the Hoopa Valley Agency wrote to the Superintendent of the Sacramento Agency in February 1916 to inquire about mining ground and whether it belonged to an individual allotment for one William A. Masten. Superintendent Dorrington responded that the land in question was part of the reservation there, and confirmed, “There is, therefore, no opportunity for you to either prospect it or lease it at this time.”189 Dissolving reservations was indeed a central tenet of allotment policy, but one gathers that it was actually difficult to obtain land deeds to plots of Indian land if the rules were to be followed. Lawyers and individuals routinely wrote in about gaining fee titles to allotments. This plea came with what were necessary claims in this discourse: “She is a good business woman and is fully capable of taking care of her allotment when she gets title to it,” read one attorney’s letter.190 Del Norte County’s District attorney wrote of another, “From what I can learn I think that he would be capable of taking care of his money.”191 Much of the correspondence from public agencies and businesses in towns, like the 189 Lafayettte Dorrington to I. Cullberg, 29 February 1916, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno, California. 190 John L. Childs to C. W. Rastall, 14 November 1924, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 191 Geo. W. Howe to Jesse Mortsolf, 14 September 1922, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 97 attorneys’ offices, indicated that allotment questions were common from Native visitors to their offices. Many asked for specific parameters in obtaining fee simple deeds and selling them. These requests and others like them trickled in over the course of several years. It is therefore hard to discern a clear pattern of linear land transfer. People moved, with different motivations, to secure lands whenever the opportunity presented itself, and they went to great trouble—hiring lawyers, writing multiple letters to agencies—to follow through. Sometimes when potential buyers outside of Native communities wrote in inquiring about land prospects, the Indian Office answered their calls. One inquirer wrote to the Roseburg Agency in Oregon a short, scrawled note—“I read in the newspaper about the sale of Indian land. I kindly beg for information. How would I get some of that land? Where is it? How is it? And how much is it worth?”192 The Indian Office sent out “circulars” of Indian lands opening up for sale—the Roseburg Agency oversaw Indians in southern Oregon “scattered over the Public Domain” and published available lands in a brochure about every three months.193 Similarly, Hoopa Valley Agency Superintendent J. B. Mortsolf advised the local timbermen and attorneys on opportunities for buying. In the summer of 1923, Mortsolf advised an inquirer to immediately move to make purchases of lands “having a good stand of redwood on them” on the southern Klamath, as “there [had] been a good deal of 192 Louise Fields to Indian Service Roseburg Agency, 27 July 1914, Roseburg Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 193 Horace Wilson to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 17 April 1912, Roseburg Agency Papers, RG 65, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno; Horace Wilson to La Fata Antonio, 24 December 1915, Roseburg Agency Papers, RG 65, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 98 activity quite recently in timber matters” there. The two correspondents also chatted happily about a Stanford fraternity in which both families had members.194 This easy camaraderie was not reflected in correspondence between Mortsolf and Native people who contacted him for information or advice about securing land. On another occasion, Paul D. Clary, “Buyer and Seller of California and Oregon Timber” wrote to Hoopa from Eureka: “I have been requested on a number of occasions to interest myself in the sale of Indian Allotment Timber Lands on the Klamath River…within this week I have been approached by some very responsible people who have a list of Indian Allotments.” He admits to his ignorance of the necessary process to obtain allotted lands and says that the “red tape” around allotment dissuaded him from earlier inquiry, but insists that money for timber could greatly aid the property owners he knows are in need. Mortsolf responded by explaining that much of the timber in the region was still held in trust by the government but that maps were available that showed new fee patent lands for sale.195 These letters illustrate the procedural protections and transactions that agents carried out—casually at their own desks—that bore enormous consequences for Native families. They also reveal the quickness with which fee titles transferred from Indian allottees to white buyers and the structural system of white supremacy that made everything from correspondence to purchase simply an easier process for white people. 194 Clarence Coonan to J.B. Mortsolf, 2 August 1923, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno; J. B. Mortsolf to Clarence Coonan, 7 August 1923, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 195 Paul Clary to J. B. Mortsolf, 28 December 1923 and J.B. Mortsolf to Paul Clary, 5 January 1924, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 99 It is difficult to find these types of records specifically pertaining to the Upper Klamath because Karuks did not have a reservation and so few had allotments. Karuk individuals do crop up in Sacramento and Hoopa Valley Agency papers, as kinship networks and Gold-Rush-era displacement relocated many individuals to Hoopa Valley and the Klamath Reservation in Yurok territory. We know, however, that they lost land to both public (the Forest Service) and private parties. Karuk circumstances also allowed for a greater degree of distance from the prying eyes of Indian agents. Places like Happy Camp and its closest former mining towns along the river were remote in comparison to sites downriver that became reservation lands. Some insight about policy implementation in Karuk homelands does come, however, from a set of field matrons, who, like others, set out to live in Indian communities and carry out duties in the nebulous realm of domesticity. The two field matrons assigned to the upper Klamath, Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, published an account “of everyday life on the frontier in an Indian village,” in 1908 and 1909, also “called the roughest place in the United States” at that time.196 Though their account comes from the perspective of “proper” white women employed to civilize Indians (and that is the rhetoric they used in describing their posts), the women’s recollections provide insight into Karuk country after the turn of the century. And, actually, the women were rather transgressive in their duties and in their personal lives, making In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-1909, all the more interesting, telling, and, perhaps, honest. An agent at Hoopa Valley gave Arnold and Reed vague instructions for their field work: “About your duties, it is a little difficult to say. I think the Government’s idea in 196 Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-1909 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 4-5. 100 appointing field matrons is that women will have a civilizing influence…I think we shall have to trust to your own good judgement. After you get up into that country, you will have a much better notion of what you ought to do.”197 They didn’t. At least, they didn’t always act particularly field matronly. One of the most interesting aspects of the book— and Karuk writer Andre Cramblit notes this in a foreword to the most recent edition of Grasshopper Song—is the fact that the two women seem more eager to learn about Karuk ways than teach white ones. Indeed, they reflect on cultural differences without lambasting Native traditions, even on such topics as polygamy (as they recognized it) and gambling (“I wish I could have bet some money this afternoon,” said Reed, after the women viewed a public gambling game after Sunday School).198 Far removed from a physical agency and with no direct oversight, the matrons in the field in Karuk country often doubted the worth and impact of their assignment and spoke of Indian devils and doctors from a position of acknowledgement and affirmation of their legitimacy.199 The account reveals some of the very reasons why assimilation didn’t work. Indian people controlled Indian Country, especially in a place like the Upper Klamath that had scattered towns and “rancherias”—reorganized Indian communities—that remained outside of the immediate purview of government agents less willing to 197 Arnold and Reed, In the Land of the Grasshopper Song, 24. 198 Ibid., 109. 199 The two women were lifelong social activists and partners. Julia Watson attributes their comfort with and approval of Indian communities in the Klamath region to the couple’s own subversive secret (their sexualities): “Grasshopper Song develops a model of collaborative autoethnography that interrogates dominant American assumptions about the imperative of assimilating both Indian people and women to Anglo norms.” She also notes that their “reimagining” of stereotypes mirrored other contemporary autoethnographic writing from whites sympathetic to Indian suffering, if not totally absolved of colonial frames of mind. Whatever the reason, Arnold and Reed enjoyed an adventure on the government’s dollar without spending it as intended. Julia Watson, “‘As Gay and As Indian As They Chose’: Collaboration and Counter-Ethnography in ‘In the Land of the Grasshopper Song,’” Biography 31, no. 3 (Summer 2008), 401. 101 acculturate than Arnold and Reed. However, as the presence of the field matrons suggests, the government did attempt to send tendrils of influence into every corner of Indian Country, even the places only accessible via days of hiking on horseback and river crossing in Indian-operated dug-out canoes. As road construction and flow of personnel increased, however, Karuk Country became less and less remote. Extended government reach could bring to Karuks details of the destinies of proximate tribes like the Hupa and Yoruk or those with homelands along any of the many other rivers in what became Northwestern California. The nature of multiracial communities like Happy Camp, on the other hand, disrupted government plans for Indian youth and prevented assimilation in the decades following Arnold and Reed’s observations and lukewarm interventions. Agency papers from the previously discussed source base reflects an ongoing concern for boarding school education in the 1910s and 20s. Along the Lower Klamath, kids often attended elementary school on Hoopa Valley Reservation or went away to Chemawa Indian Boarding School near Salem, Oregon, the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, the Stewart Indian School near Carson City, Nevada, or even Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, plus other large, far-off institutions. Even the local schools filled up with pupils, indicating that the push to collect students and some desire within Indian communities to send students to school translated into meaningful results. Horace Wilson, then-Superintendent at Roseburg, looked to place students in Stewart in 1914, but heard back that it was inadvisable, as the school already had excess enrollment.200 The Sherman Superintendent wrote to Hoopa 200 J. B. Mortsolf to Horace Wilson, 24 October 1924, Roseburg Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 102 Valley in 1924 advising that the school was full well beyond capacity.201 The much smaller Hoopa school lamented its own full capacity the following year.202 Indian families wrote in to help support their children’s attendance or, in some cases, to ask for their children’s release (the latter plea, consistent with wider accounts of similar circumstances, often denied).203 In truth, this correspondence was typical in the wider context of boarding schools, and unsurprisingly, the student experiences also fit the patterns reflected in more comprehensive studies of boarding schools in the twenty-first century. Many Karuk girls and boys attended boarding schools. Karuk language revitalization has depended on elders who, for a period of their life, refused to speak it after enduring years of shame—even danger—for doing so at schools.204 These are painful memories and there are few readily available published accounts. That general schooling experience, however, was consistent across Northern California and far beyond. As a girl, Elsie Allen (Pomo) attended school in Covelo, California—a two-day wagon ride from her home on the Russian River, south of the Klamath River Basin. (Several Pomo runners entered the Redwood Highway Marathon in 1928.) She remembered agents coming by in the fall to take students and once she became a student 201 F. M. Conser to C. W. Rastall, 20 September 1924, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 202 C. W. Rastall to F.M. Conser, 12 May 1925, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 203 For example: C. W. Rastall to James Dick, 2 July 1925, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno; J. B. Mortsolf to E. Colegrove, 14 January 1919, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 204 Adam Loften, “Karuk,” Global Oneness Project, https://www.globalonenessproject.org/library/films/karuk. 103 herself, she cried herself to sleep thinking, “I’ll never teach my children the language or all the Indian things that I know…I don’t want my children to be treated like they treated me.” Allen was also “strapped” with leather, made to feel dumb, and feared for her life.205 As the government’s reach extended, more and more students came to experience this type of trauma. Happy Camp as a Case Study Happy Camp is the historically important Karuk site of athithúfvuunumpa. It never became a reservation and few families that sent runners to the Redwood Highway Marathon from there in 1927 had had to send kids off to boarding school. Part of the reason for this among the Karuk contestants was the fact that Robert Lee Southard operated a day school just outside Happy Camp near his homestead, serving as its superintendent. He also told his children that they were both Indian and white and could think of themselves as they chose.206 He understood something vital that many government administrators did not: Indian identity could not only survive the test of time, but overlap with other identities. Sherman’s superintendent once wrote to Hoopa Valley reminding the agent there that that the school only took Indians with one-quarter Indian blood or more, and would not accept students with less than that threshold.207 The Southard brothers fit that description, but evaded school because their Christian father 205 Malcolm Margolin, ed., The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs and Reminiscences (Berkeley: California Historical Society, 2017), 183. 206 James Berry (Karuk Tribal Member), in discussion with the author, June 2019. 207 F. M. Conser to C. W. Rastall, 14 August 1925, Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 104 provided an apparently appropriate education.208 Concern for blood quantum defined Indianness according to a single standard when, in truth, the communities along the Klamath, like so many others, were multiracial and experiencing a unique set of circumstances because of it. Towns had multiracial populations and families had multiracial ancestry. Delineating blood quantum—particularly by looking around town and taking people’s word for it—was always a dicey business, but the presence of multiracial families helped shape communities and generations of rural Californians. The field matrons, mentioned previously, might have enjoyed a romantic vision of their Native friends and neighbors, but they regularly heard harrowing tales about “half- breeds” from “full-blooded” Indians they received in their cabin. While “white blood” in family lineages often elevated their status on the civilization meter, the mixing of white and Indian also complicated ideals of purity and authenticity. The matrons themselves did not offer further commentary on the issue, but it is clear that community demographics changed from the generation Arnold and Reed met to the next as multiracial families grew. Nineteenth-century American literature also displayed a trope of the “half-breed.” Often cast as suspicious social outcasts, multiracial characters sharing white and Indian parentage represented the ambivalence that Americans felt about a future where white people merged with (rather than replaced) Indians in mainstream American society rather than out on a distant frontier.209 Apparently, a common refrain characterized them as 208 There is evidence that one Southard brother, younger than the ones who ran in the Redwood Highway Marathon, attended boarding school. I discuss him later. 209 William J. Scheick, The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979), 2-3. 105 “half Indian, half white man, and half devil.”210 Though they could act as cross-cultural emissaries, often bilingual and familiar with customs of both groups, a white or Native person might wonder where their true loyalties resided. Multiracial people also reflected the reality of miscegenation, which white Americans typically feared.211 What did the mixing of white and Native communities mean for American or Indian societies moving forward? “Half-breed he no good,” an Indian visitor told Arnold and Reed in their home, “White man, he got God. Indian, he got God. Half-breed, he no got God.”212 Actually, Robert Lee Southard, a Methodist, had God. He had also had some trouble navigating policy and obtaining land because of his multiracial ancestry. The family’s homestead came from Mary Alice (Southerland) Southard’s uncle, who was a headman in the Clear Creek area (downriver from Happy Camp). Known by the nicknames “El Capitan” and “Cap,” the elder gave his nephew-in- law Robert Lee a plot for a homestead at Ferry Point, just outside of Happy Camp. Robert Lee’s mother was a “full-blooded” Indian. Mary Alice had attended Chemawa Indian school in her youth. Still, the Indian Office forced Robert to buy the land versus receive it in trust because, according to Southard descendants, the Indian Office perceived this 210 Ibid., 18. 211 In truth, miscegenation was somewhat complicated where Native people were concerned. Even as miscegenation laws expanded across the West to prohibit marriages between whites and an increasing list of people of color (immigrants from Asia, Indigenous Hawaiians, and American Indians), the laws varied by state as they consolidated. Restrictions on Indian blood quantum in defining a person’s race might also differ (and be greater than) that required to delineate someone as Black. Some of the relative leniency in white-Indian unions came from the history of marriages between white men and Native women on the “frontier,” arrangements that had proven beneficial to augmenting white land ownership. Debates in the nineteenth century about anti-Indian miscegenation laws therefore differed from debates surrounding other racial groups. See Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2, 8, 78. 212 Arnold and Reed, In the Land of the Grasshopper Song, 112. 106 transaction as an attempt by a young settler to “steal land from an old Indian.”213 Very few Karuk or biracial men in Robert and Mary Alice’s generation received allotments of their own. Their various plights reflect failures in policy and complexity in the communities that it sought to control. As post-Gold Rush society formed and towns grew, it would have been difficult to keep track of families’ racial lineage, degrees of cultural and religious syncretism, and relative social rank. After all, many Native families had lied about being Indian to avoid bigoted violence, forever distorting records and burying public identities. A small survey of government documents makes it clear that, for example, census takers ascribed different races at different times to the same individuals. Robert Lee Southard was “white” in the 1870 and 1900 censuses, “Indian” along with his family in the 1910, 1920, and 1930 censuses, and then the whole family was marked “white” in the 1940 census.214 In the 1920 census (the last before the marathon), fully Indian families or partnerships constituted over half of the households in the town of Happy Camp. White families made up a little over a third of the households. About one in ten households in town were (enumerated) biracial. At best, these estimates are approximate, but even as approximations they help reconstruct the demography of a rural town in Karuk Country in post-Gold Rush California. Though race had delineated lines of life and death in the region only a generation or two beforehand, Happy Camp residents in the 1920s largely shared a working-class identity and skills necessary for life in a remote mountain town 213 James Berry, discussion. 214 1870 U.S. Census, Siskiyou County, California, roll, ancestry.com; 1900 U.S. Census, Siskiyou County, California, roll, ancestry.com; 1910 U.S. Census, Siskiyou County, California, roll, ancestry.com; 1920 U.S. Census, Siskiyou County, California, roll, ancestry.com; 1930 U.S. Census, Siskiyou County, California, roll, ancestry.com. 107 essentially sealed off by snowcapped mountains in the winter but otherwise enmeshed in regional mining and timber industries. Other rural skills, like hunting, produced goods that entrepreneurs sold outside of town. Robert Lee Southard, even as a father to several young children, managed to sell his elk jerky for sizeable profits in San Francisco. He took annual trips, leaving the children will their “full-blooded” relatives who spoke Karuk and had traditional face tattoos.215 Other families sold baskets in the market economy. Amalgamated labor and daily life of these sorts exemplify the larger patterns of ethnic and working-class life in rural California. Scholars have rightly explained the ways in which Native communities accessed and utilized wage labor and market economies for their own survival and benefit. Wage labor not only provided money for basic necessities (albeit at unfairly low wages) but opportunities for cultural and social revival and community building, often among individuals who were denied these opportunities on their home reservation if they hailed from one. Work outside of the home, though it left Native individuals vulnerable to white employer discrimination and violence, created pockets in which Native people could socialize and pool resources. Working in some industries in significant proportions, Indigenous laborers shaped critical industries—like orchard and hop agriculture in California.216 Off reservations, Native labor (and immigrant labor, and general working- class labor) built and sustained towns. Below is a breakdown of the labor reported in the 1920 census (Table 3.1). The majority of the men in town, white and Indian, were either farmers, miners, or other 215 James Berry, discussion. 216 See Bauer, A Companion to California History, 207. 108 “laborers.” White male heads of households significantly outnumbered Indian male heads of households, even though whites did not outnumber Indians overall. The Gold Rush had, of course, brought in swarms of single white men. Only white men worked the few white-collar jobs listed in the census (engineer, contractor, merchant) and while the “other” category for Indians includes jobs like “teamster” and “mechanic,” there was a white surgeon, butcher, ranger, real estate agent, carpenter, and two white bookkeepers.217 Most of the white male heads of households were from a U.S. state, but a few European immigrants owned and operated boarding houses. A Greek contractor (marked “white”) owned the largest, with thirty-three boarders, almost all of whom worked as laborers (they are also counted among the “white” population total). There were two small Italian boarding houses and a small Scandinavian house as well (all also documented as “white”). Scattered throughout town were a few individuals and families from other European countries: France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, England, Scotland, Portugal. The only Happy Camp residents marked neither “Indian” nor “white” were four Chinese men who lived next to each other on a street called Mountain Road. These ethnic and class demographics (and the small overall population of 585 residents) constituted a likely aftermath-of-the-rush scenario in the Northern Mines area. Finding little gold, people largely cleared out or remained behind to work as farmers or wage laborers—men who, according to one historian, “Vanished into a California 217 The census did not note particular “Indian labor” that might have supplemented some families’ income. For Klamath-based tribes, woven baskets brought in the biggest profits from sales. Women weavers created and sold baskets even well before the 1920s, even, on reservations, with the help of field matrons that brought in orders from outside and delivered completed baskets after their production. See Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 192. 109 landscape once golden and now simply remote.”218 Telltale remnants of the recent history remained in each remote outposts: dozens of immigrants, the frequency of mining as a profession, the large proportion of single white men, and, where mountain migrations had ensured survival through genocide but were no longer necessary, slightly reemergent Indian populations. Happy Camp, Siskiyou County, California (1920) Enumerated “Indian” Enumerated “White” Population: 294 283 Male Heads of Households: 51 100 Miners 17 36 Farmers 10 26 Laborers 14 11 Engineer 0 5 Merchant 0 4 Contractor 0 3 None 6 2 Other or Illegible 4 13 T able 3 .1. Labor Data from the 1920 Census, Siskiyou County, California. Indian citizenship came in the midst of these early-century community developments, but it might have made little difference in Happy Camp. Indeed, the number of registered voters and their party affiliations remained largely consistent between 1920 and 1926.219 Official notification of the Act reached the Sacramento Indian Agency on July 19, 1924, and reminded the Superintendent at the office that the act did “not remove the restrictions upon the property of Indians now under the jurisdiction of 218 Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 6. 219 Index to Precinct Registers and Voting Registration, Siskiyou County, California, California State Library ancestry.com. 110 the Interior Department”; that “citizenship is not inconsistent with wardship” and therefore did “not of itself terminate the wardship of the Indians”; and that even though the agency should alert “[their] Indians” of the policy and relay that “they are now entitled to suffrage,” they should warn them of the limitations placed on voting that would create “embarrassment or disappointment.”220 The roadblocks that emerged—the necessity in certain states for voters to be taxpayers, poll taxes, literacy tests, voter intimidation, inconvenience of polling locations—surfaced right away. As Progressive Era Indian policy adopted specific iterations in the rural pockets of post-Gold Rush California, Native people adapted their lives and labors to survive and prosper under new circumstances. Life rarely changed drastically overnight with some political development, though the major systemic changes wrought from assimilationist policies flooded the Klamath and its tributaries, on reservation and off. But if policy created the imaginary trajectory of Indian futures and observable on-the-ground dynamics revealed the reality, how did onlookers, imbibed with Vanishing Race ideology and so many misunderstandings about Native cultures, respond? Perhaps non-Native people in Happy Camp had a more informed perspective of modern Native communities than zealous government officials, but they hardly produced loads of popular culture to express these observed nuances. It was a rare moment of far-and-wide publicity when eight men from such a small town catapulted themselves to national fame during the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon. Sports were an ideal setting for this type of opportunity and impact. Of course, Indian sports—even within Western competitive 220 Chas. H. Burke to Sacramento Indian Agency, received 19 July 1924, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno. 111 circuits—had a long history. That history reveals the possibilities and limits of visibility in forcing a public reckoning of modern Indigeneity. (Re)Imagining Indians in Sports and Entertainment A few key moments put Indigenous athletes in the spotlight in the early twentieth century before the marathon. The first was at the St. Louis World’s Fair. The mainstream popularity of Anthropology after the turn of the century was perhaps best demonstrated in the types of “exotic peoples” exhibits so popular at World’s Fairs and Exhibitions held in major cities to celebrate advances in science and technology. Even earlier Fairs essentially set up human zoos that were at best replicas of clan villages and at worst involved cages. In the large “anthropological” exhibits, a visitor could see representative from various African tribes, Southeast Asian people, aboriginal Australians, and of course, Native North Americans.221 When St. Louis, Missouri hosted the 1904 “Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exhibition,” the event included the “Anthropology Days,” a segregated bastardization of the official Olympic Games being held in conjunction with 221 World’s Fair literature is extensive. Robert Rydell’s All the World’s A Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 traces agendas of promoting white supremacy by the fairs’ elitist organizers. See Rydell, All the World’s A Fair. More recently, the edited volume Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World’s Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology had laid out the ways in which the displays of Indigenous peoples at that exposition elicited a wide range of reactions from non- Indigenous visitors and shaped American education, museums, and more. See Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, eds., Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World’s Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). David Beck’s Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago is the first Fair-focused book to centrally concern Native labor and agency in these settings. He found that Native people capitalized on economic opportunities that came with participation in the anthropological displays, Wild West reenactments, and Indian school exhibits at the 1893 World’s Fair, and that in these settings, Native people resisted stereotypes and tried to assert self-definition in the face of stereotypes and white oversight. While significant public intervention was impossible under those confines, the efforts of Native historical actors at the Fair remind us that any exposure that white Americans had to Native people represented an opportunity for Native people to assert their true identities and educate viewers. See David .M. Beck, Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). 112 the fair. Modern Olympic Games as early as 1904 did not yet have the prestige that we now associate with the event, but they did include a genuine commitment to sportsmanship, athletic prowess, and friendly imperial rivalry. They did not include a diverse body of athletes, and therefore set a stage for displaying a very specific strand of gentlemanly amateur competition that always resulted in white, male victory. The Anthropology Days exclusively featured athletes of color, but the intention was to mock and ridicule rather than respect. American Anthropological Association president William J. McGee and the exposition’s Director of the Department of Physical Culture, James Sullivan, organized the Anthropology Days to include some of the same events that tested athletic prowess (standard running and jumping events, for example) while also adding events that reflected athletic pastimes of the various Indigenous communities in exhibition at the Fair. As settler colonial society prepared to once again observe and mock people they deemed foreign and inferior, the stakes of racially-determined athletic loomed high in the subtext. Competitive events like running, jumping, weightlifting, pole-climbing, and spear throwing exemplified skills that, in the popular imagination, were natural to the various groups of people they called “savages.” Directed towards of people of color, this nod to natural athleticism was not a compliment; it was a suggestion of an animal-like brutalism that facilitated survival in the wilderness. But what if these skills could outshine trained European athletes? What did that mean for white masculinity in the hierarchy of athletic prowess? The organizers of the Anthropology Days said that the fair 113 would be an opportunity to research Native peoples in athletics and modernity to address some of these issues.222 Those in fear of a challenge to white male superiority breathed a sigh of relief when, after having little to no time to prepare for the segregated athletic events, Indigenous athletes did not overwhelmingly outperform their white, trained counterparts in these particular sets of skills. James Sullivan himself would later edit the Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac of 1905, which recapped the Anthropology Days. Though the writer judged the event a “brilliant success,” he also said: “This…is such a ridiculously poor performance that it astonished all who witnessed it.” “The jumping of the Pigmies, the Ainus, and some of the Indians was really ridiculous.” And, “It can probably be said, without fear of contradiction, that never before in the history of sport in the world were such poor performances recorded for weight throwing.”223 This “official” report allegedly confirmed that the “tales” of the natural all- around ability of the “savage” in athletic feats were false, calling them “overrated.”224 However, specifically in regard to American Indian participants, there were hints of praise to be heard. Spalding’s report concluded that American Indians had outperformed other Indigenous groups due to an apparently higher degree of civilization, 222 Nancy J. Parezo, “‘A Special Olympics’: Testing Racial Strength and Endurance at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition,” in The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism, ed. Susan Brownell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 59-126. 223 James Sullivan, ed. “Anthropology Days at the Stadium,” Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac for 1905 (New York: American Sports Publishing Co., 1905), 251-253. 224 Sullivan, “Anthropology Days,” 257. 114 no doubt obtained through exposure, proximity, and interaction with mainstream American society—or, assimilation.225 Though characterizing running times as “slow,” Sullivan noted that all the running victories “went to the Americanized Indians” and even distinguished between imagined levels of civilization by saying “the Americanized Indian…outclassed the savage.”226 Only this type of relative statement could fully safeguard white triumphant masculinity and assert an imagined social and political success in United States Indian policy. While the Anthropology Days were so clearly sectioned off for entertainment and scrutiny, a more dignified origin of American Indians participating in world-class Western sport traditions occurred at the same time. The true 1904 Games featured, for the first time since its modern resurrection in 1896, both Black and Native athletes on the various sporting clubs and school teams that entered the Games.227 Frank Pierce, a Haudenosaunee from the Allegany Reservation in New York, ran the marathon, representing the New York Pastime Athletic Club. The expected winner of the Olympic Marathon in the 1908 London Olympic Games was another Haudenosaunee, the Onondaga Tom Longboat, and while he disappointed at the Games, he continued to have a fabulous career as a professional runner, beating all the men who had beaten him in London and additional rivals to boot.228 Louis Tewanima (Hopi) impressed with a ninth- 225 There was also an acknowledgment of the impressiveness of Igorot pole climbing, which exceeded the abilities of “any trained athlete in America…with years of training.” See Ibid., 255. 226 Ibid. 227 There was no system to establish a single “Team USA” by this point. 228 See Davis, Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush, 7; Tara Keegan, “Tom Longboat,” in the Encyclopedia of Canadian Sport, https://encyclopediaofcanadiansport.org/tomlongboat/. 115 place finish in the Olympic marathon race that Longboat lost and returned the following Olympics, the 1912 Stockholm Games, to take the silver medal and set an American record in the 10,000-meters. Those were the same Games in which his Carlisle Indian School teammate, the famous Sauk and Mesquakie Jim Thorpe, dominated the pentathlon and decathlon, positively crushing the competition and setting World Records in both.229 The competing visions of the modern athlete and the uncivilized savage both informed societal reception of Native athletes through the 1910s and 20s. With sports so focused on displaying the finest specimens of masculine rigor, the ongoing effort to safeguard myths of white supremacy remained strong, lest the title of the world’s best men should diversify. Americans knew and eagerly anticipated the runners of many Southwest borderland nations, among them the Hopi, the Navajo, or the Zuni, in city marathons. Papers eagerly reported which famous Indian runners the audience could expect to welcome. While athletic accomplishments did earn a type of positive valuation for Native individuals in the hearts and minds of an American public obsessed with sports, most observers maintained a strong sentiment of difference: the Indian runners were so entertaining because onlookers perceived them to be a spectacle (another staple of 1920s culture). They looked, and even ran differently from their white counterparts.230 They were celebrities as much for their mastery of a modern enterprise as they were for 229 For more on Tewanima, see Gilbert, Hopi Runners, 65-87, 114-116, 123. For more on Thorpe, see Kate Buford, Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Steve Sheinkin, Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team (New York: Roaring Books Press, 2017). 230 Commentators harped on differences in running form between white runners and Indian runners. Observers often described Indian running steps as “short” and “choppy,” and often commented on Indian runners being small in stature. For examples, see “Philip Zeyouma Will Run Again,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1914; “Winged ‘O’ Has Wonderful Man in Millard,” Oakland Tribune, January 3, 1915; “Hopi Indian Runner Strides to Thrilling Victory in Marathon,” The Missoulian, May 16, 1927; “Mad Bull Wins in Race to Grants Pass,” Healdsburg Enterprise, June 23, 1927. 116 their appeal as possibly the last of their people. It hadn’t taken too long for individual American Indian competitors to assert their dominance in national and international running circuits, and yet their success never totally erased the idea of primitive noble savages forever stalking the uncut American woods—a place where a different type of running seemed natural and necessary. The Redwood Highway Indian Marathon merged imagination and reality. The runners, who grew up in the 1910s and 20s, represented modern Native and working- class families. Much of the early running practice these young men had came from basic transportation and hunting needs. Roads didn’t yet extend to and between small mountain towns and dispersed homesteads. Horses could make the climb on the cleared paths where they were wide enough, but not everyone could afford a horse, so they went on foot. When the Karuk runners showed up for the race with short haircuts, modern running shoes, and crisp white singlets, they stood in stark contrast to the Zunis with their longer hair, sandals, and various expected cultural adornments. Even the Zunis’ language barrier met American expectations of “otherness,” casting them as foreigners in a country where even in 1927, people liked to believe that English was the official American language. The contrast no doubt fueled the public enthusiasm towards the Zuni visitors, particularly Melika, who at once embodied “picturesque” Indian imagery and, because of his age, defied commonly held beliefs about athleticism and fitness. He seemed to possess a type of magical quality in the minds of his Northern Californian fans, much in line with noble savage imagery that dotted popular culture since the earliest years of European settlement in the New World. This hard differentiation of the Karuk and Zuni 117 athletes, rather than representing an appreciation for the diversity of Native nations throughout the U.S., likely reflected the ongoing propensity to rank Indigenous groups by perceived primitivity—the very foundation of the Anthropology Days. The Karuks’ deviation from expected Indianness created a problem for boosters. The eccentric Herbert G. Boorse, owner of the Happy Camp General Store, acted as the resident “coach.” (The term is a stretch—he rode in his car after the runners as they completed daily sixty-mile runs and yelled at them.) Boorse proposed the fake “Indian names” that the runners would go by (and to some degree, adopt as personas) during and after the race. But the runners still transmitted modern Indianness, and it provided an important intervention. When audiences received them, people were sometimes confused. A young white boy watching the race from a curb later recalled, “I was disappointed: the grownups had made such a big thing about the Indian angle that I’d expected [the leader] to be in feathers and buckskins.”231 Exposure to modern Native athletes forced non- Native onlookers to reconcile Indigeneity and modernity side-by-side. The result for nine-year-old Garth Sanders was disappointment. On the larger scale, other non-Native Americans often responded with ambivalence. Crowds expected men the likes of Melika, but once the race was underway, they seemed to love “Mad Bull” and “Flying Cloud” just as much. The scholarly work on Native sports proves several important facts. First, Native people participated in traditional sports of their people and in competitive colonial spheres. When Indian athletes made an Olympic team, Americans momentarily embraced them as compatriots. Outside of the context of international arenas, however, audiences 231 Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire, 117. 118 rarely regarded Indian athletes as very much like their white competitors in any sense, from running form to basic humanity. Despite the scrutiny (and in some sports like football and baseball, racist torment from game audiences), sports fostered a sense of purpose and community for Native athletes. Bonding of this sort was particularly important at boarding schools, where even in distinctly Anglo-American sports, a diverse Indigenous team would work together to triumph over white rivals and challenge public ideas about white supremacy. In many reservation communities, the continuity of Indian sports (distance running among them) kept alive traditions and instilled specific virtues. Traveling beyond the reservation transmitted the caliber of athletic ability fostered in Native communities far away from the zealous white coaches that fancied themselves the most knowledgeable trainers in the world.232 The Redwood Highway runners neither represented boarding schools nor, in the case of the Karuks, hailed from a reservation. Like boarding school athletes, however, they performed under the auspices of white organizers in contests that highlighted their race and articulated its fundamental difference. In that zone, they delivered spectacular athletic accomplishments that garnered them fame in the world of sports. Like reservation runners, they asserted the athleticism of their home communities—in their case both Karuk and rural. Very few papers quoted the athletes. When they did, the quotations were almost definitely contrived from the same stereotypes that convinced boosters that most of the field needed artificial “Indian names.” Even without platforms to speak for themselves, however, the athletes asserted modern Indigeneity in a place that had been the site of anti- 232 Gilbert discusses these topics extensively in Hopi Runners. 119 Indian genocide a single lifetime ago. Widespread press coverage sent their images and accomplishments far and wide, and there was power in that visibility and the public reckoning it forced. What was more, it came in the world of sports—already a supremely beloved institution in the United States (and, though it might be shocking to a twenty-first century audience, long-distance races were marquee events). Indian running was both traditional and modern. The runners were both Indian and American. It became difficult for non-Native observers to keep driving wedges between those identifying categories as Indian survival and cultural relevance characterized what boosters swore was the longest running race ever staged, and one that was explicitly intended to put the Redwood Empire on the map for throngs of American tourists. These findings are entirely consistent with those that historian Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert produced in Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain Between Indian and American. He found that Hopi runners who participated in mainstream running competitions between 1908 and 1936 challenged stereotypes of Indian “primitivity” by forcing non-Native observers to reckon with them as modern athletes in a high-stakes international circuit. Widely regarded at the time as perhaps the greatest runners on Earth, Hopi runners helped construct and project American national identity even as their running—and their identities—remained rooted in Hopi culture, history, and worldviews.233 This same process and pattern is visible in the Redwood Highway Marathon, though not contained to a single Native nation nor over such an expansive stretch of time. 233 Gilbert, Hopi Runners. 120 The forced reimagining of Native people as modern contributors—even celebrities—born of the Redwood Highway Marathon ended up having major implications for Northern California. Modern representations of Native people involved in the race helped to shape the development of the Redwood Empire as a popular tourist destination. Importantly, the intervention did not come from the runners alone. The next chapter shifts the focus of the marathon story from the men running to a Native woman who remained at the center of the race’s publicity and even enjoyed a larger career in redwoods tourism. Like her male counterparts, she disrupted popularly held notions about inherent divisions between modern culture and society and Native people. 121 CHAPTER IV INDIAN MASCOTRY AND PRINCESS MYTHOLOGY: NATIVE FEMININITY AND AMERICAN MODERNITY Monday, June 20 On the seventh day of the race, Mad Bull checked in at Requa, about sixty-five miles out from the Oregon state border, at 9:30 a.m., holding a shrinking lead as Cloud, fifteen miles behind, tried to close the gap. The day would bring both men to the threshold of the state border, well ahead of the schedule that the event organizers had envisioned at the outset. Mad Bull reached Crescent City, just forty miles from the Oregon border via the Redwood Highway, around dinner time. Thomas made it in by 9:30 p.m. Another twenty miles back was the old crowd favorite, Melika. He was the only remaining Zuni runner. After blisters claimed Jamon early in the race, a sprained ankle knocked Chochee out of contention near Eureka. Melika, however, was running well. The press reminded its readers that “despite his 55 years, [he] was pressing the younger men.”234 All of the top three runners had pounded the pavement extra hard in the second half of the race. Reports held that while Mad Bull had logged sixty-two miles on Sunday the nineteenth, Melika had covered sixty-six, and Flying Cloud, a shocking seventy.235 With paces quickening and injuries mounting, commentators maintained that “anything might happen.”236 234 “Indian in Lead,” Ottawa Journal, June 21, 1927. 235 Ibid. 236 “Mad Bull Leads 15 Miles at Sequa, California,” Grants Pass Daily Courier, June 20, 1927. 122 Tuesday, June 21 The final stretch of the race was grueling for all of the runners. Fatigue periodically reduced most runners’ paces to walks. Mad Bull crossed the state line around 10:00 a.m., just forty miles away from the finish, sending journalists to make frantic dispatches that it was time to get the finish line festivities in order. Southard, who had already averaged about sixty miles per day, slowed his jogging gait to a quick limp as he continued to cover the winding hills of Josephine County, his support car in tow. His collar bones protruded from the neck of his singlet, and the number “5” pinned to his chest was crumpled. Pain was visible in his clenched jaw and shrunken frame, but he trudged on in pushes and bursts, arms pumping and then swinging at his sides. The sun sent rays between the branches as the remaining miles shrunk, slowly.237 It wasn’t exactly peaceful or quiet, what with cameras pointed at him and cars trailing him (though such conditions were, by now, common place), but Southard passed a final stretch through tall trees and beams of dying sunlight as alone as he had been in a week, the finish line no longer far-off and days away, but rather a landmark he projected to reach before the following dawn. Then the rain began to fall. It grew dark. He paused for a cup of coffee near Wilderville, Oregon, just twelve miles from the finish line, banking on the fact that he was far enough ahead by this point to maintain the lead. Runners further back were feeling the toll of so many days of bodily turmoil. Injuries reportedly took “Rushing Water,” Johnny Southard’s youngest brother, out of the race after 341 miles of excellent running. By race’s end, nearly half of the field 237 San Francisco: newsreel, 1927, converted to DVD in 2003, Mendocino County Museum. 123 succumbed to injuries serious enough to end their races or at least severely halt their progress. The Healdsburg Tribune declared that “unless they collapse all three [frontrunners] will probably push on until they reach the goal,” but collapsing was certainly not out of the question.238 Wednesday, June 22, 12:18 a.m. Artificial lights illuminated the words, “It’s the Climate.” The tourism slogan had been slapped on a banner draped across Sixth Street at the corner of Sixth and G Street in downtown Grants Pass.239 On a newer banner stretched just above those words, in even larger font: “THE FINISH.” The late hour had not deterred thousands of excited fans from showing up for the midnight finish. The Madera Tribune called it “a scene unprecedented since the signing of the armistice closing the World war.”240 No one had caught Johnny Southard in the night. When he crossed the line at 12:18 a.m., he ran into the open arms of several club-bearing cavemen and an “Indian Princess.” After running for seven days, twelve hours, and thirty-four minutes, these characters might have looked like apparitions, but they were yet another set of tourist gambits that had defined the event. The Cavemen were actually those Grants Pass businessmen, dressed up as Neanderthals (they claimed), to advertise the town and the nearby Oregon Caves by rousing up some interest with their antics. The Cavemen had 238 “Mad Bull Crosses State Line at 10 This Morning,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 21, 1927. 239 The banner celebrated its centennial on July 20, 2020. 240 “Gala Scenes Mark Close Indians Race,” Modera Tribune, June 22, 1927. 124 been in Grant Pass’ public spotlight since 1922 and were familiar entities in the region.241 The men who participated adopted fake “Caveman names” like Flame Watcher, who, in his day job, owned a grocery store. Essentially, they were town mascots. Wearing wigs and wielding clubs, on this fateful night, they hoisted the exhausted athlete onto their shoulders in front of a large crowd and several newsreel cameras. Johnny Southard had run “under the colors” of the Oregon Cavemen, so the rowdy men had ample reason to rejoice in his victory—he was their victor. Atop bouncing shoulders, Southard floated through fans, to the mayor to deliver his letter from San Francisco, and then finally dropped down onto his feet in front of Princess Little Fawn, Miss Redwood Empire. In the jumble of Cavemen and spectators crowding Mad Bull at the finish line, close to the champion in all surviving shots and accounts, was this young woman, whose real name was Dorothy Allen. Some papers suggested that the champion had been hoisted up in the first place so he could be delivered to her immediately.242 Many journalists were sure to include her meeting with Mad Bull in the post-race coverage as nothing short of poetic: “Miss Redwood Empire threw her arms about him and implanted upon his cheek a tribal kiss.”243 One wonders what a “tribal” kiss, specifically, might mean, beyond the fact that both people had Native ancestry. Nonetheless, papers really harped on this embrace. The kiss was described as Mad Bull’s first “reward,” often referenced in tandem with his other reward, $1000 from the Redwood Empire Association and another $325 from towns along the 241 In 1936, they’d go on to team up with the Redwood Empire Association to hold a Caveman wedding at the caves, which elicited nationwide attention. “Oregon Caves Cavemen,” National Park Service, last modified February 28, 2015, https://www.nps.gov/orca/learn/historyculture/oregon-caves-cavemen.htm. 242 “Mad Bull Winner of Big Marathon,” Madera Tribune, June 22, 1927. 243 “Mad Bull Winds in Race to Grants Pass,” Healdsburg Enterprise, June 23, 1927. 125 racecourse.244 In the dead of night, in front of newsreels cameras, journalists, and spectators, Johnny Southard offered a tired smile as his eyelids drooped. He could finally rest before contending with the rumors and sensationalization of his hard-earned victory through a global news network.245 The performances, titles, and invented characters distorted lines of history, reality, and fiction. Papers had steadily tracked the “stoic” and “husky braves” that ran the marathon before their people were allegedly doomed to vanish.246 The character of Little Fawn, given several titles out of patterns of pageantry and racial stereotyping, apparently delivered a kiss so magical that it matched the heaps of prize money and stayed by the victor’s side as he spent most of it the following day on a gold roadster with “Mad Bull” painted on the side.247 With the loudest roar of ballyhoo yet, the finish line scene and immediate aftermath of Southard’s victory, as more runners poured into Grants Pass, featured all of the empowering and all of the problematic elements of the race side-by- 244 See, for example: “Mad Bull Wins Redwood Highway Race; 55-Year-Old Indian is Third,” Tampa Tribune, June 23, 1927; “Mad Bull is Winner in Big Marathon Race,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 22, 1927; “Mad Bull Winner of Big Marathon,” Madera Tribune, June 22, 1927; “‘Mad Bull’ Is Marathon Champion,” The News-Review (Roseburg, Oregon), June 28, 1927. 245 San Francisco: newsreel, 1927, converted to DVD in 2003, Mendocino County Museum. 246 This language circulated widely before and during the event. For examples in race promotion, see “Klamath Indians Prepare For Long Redwood Marathon,” Healdsburg Tribune, May 28, 1927; Kline, Ben G., “Indian Marathon on 480 Miles of Coast Planned: Red Men Are Rapidly Being Signed Up for Event Along Redwood Highway,” San Bernardino Sun, June 1, 1927 (reprinted as far as North Adams, Massachusetts in The North Adams Transcript, June 2, 1927); “The Marathon,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 4, 1927; “Indian Runners Starting Long Marathon Today,” The Evening News (San Jose, CA), June 14, 1927. 247 Southard’s descendants confirm the purchase and quick loss of this car (it was a lemon), but several years of searching failed to turn up a photograph of it. Tales of the trophy car spread far and wide through the press, as well. See “Mad Bull Spends Money Won In Run for Auto to Ride In,” New York Times, June 24, 1927; “Mail,” Hull Daily Mail (Yorkshire, England), August 19, 1927, also in Berwickshire News and General Adviser (Scottish Borders), August 30, 1927. 126 side. Figure 4.1 is a reenactment of Mad Bull’s finish, staged the next morning in daylight. Figure 4.1. Johnny “Mad Bull” Southard won the 1927 Redwood Highway Indian Marathon. This picture ran as a postcard and now circulates on the Internet. The Redwood Highway Indian Marathon displayed cases of early Indian mascotry and upheld racist stereotypes through both masculine and feminine imagery. While white advertisers lifted elements of that imagery from ages-old lore, the motivations and actions of the Native participants invited a public conception of modern Indigeneity. These interventions shaped emergent regional identity as homelands and sites of recent genocide transformed into tourist destinations for newly automobilized American travelers. This chapter examines the career and person of “Little Fawn,” Dorothy Allen. 127 Her image, which stemmed from the Indian Princess trope but updated it for a modern audience, invited new conceptions of Indianness through channels of modern womanhood and beauty. As part Indian Princess of yore and part modern flapper, Allen stood at the intersection of mainstream beauty culture and the ongoing “Indian Question” about the place of Native people in American society. The character that Allen shaped ultimately forced white observers to imagine modern Indigenous femininity and Indian futures in the face of “Vanishing Race” ideology. This was a feat not unlike the one her male counterparts achieved through their athleticism, but through very different channels. Importantly, she shaped the image herself. Her story reveals a public reckoning specifically of Native women—more specifically, modern Native women—that was even more radical than the revisions forced by the male racers (the gendered component of which is discussed in a later chapter). Her example represented the most extreme version of an Indian Princess for the modern era, but there was a string of comparable examples in close proximity around the same time that revealed currents and limits of assertions of modern femininity and Indigeneity at the time. Two cases besides Allen’s highlight the most relevant concurrent interventions driven by Native women into realms of popular culture. There are perhaps many other suitable examples, but Allen’s story intersects most notably with those of Jessie Jim, a young woman from the Colville Reservation in Washington state, and Esther Lee Motanic of the Umatilla Reservation in Eastern Oregon. In the summer of 1926, each of these women occupied a civic spotlight as a public Indian Princess, a role that also functioned very much like a beauty ambassador—someone elected to fictional royalty at least in part for their looks, with the intention to somehow interact with society 128 at large in this celebrated capacity. Looming over them all, however, was the imagined tradition of the famous Powhatan “Princess,” Pocahontas. As twentieth-century iterations of that stock character, these women both embodied and amended the Pocahontas image that occupied such a central role in foundational American mythology. In this chapter, I examine their cases in turn before revisiting the uniqueness of Dorothy Allen’s circumstances and their implications in radically altering the face of Native femininity in the popular press. I stress her conscious role in shaping her image and the ways in which both Allen and her regional counterparts engaged in ambassadorship and self- definition—pursuits that Native women undertook since early contact with Europeans.248 Beads, Fringe, and Feathers Little Fawn—Indian Princess—Miss Redwood Highway (and later Miss Redwood Empire)—debuted in 1926 in a special bridge opening ceremony. “GIANT NEW CAUSEWAY OF ‘PERPETUAL’ TIMBER BUILT,” announced regional newspapers when a 4,000-foot redwood timber bridge went up just south of Requa, California, crossing the “Big Lagoon” there.249 Businessmen and contractors who had built and promoted it—the Redwood Highway Association, the State Highway Commissioner, the Redwood Lumber Dealers’ Association, and more —showed up for a 248 The bulk of the archival source material comes from the California Digital Newspaper Collection’s online archive of regional newspapers. Without being able to provide fuller accounts of the mental world of these historical actors, I suggest possible motives and interpretations of word and deed with multiple possibilities in mind and with the firm conviction that other historians have figured out patterns that are applicable to these cases. In the case of Dorothy Allen, I utilize memories and sources provided by Allen’s niece, Adrian Gilkison, who has been involved in cultural revitalization and education in Karuk homelands herself. 249 “Giant New Causeway of ‘Perpetual’ Timber Built,” Reno Gazette-Journal (Reno, NV), Sept. 3, 1926; “Giant Causeway of “Perpetual’ Timber is Built,” Eugene Guard (Eugene, OR), Sept. 22, 1926; “Big Lagoon Span to be Opened to Traffic Aug. 22,” Healdsburg Tribune (Healdsburg, OR), Aug 12, 1926. 129 late-summer ribbon cutting ceremony in a caravan of assorted roadsters. It was a scene unmistakably set in the 1920s. Pressed suits, boaters, and newsboy caps abounded. Women in the audience wore cardigans and cloches, middle class fashion staples of the era. At the center of the action, “Miss Trinidad” and “Miss Orick,” local beauty pageant winners, matched in white long-sleeved gowns, tied at the neck with large black bows that covered their fair necks. Together, they held the ceremonial ribbon, strung wide enough for the principal car of the oncoming caravan to drive through and officially open the bridge. Leading the procession, perched atop the hood of a luxury Lincoln, sat Dorothy Allen, draped in fringe and beads and wearing a single-feathered headband over a short, black bob. She waved a sleeveless arm in the air and flashed a smile outlined by painted lips (Figure 4.2). Figure 4.2. Causeway Ceremony, August 2 2, 1926. Permission from Adrian Gilkison. 130 The description could be one of any number of women who, by the mid-decade, had adopted the accoutrements of the Modern Woman—specifically, the flapper. But this woman was a few days shy of sixteen and had been plucked from a local public high school to dress up and preside over the bridge ceremony. Given her Karuk and Yurok ancestry, she was a remarkably uncommon flapper figure, for flapperdom was a domain often (and contentiously) claimed for white women. Allen, or in this moment, Princess Little Fawn’s fringe was buckskin; her feather, an eagle’s. Her royalty incorporated steadfast stereotypes of imagined and historical Native femininity, but she was undeniably modern in the updates of those tropes, positioning Allen as an important intervention in the reconciliation of both racialized and gendered narratives in a rapidly modernizing country. The Prevalence of the Powhattan Princess The image and associated mythology of Native female royal lineage, nearly always expressed in the image of the Indian Princess, has been written onto Native women since Europeans and Euro-Americans started interacting with them centuries ago. The concept of a Princess was European. Indigenous nations had no such office or tradition. Still, when colonizers could apply the title with mentions of full-blood status and shared heritage with tribal leadership, they did. With Princess status eventually came an expected physicality derived from Western images of Pocahontas, the preeminent (American) Indian Princess: long dark hair, handmade buckskin gowns, decorative beads or furs or feathers, and a general quality of bone structure and countenance that translated to a mix of exotic beauty and European likeness in the eyes of wordy white men who wrote accounts. 131 It was an image held in high regard. The imagined Pocahontas, distorted by four centuries of developing American mythology by the early twentieth century, communicated ideals of feminine beauty and virginity as well as Indian compliance with and support of colonialism. Despite her appeal as a child of the untamed forest, commentators aligned Pocahontas (and the enduring stock character of “the Indian Princess”) with white society rather than her own. She was considered rare among her people for her pleasant physical attributes and good sense. In fact, iconic depictions describe her as whiter than their Indian sisters, both in appearance and perceived civility.250 Like Pocahontas in the Euro-American creed, Indian Princesses were by definition helpful companions to white men and colonizers. Specifically, they possessed a propensity to aid white society in some way and came to share important Western values like Christian religion, gendered labor, and formal education. Those labeled princesses should be “full-blooded” Indians, as well. That status confirmed ethnic authenticity for white observers and came with a set of rules and behaviors that shaped stereotypes of not just the Indian Princess but also the enduring images of horseback warriors and noble savages.251 250 For example, these standards are all visible in descriptions and illustrations from Ten American Girls From History, a school textbook originally published in 1917. The textbook itself is dedicated to a Ms. Edith Bolling Wilson, “a descendant of Pocahontas, the Indian girl of the Virginia forest who links the flower of early America with the ‘new freedom’ of today.” The first case study in the textbook is that of the “loyal” Pocahontas, described as “a slender, straight young girl with laughing eyes such as are seldom seen among Indians, and hair as black as a crow’s wing…a happy, hearty forest maiden.” The last line of the chapter memorializes “the white man’s steadfast friend.” Kate Dickinson Sweetser, Ten American Girls From History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917), Internet Archive, accessible through the Library of Congress at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t7vm4n458&view=1up&seq=11. 251 For a history of concerns over authenticity in the Northwest in the late nineteenth century, see Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians. For a succinct synopsis of the Indian Princess myth and the Princess/squaw binary, see “‘What’s the Problem with Thinking of Indian Women as Princesses or Squaws?’” in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths about Native Americans (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 137-144. 132 It is worth noting explicitly how very inaccurate white conceptions of Pocahontas were from the very time Captain John Smith and his white contemporaries detailed her in their writings. Historians from inside and outside Native communities have unpacked Pocahontas’s lived experiences and have not only deconstructed the mythology surrounding her young life and role in the Jamestown story, but also helped reconstruct the mental world of an intelligent young person who navigated insurmountable odds to survive and help resist worsening colonial conditions for the benefit of her people. Mattaponi oral history maintains a detailed story of Pocahontas’s life.252 According to seventeenth-century Powhatan traditions, Pocahontas would not have even been present at the meetings between Captain John Smith and her father, Paramount Chief Wahunsenaca, let alone intervene on anyone’s behalf.253 She did occasionally visit Jamestown, the Mattaponi record confirms, “but she went under the permission and protection provided by her father,” and as “the Powhatan symbol of peace.”254 When she later came of age, the English captured her to deter a Powhatan attack that might expel the increasingly dangerous colonizers. Pocahontas was a prepared and savvy captor, having been trained by her people for such a circumstance. She adopted Christianity and took an English husband for a full range of reasons we can only speculate about, but certainly, according to the record of her people, to maintain peace.255 252 The Mattaponi were members of the Powhatan Chiefdom. 253 Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star,” The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing), 19-20. 254 Custalow and Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas, 25, 28. 255 Ibid., 56-57, 59-60. 133 Pocahontas’s role as peace symbol and cultural intermediary placed her in the company of other female Native cultural ambassadors who met colonizers and directed diplomacy in pockets of the continent through eras of early contact.256 Ambassadorship, like all areas of cross-cultural relations, changed over time and according to regional contingencies. Both female ambassadorship and the mythology surrounding it, however, persisted. Its legacy connected the Pocahontas story in its actuality and in its mythology to the twentieth-century ventures of public Native women representatives herein. The symbolism is important, but so were the living and breathing women directing the cultural transactions of information, war, and peace. After Pocahontas, key historical figures in the Northwest, specifically, kept the image of the Indian Princess alive and relevant in enduring regional memory. In the minds and mythologies of settler society, both Sacagawea for her guidance and diplomacy in the Lewis and Clark expedition, and “Winema,” a woman credited with warning a U.S. commissioner about looming Indian attack during the Modoc War, embodied the Indian Princess values throughout the nineteenth century. Their celebration, however, took off in the twentieth century.257 Both became familiar figures in American literature, art, and lore surrounding the white settlement of the American West. 256 Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Rebecca Kay Jager, Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015). 257 Oregon suffragette Eva Emery Dye wrote The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark in 1902, highlighting Sacagawea’s role with the Corps of Discovery just before its centennial. Susan B. Anthony gave an address in the woman’s honor at the unveiling of a Sacagawea statue three years later at the Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon. Lecturers, authors, and playwrights bolstered the mythology surrounding the woman known as Winema from the mid-1870s on. Storytellers presented Winema as a heroine for civilization, even explicitly comparing her to both Pocahontas and Sacagawea. See Donna J. Kessler, The Making of Sacagawea: A Euro-American Legend (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996); Boyd Cothran, “Pocahontas of the Lava Beds” in Remembering the Modoc War, 81-110. 134 Scholars have expounded on what Rayna Green coined the “Pocahontas Perplex.” Her foundational article by that title traces the origins of Indian Princess mythology and contrasts it with its adjacent and alternative image, the “squaw.” Although one image is intended to be positive and the other one is negative, both images define the existence of Native women solely in relationship to men and function as “controlling metaphor[s]” of real Native women.258 Green’s analysis reveals the narrow confines and social ramifications of these particular mythical expectations that pigeonhole Native women in history and society—expectations that continued to dominate non-Native imaginings of Native women into the twentieth century. Modernity, however, made the Princess motif even more perplexing. Indian Princesses and Modern Femininity Modern ideals of femininity from behavior to beauty took form in the early decades of the twentieth century—in fact, they emerged from competing standards that strived to either uphold or abolish Victorian womanhood defined by modesty. Physical beauty received a lot of attention in the public sphere and had easily observable political implications. One battleground that developed for this discourse was the beauty pageant, a stage explicitly set for evaluations of womanhood. In fact, beauty pageants of the 1920s 258 See Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” The Massachusetts Review 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1975): 698-714, which is a landmark discussion of Indian Princess mythology. For a more scathing history of the myth and Americans’ relation to it, see Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Avon Books, 1969), 11. Another early work was Edward McClung Fleming’s “Symbols of the United States: From Indian Queen to Uncle Sam,” in Frontiers of American Culture, eds. Ray B. Browne, Richard H. Crowder, Virgil Lokke, and William T. Stafford (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1968). Other works relate the mythology to American national identity and examine its iteration in literary history and media. See Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); S. Elizabeth Bird, “Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular Media,” Journal of Communication 49, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 61-83. 135 were sites where (often male) judges debated liberal and conservative ideas of appropriate female appearance and behavior to define the normative image of the desirable American woman in the years surrounding contentious social debates like women’s suffrage and increased independence through personal income. The decisively conservative major contests, like the Atlantic City Bathing Beauties contest, forerunner of the gold-standard Miss America Pageant, favored young, long-haired, “unpainted” women and articulated a certain degree of disdain for “New Women,” or flappers, who appeared vain, self-promoting, or worst of all, outwardly sexual.259 These spaces were not only conservative, but also, like so many other spaces, typically segregated by race. Indian Beauty Pageants grew in popularity in the 1910s and 20s, as did pageants for other women of color, usually organized by their own communities.260 They were popular on campuses of both historically black and white colleges, at Indian boarding schools, and at community events like rodeos and festivals.261 In late July of 1926, for example, judges selected Jessie Jim, “winsome Okanogan Indian maiden,” to be “Princess America” out of a field of about two-dozen Native women competing at the National Indian Congress. 262 Figure 4.3 depicts the moment she was crowned. The event was a center-city meeting of regional tribal 259 See Kimberly A. Hamlin, “Bathing Suits and Backlash: The First Miss America Pageants, 1921-1927” in “There She Is, Miss America”: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant, eds. Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 27-52. 260 For an overview of the rise of black beauty pageants, see Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 261 Karen W. Tice, Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry,Student Bodies, and College Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 41. 262 “Indian Beauty is Invited to Attend Pageant,” La Grande Observer (La Grande, OR), Aug 12, 1926; “Indian Maiden May Preside at Atlantic City,” The Evening Herald (Klamath Falls, OR), Aug 12, 1926; “Indian Maid to be Princess,” Daily Capital Journal (Salem, OR), Aug 12, 1926. 136 delegates and performers in Spokane, Washington. White boosters had established the Congress in 1925 as a way to attract tourists. At the same time, tribal leaders from around the Northwest had the opportunity to confer on shared issues, offered educational programs, delivered speeches, and, in its inaugural year, cheered on Haskell Institute’s football team against Gonzaga University’s (Haskell won). There was also a parade, teepee building contest, track meet, and other festivities.263 Figure 4.3. Jessie Jim crowned in Spokane, July 1926. Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and University of Washington Digital Collections. While the next year—the year of Jessie Jim’s election—featured greater tribal representation and more Indian agenda items, these additions did not replace the previous year’s program or the patterns of mainstream interest in Native American cultures at the 263 For more on the role of Indian versus white participation in the Congress, see Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, The Spokane Indians: Children of the Sun (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 275- 276. For more about American desires to observe Indian “authenticity” in the age of assimilationist policy, see Raibmon, Authentic Indians. 137 heart of the marquee events. For example, Jessie Jim was not a surprising selection, given the fact that white men were involved in staging the event. She was “full-blooded” and had a claim to regal heritage as the sole daughter of “Chief Long Jim,” and “granddaughter of Chief In-na-mo-she who once led the Chelan, Methows and Okanogans to battle.”264 War chiefs no longer posed a realistic threat to the U.S. Army or white settlers, so they were safe for white people to admire from a historical distance through a lens of romanticization. Jessie Jim therefore checked the boxes of authenticity and intrigue, and as a result, enjoyed a newfound celebrity status that opened up opportunities for the young woman and built a narrative that ultimately celebrated Jim’s personality and talents beyond her physicality. White journalists described her as “a perfect type of Indian beauty” both for her physical appearance and for her character, which was typical of commentary on pageant winners by and large. “Those who question Miss Jim,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published, “will learn that she likes algebra and English, is adept at needlework and cookery and plans to become a musician.”265 This combination of traits made her the magical and paradoxical mix that Americans desired of “Indian maidens” in the Progressive Era. Clearly, she was no savage, for the imagined “squaws” of old did not place stock in mathematics or Western literary or musical traditions. Americans instead recognized in her the enduring image of Pocahontas, but with behaviors that exemplified a modern iteration of the Pocahontas image. The threat of swift justice from an executioner’s blade to the neck of an English captain were long gone; the way Indians 264 “Siwash Indian Beauty Visits St. Louis Fair,” St. Louis Post-Dispatcher, Sept. 13, 1926. 265 Ibid. 138 represented a threat to Americans in the early twentieth century was refusing to assimilate into Western society, at least according to government programming. Jessie Jim could satisfy the white supremacist urge of America at large by showing adeptness in dignified Western pursuits like English education and music, and in gendered, domestic labor like needlework and cooking while still looking the part of the iconic Indian Princess; a friend, not a foe to white society, also beloved by her own people. Jim stayed in the national press for at least two months after the National Indian Congress meeting. White journalists kept up the complimentary rhetoric but also utilized racist stereotypes to situate her in stark contrast to white women and American modernity. Pageant organizers of the Atlantic City Bathing Beauties contest invited Jim to be their guest of honor in New Jersey. Being the guest of honor meant that Jessie Jim was not invited to formally compete in the pageant, but rather to be present for the crowning of a white champion. Jim accepted the invitation. Journalists followed her progress as she went cross-country with a chaperone. Though she was photographed at various events, organizers rarely if ever invited to speak. A city official in Chicago, for example, exchanged gifts with Jim and took photos with her and Mae Greens, the white “Miss Chicago.”266 Henry Ford received Allen in Detroit. She even visited Broadway in New York City. Jim’s Broadway stop especially seemed to intrigue journalists for the proximity of the “full-blooded” Indian beauty and the “dolls” of a modern spectacle like Broadway.267 Similarly, Jim’s appearance at the Greater St. Louis Exposition led one 266 “Indian Beauty Here on Way to Atlantic City,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 3, 1926; “Indian Entry in Beauty Contest,” Lincoln Journal Star, Sept. 6, 1926. 267 Multiple papers noted that when asked to comment about the “beauties who throng Broadway,” Jim supposedly said nothing more than “Hmmmm.” Though many quoted it, few papers further commented on Jim’s response. Those that did, however, seized on the occasion to perpetuate racist stereotypes. The Tampa Times, for example, summoned the hoary trope of the “stoic Indian” to observe that “Indians are 139 local journalist to explicitly observe the “strange and historic contrast” between the “scion of the aboriginal Americans” and “several hundred go-getting automobile salesmen, typical of the New America.”268 Positive valuations of the young woman paired with unquestioned adherence to American myths about noble savagery and unfitness for modern society in the characteristic ambivalence of a racist mainstream culture long intent on celebrating and appropriating Indigeneity but firmly committed to white supremacy.269 While “early-twentieth-century pageantry” certainly insinuates this inaugural age of Miss America and the like—contests about standards of physical perfection—in the 1910s, suffragists had used pageantry to advocate for political rights in a strategy that wrapped a radical demand in the packaging of traditional feminine respectability and social influence.270 Activism surrounding suffrage and other progressive reform work made visible key Native public figures that challenged both gender roles and racial stereotypes. The most relevant example is perhaps Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), who was regularly visible in the public realm in the 1910s, when she became a lawyer, activist, suffragist, officer in the Society of American Indians, and met with President Woodrow Wilson in a women’s delegation. According to noted for not indulging in a superfluity of words.” This was sarcastic praise for “[rising] to the occasion” with her monosylabic response. See, for example, “H-M-M-M-M-M.,” Tampa Times, Sept. 13, 1926. 268 “Miss American II, Real Indian Beauty, Greets Expo Crowds,” St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, September 14, 1926. 269 Philip Deloria offers an analysis of the historic invocation and appropriation of Indigenous cultures in Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 270 Hamlin, “Bathing Suits and Backlash,” 28. Also see Linda J. Lumsden, “Pageants: Acting Onstage and Offstage” in Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 70-95. 140 Cathleen Cahill, “she asserted her place as a modern Native woman, rejecting the widely held notion that Indians were relics of the past.”271 Baldwin chose to march in the first national parade for suffrage in March 1913 in her graduate regalia that displayed her status as a lawyer rather than, say, ride on horseback in a traditional beaded leather gown like white suffragists often requested of Indian women in the movement. Practicing law was, of course, an unexpected and exceptional career for a Native woman—or any woman—at the time.272 This type of public activism in the political realm is easy to identify looking back, even if it has remained woefully underappreciated. Public activists sought out audiences and explicitly called for reform. They articulated and helped achieve important political aims, and wrote a decisive chapter in the history of Native womanhood. Many other women—hoards by comparison—occupied smaller stages. By 1899, Native people constituted forty-five percent of the educational division of the Indian Service, working in various capacities.273 In its “most formative period” that spanned the turn of the century, the agency employed thousands of Indian people.274 Their visibility and 271 Cathleen D. Cahill, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 1. 272 Another excellent example is Zitkala-Ša (Yankon Dakota). She emerged as one of the best-known Native activists and writers of the early twentieth century, writing and speaking on women’s rights, Native rights, and, importantly, the intersections of racist and sexist bigotry. The efforts and achievements of Baldwin, Zitkala-Ša, as well as several other women of color who shaped the suffrage movement are detailed and contextualized in Cahill, Recasting the Vote. Cahill proves that despite the dominant image of the suffrage movement with its white faces and uniforms, women activists of color fought hard for access to rights of citizenship, voting, and more, and that this activism was crucial but has remained misunderstood and underappreciated. 273 Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil, eds. Through Women’s Eyes: An American History, 5th ed. (New York: MacMillan, 2019), 361-362. 274 Cathleen Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 7. 141 influence often interrupted structures of intimate colonialism wherein white paternalistic or maternalistic agents and instructors would devalue Native ways of being and supplant them with racist, nationalistic goals of colonialism and assimilation. The “power of example” the agency wished to project was assimilated Native adults. As noted in Chapter III, however, what these Native federal employees often actually taught was resistance to total assimilation while benefitting from the opportunities that Western education afforded.275 Jessie Jim was not an outspoken activist. She did, however, wear her regalia with pride and consent to be featured in public events from coast to coast that drew attention to (and therefore might have invited scrutiny of) her beauty and abilities. That visibility afforded her unique opportunities to travel, meet community leaders, and assert the modern presence of her home nation and of Native women. One of Jim’s last hurrahs as Princess America was a stop in Pendleton, Oregon, where she rode on a parade float to close the annual rodeo, called the “Round-Up,” next to the selected Queen that had reigned over the event. That woman was Esther Lee Motanic from the Umatilla reservation (Figure 4.4)—the event’s first ever Indian Queen. In a procession that celebrated pioneer settlement in the region (it was called the “Westward, Ho!” parade), two Native women asserted their place at the center of the town’s most beloved enduring tradition. While they were similarly cast as Indian royalty and received similar reception and newspaper treatment during their time in the spotlight, the ways in which their 275 Ibid. 142 experiences diverged reveal further dimension of both modern Native womanhood and white society’s reaction to it. Motanic had qualities that more explicitly reflected a Princess image updated for this early-twentieth-century age of Indian education, federal employment, and the safegyarding of normative white womanhood. When the Round-Up officials crowned her their event queen, they selected her from a pool that included white women. Her victory wasn’t side- by-side white women like Jim’s, but over them. It also wasn’t quite a beauty pageant; a Figure 4.4. Esther Motanic as Round- committee of event officials selected her to be Up Queen, September 1926. This picture circulated in the press and the symbol of the celebration. Motanic had long appears to have been printed for postcards. hair she wore in braids and was typically photographed in a traditional-looking buckskin Indian dress with detailed embroidery. Her ancestry included Nez Perce, Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla. In a 1924 “Pioneer Pageant” in Walla Walla, she had been cast as Sacagawea. She had also been the first Native woman to graduate from Pendleton High School, sang mezzo soprano in church choirs throughout her childhood and adolescence, and played the violin. After her accomplished career as a student, she joined the U.S. Indian Service, which relocated her 143 to Arizona to work among the Navajo. Observers pointed to all of these qualities in their positive valuations of her. Motanic had first made the papers two years earlier in 1924, when she won the Round-Up’s segregated Indian beauty pageant. The coverage for her victory called attention to several distinctions in modern beauty culture. First, there was the acknowledgement of segregation: “Indians have their beauty shows just like the white folk,” one article read. Then, the paper moved to a more complicated statement about beauty standards: “But there was much wailing through western tepees this year. Those fair maidens with copper skins, who had fallen into the bobbed hair ranks, were barred from the beauty pageant.”276 Even if Indian women could be “fair” by and large, their downfall came, like white women, from “[falling] into the bobbed hair ranks.” Bobbed hair would have stood in contrast to the traditional and expected image of a Native woman as much as a Victorian white woman. It also would have departed from actual enduring traditions in many Indian nations in which long hair held cultural importance.277 The rules of the 1924 Round-Up pageant suggested that, even free from the stipulation that beauty first and foremost meant white, other normative elements of conventional and ethnic gendered appearance classified contestants into specific desirable images. Esther Motanic satisfied American nostalgia for “authentic” Indians, what with her full-blood status and traditional regalia. Motanic, like Jim, was an example of someone who could pass as the imagined, desired Indian Princess, but infuse the image with expanded 276 “Red-Beauty,” Edwardsville Intelligencer (Edwardsville, IL), Sept. 22, 1924. 277 Indeed, hair-cutting at Indian boarding schools was traumatic for boys and girls alike. See published accounts from boarding school pupils: Luther Standing Bear and E. A. Brininstool, My People, the Sioux (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928); Zitkala Ša, “The School Days of an Indian Girl” in American Indian Stories (Washington: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921), 47-80. 144 personality traits. Indian women adopting modern beauty trends that deviated from the coveted norm, however, could not even compete. The title of Round-Up Queen two years later was a significant step up in prestige, and it officially diversified the imagined pool of potential royalty at the event. Such an election was more likely in Pendleton than in other places. Rodeo scholar Renée Laegreid suggests that the Umatilla Reservation, only about fifteen miles outside of Pendleton, had a shared sense of community with the settler town, and further notes that the three tribes on the reservation had been involved with the Round-Up since its inception in 1910.278 Their involvement was part of a larger trend of Indian nations taking advantage of rodeos (and eventually creating their own) to preserve and highlight cultural traditions. Rodeos were therefore spaces of potential empowerment for Indians in modern society where they remained visible and participated in modern ventures that were meaningful and impressive to both Native and non-Native viewers.279 The prospect of integrated royal courts at a rodeo differed significantly from the segregated pageant in the program both in form and in implication. It signified that conversations surrounding beauty and selected female representatives had, in some way, grown to be more inclusive. The papers heralded Motanic’s victory as nothing short of historic: For the first time in history, since Pocohontas played the leading part at Captain John Smith’s wedding, an Indian girl is to receive the highest honors that the 278 Renée Laegreid, Riding Pretty: Rodeo Royalty in the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 59; Renée Laegreid, "Rodeo Queens at the Pendleton Round-up: The First Go-Round, 1910- 1917," Oregon Historical Quarterly 104, no. 1 (2003): 6-23. 279 For more on Indian involvement and goals in rodeos, see Allison Fuss Mellis, Riding Buffaloes and Broncos: Rodeo and Native Traditions in the Northern Great Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). See also Peter Iverson, When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). 145 paleface brethren can bestow. She is Esther lee Motanic, full-blooded Cayuse maiden, and she has been chosen queen of the Pendleton Round-Up… “Queen Esther 1” is the first of her people ever selected to hold the post…until now, it has always been a white girl. It is entirely likely, Round-up officials say, that Esther will be the only Indian maid ever made ruler of the contest arena.280 The coverage makes it clear that the precedent for such an event extended back to the Pocahontas epic, and that despite that familiar and memorialized storyline, it was not a trend that was likely to continue in Oregon in years to come; regular venues for celebrating white womanhood would not be given up permanently. This means that the diversification of the title might not have stemmed from a commitment to a more inclusive future, but instead from the nostalgia of a story that Americans wanted to keep relevant through their own, local iteration. The contours of her admiration were specific and expected. One paper declared that Esther Lee Motanic “possesse[d] the rare combination of facial beauty and intelligence.”281 Another caption read, “This talented young woman has much more than beauty to recommend her. She is highly educated, a brilliant conversationalist and writer, and a welcome and much sought guest of her white sisters. She is as much at home among the tepees of her own people.”282 These items—her education, her success as a writer, her approval in the white community as well as her own—all point to values that white America instilled on Native people. Commentators were also impressed by Montiac’s government employment. As the Tampa Times noted, “She has been rendering 280 “Pretty Indian Maiden is Chosen Queen of 1926 Festival,” Harrisburg Sunday Courier (Harrisburg, PA), September 5, 1926. 281 “Real Indian Girl is Roundup Queen,” Santa Ana Register, September 3, 1926. 282 “Navajo Maiden Chosen Queen 1926 Round-Up,” Huntington Herald (Huntington, IL), August 30, 1926; “Beautiful Navajo Maiden Chosen Queen of 1926 Pendleton Round-Up,” Orlando Sentinel, August 31, 1926; “Indian Maid Chosen Queen of Round-Up,” Tampa Times, September 7, 1926. 146 valuable services to the government through her work among the Navajo Indians of Arizona…at the conclusion [of the Round-Up]…she is hurrying back to Arizona, to resume her work.”283 By 1926, a Native person working with the government in official capacities, celebrated by other Indians and by her white neighbors, was a hopeful image for those invested in a positive image of an inclusive United States in all its racial and ethnic complexity, even though the positions offered opportunities for Indian employees to undermine assimilation efforts. Motanic’s government employment, education, and acknowledged physical beauty were all markers that the new Indian citizenry were behaving according to plan. Actually, Motanic’s family had a long involvement with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Figures 4.5 and 4.6 are photographs from the collections of Lee Moorhouse, a photographer and Umatilla Reservation Indian agent at the turn of the century. Parson Motanic, Esther’s father, posed in both traditional regalia and mainstream modern dress in his automobile, one of the few on the Umatilla Reservation when these pictures were taken in 1915. The girls and women wear the same clothing in both photographs. Parson Motanic was a well-respected (and oft-photographed) property owner on the reservation, a practicing Presbyterian, and a celebrated athlete. Several of his children would end up publicly recognized in the state, consciously pursuing recognition and consenting to the dissemination of their images. The Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation aided the recognition. Just in 2013, the tribe posted on social media encouragement to attend the unveiling of bronze statues of Esther Lee Motanic and 1916 All-Around Round-Up champion, Jackson Sundown. Descendants participated in the unveilings, and 283 “Indian Maid Chosen Queen of Round-Up,” Tampa Times, September 7, 1926. 147 in the case of the Motanic statue, a granddaughter also served as model for the sculptor.284 Figures 4.5 and 4.6. Motanic Family in Automobile. Lee Moorhouse photographs, PH036, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries. A question of empowerment always remains open in pageants or other types of popularity contests.285 Both Jessie Jim and Esther Lee Motanic fit within the parameters that Americans easily recognized as belonging to the quintessential Indian Princess. Jim’s selection was rather expected: not only was she elected in a segregated beauty contest, but she styled herself in what the public would recognize as traditional Indian womanhood and royalty. Motanic also embodied the expected image but had beaten out 284 Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, 2013, “The Pendleton arts commission will unveil the city’s first American Indian public art Saturday, June 1,” Facebook, May 30, 2013, https://www.facebook.com/CTUIR/posts/670934306253582; Chris Rizer, “Esther Motanic Will Be City’s First Woman, Indian Public Art,” East Oregonian, January 7, 2013, https://www.eastoregonian.com/news/local/esther-motanic-will-be-city-146-s-first-woman-indian-public- art/article_ea32e036-50cf-52df-9b51-39a7e0384412.html. 285 Wendy Kozol takes up this question to discuss the Bureau of Indian Affairs Collection of “Miss Indian America” photography from the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the same politics of voyeurism, beauty, race, and colonialism characterized the mid-century iteration of Indian Princesshood and beauty culture. See Kozol, “Miss Indian America: Regulatory Gazes and the Politics of Affiliation,” Feminist Studies 31, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 64-94. 148 white women for her title, a significant development in a framework that typically cast attractive Indian and white women side-by-side rather than in the same arena and drawn from the same pool. Despite the misguided elements of the selection processes and the white desire for Native women to embody certain roles, Jim and Motanic benefitted from their experiences and made visible certain aspects of their cultures and personal ambitions. That type of achievement sculpted legacies that modern tribal communities tend to celebrate. The same is true in the case of Dorothy Allen, but her influence was even more radical. Dorothy Allen as Little Fawn embodied a completely new image of the Indian Princess not only updated in the ways the former examples illustrate but entirely reimagined. While a flapper was certainly a recognizable image, an Indian flapper was surprising in the 1920s. The flapper ideal, as well as larger notions of beauty, almost necessarily included whiteness in its definition, and the constraints of the title of Indian Princess included appearances and behaviors that looked nothing like the New Woman. With politics of race, beauty, Indigeneity, and modernity all standing in conflict with one another in mid-1920s, the reconciliation of those categories in this one figure suggests that something unusual happened in Northern California. In the pageant and rodeo settings, the visibility, personalities, and behaviors of select Indian women carved away space for updated Indian femininity that still adhered to a visual standard. In the tourist industry, a bolder spectacle offered the desired draw. The Redwood Highway Association invented “Little Fawn” as an emblem of a region aiming to quickly attract tourists in automobiles. Modern technology would bring visitors to the heart of the ancient redwood forest, a meeting of two eras in one striking setting. 149 Observers celebrated Allen for her “full-blooded Indian” status as well as her modern- meets-traditional style, even as both Indian racial status and the connotations of modern styles were under heavy scrutiny on the national scale. She was another meeting of old and new, and as the highway successfully attracted thousands of new visitors each year, she remained visible and present at the center of the action. Her image would eventually reach an international press that eclipsed the coverage of events like the National Indian Congress or Pendleton Round Up. Allen came to be Miss Redwood Empire by winning an informal contest she hadn’t known she had entered. Administrators at Eureka High School called her down to the office along with a few other Native girls, where they met some suited men who told the girls that they needed an Indian Princess to help with some highway celebrations. By the end of the school day, she received a notice that she had won the unofficial contest and that she and her chaperones, the family with whom she boarded at the request of her father (so she could attend school), would have to travel throughout the Redwood Empire for events.286 Of course, boosters in the Redwood Empire Association, which oversaw highway tourism, sought out Native girls for the purpose of adorning them with a contrived costume and invented Indian name. Allen’s family shows up on Indian census rolls and was labeled “Indian” on the federal census as well.287 Their racial identity was public. Hailing from Red Cap, a former mining town on the Klamath River, the family had both 286 Adrian Gilkison (the niece of Dorothy Allen), in discussion with the author, January 2021. 287 1920 U.S. Census, Humboldt and Klamath Counties, California, roll, ancestry.com; 1921 Indian Census, Greenville Agency, roll, ancestry.com. 150 Yurok and Karuk ancestry. John Orvel Allen, Dorothy’s father, was a well-liked man and a well-respected Forest Ranger for the Forest Service.288 Native communities had a contentious history and ongoing relationship with the U.S. Forest Service across the country, and yet it was, in many rural places, a reliable and desirable employer.289 Dorothy Allen herself did some administrative work for the Forest Service as a young woman. Because of her and her family’s range of roots in American institutions as well as ancestral homelands, Allen truly did represent the modern Indigenous experience. Boosters’ visions, of course, were not quite so nuanced or realistic. Figure 4.7 shows a picture of Allen that circulated in the press in 1926. A robust documentary record of her public career remains in clippings and promotional materials. Beyond the story of her representation, however, Allen’s living family members recall her lifelong memories of her time as Miss Redwood Empire and similarly reflect on what the title entailed and represented. Allen did not speak publicly about her experiences. She was keenly aware since her youth that fame for a woman invited prying eyes and churned rumor mills, but Figure 4.7. This picture ran in several she gave her family express permission to share her stories American newspapers in 1926. after her death (which came in 2012 when she was 102 years Newspapers.com. 288 James McNeill, a Karuk runner in the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon, recalled John Allen in a published account of the race. See James McNeill, “Bunion Derby,” The Siskiyou Pioneer 4, no. 2 (1969), 7. Adrian Gilkison also discussed John Allen’s and other family members’ work in the Forest Service in discussion with the author. 289 For a history of natural resource management contested between the U.S. government and tribal communities, see Theodore Catton, American Indians and National Forests (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016). 151 old). Both big impressions and small details from these recollections reveal a conscious play with markers of modernity, and, as a result, a powerful and intentional presentation of a modern, individual woman, one who reaped personal benefits, excelled in her employment, and sculpted a legacy dear to her family and community. Princess Little Fawn always appeared in a basic knee-length fringed dress. A 1927 caption described it as a “more or less modern version of her ancient tribal costume.”290 The Redwood Empire Association provided that costume, which mimicked generic buckskin, but according to Dorothy Allen’s niece, “really felt more like the cloths you’d use to clean a car—chamois.”291 Even worse were the oversized moccasins. On occasion, Allen took care to ditch them in favor of “her own fanciest, highest heels.”292 Indeed, both pairs of shoes show up in surviving photographs, though only the former fit the prescription for quintessential Indian dress. Other elements of the costume further distorted the traditional image. The dress was short-sleeved and hung loosely off of her shoulders rather than fitted to her figure. A belt hung also loosely around the waist, projecting a straight, “boyish” silhouette popular among flappers. Figure 4.8 is a surviving full-body image of Allen with the victor of the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon, Johnny Southard. Post-race postcards like this one reveal details in dress that visually differentiate Little Fawn from Jessie Jim and Esther Motanic. The wrinkling of stockings is visible around Little Fawn’s exposed knees. No longer worn for warmth under Victorian gowns, stockings like these were a modern 290 “Princess Greets First Runner,” Oakland Tribune, June 20, 1927. 291 Adrian Gilkison, discussion. 292 Ibid. 152 fashion emblem all their own.293 There is also a hint of another undergarment beneath her raised arm: the lace of a brassiere or slip. This was another personal garment, not one provided by boosters. With the New Women of the era came new underwear. Corsets, the iconic emblem and guardian of the female figure, were slowly phasing out. Catalogs featured adorned lace chemises to not only wear under the boxy dresses but potentially to be seen in their own right.294 This is perhaps what we see in the low arm hole. She accessorizes with a single strand of beads and a headband with a feather—these were also flapper accessories. Allen wore her hair short her whole life, though probably did not see her bob as a political Figure 4.8. Little Fawn and statement.295 Still, all of these details blended the Mad Bull, Grants Pass, June 22, 1927. Postcard. traditionally “Indian” aesthetic recognized by American society at large with mainstream, modern styles. Jim’s and Motanic’s dresses were, of course, of completely different and modest by the standards of mainstream society. Jim and Motanic wore actual regalia with more 293 Sharon McConnell-Sidorick, Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia’s Radical Hoisery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 110. 294 For a more comprehensive history of women’s underwear, see C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington, The History of Underclothes (London: M. Joseph, 1951); Colleen Hill and Valerie Steele, Exposed: A History of Lingerie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 295 Gilkison, discussion. 153 fabric, more beads and adornment, and more embroidery than the Little Fawn costume. They were culturally significant garments crafted by Native women, unlike Allen’s. Even if white observers failed to appreciate their full significance in cultural persistence and pride, they expected to see dresses like Jim’s and Motanic’s on Native women. Figures 4.9, 4.10, and 4.11 offer side-by-side looks at the similarities and differences between the women’s clothes. Figures 4.9, 4.10, and 4.11. Left to right: Jessie Jim, Wyoming State Archives; Esther Lee Motanic, Whitman College and Northwest Archives; Dorothy Allen (as Little Fawn), Mendocino County Museum. 154 Despite the visual modern updates, commentators immediately compared Allen to Pocahontas. Such should be expected. Papers from the West Coast to the Midwest also compared Little Fawn (they usually did not use Allen’s real name) to Esther Lee Motanic in a rendition of the following caption: Pendleton, Ore., “started something” when it chose Esther Lee Motanic, Indian beauty, as queen of its annual roundup and announced her as the loveliest Indian girl in America. California wants to enter charming “Little Fawn”…in a contest with Miss Motanic and all other Indian comers. “Little Fawn” is a princess of the Klamath tribe.296 This coverage situated Allen in the context of other Native women, not in one with white women like the ones who won “Misses” titles in nearby California towns. It also misidentified her Tribal affiliation.297 Boosters in the Redwood Empire Association consciously chose to combine the “Little Fawn” and “Miss Redwood Empire” titles, deliberately casting a Native woman as the emblem of the region in general, but there hadn’t been a formal contest with white and Native women in the same arena. In this way, the parameters of Allen’s title were similar to Jessie Jim’s. The papers, however, referenced Motanic, who also represented a local entity. The suggested contest never formerly occurred, but the challenge revealed tendencies to racially segregate beauty conversations so as to not put white women in competition with Native women, and perhaps in this case, hedge away from the fact that Motanic had been in direct competition with white women. Instead presenting her as a novelty and calling for a 296 “Rivals Esther Lee Motanic,” La Grande Observer (La Grande, Oregon), September 13, 1926; “A Rival for Indian Beauty,” Traverse City Record-Eagle (Traverse City, Michigan), September 10, 1926; “A Rival for Indian Beauty Honors,” Santa Cruz Evening News, September 13, 1926. Note that the tribal affiliation is incorrect in the caption. 297 The Karuk, Yurok, and Hupa Tribes live along the Klamath River, but the Klamath Tribe, formerly the Klamath Indian Tribe or Oregon, consolidated Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin peoples. 155 bigger segregated pageant, white newspapers drew lines around zones of womanhood, keeping the Indian Princess in her place. In her three-year tenure with the Redwood Highway Association, Allen enjoyed a robust public career, adoration from the press, and access to experiences she never would have otherwise had. This last item is what stood out most to her. She enjoyed being “Little Fawn” because it afforded her the opportunity to travel.298 The moment she remembered the most came just before the end of the first race. Before heading into Grants Pass for the big finish line event, Allen and her entourage stopped over at the Oregon Caves. Actress Myrna Loy, recruited by boosters to tie the event to Hollywood, sang “Indian Love Call” for the crowd. Caves are famous for their superior acoustics. The song, which engages romanticized imagery of noble savagery, nonetheless rang enchantingly throughout the caverns. It deeply impressed Allen, who said in retrospect that she could not even recall if the actress was a good singer—Allen had simply never heard a soundscape like the one in that cave, nor shared a stage with a movie star.299 Allen’s experiences and her publicized image were dependent on her immediate circumstances, namely her association with local boosters in a rapidly-developing tourist destination, plus the freedom she had to embellish her appearance with personal touches like bobbed hair and high heels. The parameters of developing regional identity opened up space rooted in American nostalgia for Indian imagery and heritage, but apparently able to adapt that nostalgia to a modern setting when confronted with a woman who embodied the intersection of femininity, modernity, and Indigeneity. The agencies that 298 Gilkison, discussion. 299 Ibid. 156 did the promoting were peculiar in some ways. A blending of traditional and modern was exactly what boosters were selling, and in Northern California, that opened up a possibility for modern space belonging to Indian people. The redwood forest was a place where visitors could stand in awe at the base of towering, ancient trees, set up “primitive camps,” and then drive into town in their Model Ts and dine at hotels. The Redwood Empire offered the luxuries of modern society, and the luxury of escaping its burdens, in uncannily close proximity. Tradition and modernity were not only side-by-side, but also overlapping. Little Fawn represented their harmony. Even with stereotypes written onto her that continued to force Indians into a predetermined narrative written by the colonizer, she could start to write those narratives anew. Dorothy Allen wrote a segment that appeared in her obituary that read: While I was in Eureka High School I was chosen to be the Miss Redwood Highway or ‘Princess Little Fawn.’ I presided over the All Indian Marathon (a money making scheme promoting the Redwood Highway or Highway 101!) The race started in San Francisco and ended in Grants Pass, Oregon. It was a fun time for a 17 year old girl.300 Even in the short excerpt, one can see the reasonable reaction to earning the title. It was an honor to be selected from a group of peers, and the various travels, ceremonies, and flashy events were fun for someone who couldn’t have otherwise attended. It was a rare opportunity. She did not mention agenda items or muse over a legacy that would become part of a story of cultural resurgence and self-definition. We cannot say for certain whether Jessie Jim or Esther Lee Motanic would have understood their fame in such a way, either. Each woman’s story relayed above, however, while bound by tendrils of firmly established Indian Princess mythology, brought progress in public ideas and social 300 “Dorothy Eleanor Gaby,” Eureka Times-Standard, September 9, 2012. 157 spaces. Their stories each speak to the intersection of modernity, Indigeneity, and gender in the 1920s, before mid-century pan-Indianism would offer new spaces and vocabularies to transmit cultural relevance in rural and urban settings alike. Including them in the timeline of such pursuits, however, acknowledges the agency they possessed in their public careers and the broad impact of their actions in defining Indigenous womanhood in the Northwest. The Princess in Perpetuity Symbolic royalty and pageant titles often explicitly stress ambassadorship, where Native people are involved, between tribal or reservation communities and white society. Native women in these roles, however, have made it clear that their missions are not to simply aid white society in its colonial aims like the original myth of Pocahontas suggested. Dorothy Allen’s role as a type of ultra-modern cultural beauty ambassador invoked myths and truths about Native women across the continent in the past, the myths centering on notions of Indian Princess lore and the truths stemming from the long pattern of female ambassadorship and symbolism for peace and harmony, between communities and between eras of the American story. She was not the only one to update the Pocahontas image, as other elected Native public women at the same time displayed new qualities that white and Indian communities valued during the age of assimilationist policy. Allen’s image and circumstances, however, pushed the boundaries of what would have usually been considered acceptable in realms of both beauty and the “Indian Question,” delivering a radical, partially contrived, but easily identifiable depiction of modern Native femininity to a crowd that embraced her. 158 Even famous Native women in Hollywood, like actresses Lillian Margaret “Red Wing” St. Cyr (Winnebago), Te Ata Fisher (Chickasaw), and Molly “Spotted Elk” Nelson (Penobscot), all of whom were enjoying public careers in the 1920s, had long hair and wore long dresses. The parts they played called for such an appearance on top of their presumed desire to fashion themselves in the ways that they did. The silver screen, so strikingly modern, made very little room for Native women outside of stereotypical roles.301 Little Fawn’s image was so unique because it wasn’t just an updated Pocahontas image that in many ways, particularly visual, recast the original Indian Princess as a twentieth-century reincarnation. It invited new conceptions of Indian women and their enduring influences within modern American institutions. She was a princess with bobbed hair and a short skirt, and there is no evidence that the press frowned upon these attributes, as was so often the case in beauty contest commentary, or that dominant society took issue with the selection of a Native woman to be Miss Redwood Highway in the first place. When Little Fawn cut the ribbon at her first bridge opening celebration in 1926, that ribbon was held on one end by “Miss Orick” and by “Miss Trinidad” at the other, both white women representing nearby towns, both dressed in long-sleeved, high- necked dresses, and both secondary in importance to the Indian ribbon cutter. It would be overzealous to suggest that enthusiastic journalists reporting from Spokane, Round-Up officials in Pendleton, or boosters in California’s redwood forest were consciously pursuing the idea of equal and shared space or governance with Native 301 M. Elise Marubbio’s Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film discusses the prevalence of tropes concerning Native women in film. Some of the movies discussed come after the 1920s, but the tropes were in full swing by the end of the 1910s. See M. Elise Marubbio, Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006). 159 people. Even the spaces discussed herein closed relatively quickly. Pendleton’s Round- Up board returned to selecting white ‘cowgirls’ to represent their image and preside over their ceremonies. Spokane would not host another Indian Congress. The Miss America event made do without a regular resident Indian beauty. Even the Redwood Empire Association typically selected white women for public representation, whether they held baby chicks for Petaluma’s Butter & Egg Day celebration, paddled canoes for the cameras, or became “Miss Redwood Empire” herself in ensuing years.302 The generic Indian Princess persisted as a mascot. Product branding in the early twentieth century featured “noble savage” imagery in the form of headdress-wearing or peace-pipe-wielding men and beautiful, submissive Indian princesses. Americans (and Europeans) displayed carved “cigar store Indians” on sidewalks.303 Argo’s corn starch featured an Indian “corn maiden” since the product’s inception in 1892. Centerville Canning Company featured a “Squaw Brand” for canned vegetables in the 1920s. The famous Land O’Lakes Maiden debuted in 1928. These are scattered examples, but they highlight the breadth of similar imagery that gained prominence throughout the first few decades of the twentieth century. The similar and ubiquitous images highlight the importance of the interventions forced by influential Native women in local public spheres. 302 “Redwood Empire Association Photographs,” Box 2: BANC PIC 1978.145, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California. 303 See Brian D. Behnken and Gregory D. Smithers, Racism in American Popular Media: From Aunt Jemima to the Frito Bandito (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2015), 36-37; Victoria E. Sanchez, “Buying into Racism: American Indian Product Icons in the American Marketplace,” in American Indians and the Mass Media, eds. Meta G. Carstarphen and John P. Sanchez (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 155. 160 As the century bore on past the “Roaring Twenties,” actual Native women continued to utilize press visibility to the advantage of themselves and their communities, as well as represent themselves and their communities through pageants, rodeos, and other contests. Rachel Buff concluded that powwow princesses are able to “translate alterity into a language that tourists can understand” and also act “as powerful symbols and actors in the landscape of contemporary Indian culture.”304 In the 1950s, in response to termination and relocation policies that sent Indian individuals off reservations and into urban centers at the behest of the government, events like powwows or Indian beauty contests provided community among the displacement. They both reinvented diverse traditional cultural practices and introduced elements of mainstream modern culture in which twentieth-century Indians took part. Similarly, Wendy Kozol found that the surviving visual culture—portraits and published photographs—from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Miss Indian America pageant in the 1960s and 70s depicted women who transmitted social agency in the way they negotiated their racial and gendered affiliations with modernity, pan-Indianism, the state, and tribal and national identities in the face of exploitation.305 Native women in the 1920s, in the early ages of pageantry, undertook similar work. After the marathon, an ice cream parlor sent out an employee to take a picture of Mad Bull and Little Fawn and printed a large copy for its window.306 The end of the event was not the end of the dissemination of the images of the Native women and men 304 Rachel Buff, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945-1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 149. 305 Kozol, “Miss Indian America,” 64-94. 306 Gilkison, discussion. 161 who had participated in the event. The deluge of press coverage that followed the race revealed what other interventions had possibly been made beyond those discussed in this chapter (focused on Native femininity), and where unyielding stereotypes still abounded in the public telling of marathon stories. Native people had, after all, been at the heart of a hugely successful tourist gambit that circulated heaps of press. The next chapter examines the narratives that came out of the first Redwood Highway Indian Marathon in the particular areas of tourism and related efforts like preservation and conservation of trees in the redwood forest. All of those institutions had racist histories in the Northwest and elsewhere, and each had shaped the highway and the highway marathon. The aftermath of the first marathon revealed much about the state of ongoing Indian stereotypes and the extent of intervention forged from the Native historical actors. Then, the event went dormant until it was time to advertise again, and old and new issues were back on the table. 162 CHAPTER V “HIGHWAYS ARE SHOW WINDOWS”: SELLING THE REDWOOD EMPIRE After the Marathon For the runners, the soundtrack of the race had blended the gentle babbles and chirps of the expansive forest with the sounds of mechanized, motorized metal on the road. Cars had regularly greeted runners with tootles from their awooga horns even as the athletes coughed on exhaust fumes that sputtered out of the roadsters that accompanied them. Caravans had followed them for support and to aid in publicity, and more than a few spectators had pursued the race beyond city limits as runners trekked from checkpoint to checkpoint. In fact, a bump from an automobile was a real threat in certain stretches. The highway had been the racetrack; the runners and roadsters alike had traversed it. One man who truly fancied his experience an expedition of sorts was the race referee, Harry G. Ridgway, president of the “Marvelous Marin” booster club that promoted Marin County, one of the stops along the highway. The whole thrilling tale from the planning to the residual promotion fueled his enthusiasm for the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon, and he was only too happy to share his story when the last runner had crossed the line. Ridgway’s job had been to appoint a team that made sure contestants followed the rules during the contest and to traverse the racecourse himself, monitoring the runners. Carrying out this seemingly simple task, Ridgway insisted that, “[his] experiences, to say the least, were many and novel, inasmuch as a race of this kind had never been 163 attempted.” Ridgway supervised course instructors who policed runners individually from the seat of their individual caravans containing their sponsors. Constant vigilance prevented racers from taking shortcuts or hitching rides, though there did not appear to be any attempts to have to halt. “It was considerably less of a task,” Ridgway said, “for the runner to keep awake moving than for a driver or inspector to trail him in a car.” To fight road hypnosis and boredom, inspectors apparently periodically ran beside runners as pacers and handed off the steering wheel to someone else. Nobody, apparently, relieved Ridgway’s team, day or night. “The task was so monotonous,” he reported, “that many dropped out at the various towns.” Ridgway scrambled to replace them with on-the-spot volunteers. Ridgway himself, traveling in a La Salle sedan, drove (or was driven) over stretches of the course several times per day, tracking each runner for a time. Even as the field narrowed with men dropping out to tend to injuries, growing and sizeable leads meant long trips for the referee-mobile, starting early in the morning and running well past midnight as runners ran on their own schedules and often took advantage of the cool night air and relative reprieve from traffic. “I have never put in a more strenuous 10 days,” he said, “than I experienced in refereeing this race.” Ever the advertiser, though, Ridgway insisted that he “at no time during the trip” completely tired from the long drives, amounting to about 3,000 miles by his estimation: “It was the most comfortable car I had enjoyed riding in.” His driver, a Mr. McCord, was vigilant through the nights and, like an apprentice boatman tackling rapid after rapid, never complained of his endless toil. 164 Ridgway did not comment much on the runners. They must have either handled their grind with grace, or he was simply oblivious to their suffering in comparison to his managerial team’s. Ridgway noted sprains, bruises, and the need to monitor heart rates, but he most robustly commented on the success of the publicity rather than the men who gave people something to write about. “Nothing in the sporting world has ever attracted more attention and interest,” he claimed. His colleagues in the Redwood Empire Association echoed this excitement, raving about the “suitcase full of publicity” that overflowed across the nation and even beyond.307 One might scoff at Ridgway for his overblown sense of self-importance and his hyperbolic enthusiasm, especially as he was mere yards away from men actually running this distance that was exhausting even to drive. Truthfully, though, driving the Redwood Highway in 1927 required some skill and diligence. By that summer, the route was good enough for runners to follow it beginning to end. Still, it was stocked with switchbacks and not at all uniformly paved, and the California Highway Commission and Redwood Highway Association knew it needed steady improvements to realize its full potential as a gateway to and beacon through the Redwood Empire. Still, it had proved alluring for motorists. In fact, on the first day John Southard no longer had to wake up and set out for dozens of miles on foot, he went out and spent the majority of his victory check on a flashy new roadster for himself. Legend has it that he had “Mad Bull” painted along the side of this iconic sedan and then took his first trip right down the main street in Grants Pass with his mother and Princess Little Fawn in passenger seats. (According to his family, that car ended up being a lemon. He sold 307 “Shows a Suitcase Full of Publicity,” Sausalito News, November 12, 1927. 165 whatever make and model it was and eventually became “a Buick man for life,” opting for reliability over pure aesthetics. It had, after all, been a Buick support car that tailed him during the race.)308 Boosters had touted since the beginning of the decade that “highways are show windows,” absolute necessities in attracting and supporting visitors.309 They thought carefully about how to promote motor travel and how to sell their product. Committed to the notion that the region needed better highways and more cars, many people in the business of promotion worked to perfect this particular show window of which local residents were so proud. That push outlived the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon itself. The race did, however, grow interest in the highway and give it some of its early character. Plus, boosters’ framing of the region and the race revealed some of their finer plans for promoting motor tourism by and large—plans that involved and excluded Native people in prescribed ways. The image of Indians running through the woods represented an age-old trope in the mainstream American imagination, another reflection of the constant relegation of Native people to a bygone past. But the average American would construct a scene complete with loin cloths, bows and arrows, and soft footfalls on pine needles or dirt paths, not a highly-publicized and officially timed trek of trained athletes in crisp, numbered singlets and double-soled boxing shoes.310 What boosters imagined was not 308 Judy Waddell (niece of John Southard; daughter of Marion Southard), in discussion with the author, June 2019. 309 “Minutes: Organizing Meeting North of Bay Counties Association,” November 5, 1921, “California Development Association” folder, Redwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum. 310 One of the many visuals that marked the Zuni runners as “picturesque” in the eyes of white observers were their sandals. The Karuk runners, however, all ran in mainstream competitive running attire. 166 exactly what they ended up getting or delivering. The dual function of the racecourse, the presence of automobiles, and the emphasis on tourism all defined the event as decisively modern. In effect, it became a fixture of regional economy and identity as boosters worked to put the region on the map. But what did white observers make of the pairing of these modern fixtures—the forward-looking momentum of the whole stunt—alongside a fully Native cast of athletes that excited, intrigued, and confused them? Recall nine-year- old Garth Sanders’s disillusion over the disappointing lack of “feathers and buckskins…”311 Envisioning the future of the region involved carefully framing the past. Of course, Vanishing Race ideology influenced advertising and reporting at every turn. Boosters employed local Native people to project contrived “Indianness” and used nearly identical language to lament vanishing races of trees and people. This strategy fit into standing racialized narratives of Native history as pre-history. At the same time boosters featured the region’s Indigenous people in this way, they also told careful narratives about the place itself. The “wilderness,” though endangered, would endure with ongoing preservation efforts and the highway would be the key to both preservation efforts along the route and the way to access it. As discussed, the promise of the region was ultimately that in the redwoods, one could explore both ancient wonders and modern amenities.312 311 Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire, 117. 312 Scholars and promoters have long debated what exactly the Pacific Northwest, or certain pockets of it, represent on a spectrum ranging from frontier wilderness to urban promise and innovation. Boosters for the Redwood Empire in the 1920s promoted both notions. For a sample of the scholarly questions surrounding regional definitions and identities related to the Pacific Northwest (as we now understand it), see Eve Vogel, “Defining One Pacific Northwest Among Many Possibilities: The Political Construction of a Region and its River During the New Deal,” Western Historical Quarterly 42 (Spring 2011): 29-53; John M. Findlay, “A Fishy Proposition: Regional Identity in the Pacific Northwest,” in Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, eds. David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner (Lawrence: University Press 167 Nature and industry intersected—overlapped—and the ancient past and ultra-modern present truly existed in tandem. Native people fit uneasily into this image. They were supposed to be part of the past in stereotypical ways, but the merging of old and new (as discussed in the previous chapter and the figure of “Little Fawn”) in promotion disrupted those stereotypes. Defining and managing the categories of past, present, and future, took careful work and rhetoric and produced conundrums. This chapter explores ways in which white people working in capacities to define and structure the region—namely boosters and people invested in forest preservation and management—worked to exclude Native people in the modern iteration of the redwood forest and Northern California more broadly. Native people, however, also created modern California. In the immediate sphere of Redwood Empire tourism, the Highway Marathon created a possibly unique narrative of the pairing of Indians and modern technologies and industries in the way it situated cars and Native people side-by-side. Boosters had created the whole event to advertise a new road through the wilderness. Native people in this marathon became the subject matter of the advertisements, used the road, and, of course, were part and parcel of a nation-wide developing image of wilderness that encompassed everything from the rhetoric of Romantic literature to the very real and sweeping consequences of scientific forest management. Lines of inclusion and division among and between these categories were not perfect or fixed. As the essential trappings of modernity came to California’s redwoods region, Native people were both recipients and participants in the most crucial spaces of development. of Kansas, 1997), 37-70; John Cleman, “The Belated Frontier: H. L. Davis and the Problem of Pacific Northwest Regionalism,” Western American Literature 37, no. 4 (Winter 2003), 430-451. 168 Pushing for Preservation At the Second National Conference of State Parks, held from May 22 to 25, 1922 at the Bear Mountain Inn in New York, Mr. Joseph Donohue Grant delivered an impassioned report about the Redwoods of Northern California and the need to preserve them. “These trees fire the imagination,” he said. “These last remnants of a once great race are one of the few links between the present and the prehistoric past. The Redwood has stood sentinel over a thousand changes in the structure and order of the material world. It has seen the rise of civilization. It has looked upon the growth and fall of empires.”313 This language is familiar not just to the preservationist or practitioner of transcendentalist polemic but to all those familiar with Vanishing Race mythology. Of course, in this example, the race in question is not one of people; it’s of trees. J. D. Grant’s statement about the redwoods invoked a glorious ancient history and placed it in contrast to impending doom in the era of “civilization.” The personified trees held an age-old wisdom and significant nostalgia factor derived from their long tenure in their homelands, flourishing for centuries unbeknownst to previous generations of so many white Americans. Of course, this imagery was often applied to Native people, understood to be relics of the past, noble savages, and children of the forest. The conflation of nature and Native people had long roots in facets of Vanishing Race ideology and related American mythology like the “noble savage”—a conception of Native people as 313 Henry Francis, ed., Proceedings of the Second National Conference on State Parks at Bear Mountain Inn Palisades Interstate Park New York (Publication Committee, 1923), 50. 169 inherently part of the natural landscape rather than human society.314 Anti-Indian racism was central to U.S. policy regarding the management and protection of nature in the Progressive Era. Boosters, government officials, and white activists in the 1920s—those most central to our story in the redwoods—reflected several decades of exclusionary policy and wilderness ideology as they sought to manage, protect, and promote redwood trees. During the Gold Rush, settlers extracted more lumber than gold. That early cutting impacted Indigenous communities who, for example, harvested nuts from pine trees. Akins and Bauer recount a short story of a white man chopping down a sugar pine and mocking a Yurok woman who had been doing just that.. The woman “concluded that ‘the white man would spoil everything.’”315 Jared Farmer, in his California history as told by trees, relays that “in the 1850s the discovery of gold, the disclosure of scenery, and the dispossession of native peoples—who of course already knew about the trees—happened in rapid, interrelated fashion.” He also notes that in the Yosemite Valley (but likely beyond), settlers burned trees as part of a “scorched-earth offensive” to pursue and punish Native people unwilling to bend to settler demands.316 Timber harvesting, of course, outlived the Gold Rush. Commercial logging accelerated in the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. The 1920 Census of Manufactures 314 For information on the trope of the noble savage and its historical application to Native people in what became the United States, see Robert F. Berkhofer, “European Primitivism, the Noble Savage, and the American Indian” in The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 72-79. 315 Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 134-135. 316 Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013), 12. 170 ranked lumber industries eighth and ninth in its table of California’s principle industries ranked by value.317 Those rankings would climb throughout the decade.318 It also reported that “the relative importance of California as a lumber producing state [had] been increasing” in the period between 1909 and 1919 and that in 1919, loggers cut 410,442,000 board feet of redwood timber.319 That volume doubled the bounty found in many plots preserved for early state parks, like Humboldt State Redwood Park (established in 1921), which boasted only around 200,000,000 feet in its 2,000 acres.320 An impending loss of trees eventually became a problem for non-Indigenous people in the region. Boosters and preservationists in the Progressive Era, for example, sought to slow the loss of trees, particularly in strategic areas that could instead be parks or tourist attractions.321 Questions about land use and protection, however, varied and grew contentious throughout the entire twentieth century. Strategies varied by 317 These categories were “Lumber and timber products” and “Lumber planning-mill products, not including planning mills connected with saw mills.” Census of Manufactures, 1920, Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC, 1920), 84, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1920/volume- 9/06229683v9ch01.pdf. 318 The National Forests of California, Miscellaneous Circular No. 94 (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, 1927), 11, https://foresthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/TheNationalForestsOfCalifornia-1927.pdf. 319 Census of Manufactures, 1920, Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC, 1920), 84, 102, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1920/volume-9/06229683v9ch01.pdf. 320 Francis, Proceedings of the Second National Conference, 47. 321 Farmer reminds us that tourism was actually on settlers’ radar from the time of the Gold Rush, as well. He says that as vigilantes entered the Yosemite Valley, they “immediately recognized that the wonder-spot would become a magnet for tourists—once the Sierra Miwok had been driven out.” This example pertains to the lands of the Giant Sequoia, a tree, by the way, that white botanists decided to name after the Cherokee man that invented the Cherokee syllabary. Though the example is of the Giant Sequoia rather than the coastal redwood, it demonstrated the long roots (pardon the pun) of anti-Indian sentiment in wilderness ideology connected to tourism despite the regular equation of Native people and nature and the common practice of appropriating Native names for new purposes. Farmer later discusses how early tourists and colonizers imbibed their own histories and meanings onto the sequoias, refusing to recognize or honor any type of enduring connection between people Indigenous to the region and the trees. Farmer, Trees in Paradise, 12, 19-20. 171 organization. At the time the Redwood Highway Association worked in earnest to build and promote a regional highway in the century’s earliest decades, environmental conservation and preservation had been issues on the table both locally and throughout the Western world. A wing of conservationists perhaps best represented by U.S. Forest Service Chief and “Father of American Forestry,” Gifford Pinchot, called for a “wise use” approach to land that allowed human access to natural resources with sustainability in mind. Preservationist circles aimed to keep humans from influencing the landscape in any sense. Not even “wise use”—just, no use. Debates came head-to-head in the decades leading up to the construction of Highway 101, christened in its nearly-complete form during the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon. The issue of damming California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide a water source for growing San Francisco played out in Congress and in public discourse for several years around 1910. Congress also debated legislation related to migratory birds and endangered species around the same time. The government formed the National Park Service in 1916.322 Activists and politicians eyed both protected wilderness and utilitarian uses of natural resources in what could be contentious debates while others outside of these circles advocated for broad land sale and usage entirely determined by the desires of private property owners. The men in charge of these conversations at the administrative level had steadily expressed racism towards Native people. Madison Grant, for example, one of the most well-known conservationists of the early twentieth century, and one who exerted 322 Robert W. Righter provides a detailed history about, as his title indications, The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy and environmental legislation in the twentieth century. For a brief chronology that illustrates the broad strokes of the history mentioned here, see Robert W. Righter, The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy: American’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), xv. 172 considerable influence in the redwoods, was a staunch eugenicist. His commitment to natural preservation was matched only by his commitment to racial preservation. Grant published The Passing of the Great Race: or the Racial Basis of European History in 1916 to articulate his theories of Nordic (white) supremacy. The first time Grant mentions Indians in that book is to say that early colonization represented “nearly an ideal condition” for them, as the Hudson Bay Company offered protection and direction. In the same argument, he defines Indian people as the company’s slaves.323 Unfortunately, Grant’s work was influential, particularly in Nazi Germany.324 Conservation practices depended on newly-developed “Scientific Management” strategies. The United States Forest Service, established in 1905, operated under that creed, which described a specific set of strategies designed to control forest ecology and usage according to goals for longevity of resources and select human usages. While it prevented things like overcutting and blatant trash pollution, scientific forest management, especially in the period in question, utterly ignored centuries of Indigenous knowledge and land usage. Not just the seizure of land, but the entirely new conception of it, often created serious tensions with Indigenous communities that had lived in and carefully altered landscapes in homelands for centuries.325 While Pinchot, the first head 323 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 8-9. 324 See Timothy W. Ryback, “An American Bible,” in Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life (New York: Random House, Inc., 2010), 94-115. This chapter is an addition to earlier editions of the book and is specifically about Madison Grant’s influence on Hitler. 325 In Northern California, one of the biggest (and as it turns out, most devastating and counterproductive) changes that government agencies forced was the prohibition of prescribed burns conducted by tribes. The Karuk Tribe’s website explains that their “ancestral cultural practice” of regular burning worked “to manage the landscape, to stimulate the production of resources for humans and for animals, to prevent catastrophic wildfires, and to provide for species abundance and diversity.” Certainly in the century that the government has disrupted this management and installed a new management system focused on fire suppression, catastrophic wildfires have become yearly occurrences due to this mismanagement and other 173 of the Forest Service, fancied Indians natural allies to his agency, describing them as conservationists with esteemed ancient environmental wisdom, the Forest Service’s earliest policies set the tone for troubled relations to come.326 In Northern California, the Forest Service established the Modoc Forest Reserve (National Forest) first in 1904, the Klamath National Forest (which included a Happy Camp Ranger Station) in 1906, and the Stony Creek National Forest (which became the “California National Forest” and eventually the “Mendocino National Forest”), in 1907. These creations had consequences for tribes. The Karuk Tribe maintains that the establishment of the Klamath National Forest “effectively left [the] Tribe without recognized title to [their] own land.”327 Recreational access to water sent white rafters through private Karuk sites used for annual World Renewal Ceremonies. This was a problem for decades before the Forest Service started working with the Tribe to schedule area closures to ensure privacy and safety.328 And, of course, traditional forest practices related to renewal burns became prohibited, disrupting Karuk traditional life and altering forest ecology. Preservationists and their organizations were also active agents of colonialism in similar ways. The famous naturalist John Muir was particularly influential in California. He had, with likeminded preservationists, helped to negotiate the establishment of both factors, but the negative impact on tribes as well as the environment was apparent since the earliest years of the agency. See “Wildland Fire Program,” The Karuk Tribe, https://www.karuk.us/index.php/departments/natural-resources/eco-cultural-revitalization/191-wildland- fire-program. 326 Catton, American Indians and National Forests, 37. 327 “Karuk Department of Tribal Lands Management,” The Karuk Tribe, https://www.karuk.us/index.php/departments/land-management. 328 For more, see “Traditional Karuk Ceremony Activity on the Klamath River,” United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, updated 2020, https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/klamath/workingtogether/tribalrelations/?cid=fsm8_049849. 174 Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park in 1890. Muir’s personal writings demonstrated his reverence for nature and his very related anti-Indian racism. His writings reflect this racism in its regular invocations of Indian stereotypes (silence, stoicism, and noble savagery) and in its descriptions of Native individuals as dirty and ugly as he likens them to animals.329 In the view of many a preservationist, wilderness excluded all people. Wilderness meant only the presence of plants, natural landmarks, and non-human animals. Because stereotypes abounded that equated Native people and the natural landscape, ideas about how to include or exclude them from conceptions of the wilderness could be ambivalent, but policies of exclusion won out. Preservation often meant forced relocation or uncomfortable voyeurism for Native people. In early National Park Service efforts to section off and preserve designated wilderness sites, the government relocated Indigenous people who lived on homelands that became parks. Removal sent Indigenous people to reservations, linking the two government entities inexorably. Continued Indigenous usage of park lands before total removal inadvertently invited white voyeurism. White tourists visiting the parks watched Native people use the land or simply live daily lives, imagining them as fixtures of the landscape, which of course fed into racist stereotypes surrounding noble savagery that had been prevalent in American culture for centuries by the early 1900s. This whole process, of course, exemplified the purely constructed nature of “wilderness.” Land had never been untouched; forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems had always been dynamic spaces influenced—sometimes in quite sustainable ways—by the people living in and near them. Even if Native people offered the tourist a more recognizable link 329 For examples, see John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 11,53-55, 58-59, 90, 108, 226. 175 between humans and undeveloped nature, the momentum of the wilderness movement steadily worked to exclude people entirely, in any capacity besides carefully controlled observer.330 The potential influence of the National Park Service in the redwood forest remained uncertain in the early twentieth century. Sequoia National Park was the “first national park formed to protect a living organism: Sequoiadendron giganteum.”331 This precedent would influence the conversation surrounding the future of the Giant Sequoia’s cousin, Sequoia sempervirens, better known as the California redwood. The Giant Sequoia enthusiasts had had certain advantages in the effort to corner off their charges compared to the redwood hopefuls, though. Giant Sequoias don’t make for good lumber, as they produce a brittle wood. The taller redwoods on the coast could be transformed into superior lumber easily, aided by trees’ height, straightness, and relative fire resistance. As the timber industry boomed after World War I, many commentators thought there was a pressing need for federal intervention to regulate cutting. Pressure was such that in July 1919, California Congressman Clarence F. Lea introduced House Resolution 159, calling for the Secretary of the Interior to launch an investigation on “the sustainability, location, cost, if any, and advisability of securing a tract of land in the 330 Mark David Spence discusses this history in detail in Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). One of Spence’s central examples is Yosemite Park, not quite in the region at stake in this chapter, but in a region that shared some important historical landmarks (like the Gold Rush) with the Redwood Empire further north. Karl Jacoby also explores the ground-level consequences that Progressive conservation efforts delivered to people living in areas the government sought to regulate. His work explores both Native Americans and rural whites and details how conservation and the construction of parks interrupted historical human uses of land. See Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 331 “History and Culture,” Sequoia & Kings Canyon, National Parks Service, updated October 15, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/seki/learn/historyculture/index.htm. 176 State of California containing a stand of typical redwood trees…as a national park” for both recreation and preservation.332 National Park Service Director Stephen T. Mather supported the idea, but competing interests in the versatile trees—no doubt chief among them a capitalist drive to harvest them—prevented the formal allocation of a national park in the redwood forest.333 Boosters, too, had wanted a park. Their conversations at annual meetings often included the idea of lobbying for national park status for the monetary benefit of nature tourism, an issue not totally removed from their preservationist counterparts speaking up so loudly through groups like the Save the Redwoods League. Even before the Redwood Highway Marathon, Leo Lebenbaum, Director of the Redwood Empire Association, concluded in a report, “We should give some attention to the setting aside of park areas, particularly to the establishment…of a national park.” He continued, “Though we have perhaps more to offer than many national parks, still we lack that advertising and publicity that only national parks get by reason of their status only.”334 This goal united activists, politicians, and boosters in the 1910s and 20s. Opting to not wait for final word on a national park, however, organizations and individuals launched an effort to buy land at the local level and convert it into state parks. 332 “Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 952, https://books.google.com/books?id=DRFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA952&lpg=PA952&dq=1919+congress+su mmer+resolution+redwoods&source=bl&ots=KXOC7R0jUY&sig=ACfU3U3o0sAtpEfS4tiM3zYRfGWto oCjoA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxzjCp4DhAhUGCjQIHf0ABzUQ6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepa ge&q=1919%20congress%20summer%20resolution%20redwoods&f=false. 333 “History of Redwoods and Save the Redwoods League: 100 Years of Protecting Redwoods,” Save the Redwoods League, https://www.savetheredwoods.org/about-us/mission-history/redwoods-timeline/. 334 “Quarterly Report of the Manager Secretary Before the Executive Committee in Conference with Directors” January 25, 1927, Folder 2, Redwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum. 177 Leading the charge by the 1920s was the Save the Redwoods League formed in 1918 by renowned geologist and archaeologist Henry Fairfield Osborn; Madison Grant, administrator for the New York Zoological Society (and aforementioned racist); and West Coast paleontologist John Campbell Merriam. It was the Save the Redwoods League chairman, Mr. Joseph Donohue (J.D.) Grant, who made the plea to a national audience about the importance and trajectory of redwoods preservation at the Bear Mountain Inn. After his romantic overview of the magisterial trees, he added, “And that the Redwood, one of the supreme adornments of California, may be saved for the enjoyment of the travelers throughout the world for all time, their preservation has been made by Californians the center and the motive of their movement toward the establishment of State Parks.”335 Indeed, the Save the Redwoods League carried out remarkable fundraising efforts throughout the 1920s that led to the purchase and establishment of multiple protected groves of redwoods, typically dedicated to individuals in public ceremonies. This small-scale purchase and donation had been among the earliest method of redwood preservation since the issue emerged.336 Every acre represented a small but significant victory. Settler society in Northern California in the early twentieth century, however, had to balance the relative values of the different economies that the trees enabled. On the one hand was timber—at an earlier point seemingly limitless but, by the 1920s, significantly lessened—and on the other was scenery that attracted vacationers and residents alike. Selling the trees as a product and selling them as an experience eventually became 335 Francis, Proceedings of the Second National Conference, 50. 336 For example, California Congressman William Kent purchased and dedicated Muir Woods National Monument, just north of San Francisco, in 1908. 178 competing interests. Many voiced a willingness to share trees between industries. The Save the Redwoods League was realistic about the state’s tree consumption and sought to balance the potential benefits that the redwoods created with other stakeholders. Their articles of incorporation reflected several priorities: allocating trees for recreational parks, tourist attractions, and cutting. Their stated mission read as follows: To foster, encourage, advance, create interest in, to promote and bring about a better and more general understanding of the value of, the primeval redwood or Sequioa and other forests of America as natural objects of extraordinary interest as well as of economic importance. To foster and encourage the formation of private, county, state and national parks in the redwood forests, and, more particularly, to buy, own, hold and acquire areas of typical primitive redwood forests for the purpose of have them become national, state, and county redwood parks. To foster and encourage the formation of private, county, state and national forest reserves for the sustained production of redwood lumber and other forest products on lands now wholly or in part cut-over. To bring into unity of purpose and action all interests concerned with the movement to preserve and save portions of the redwood forests for scenic, recreational and economic purposes.337 Again, the language of “primeval redwood” and “primitive…forests” reflected the solidifying narrative of the region’s simple and static past—a narrative constantly invoked to talk about “vanishing” Indians. The overall goal of the statement, however, was to conserve redwoods for a variety of purposes that reflected different industries in California. To be fair, Madison Grant called it a “crime” to keep cutting endangered trees. “The cutting of a Sequoia for grape stakes or railroad ties,” he said, “is like…lighting one’s pipe with a Greek manuscript to save the trouble of reaching for the matches.”338 In 337 “Articles of Incorporation,” Save the Redwoods League, October 14, 1920. Provided to author via email by Save the Redwoods League, San Francisco, California. 338 Francis, Proceedings of the Second National Conference, 51. 179 general, however, conservationists in this region typically embraced the importance of timber as a viable product and lucrative regional industry in addition to an important outlet for “scenic, recreational,” and even scientific purposes. J.D. Grant said that the redwoods historically “meant a great deal economically and industrially” when he spoke at Bear Mountain.339 According to Madison Grant, the proceedings of the Save the Redwoods League were “done in a spirit of fair-play to the lumbermen,” who were apparently supportive of the League’s goals anyway. This sharing of trees is reflective in the League’s initial mission statement. “They do not want to see the finest of the Redwoods perish,” Grant said of competing stakeholders: “They do not want to have our highways traverse scenes of desolation.”340 Certainly, though, they wanted timber and moved to access new tracts through legal and extralegal channels ranging from purchasing allotments (discussed in Chapter III) to simply cutting without permission. Really, there was no question in the mainstream that some timber should be cut as long as other live trees remained accessible to the public. The issue was where to allow the cutting, how much, and at what pace. And much of the answer to those crucial questions depended not just upon the qualities of the natural environment, but on the ribbon of highway slowly unrolling in the region after the turn of the century, like the ones Madison Grant referenced. The Redwood Highway emerged as a logical priority to address several goals and concerns. Its importance could hardly be overstated in any of these areas. In effect, it became both the red carpet to and crown jewel of the region in the way that it tied together lucrative pockets of the economy and commodified and 339 Ibid, 45. 340 Ibid, 49. 180 preserved “wilderness” among a civilization emblemized by technology and infrastructure. Decisions to build it, and to act on these consolidated efforts, of course, were carried out without any real regard for Native communities or perspectives. As non-Native Americans anticipated the extinction of Indigenous peoples, they embarked on a misguided preservation effort in the forms of salvage anthropology and curio trading, outlined in Chapter III. Efforts to preserve disappearing redwoods were more coordinated in social and political spheres, carefully balancing capitalist economic priorities and public interest. People did not necessarily agree on protective practices, but ideas about the history and destiny of the redwood forest shaped the emergent tourism industry, regional identity, and influenced the region’s infrastructures. Paving the Way to the Wilderness A highway running through the redwoods was the entity that could help articulate and produce a steady effort to protect trees, whether to serve as roadside tourist attractions, forests under government management, or locally owned preserves. In fact, in a 1922 publication, J.D. Grant insisted that the “present task” of the Save the Redwoods League by then was roadside preservation along “A ‘Highway of the Giants.’” The road, he thought, would facilitate the development of a park and was therefore necessary to long-term protection and enjoyment of the remaining redwood forest.341 This thinking, of course, dovetailed well with boosters’ desires to construct and improve a highway lined 341 J.D. Grant, Saving California’s Redwoods (Berkeley: Save the Redwoods League, 1922), 16, https://archive.org/details/savingcalifornia00gran/page/n21. 181 by enough trees to present a fully immersive forest experience to drivers, passengers, and campers.342 Highways at the time were extremely important pieces of the process to define, preserve, and access wilderness throughout the American West, even though their construction through forests, in parks, and alongside natural landmarks seemingly put them in sharp relief as something distinctly non-wild. Historian David Louter describes the historical relationship between motor travel and scenic wilderness in the context of Washington state’s national parks in Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks. According to Louter, in the 1920s, park agents recognized the importance of the highways and park roads that brought the new leisurely middle class to these swaths of protected wilderness. Cars were actually central to the whole ethos of the parks in general. The natural world was a landscape best and necessarily viewed through the windshield. Roads weren’t intrusions; they facilitated responsible travel and visitation that dictated and preserved, rather than damaged, the park scenery. The idea for the highway was, as demonstrated, wholly connected to the preservation-minded movement to save key trees, but it came to fruition more steadily and with more widespread support. Preservationists imagined a highway that could “safeguard” the landscape by “preserving strips of timber from 300 to 1,000 feet 342 The widespread desire for a park was not enough to make it happen in the period in question. Redwoods National Park would not come to fruition until 1968 when preservationist and conservationist societies, including the Save the Redwoods Leagues, the Sierra Club, and the National Geographic Society, convinced Congress to successfully battle timber companies and preserve a full ecosystem rather than disjointed swaths of it.342 Congress first allocated 58,000 acres, and then added an additional 48,000 acres ten years later (most of this addition had already been logged). “Redwood National and State Parks” is now the only jointly operated State and National Park conglomerate, since establishment efforts came together over time and under different management. 182 wide.”343 But California’s early road system came in fits and starts. Even in the half century after California officially gained statehood, there wasn’t quite enough money to support a consolidated effort to pave paths through the enormous state. Apparently, funding for roads was usually county-based, so, “The rich counties had good roads, the poor counties had poor roads.”344 It was not until 1909 that the state governor signed the State Highway Act, which would kick in the following year. This Act aimed to raise $18,000 through bond sales in order to finance the connection of scattered county roads and establish a unified state highway system.345 The state’s Department of Engineers established the first California Highway Commission in 1911 to oversee the project. Construction started the following year. Another States Highway Act in 1915 brought in additional funding for the project. The redwoods region saw a few major developments even in the early years of the process. Over 100 miles had been surveyed or marked for surveyance between Sausalito and Crescent City by 1914. Contracts for grading and laying pavement covered significant stretches in Mendocino and Sonoma counties even before then. Momentum on 343 “Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 952. https://books.google.com/books?id=DRFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA952&lpg=PA952&dq=1919+congress+su mmer+resolution+redwoods&source=bl&ots=KXOC7R0jUY&sig=ACfU3U3o0sAtpEfS4tiM3zYRfGWto oCjoA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxzjCp4DhAhUGCjQIHf0ABzUQ6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepa ge&q=1919%20congress%20summer%20resolution%20redwoods&f=false. 344 John Robinson, “The Redwood Highway: Part II—Building the Road,” California Highways and Public Works (July-August 1964), 24. 345 Howe & Peters Consulting Engineers, “Engineer’s Report to California State Automobile Association Covering the Work of the California Highway Commission for the Period 1911-1920,” in The State Highways of California: An Engineering Study Conducted Jointly by the Automobile Club of Southern California and the California State Automobile Association (Los Angeles and San Francisco: Automobile Club of Southern California and California State Automobile Association, 1921), 11, https://books.google.com/books?id=G0w7AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false. 183 grading then slowed significantly in 1915 and 1916. Again, expansive state politics and limited resources interfered with local desires. Builders also had to work around ferry crossings or build bridges hundreds of feet long to cross the many rivers and tributaries that characterized the Northern California coastal landscape. There were also climate conditions to battle; even in 1916 old stretches of roads through the region were traversable in heavy rain and snow only by pack animals, perhaps for several months at a time.346 Come World War I, wartime regulations slowed the shipping of necessary materials as wartime industries pulled laborers towards other industries.347 By 1920, a consolidated path existed on the coast between Sausalito and Eureka, but it did not yet make for easy traveling. By 1923, however, Motor Land magazine was featuring the Redwood Highway in its pages. “What a place to camp!” exclaimed one Vonard Fraser in the July edition. He concluded that the highway “[breathed] the very spirit of the West in the wide spaces of its vision and in the wilderness of beauty which it opens to the motorist.”348 That same year, the northern part of the Redwood Highway— Route 199—got its designation in the Forest Highway System. The state improved it greatly through 1926, and, of course, added key bridges like the one over the Klamath that Dorothy Allen opened.349 This was good enough for substantial motor travel and good enough for boosters to capitalize on in the form of caravan tours, opening ceremonies, and the marquee event of the marathon. Alongside the special events, the 346 Robinson, “The Redwood Highway: Part II,” 27. 347 In this case, however, select convicts helped fill the void left in the road construction industry. 348 Vonard Fraser, “California’s Redwood Highway,” Motor Land, July 1923, 12. 349 Robinson, “The Redwood Highway: Part II,” 29. 184 highway facilitated regular fixtures of tourism and, in all likelihood, contributed to population growth in the towns along it. Table 4.1 reflects the 1920 and 1930 populations of the largest towns in each county in California along Highway 101. In all but one town (Willits), the population grew over the course of the decade. For most towns, growth was enormous, as towns saw growth rates that averaged over 30%. Roads were, of course, one of many factors that might have contributed to recruiting new residents and businesses. Indeed, many sites throughout these states enjoyed similar growth during this time period. Places that remained more rural without a highway nearby—places like Happy Camp and Sommes Bar, for example—did not, however, show significant growth, if any. Happy Camp apparently lost nineteen residents in the same time span. Sommes Bar gained thirty- five.350 County City Population Population Growth 1920 1930 Rate Del Norte (CA) Crescent City 955 1,720 +80.1% Humboldt (CA) Eureka 12,923 15,752 +21.9% Humboldt (CA) Fortuna 986 1,239 +25.7% Humboldt (CA) Arcata 1,486 1,709 +15.0% Marin (CA) San Rafael 5,512 8,022 +45.5% Marin (CA) Sausalito 2,790 3,667 +31.4% Mendocino (CA) Willits 1,468 1,424 -3.0% Mendocino (CA) Ukiah 2,305 3,124 +35.5% Sonoma (CA) Petaluma 6,226 8,245 +32.4% Sonoma (CA) Santa Rosa 8,758 10,636 +21.4% Josephine (OR) Grants Pass 3,151 4,666 +48.1% Table 5.1 Town Populations in Redwood Highway Towns, 1920 and 1930. These figures come from the 1930 Census. Volume 1. Population, Number and Distribution of Inhabitants: Total Population for States, Counties, Townships or Other Minor Civil Divisions; for Urban and Rural Areas; and for Cities and Other Incorporated Places, Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC, 1931). 350 1930 U.S. Census, Population, Number and Distribution of Inhabitants, Bureau of the Census. 185 Roadside attractions and accommodations popped up throughout the 1920s to entertain and house the growing number of travelers from near and far. Some—like Rodney Burns’s “Stump House,” (the “most unique curio shop in the world,” hewn from a redwood stump) had been created earlier, but the highway could bring in far more visitors.351 Entrepreneurs opened the Eureka Auto Park right across the street from the Stump House in 1921 to “welcome automobile travelers from all directions” and offer “conveniences that will delight the most exacting housewife.”352 In a less overtly sexist but similar pitch, the same paper advertised the Arcata Auto Park in 1925: “Even though there are so many modern conveniences, there is even more nature.”353 Auto Parks offered camps, small stores, picnic tables, and recreational activities like fishing and boat launches. In Humboldt County, there was also Kennedy’s Auto Park (1926), and in Del Norte, there was the Giant Redwood Park (1926) with the “Honest Abe” tree, “The Fallen Giant,” and “The Octopus Tree.” There were by and through the 1920s, many other camps all along the route. In 1926, boosters advertised Maple Hills in Humboldt County, a collection of cabins on the stretch of highway that hugged the South Fork of the Eel River. Each cabin, though tucked away “in groups of trees, well separated from each other,” had the modern amenities that constituted “all the comforts of little summer homes.”354 Patrick’s Creek Tavern (also 1926) between Crescent City and Grants Pass 351 “Bring Your Friends to the Stump House” in Eureka High School, Sequoia yearbook (1917) cited in Diane Hawk, Touring the Old Redwood Highway: Humboldt County (Piercy, California: Hawk Mountaintop Publishing, 2004). 352 “Auto Park Will Be Opened Mon. – Best Tourist Camp in California,” Humboldt Standard, April 30, 1921. 353 “Arcata Auto Park,” Humboldt Standard, July 6, 1925. 354 “Maple Hills,” Redwood Highway Bulletin, September 24, 1926. 186 was “absolutely modern throughout.”355 Boosters hyped Del Norte groves as “the last of the West,” and advised, “Do not let anyone turn you back, now is the time to see this wonder land, before the hand of man sweeps away the beauties of nature.”356 The growing tourism industry, through roadside attractions and accommodations ranging from tent sites to hotels, touted the old and the new, and invited motor tourists to take the highway to see the sights. There was, of course, still no national park, but the Redwood Empire and Redwood Highway Associations never needed the official seal of approval to articulate their domain’s importance. “The [Redwood Empire] Association is treating the Redwood Empire and everything in it as a national park,” they concluded in October 1927, stressing that the popularity of the landscape had fostered highway improvements and extensive advertising.357 The redwoods constituted both a “windshield wilderness” and a bustling home full of modern marvels and amenities for the communities that resided there or visited. At the center of that transformative equation had been Americans’ drive to drive. Indians and Automobiles Cars in general came with a designated set of values, images, and imagined possibilities. The accessibility of cars like the Model T come the 1910s altered American culture entirely. John Steinbeck famously wrote in Cannery Row, “Someone should write 355 “Patrick’s Creek Tavern Now Open to Public,” Redwood Highway Review, July 6, 1926. 356 “Del Norte ‘The Last of the West,’” Redwood Highway Review, August 15, 1927. 357 “Seventh Annual Meeting Redwood Empire Association, October 7, 1927” Folder 2, Redwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum, Willits, California. 187 an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars… The theory of the Anglo-Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered.”358 The transformative nature of the car, which brought convenient transportation and recreational travel to so many American families in the 1910s and 20s, can hardly be overstated, but as scholarship has revealed, it wasn’t just “Anglo-Saxon” families that adopted and benefitted from the automobile, despite their privilege. It also certainly was not just white people who showed up as key figures in advertising. Particular images and associations between Indian people and automobiles circulated even in the earliest days of automobile tourism. In the words of Phil Deloria, “things get weird…when the symbolic systems built on cars and Indians intersect.”359 Deloria tells an important and, well, unexpected story about Indian car ownership, particularly on the Plains and connected to reservation communities. He frames his approach around the question, “Were there other Indian people driving around in forbidden automobiles” beyond a few iconic representations in popular media throughout the twentieth century? The Redwood Highway Marathon reflected the intersection of Indians and cars, and its weirdness. Much as the story of the Highway Marathon engages and complicates notions of Indian sports entirely outside of the often-discussed boarding school context, it also places the Indian-car pairing on highways that ran through growing urban sites, by the geographical standards of the time, rather than on Plains reservations. 358 John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (London: Willian Heinemann LTD, 1945), 45. 359 Philip Deloria, Indians In Unexpected Places, 138. 188 The race itself, of course, started in San Francisco, one of the biggest American cities, and certainly a huge city in the West. While stereotypes abounded, expressed in expected ways before and during the marathon (and at the finish line,) the event provided an entirely different real-time and visual narrative of Indian people alongside and connected to modern technology in the form of cars. The juxtaposition of the “symbolic systems” appeared in one form during the marathon and shifted when Johnny Southard immediately purchased an automobile and became one of the culturally forbidden drivers that Deloria identifies. The winner of the second race would also immediately buy a car with his prize money. In this way and in the form of open participation in caravan teams that often included members of Native communities, the marathon enabled Indian driving and in some cases all but provided the cars. The resulting public engagement demonstrated wider patterns of white safeguarding of advanced technology, but the reality of the circumstances broke the stereotypes wide open for reconsideration—reconsideration that would continue in the reflection of the race and through its 1928 rematch. Though individual Indians pursued car ownership alongside their white counterparts in industrializing society, and similarly viewed automobiles as a means of freedom-seeking and a worthy investment, mainstream society seemed able only to attribute a warped idea of the Indian to the idea of the automobile rather than be able to mentally place actual Indian people in actual automobiles. Deloria notes that—alongside other early Indian mascotry in branding—the Oakland Automobile Company released a “Pontiac” in 1926, a car named after the Ottawa warrior who led a promising anti- 189 colonial war campaign against British forts in 1763 in the old Northwest.360 Safe from this type of violent independence struggle in the 1920s, white Americans could reduce Pontiac’s image to that of a rebel, a rugged wilderness man, a fitting symbol of a man that, reimagined and appropriated, might buy a car to facilitate his independent exploits in the open American West, finally reachable by roads. Many more Indian names, often tribal or national ones, would be applied to automobiles come the mid-century and beyond (Thunderbird, Jeep Cherokee, etc). A particularly revealing overlapping of names in the marathon context came not from tribal names or tribal leaders, but rather with the contrived name “Flying Cloud.” After the race, the press drew out the connection between Henry Thomas’s running persona and “a Flying Cloud brougham,” the roadster recently debuted by the Ransom E. Olds automobile company.361 The Petaluma Daily Courier ran a September article and photo, “When Cloud Meets Cloud” that featured Thomas standing shirtless in front of the recent “Flying Cloud” model (Figure 5.1). “The Indian Flying Cloud proved his right to bear his proud cognomen” by participating in the marathon, the article insisted.362 In this case, the name apparently first belonged to the car, but such a rugged man was allowed to use it if he was going to be similarly impressive and iconic. 360 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 167. 361 “When Cloud Meets Cloud,” Petaluma Daily Morning Courier, September 11, 1927. 362 Ibid. 190 Fig ure 5.1 This picture ran in the Petaluma Daily Morning Courier, September 11, 1927. Newspaper discontinued in 1928; succeeding title discontinued 1966. This was an even closer alignment between cars and Indians than usually observed or articulated connections. First of all, the Indian figure in question was a living individual and not a historical tribal leader or generic and anonymous image. Pontiac cars, for example, featured a hood ornament of a Native man’s head “with hair streaming back in the wind.”363 In 1934, Charles McNally photographed a Native man dressed in regalia and sitting on the hood of a Pontiac in place of the hood ornament, a mascot- come-to-life in an image designed for white consumption and humorous, rather than serious, appreciation.364 This type of impulse was alive in 1927 because so many non- Natives saw Indians primarily as images, and, even by then, mascots. The picture of and accompanying short article about Henry Thomas, however, diverges from that approach in significant ways even though it reenforces it in others. The article celebrates Thomas 363 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 178. 364 Ibid., 178-179. 191 as a “pace setter in the longest marathon race on record” and remarks on his early lead and “remarkable feat of covering 54 miles in a single day.”365 Then, however, it shifts to discussion of Thomas’s Zuni competitors. The article infers a temporal distinction between the Karuks and Zunis in the race. It refers to “Indian superstition” among Zunis who “called upon their ancient gods” in rituals to help them succeed, a type of spell cast against competitors. Henry Thomas and his Karuk compatriots, with their boxing shoes and running shorts, stood in contrast to the Zunis and their “superstitious” rituals.366 This was the first of several sources published during the tenure of the two-year Redwood Highway Indian Marathon that would capitalize on the “Flying Cloud” parallel and invoke or upset steroeotypes. In 1928, papers would feature more runner-and-car side-by- sides even beyond the single example of Henry Thomas, and it would strengthen these tendrils of reasoning that linked Indians and cars in a modern context (see Chapter VI). Native people also, however, purchased, drove, and maintained cars, even before the technology was widespread and cars nearly ubiquitous. Again, Deloria has collected the best evidence: Osages who used oil royalties to buy cars in the wake of Oklahoma oil booms, California Indians using land sale money in the era of allotment to purchase cars, and numerous cases of people of any given tribal affiliation participating in American consumer culture when funds granted.367 Cars were not necessarily common in Happy Camp or mountain communities by the end of the 1920s. Many people—like Henry Thomas’s family, for example—still relied on horses and roads like Highway 96 into and 365 “When Cloud Meets Cloud,” Petaluma Daily Morning Courier, September 11, 1927 366 Ibid. 367 Deloria, Indians In Unexpected Places, 177, 151. 192 out of remote communities were yet to be built. When John Southard bought his victory car, the transaction invited all sorts of commentary. His transition from runner to driver shifted his public perception, further complicating Indian stereotypes and offering a highly visible indicator of Indian modernity in the heart of a growing town like Grants Pass, Oregon. The worst of the press coverage lifted stereotypical notions of Indian primitivity and squandering to present a pejorative angle on the transaction. Highlighting the “Mad” in “Mad Bull,” the United Press reported, “Mad Bull has Prosaic Name, He Spends his Dough,” qualifying that questionably clever title with the subtitle, “First Prize Transferred to Auto-Dealer—“No Walkee.” The article called him “an Indian with Indian ideas” and recounted how he quickly spent the majority of his prize money on a car. The article then says that Melika and his fellow Zunis departed by train—“the second train ride any of these redskins had enjoyed. The first was when they went to San Francisco for the start of the race.”368 Every image in the short article located modern technologies outside the regular realm of Indianness. It also suggested, as did many commentators at the time, that the typical American investment of car ownership represented mere reckless spending when the purchaser was Indian.369 The “No Walkee” subtitle invoked invented Indian speech, akin to the soon-to-emerge “Tonto Talk” in the Lone Ranger radio show. Phonetic stereotypes about perpetual partial English in Native communities would have already surfaced in popular depictions of Indians communicating with white 368 “Mad Bull Has Prosaic Name, He Spends his Dough,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 23, 1927. 369 For more on perceived Indian squandering in car buying, see “Technology: ‘I Want to Ride in Geronimo’s Cadillac’” in Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 136-182. 193 colonists, traders, or American settlers.370 John Southard spoke fluent English. So did all of the Happy Camp runners. Many in his generation spoke Karuk, too, but whereas these multilingual abilities actually surpassed most “native-born” whites in the United States, journalists invoked the old stereotype to temper the otherwise thoroughly modern narrative of an Indian car purchase.371 Other coverage was not so overtly racist, but still drew a distinction that essentially separated Native and non-Native people. “Soon after completing the marathon and immediately after regaining his breath, Mad Bull was tamed and completely captivated by our modern methods,” read a piece in the San Bernardino Sun.372 The Native runner was clearly not a member of the exclusive “our” in the article. The image of Native people utterly bewildered and impressed by modern technology was another standing stereotype.373 Only a paper from England seemed to report Southard’s purchase without the added commentary of Indian stereotyping. The Hull Daily Mail translated the transaction into pounds sterling and said he bought “a motor-car with his name printed on the door, his mother accompanying him on his first ride.”374 370 The stereotype apparently had its roots in American Indian Pidgin English, or Native American Pidgin English, which enabled communication between Native and white people as early as the seventeenth century. Like any pidgin language, it was used by both parties and was not merely a “broken” form of one language. See Douglas Leechman and Robert A. Hall, Jr., “American Indian Pidgin English: Attestations and Grammatical Peculiarities” American Speech (1955), 163-171. 371 Crispin McAllister (Karuk Tribal Member; Salmon Run Coordinator), in discussion with author, May 2019. 372 Sid Olin, “The Morning After,” San Bernardino Sun, June 25, 1927. 373 See “Technology” in Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 136-182. 374 “‘Mail’ Mustard and Cress,” Hull Daily Mail, August 19, 1927. The omission of further commentary of Southard’s purchase does not suggest that Indian historical actors were safe from stereotyping in any corners of the Anglophone world. 194 No matter the reality of car ownership and driver status, however, white Americans continued to imagine driver and owner status as exclusive entities, even as they remained fascinated with rhetorical links between autos and Indians, steadily presented in popular culture.375 Even chauffeuring started as a distinctly white profession. It stemmed from the European equivalent, which entailed skilled labor and knowledge of complex early automobiles. By the early 1910s in the United States, however, white and Black chauffeurs were in high demand in urban places. A racial pay gap plagued their work, but Black mastery of auto machinery and their skilled driving—learned in automobile schools—disrupted anti-Black stereotypes that claimed Black people were lazy and/or stupid compared to white people. Based on demographics, Indian chauffeurs were far less common. Racialized expectations of car ownerships have never disappeared, of course. Mainstream American culture maintains rigid ideas about what the driver of a fast, flashy automobile must look like and what his background must be. While the ample examples of non-white, non-male car ownership have evidently not eradicated expectations, they matter very much. The Redwood Highway Indian Marathon popularized the Redwood Highway and circulated the alluring idea that the Redwood Empire contained unbeatable, untouched wilderness and modern amenities alike. The rugged wilderness awaited, but so did roadside auto camps and cushy hotel-restaurants for families. The other half of the race’s equation was the emphasis on the Indian athletes. Indian figures in the period’s advertisements for modern technologies so often stood at the side, gazing in wonder at 375 See Mia Bay, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021), 113. 195 trains, cities, or cars.376 Instead of standing in contrast to the highway, the Redwood Highway runners conquered it on foot. One then bought a car for himself. Southard’s purchase asserted Indian modernity—why should he not enjoy the freedom and convenience of car ownership? He had already experienced one highway more intimately than nearly any other human, after all. It would still be awhile, however, before white Americans could understand why that “fleet-footed member of the Karook tribe”—or any other Indian—should be behind the wheel of a modern roadster.377 The Marathon as an Accelerator of New Ideas In leveling the land and laying the pavement, highway constructors invited a new way of life and a new set of possibilities into the woods. The highway would enable the marathon and influence all the communities through which it ran. It would bring people into the redwood forest, where they could enjoy the protected groves of trees as tourists or, perhaps, be forced into rethinking the parameters of modernity they took for granted if they got to enjoy tourist stunts that propelled local bob- or boxing-shoe-clad Indians into stardom. This wasn’t just a new age for the forest; it was a new age for the whole region, including Northern California’s Indigenous people who, like the Karuks, lived outside of the redwoods corridor but experienced the social, cultural, and economic changes that emitted from it and neighboring San Francisco. The Redwood Highway Marathon was successful in its express goal of advertising the highway and the forest through which it ran. Boosters immediately began planning a second race, before some of the finishers even arrived in Grants Pass. The 376 See Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 142-143. 377 “Mad Bull is Winner in Big Marathon Race,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 22, 1927. 196 men of the Redwood Empire Association, of course, did not have implications of Indian modernity on their mind. They pursued profits. The race was an exciting single event, more spectacular than their caravan tours or bridge opening ceremonies (though they certainly advertised and touted those events as much as possible). Automobile tourism through the forest, however, could be year-round and perpetual. Without planning to, boosters primarily concerned with forest preservation, highway construction, and tourism, recruited a cast of historical actors that shaped the very character of the region that boosters sought to define and project. Because the Redwood Highway marathon necessarily put Indians and cars in close proximity along the Redwood Highway, viewers consumed real-life images and accounts of Indians, wilderness, roads, and modernity converging, even if they never expressed a keen understanding of how all of those things intersected. In the case of the Zunis, white Northern California audiences interpreted the “picturesque” image of Indianness from popular culture. This understanding and accompanying expectations were, of course, inaccurate. The Zuni runners, too, were modern actors shaping modern enterprises even as they maintained noticeable traditions and appearances. The obvious disruptions to stereotypes that the Karuk runners provided, however, were so glaring that they invited commentary and shaped people’s expectations moving forward. That impact, apparent immediately following the race, became even more important in the race’s rematch, exactly one year later. The next chapter traces a key intervention that the runners forced in the particular area of masculinity. It was a change born of the specific details of the marathon discussed so far in this dissertation. 197 CHAPTER VI FROM VANISHING TO “VIRILE”: NATIVE MASCULINITY AND AMERICAN MODERNITY REDWOOD EMPIRE ASSOCIATION STAGES FIRST CLASS SPECTACULAR PUBLICITY FEATURE REDWOOD HIGHWAY INDIAN MARATHON A SUCCESS T h r o u g h t h e m e d i a o f t h e n o w f a m o u s R E D W O O D H I G H W A Y I N D I A N M A R A T H O N , - - l o n g e s t m a r a t h o n i n h i s t o r y , l i t e r a l l y m i l l i o n s o f p e o p l e h a v e b e e n f o r d a y s r e a d i n g a b o u t t h e R e d w o o d E m p i r e , t h e R e d w o o d H i g h w a y , a n d a l l t h a t i t o f f e r s f o r t h e f u t u r e . E a c h c o m m u n i t y h a s e n j o y e d i n d i v i d u a l p u b l i c i t y . T y p i f y i n g t h e w i l d , y e t c o l o r f u l a n d r o m a n t i c p a s t w h i c h i s t h e h e r i t a g e o f o u r R e d w o o d E m p i r e , t h e I n d i a n w a s c h o s e n t o m a k e t h i s m a r v e l o u s d i s p l a y o f e n d u r a n c e , f o r t i t u d e , [ s t o i c i s m ] a n d p h y s i c a l w e l l b e i n g , b y r u n n i n g a n d w a l k i n g o v e r t h e e n t i r e l e n g t h o f t h e R e d w o o d H i g h w a y . B y s o d o i n g , t h e e y e s o f t h e w o r l d h a v e b e e n c e n t e r e d o n t h i s R e d w o o d E m p i r e – n o t f o r j u s t a d a y , b u t f o r D A Y S – W E E K S , a n d i t i s n ’ t o v e r y e t ! T h e e f f o r t w i l l b e c o n t i n u o u s f o r m o n t h s t o c o m e . 1 . - T h e t e r r i t o r y w i l l h a v e b e e n a d v a n c e d s e v e r a l y e a r s a h e a d o f i t s n o r m a l g r o w t h . 2 . - T h e a c t u a l l o c a t i o n a n d e x t e n t o f t h e R E D W O O D E M P I R E h a s b e e n q u i t e d e f i n i t e l y f i x e d i n t h e m i n d s o f a n a t i o n - w i d e m a s s o f p r o s p e c t i v e t o u r i s t s , v a c a t i o n i s t s a n d s e t t l e r s . 3 , - T h e R E D W O O D E M P I R E h a s t a k e n o n a n a t i o n a l s i g n i f i c a n c e i n a b r i e f s h o r t s p a c e o f t i m e , a t a c o m p a r a t i v e l y s m a l l c o s t . I n f a c t , t h e v a l u e o f a c t u a l n e w s p a p e r s p a c e f e a t u r i n g t h i s e v e n t w o u l d r e a c h m a n y t e n s o f t h o u s a n d s o f d o l l a r s . H e r e a r e s o m e o f t h e c h a n n e l s o f p u b l i c i t y c o v e r e d b y t h e R E D W O O D E M P I R E A S S O C I A T I O N d u r i n g t h e m a r a t h o n : F i v e w i r e n e w s e x c h a n g e s , c o v e r e d s i x t i m e s d a i l y , r e a c h i n g m e t r o p o l i t a n a n d c o u n t r y d a i l i e s t h r o u g h o u t t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s : m i l l i o n s o f c i r c u l a t i o n . A l l m e t r o p o l i t a n d a i l i e s i n S a n F r a n c i s c o b a y d i s t r i c t . P i c t o r i a l n e w s s e r v i c e n a t i o n w i d e , t h r o u g h f o u r p i c t o r i a l n e w s e x c h a n g e s , c o n c e n t r a t i n g o n t h e P a c i f i c C o a s t . M i l l i o n s o f c i r c u l a t i o n . M o t i o n p i c t u r e n e w s r e e l d i s t r i b u t i o n , t h r o u g h f o u r p r i n c i p l e a g e n c i e s , r e a c h i n g a p p r o x i m a t e l y 8 0 m i l l i o n s o f p e o p l e [ i n t e r n a t i o n a l l y ] . R a d i o a n n o u n c e m e n t s t h r o u g h o u t P a c i f i c C o a s t d a i l y , r e a c h i n g m a n y m i l l i o n s o f p e o p l e [ c o m p o s i n g ] r a d i o a u d i e n c e s . N u m e r o u s o t h e r c h a n n e l s o f p u b l i c i t y — b o t h p r i n c i p a l a n d c o l l a t e r a l , t h e v a l u e a n d e x t e n t o f w h i c h w o u l d t a k e t o o m u c h t i m e a n d s p a c e t o h e r e d e s c r i b e . T h i s i s j u s t o n e o f t h e m a n y m a j o r p r o j e c t s f o r t h i s y e a r u n d e r t a k e n b y t h e R E D W O O D E M P I R E A S S O C I A T I O N . C o r d i a l l y y o u r s , C l y d e E d m o n d s o n , M a n a g e r Figure 6.1. Replica of Redwood Empire Associ ation Press Release, October 1927. By Author. Original document citation: “Redwood Empire Association Stages First Class Spectacular Pu blicity Feature; Redwood Highway Indian Marathon a Success,” October 1927, folder 1, Re dwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum, Willits, CA. 198 It’s not clear where exactly Redwood Empire Association manager Clyde Edmondson sent the hastily (judging by the many typos) typewritten press release reproduced in Figure 6.1. As boosters sang their own praises far and wide, however, they discussed their investments and accomplishments in their own circles, too. REA meeting notes following the 1927 race included similarly enthusiastic declarations of success. Committee members estimated that the event was worth about $100,000 in its advertising value.378 For some perspective, the REA had pitched in $3,500 to cover the capital prizes and “general expense” of the 1927 race.379 In 1928, it spent about $3,364 on publicity ranging from event promotion to editorial publicity for everything besides the marathon. The marathon expense itself went up to $20,405.73, representing, by far, the largest investment the organization was willing to make based on the previous year’s gain.380 A report from the manager secretary of the REA had also said that one of the “tangible results” of the marathon was that “it featured the Indian lore and the romance of this ‘Last of the West.’”381 The organization had capitalized on the “Indian” angle and administrators had articulated it as a special triumph. This particular triumph, however, did not make it into Edmundson’s final list. Was this simply because Indian people were, 378 “Outstanding Accomplishments of the Redwood Empire Association Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 1927,” October 7, 1927, Folder 1, Redwood Empire Association Papers. Further discussion in “Summary of Activities of the Advertising and Publicity Department of the Redwood Empire Association,” October 7, 1927, Folder 1, Redwood Empire Association Papers. 379 “Minutes of the Semi-Annual Meeting Board of Directors Redwood Empire Association,” May 10, 1927, Folder 2, Redwood Empire Association Papers. 380 “Report of Revenues and Expenses for the Year ended September 30, 1928,” Carton 116, The Redwood Empire Association Records BANC MSS C-A 398, Bancroft Library. 381 “Report of the Manager Secretary June 1-August 30,1927,” August 30, 1927, Folder 2, Redwood Empire Association Papers. 199 in the final cut, of secondary importance to the publicity statistics? Was it because there was something wrong with the stereotype after all? Logistical planning for the 1928 race started almost as soon as REA members left the race’s terminus city and headed back to regular meetings in California hotels. The marathon committee met on September 26, three months after Johnny Southard crossed the finish line, at the Cecilie Hotel in Ukiah to discuss their plans for the rematch. A familiar cast of characters was in attendance. The chairman couldn’t make it, but the referee, Harry Ridgway, presided. Dr. Coolidge and his wife were there, as well as high- ranking REA administrators and representatives from such organizations as the Eureka Chamber of Commerce, the Pacific Lumber Company, The Redwood Empire Hotel- Resort Conference, and the Willits Development Association.382 There were no Native representatives present, nor is there any evidence that boosters made any effort to consult or even converse with Native individuals or communities in their ongoing marathon planning.383 The committee made recommendations for many aspects of the race to stay exactly the same: the course, the general rules and eligibility requirements, the structure of sponsorship. They motioned, however, to significantly up the prize money, indicating that the winning sum “should be $10,000 with at least $5,000 in additional prizes.” Apparently, “Not only did each committeeman express himself as thoroughly sold, but willing to see that even greater financial support was forthcoming from those they 382 “Minutes of Marathon Committee Meeting at Cecilie Hotel Ukiah,” September 26, 1927, Folder 1, Redwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum. 383 This omission is not surprising, since middle-class whites tended to populate the administrational positions of the tourist industry. 200 represented, next year.”384 They would eventually fall short of this goal, but manage to offer a combined $10,000 in prizes. The off-season did not bring an utterly new life to the men who had run, or even won the inaugural race. The race had offered a potentially lucrative seasonal labor opportunity wherein the top finishers could earn well above their working wages in just a week. Southard’s car purchase hadn’t panned out as planned. He and several other racers toured a few towns for celebrations throughout the summer, but the early fall, both Southard and runner-up Henry Thomas were picking hops near Santa Rosa. Hop picking was a common job for Native laborers in the Northwest. In September, Southard, still known as Mad Bull, “was decorated with a hop crown as champion picker of the county in the Gus Peterson hop yards.”385 Once a champion, always a champion. But training for the next race promised to be more intense (and more efficient, and safer) once spring came. Then, a constant spotlight would shine on the men gearing up to race. By the end of March, the REA had mailed out entry blanks “to every Indian reservation in the United States and to Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada.”386 At least, that’s what they claimed. Talk sprung up around the same time about who might enter and pose the biggest threat to the returning podium-finishers. The highest level of interest was along the running route itself, though a wider cast of talented runners from the Southwest also made plans for a June trip. Healdsburg boasted of the abilities of one Manuel Cordova (Pomo, Mishewal-Wappo), rechristened 384 “Minutes of Marathon Committee Meeting at Cecilie Hotel Ukiah,” September 26, 1927, Folder 1, Redwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum. 385 “Mad Bull is Champion Hop Picker at Peterson’s,” Healdsburg Enterprise, September 22, 1927. 386 “Entry Blanks Mailed for Redwood Indian $10,000 Marathon,” San Bernardino Sun, March 22, 1928. 201 “Hummingbird,” who had won a nearby “mountain marathon” the previous summer. This was an even looser invocation of the term “marathon,” as that race was under six miles long, but local sports commentators insisted that the man showed great promise in endurance events and Redwood Highway Marathon personnel from towns nearby started advising him and discussing his fitness and community support.387 Apparently, members from the Wappo community dressed in regalia and held a ceremony to support him, though they invited some white people to spectate.388 In this way, communities along the highway actually mobilized to ensure their representation in the second run and hype up new celebrities that might bring athletic glory back home. Trainer Mike Kirk sent word that the three Zunis would be back for round two and accompanied by a few more fellows.389 The group is pictured in Figure 6.2 below. Kirk reportedly said, “Last year my boys were unfamiliar with the route, and the paved highway in spots bothered my runners in particular. But this year watch my Zunis smoke.”390 Besides Melika, Chochee, and Jamon, Kirk introduced 23-year-old Oscar Sheeka (often just called Sheeka), who would run for the Golden Gate Ferry Company, and 36-year-old Lutci, “Chief Napaco” to run for Napa County. Pictures showed them in headbands and beads with their trainer, or shirtless in the desert. 387 “Healdsburg to Enter Indian in Marathon,” Healdsburg Tribune, February 14, 1928; “Dozen Pairs of Shoes Ordered for Cordova,” Healdsburg Tribune, March 9, 1927. 388 Mention of this ceremony found in “Geyserville ‘Redskins’ Hold All Night Ceremonial,” Healdsburg Tribune, March 12, 1928. Cordova was Dry Creek Pomo, raised by Wappo people in the Alexander Valley in Sonoma County. 389 “The Runners,” Blue Lake Advocate, June 2, 1928; “Sport Tabloids,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 6, 1928; “The Zunis and their Mentor, Mike Kirk,” Healdsburg Enterprise, June 14, 1928. 390 “Six Zuni Indians Among the Runners,” Blue Lake Advocate, June 2, 1928. 202 Figure 6.2. The 1928 Zuni racers. Pho to from the Mendocino County Museum. The biggest story from the Southwest was that Nicholas Qömawunu, “universally held to be the greatest Indian runner ever developed” might compete.391 Qömawunu, who trained with Kirk but would be entered with fellow Hopis by the trader Lorenzo Hubbel, was indeed an accomplished and widely famous runner. He won a New York City to Long Beach Island Marathon in 1927, a victory that “made him a highly sought after competitor in other marathons.”392 Adding to his intrigue was his reported status as a Snake Dance priest back home in the Hopi village of Orayvi. Hopi Snake Dance ceremonies involved displays of both distance running and snakes, and therefore became, in the mind of Americans, a quintessential marker of exotic Indianness and primitivity. Qömawunu’s competitions away from the mesas meant the opportunity to see the runner 391 “All Ready for Indian Race to Grants Pass,” Blue Lake Advocate, June 9, 1928. 392 Gilbert, Hopi Runners, 136. 203 outside of the ceremonial context.393 The addition of Hopis to the line-up also offered the “added color” of a reportedly “great rivalry between the Zunis and the Hopis.”394 The prospect of additional runners from the Southwest had the power to pique interest, as sports fans likely knew about the proven running prowess of peoples such as the Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo (apparently, one Navajo man who went only by “Red Robin” during the race jogged up to the starting line through all of Southern California). A San Francisco radio station broadcasted an interview with “Charles Erickson, noted authority on the Hopi and Zuni” to “describe in detail the marvelous running ability of the Hopis, and…analyze the chances of the various runners in the race.”395 Erickson appears to have been a white man and one-time railroad worker, an Arizona resident who had previously been involved in publicity centering on local Native people, like when he conducted the 1923 Indian Band in Santa Fe.396 Erickson was likely familiar with Hopi runners, but the practice of plucking up white men to serve as authorities on Indian cultures and communities represented the continued pattern of exclusionary white male consultation that characterized the planning and implementation of the marathon and mainstream conversations about Native people and communities by and large. The promise of the first marathon’s revenue persisted; so did the ongoing problems in publicity. 393 See Gilbert, Hopi Runners, 137; Amateur and professional Anthropologists had taken particular interest in the Hopi Snake Dance since at least the 1880s. See Lomayumtewa C. Ishii, “Hopi Culture and a Matter of Representation,” Indigenous Nations Studies Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 33-52. 394 “Arizona’s Indians Give bit o’ Color to Redwood Race,” Sotoyome Scimitar, May 17, 1928. 395 “Redwood Highway Marathon will be on Radio Tonight,” Healdsburg Tribune, May 15, 1928. 396 He apparently did so with a yardstick, and the inaugural band “had a cornet, a badly dented tuba and a bass drum.” See Leslie Linthicum, “Strike Up the Old Indian Band,” Albuquerque Journal, November 11, 2012. Also see “Santa Fe Indian’s Band 2012 Reunion,” Old Trails Journal (Winslow Historical Society and Old Trails Museum) 3, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2013): 3. 204 Training for some runners began in the early spring. It took a much different form than it had the previous year. Reports went out in April that race officials were in the process of organizing training camps.397 Indeed, training and publicity started at tracks throughout the Redwood Empire and beyond. An REA photographer made rounds to capture runners in preparation. Below (Figures 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5) are shots of Manuel Cordova at a country club near Healdsburg with local women acting as race starters, competitors, and running shoe consultants. These first ran in the San Francisco Call.398 Figures 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5. Manuel Cordova pictured with Vera Churchman (posing as a runner) and Geraldine Black (posing as the race starter). The papers had not forgotten about Miss Redwood Empire, either. Her familiar face graced the papers along with some other newcomers, like Elder Barney, a.k.a. “Thunder Cloud” (Karuk) running for Eureka and Jasper Grant (Rogue River Tribes), a.k.a. “White Horse,” running for Arcata. Grant had also attended Chemawa (Salem) Indian School in Oregon. None of the runners in the first race had shared this common 397 “Indian Runners Will Have Training Camp,” San Bernardino Sun, April 10, 1928. 398 “Healdsburg’s Entrant In Redwood Highway Marathon Photod With Local Girls,” Healdsburg Tribune, April 18, 1928. 205 schooling experience. Figure 6.6 shows a promotional shot featuring Dorothy Allen as Little Fawn. Figure 6.6. Left to right: Elder Barney, Dorothy Allen, and Jasper Grant. San Anselmo Herald, May 18, 1928. The top-finishers from the 1927 race undertook professional-level training. Southard and Thomas took a trip north to the city of Eugene to train with the legendary University of Oregon and U.S. Olympic team coach, Bill Hayward. Hayward was the world’s foremost expert on competitive running. In Eugene, too, photographers rushed to catch shots of the men training on the track, or getting training notes from the receiving end of the coach’s pointer finger. The Eugene Guard reported that the men were running “20 to 75 miles a day over Lane County roads,” testing their feet on gravel, pavement, and other punishing surfaces.399 Apparently, Hayward was, by May, insisting the runners 399 “Indian Marathon Runners on Road for July Event,” The Eugene Guard, May 11, 1928. 206 were approaching top form. A rare shot caught the three men apparently at ease and in good spirits during training (Figure 6.7). Figure 6.7. From left to right: John “Mad Bull” Southard, Coach William “Bill” Hayward, and Henry “Flying Cloud” Thomas, in Eugene, Oregon. Eugene Guard, May 11, 1928. The REA had heavily promoted the 1927 race, but featuring pictures of the runner-celebrities entering for round two was a new tactic for 1928. Papers along the marathon route proclaimed, “Photographs of the entries have been featured in practically every sporting page in the United States.”400 Probably not, but the images certainly went far and wide. Promotional materials still tended to avoid quoting athletes or consulting with anyone from their home communities or families. They did, however, often include 400 “All Ready for Indian Race to Grants Pass,” Blue Lake Advocate, June 8, 1928. 207 the runners’ real names in addition to their race-time “Indian” ones. There was a much greater opportunity in 1928 to (at least superficially) get to know and recognize the runners in the months and weeks leading up to the start of the race. The men were no longer presented solely as faceless “husky braves,” but as personable contenders for the grand prize, and, even more so in 1928 than in 1927, local hometown heroes that their neighbors could get behind. Some entrants brought in particularly interesting back stories. Eddie Vandervale (Hopland Band of Pomo Indians), who would be running under the nickname “Chief Geyser” for Cloverdale, reportedly both attended college and was “for some time employed as a runner by the late Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionist.”401 Villa did indeed likely employ runners as scouts and messengers, mostly among the Rarámuri, famous above all others for their distance-running and among whom Villa sought refuge.402 The newspapers said Vandervale spoke of the long “[jaunts] over rough territory” with Villa himself.403 Whether true or not, it was a great story and intimidation tactic. Guy Rockey (Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo), to be entered as “Chief Petaluma,” had played minor league baseball along with his brother, Otis. The San Francisco Seals had signed Guy as a shortstop and his brother as a pitcher in 1926.404 401 “Cloverdale Marathon Racer College Graduate,” Healdsburg Enterprise, May 17, 1928. 402 Many accounts of Pancho Villa’s activities reference messenger and scout runners. See for example Jessie Peterson and Thelma Cox Knoles, eds., Pancho Villa: Intimate Recollections by People who Knew Him (New York: Hastings House, 1977), 101. 403 “Cloverdale Marathon Racer College Graduate,” Healdsburg Enterprise, May 17, 1928. 404 “Rockey, Indian Marvel Pitcher, Signed by Seals,” Healdsburg Tribune, August 5, 1926. 208 Guy still had the reputation in 1928 of being “one of the best baseball players in northern California.”405 The San Francisco Examiner ran a picture of a shirtless Rockey running alongside a Western Motors Company “Pontiac Six” to promote the marathon. The car was equipped with a “war bonnet” on its radiator, according to the accompanying article, playing up both its connection to the approaching marathon and its namesake, the Ottawa war leader who nearly expelled British colonizers from their forts in the Great Lakes region in 1763.406 This imagery was a helf-step removed from pure mascotry but not the wholly new pairing of Indian and auto that the shots of Henry Thomas with other Flying Clouds represented (see “Indians and Automobiles” in previous chapter.) Some towns prepped by planning smaller all-Indian marathons as qualifying races or local promotions for the bigger event.407 Lake County, just off the highway route, held a trial race in early May from which they selected their “Chief Konocti.” It was Lawrence Albino (Robinson Rancheria Pomo) of Upper Lake who claimed the title after running 41 miles in seven hours.408 Thousands of spectators apparently lined up to watch a 28-mile all-Indian race in Napa County later that month, won by Ukiah’s Edward Marando and featuring Joe Meyer (Pinoleville Pomo), “Chief Ukiah,” Ukiah’s entrant in the upcoming 405 “Willits Entry for Marathon Training Hard,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 17, 1928. 406 “Many Prizes for Marathon,” San Francisco Examiner, May 13, 1928. For more on Pontiac and the conflict called “Pontiac’s War,” or “Pontiac’s Rebellion,” see Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2007). 407 “Napa County to Hold Marathon Race in May,” Healdsburg Enterprise, April 26, 1928; “Lake County to Enter Runner in Marathon Race,” Healdsburg Enterprise, May 3, 1928; “Sonoma County,” Healdsburg Tribune, May 4, 1928. 408 “Indians in Final Training for Marathon from Here to Grants Pass; Start June 14,” Sausalito News, May 26, 1928. 209 REA marathon.409 Albino took second in this race after leading for over seven miles.410 Talented Native runners were no longer novelties in Northern California. Anyone reading the sports pages knew about the local marathons, the marquee event over the Redwood Highway, and many of the men who might be competing. The REA hired a promotor, Walter Meachem, to “visit every town in the Redwood Empire for the purpose of interesting the citizens in the dollars and cents value of the coming Redwood Empire Indian marathon.”411 Business owners geared up to offer their best service for “the right kind of tourists, not the proverbial ‘tin-can’ but well-to-do folks able to take a vacation, to spend a little money with the ones who treat them right.”412 The marathon committee announced in May that “an Indian village, complete in every detail,” would be erected at the San Francisco starting line. The city’s mayor agreed to this “wigwag” camp, where runners were to sleep “and put the finishing touches on their training in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and along the city streets.”413 Townspeople and regional promotors alike were all hoping to surpass the excitement, spectacle, and pay-off of the previous year’s extravaganza, and the outlook was positive. As the race loomed near and audiences up and down the coast anticipated and celebrated the runners, it became clear that this iteration of the event differed from the 409 “Indian of Ukiah is Winner of Sunday Napa County Race,” Healdsburg Tribune, May 21, 1928. 410 “Mirando Wins Marathon,” San Bernardino Sun, May 22, 1928. 411 “Oregonian Is Boosting Marathon,” Healdsburg Tribune, May 5, 1928. 412 “The Colonel’s Column,” Healdsburg Tribune, May 5, 1928. 413 “Marathon Runners to Sleep In Wigwams,” San Anselmo Herald, May 11, 1928. 210 first round. Stereotypical imagery and rhetoric still circulated, but the press had also disseminated actual images of the runners, as well as their names and some personal details about their lives (which did include accurate information among the hype). A spectator might even be able to find printed cards with individual details about certain runners—like the cards a Mr. Bill Miller passed out for free in Healdsburg—and get to know the runners the way sports fans across the nation got to know their favorite leading sports figures in mainstream athletic circuits.414 Out of the promotion for the second Redwood Highway Indian Marathon also came the pitch that would be the surviving marathon mission statement for local historians who would collect and disseminate information about the two-year event: “The purpose of the race is to give the Indian, the first inhabitant of the Redwood Empire, the opportunity of proving to the paleface world that he is not a dying race, but a strong and virile one.”415 Certainly for anyone revisiting the marathon’s history in the late-twentieth or early-twenty-first century, the nod to empowerment and Indian futures is at least a more pleasant packaging of the event than one wrapped up in Vanishing Race ideology. The impulse to overwrite that stereotype, however, is a bit more surprising coming from the mainstream Northern California press of 1928. The same paper exactly one year before had referenced the runners as “husky braves,” the “real descendants of the old-time West,” and focused on the romanticized past instead of a robust future.416 One paper 414 “The Marathon is On and It is Your World Classic,” Sotoyome Scimitar, June 14, 1928. 415 “Tomorrow the Marathon,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 13, 1928. You can see this quote in Lee Torliatt, “Indian Marathons: 1920s Runners Go for Cash and Glory,” Journal of the Sonoma County Historical Society (1999), 6; Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2001), 114. 211 certainly could not lift the social influence of the Vanishing Race myth, but the rhetorical shift in perspective from Indian ancestors to offspring was indicative of a larger intervention that the 1927 race had forged in the region. From the perspective of boosters, the perpetuity of the most successful advertising stunt they could offer necessitated a perpetual pool of runners, drawn from any Indigenous communities that wanted to send runners. The end of a race of man would mean the end of the race from San Francisco to Grants Pass. Even though the trappings of standing Indian stereotypes continued to bolster public interest, the acknowledgement of Indian modernity and futures in their continued participation in this running event contradicted the notion that present-day Native people were doomed to extinction—as the 1928 article asserted, the race was not dying. Particularly telling is the description of Indian men as “virile.” While generally denoting strength and manly fitness, “virility” literally describes procreative manhood. The Redwood Highway Indian Marathon helped rewrite public understandings of Indian masculinity in the familiar domain of sports—a zone of public influence that had long harbored gendered and racialized conversations about human worth. This chapter explores the influence of the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon as a defining regional event on public notions of modern Indian manhood. 416 “Tomorrow the Great Marathon,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 13, 1927. In my travels through Ukiah, Willits, and other Northern California towns that had been on the race route, these were some of the well- known published accounts of the race. The quote was also part of the 2004 museum exhibit, Games of Skill, Power and Chance in Native California (August 14-November 7, 2004), The Grace Hudson Museum, Ukiah, CA, and in promotional material for that exhibit and the annual commemorate “Legends of the Redwoods” 5K/10K that the museum helped sponsor. See for example, Sherrie Smith-Ferri, “Legends of the Redwoods Race,” Ukiah Daily Journal, July 2, 2007. 212 Remaking Masculinity after the Turn of the Century Idealized masculinity underwent significant changes in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Gender historian Gail Bederman has explained the ways in which discourses about human civilization encompassed ruminations on developing manliness/masculinity (one term gave way to the other around the turn of the century, though many scholars still use the terms fairly interchangeably), constructing a racist and sexist hierarchy in which Anglo-Saxon-descended men occupied the highest seat of social status and those below fought to gain certain rights and privileges (like citizenship and voting rights, for example). While conversations about masculinity ruminated on newly-prized aggressive male behaviors ranging from realms of speech to sexuality, it also referenced these qualities as part of a “natural,” “primitive” way to be a man.417 The man unencumbered by superficial restraints and emasculating manners of previous generations was the real man of the moment. This shift defined the transition from Victorian manhood to modern masculinity. One of the leading culprits in this saga to tout what has been called “passionate masculinity” (and what one might now call “toxic” masculinity) was a man—the man— at the head of the quest to push sports for American boys. Theodore Roosevelt emphasized the importance of “the strenuous life” in an 1899 speech by that title. The twentieth century, according to Roosevelt, would depend on men who did “not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid 417 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Also see Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffin, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990) for an in-depth discussion of Victorian American manhood in the areas of aging and maturing, friendship and marriage, and work and the workplace. 213 ultimate triumph.”418 He extended this notion of hard work and resultant glory beyond the individual, all the way to the scope of a growing American military presence abroad. The aggressive efforts of American men, practiced on football fields or in feats of human strength and endurance, would fuel overseas imperialism well into the new century.419 The need to redefine and assert masculinity in the face of perceived crisis was in reaction to social and economic changes that altered traditionally male spheres. In effect, the qualities that had defined the proper male sphere just before the turn of the century— reason, restraint, respectable family status—altered into male behaviors instead surrounding new conceptions of work, the acceptable public display of anger and aggression, and new efforts to distance men and women, who were no longer so obviously separated in dichotomous realms of society (like public and private, political and apolitical, etc.). Public commentary about gender roles after World War One emphasized a man’s need to provide through success at work, achieve independence even from his family, and be physically fit.420 These developments in American masculinity set the tone for the 1920s, when assertions of masculinity necessarily involved a more robust differentiation between men and women as women won increased access to economy and politics and as white men strived to uphold white supremacy amidst continued immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. 418 Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” Speech, Hamilton Club, Chicago, IL, April 10, 1899. 419 And, by the way, when soldiers went to shoulder the “White Man’s Burden” abroad, they would make it a point to bring American sports with them as part of the civilization mission. See Gems, The Athletic Crusade. 420 For example, these were all topics stressed in the Psychology column of Hearst’s American Weekly, which had a wide readership of mostly urban working-class Americans. See Andrew P. Smiler, Gwen Kay and Benjamin Harris, “Tightening and Loosening Masculinity's (K)nots: Masculinity in the Hearst Press During the Interwar Period,” The Journal of Men’s Studies 16, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 266-279. 214 At the same time, Progressive reformers in that decade often explicitly aimed to eradicate coded male behaviors that, they thought, played the leading role in fueling social ills like poverty and domestic violence. Prohibition rhetoric, for example, identified drunken men as one of the biggest threats to American society, and temperance leaders implored them, “in the name of…manhood” to support an alcohol ban.421 Gender talk was happening everywhere with a wide range of applications in both maintaining power structures and inviting major reform, but the baseline of male aggression and physical power prevailed whether commentators viewed it in a positive or negative light. These dominant questions surrounding gender would have been in the air in Northern California towns in the late 1920s, with special iterations that addressed rural working- class culture and regional identity, as well as intersections with accessible modern institutions (like sport) and racial identity . Nuanced Masculinity in the 1920s Gender historians do not typically talk about the 1920s as a distinctive period for masculinity. Indeed, many important works that talk about masculinity after the turn of the century wrap up right around the 1920-mark, like Bederman’s. The broad strokes suggest that the changes and concerns of turn-of-the-century masculinity persisted through the 1920s because as modernity flourished and women continued to seek and win new opportunities, anyone with an interest in maintaining Victorian masculinity had every reason to stay reactionary and promote ideas about passionate manhood. Certainly, 421 See Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 2010), 73. Some recent writers have suggested that temperance was primarily about women’s safety, not Christian morality. See Moira Donegan, “The temperance movement linked booze to domestic violence. Did it have a point?” The Guardian, January 3, 2020. 215 the cultural obsession with sports (still so heavily dominated by men) in the 1920s suggest that earlier currents continued throughout that decade. Other key changes, however, ones distinctive to the 1920s, likely defined nuanced masculinities and shaped intersections of race, class, and gender. In her work on aerial polar exploration in the 1920s, Marionne Cronin unearths some useful frameworks for thinking about a distinctive 1920s masculinity centrally concerned with each of these categories. Exploration and explorers, of course, represented a long tradition in the white public imagination of male ruggedness, courage, knowledge, and conquest. Polar exploration, especially, put men and their limited equipment in direct contact with a dangerous, unyielding frontier.422 Physical and mental fortitude determined who survived and brought home new accounts of that punishing wilderness and who died trying. Cronin explains that aviation—which grew enormously in popularity during the 1920s— threatened the image of the heroic explorer because the explorer was no longer in direct contact with the wilderness and did not perform the traditional masculine heroism of on- the-ground explorers. Despite that “significant problem,” the category of “technological explorer” emerged to fit aviators into the standing, celebrated tradition for the way aviators tackled a new frontier in the air, mastered their machinery, and demonstrated the utmost mental and physical fortitude in and outside of the plane. “This blending of rationality and physicality,” she explains, “echoed the image of heroic engineers developed by popular writers who…merged a managerial ideal with 422 Marionne Cronin, “Richard Byrd, Technological Explorer: Polar Exploration, the Machine, and Heroic Masculinity in Interwar America,” Technology and Culture 57, no. 2 (April 2016), 329. Also see Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), in which Bloom discusses racialized and gendered public discourses of polar expeditions and how they shaped American national identity. 216 ideas about rugged masculinity to create an ideal figure that was both the lone, romantic frontiersman whose rugged physical vigor enabled him to escape the stultifying feminine influences of civilization and to master (female) nature, and simultaneously the educated professional who mapped and civilized the wilderness.”423 These details are crucial in understanding not just technological explorers, but a much wider range of male celebrity in this era. Aviation is a particularly useful example for studies of sport because it was considered sport, spectacle, and technological innovation all at once. Cronin mentions the emergent figure of the “heroic engineer.” The definition of “technology” solidified around 1920 as influential writers and intellectuals like Thorstein Veblen packaged the concept and the men involved for a modern public, overlooking women who had long constituted the labor pool in professions like textile manufacturing and other work that involved machines. Through this channel, male engineers emerged as valuable producers who advanced civilization and upheld the standards of modern masculinity.424 Whereas the initial shift from skilled, physical labor to managerial work systems represented a crisis for masculinity, growing admiration for higher education and fascination with the rapid pace of modern development apparently created new idealized male figures that maintained middle-class gendered values but applied them in modern settings. Those on the front lines of innovation represented the pinnacle and hope of modern civilization, so long as they appropriately blended white-collar ideals with preferred traits of male appearance and sexuality. 423 Cronin, “Richard Byrd, Technological Explorer,” 337. 424 Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870- 1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 44-45, 123. 217 There seemed to be, however, more room for variation in male appreciation than one would expect, assuming that Rooseveltian gender ideology more or less persisted through the 1920s. Cronin’s article centers on Richard Byrd, an American naval officer and aviator who carried out an aerial North Pole exploration in 1926 and returned home from his flight an American hero much the way that Charles Lindbergh would the following year when he achieved his accomplishment in aviation. Cronin notes, “Despite the ongoing importance of personal courage [and other traditionally masculine traits] in Byrd’s heroic image, descriptions of him accentuated neither physical strength nor a rugged masculinity; instead, in an interesting departure from pre–World War I emphases on physical masculinity, he was regularly described as ‘slim’ and ‘graceful.’”425 He was apparently restrained, humble, and polite, as well. Cronin argues that this emphasis was a product of the nativist desire to distinguish “native-born” white Anglo-descended American men from “brash, immigrant, working-class popular heroes that threatened traditional notions of masculinity.”426 In many ways, Byrd was a modern Victorian man, a pairing typically understood to be somewhat at odds, except as a naval officer and homegrown Southern boy, he was thoroughly American. This allowance for Byrd’s heroism indicates more than the anti-immigrant anxieties of the middle-class in the 1920s. Cronin touches only briefly on race to stress anti-immigrant public sentiments and note that Byrd made jokes at the expense of African Americans who were excluded from this early aviation scene. If we consider aviation as a sport, however, many more nuances of racist ideology can explain the 425 Cronin, “Richard Byrd, Technological Explorer,” 344. 426 Ibid. 218 double standards that condemned either Victorian or passionate manhood when a person of the “wrong” race or class displayed such qualities but celebrated this apparently perfect union of values in a white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class man like Byrd. Previous chapters have explored at some length the anxieties that white athletes and sports fans developed all throughout athletic history, fearing that the victory of people of color threatened white male supremacy. Aviation was an increasingly high-profile corner of the broad sports world that was not yet threatened by racial diversity. It was far from a working-class activity and it was, because of the training and cost required, highly exclusive even among men in the middle- and upper-classes. It would have been in white supremacists’ interest to adapt heroic images to aviators where possible, and to promote aviation as a particularly important arena, so white men could safeguard their status atop the field. Commentators could insist upon the complete goodness of men like Byrd and Lindbergh, drawing from various and overlapping historical masculinity standards and present this new image—like the heroic engineer—safe from the danger of sports like football, baseball, boxing, and competitive running. In those high-profile sports, competitors of color were everywhere and, in many cases, easily outmatched their white counterparts. Aviation allowed white men to dominate a new corner of the athletic kingdom that apparently represented the height of civilization. Steady acceptance of a “managerial ideal” drew on mainstream gendered values but claimed and celebrated important modern spaces for white men in a way that adherence to less nuanced masculine qualities could not. This must have been a slow and class-specific process, unable to shift the sentiment of the masses swiftly or totally (modern masculinity defined by competition, aggression, and virility persists in the 219 twenty-first century), but it does suggest that people reading papers and otherwise following news of male accomplishments in and beyond sports encountered ruminations on masculinity that were distinctly of-the-moment. There is much more to say about race and masculinity in the 1920s. Working- class men of color, for example, forged masculine identities that expressed culturally- specific gender goals and resisted homogenous measures of masculinity that stressed dominant whiteness. Linda España-Maram explored the ways in which the Filipino community in Los Angeles forged an ethnic gender identity through popular culture and leisure activities, including sport, starting in the 1920s. Activities like boxing created spaces in which Filipino men could create and celebrate their identities beyond recognizable categories like “worker” or “immigrant.” Boxing also provided an opportunity to win purses that surpassed low wages in working-class jobs and a chance to triumph over competitors from other racial and ethnic communities, namely whites who routinely infantilized and denigrated Filipino men.427 The 1920s also, of course, represented a revolutionary age in the forging of new Black masculinities. White supremacist violence in the Jim Crow era most obviously targeted Black men across the South, continuously leveling false allegations of the Black man as a sexual predator. In Black cultural movements of the 1920s, like the New Negro Movement, leading intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois ruminated on Black masculinity while cultural icons of the Harlem Renaissance articulated and expressed various modes 427 Linda España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 220 and goals of self-expression in and beyond gender and sexuality.428 Black men in sport faced segregation in city and professional leagues, barred from participation in sports in which Black men had previously excelled, like jockeying. In other sports, Black athletes did make some gains, displaying tremendous skill in “Negro League” baseball and international track and field, among others.429 The sequestered skill of Black athletes would, of course, remain a perceived threat to white would-be competitors for decades to come. Delving into histories of urban immigrant communities or Black cultural movements is, of course, only so applicable to other examples, like rural Northern California and Karuk communities. Some connections are quite clear: men parsed out masculinity standards in non-white communities and had to contend with a dominant culture that stressed white masculinity as the norm and pinnacle. Physical fitness and competitive sport were rallying points and a critical part of the social process of gender identity formation and expression. These currents washed over a very diverse Indian Country, as well. Native men—and Native male accomplishments—however, fit into this formulation somewhat awkwardly. The next chapter discusses in more depth the way that the Black-white conflict replaced the preoccupation with, by the end of the 1920s, a somewhat resolved “Indian Question.” Indigenous men no longer represented the main threat to white American men—that was the purview of Black and immigrant men. White supremacy and the inherited structures of settler colonialism, however, exclude and 428 See Anna Pochmara, The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011) and Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 429 See Arthur Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete (New York: Penguin, 1993). 221 devalue Indigenous men, draw sharp lines of separation, and carefully craft strategic areas of cultural appropriation. Indigeneity intersected with mainstream notions of masculinity in—again—distinctive ways in and around the 1920s that are, so far, largely unexplored in scholarly literature. The details, however, help explain the gendered landscape of the early- and middle-interwar period before the better-known history of the Great Depression’s impact on masculinity. Native American Manhood and American Ambivalence Karuk men (like other Indigenous men) had additional input about how to be a man in their homelands. Karuk Tribal Member Jim Berry remarks, “My family hunted the mountains and canyons of the Klamath River Corridor. Hunting for big game in this region of the United States is unlike most other areas. Our people hunted year-round, at that time for subsistence, living on puufich (venison), as a major part of the diet. This, in part, was the way of life that helped lead the competitive nature of our people.” In addition to venison, Karuk hunters brought home elk and bears from lands that, as Berry notes, were incredibly hard to traverse for the untrained venturer. The Klamath River Corridor is characterized by steep peaks, rocky river rapids, and remote forest. Hunters walked in and out of this mountainous forestland. This means the walk out involved tugging large game in tow. John Southard and his brothers would compete to see who could carry a buck carcass the highest up the mountain in a single sprint while on hunting trips.430 Salmon fishing in the Klamath constituted an essential portion of the traditional Karuk diet and culture, as well. Much of this food collection—big game hunting and 430 Jody Waddell (son-in-law to Marion Southard), in discussion with the author, August 2017. 222 fishing—was men’s work.431 Berry’s and others’ stories of their ancestors in the 1920s suggest that hunting at that time was both a continually necessary fixture of subsistence and a zone of mostly male life in which participants prized (and relied on) physical fitness and developed a culture of competitiveness.432 This emphasis on physicality and development of a wide array of sporting activity is consistent with wider histories of rural Indian Country. To meet the demands of rural life, people had to train in a variety of ways, and the resulting fitness primed them for physicality in recreation, leisure, and even ceremony. Philip Deloria discusses a “particular kind of Indian physicality” in relation to his grandfather’s upbringing “in a mixed world” of input from family and friends in and outside of his Yankton Dakota community.433 Native communities across the continent had longstanding sporting traditions—like the runners of the Southwest or stickball players further East. Though the 431 Kari Marie Norgaard, Ron Reed, and J.M. Bacon explored the impact of declining salmon runs on Karuk masculinity in their 2017 article, “How Environmental Decline Restructures Indigenous Gender Practices: What Happens to Karuk Masculinity When There Are No Fish?” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4 no. 1 (2018): 98-113. The authors interviewed members of Karuk communities and examined public testimony that discussed the struggle to conceive of and exercise Karuk masculinity within the framework of altered environments, colonialism, and anti-Indian racism. While their subject is recent history, the study reinforces the continued centrality of masculinity in cultural subsistence patterns through time. 432 There is a notable lack of scholarship on working-class ethnic masculinities in rural Western sites in this time period. The body of scholarship available on working-class masculinity and race more generally stresses the exclusionary masculinity forged in predominantly white workplace settings throughout the twentieth century, like the mining communities and factory workers discussed in such works as Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998) and Matthew Basso, Meet Joe Cooper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s WWII Home Front (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Other works explore working-class culture and race in urban settings to explore the ways in which men in “unskilled” positions expressed masculinity outside of work, in leisure activities that likely stressed the early-twentieth-century ideals of combative and rough masculinity. See España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila; Stephen Meyer, Manhood on the Line: Working-class Masculinities in the American Heartland (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). 433 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 115. 223 parameters varied by nation and region, some sports were specifically for men (Haudenosaunee lacrosse, for example). Sports factored into Native masculinity (and in other cases into Native femininity) across the continent. Theories and histories of Native masculinities have received some attention in recent interdisciplinary scholarship, but there remains a gap in studies that can help precisely situate nuanced historical gendered perspectives across Indian Country in the interwar period in the United States.434 One applicable avenue of inquiry, however, is military service in World War I. Native men disproportionately enrolled in U.S. military service during the war. While there was, of course, no absolute consensus on the war, the draft, or military service across Indian Country, Thomas Britten asserts that “Indian peoples with strong warrior traditions…sent their sons off to war with the expectation that they might gain entrance into elite warrior societies upon their return.” This pattern built on lineages of former male service with the U.S. Armed Forces.435 Non-Native commentators might ascribe the language of Plains warfare in a mode similar to that of the ongoing commentary in sports—tropes that relied on stereotypes. “Postwar accolades may have been,” however, “the very ends that some Indian soldiers sought,” proud to receive acclaim for service as venerated soldiers.436 Survey responses from Indian veterans, collected in the 1920s, 434 See, for example, Robert Alexander Innes and Kim Anderson, eds. Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015); Sam McKegney, ed., Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014); Kyle Mays, “Indigenous Masculinity in Hip Hop Culture: Or, How Indigenous Feminism Can Reform Indigenous Manhood” in Kyle Mays, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 67-85. 435 Thomas Britten, American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 71-72. 436 Britten, American Indians in World War I, 83-84. 224 stressed warrior tradition, lineage, and aspirations in their motivations for and interest in their service.437 The Society of American Indians, a pan-Indian Native rights organization founded by Native professionals in the Progressive Era, took a position of “a hybrid patriotism” in their Americanization ideology. This formulation stressed both Indianness and Americanness and located Indian identity across tribes and shared with mainstream American identity.438 These were some of the reasons to enlist. There were other reasons to resist. It’s worth noting briefly that some Indian military men served as messenger- runners, with face-to-face communication being safer than telecommunications that the enemy might be able to access. These were respected service positions. William Blindwoman (Northern Cheyenne) and Chester Armstrong Four Bear (Cheyenne River Sioux) were among the many Native American army runners who received praise and hero status for their efforts and skills. World-renowned long distance runner Tom Longboat (Onondaga) served as a runner for the Over-Seas Canadian Expeditionary Force, as well. He also ran in expositions to entertain other soldiers.439 Though the Navajo “Code Talkers” of World War II are famous for their development of an unbreakable code based on their Indigenous language, the usage of Indian languages in transmitting messages via telephone dated back at least to World War I. By the end of the 437 See Susan Applegate Krouse, “Serving for Duty and Justice” in Susan Applegate Krouse, North American Indians in the Great War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 17-34. This book utilizes a collection of a few thousand surveys submitted by Indian veterans in the 1920s in which they reflected on their military service. 438 Paul C. Rosier, Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 44. 439 Keegan, “Tom Longboat.” 225 war, the Army relied on some communication in Cheyenne, Comanche, Osage, and Lakota languages.440 These communication services, so well suited for Indian men, should be understood as critical wartime services that highlighted the blending and evolution of traditional and modern Indigeneity, including in the realms of warriorship and men’s work.441 Participation in the war effort bolstered the political goals of demographics aiming to gain political representation, perhaps most notably Indigenous people and women. Congress conferred citizenship to all Native Americans in 1924, partially in response to the tremendous number of Native enlistees and their invaluable services. Like other race-based legislation, it was superficially inclusive without always having the so- called teeth to put that inclusive urge into action or exercise it in consultation with the communities it sought to serve. Nonetheless, the context of the war mattered among other factors in the passage of the act. Aside from the visibility of Indian soldiers on the eve of the 1920s and formal citizenship in 1924, Indigeneity factored into mainstream notions of modern masculinity because of the emphasis on “primitiveness” in acceptable male behavior. As Anna Pochmara explains, “Victorian manliness draws privilege from the position of patronage over uncivilized non-white races, whereas modern masculinity appropriates the imaginary primitive vitality of other races to revitalize itself.”442 Non-Native observers 440 Britten, American Indians In World War I, 106-107. 441 Also see Krouse, “On the Front Lines as Scouts and Runners” in North American Indians in the Great War, 66-79. This book utilizes a collection of a few thousand surveys submitted by Indian veterans in the 1920s in which they reflected on their military service. 442 Pochmara, The Making of the New Negro, 10. 226 had long leveled the criticism of primitivity and its relatives—savagery, barbarism, etc.— at Indigenous people and traditions. Desiring a display of primitiveness in white men therefore jived uneasily with ongoing condemnations of Indigenous inferiority based on antimodernism and official policy aimed at assimilation, even as citizenship insinuated that that process was complete. In truth, Americans had long displayed an ambivalent and contradictory attitude towards facets of Native culture in North America. Anti-Indian racism and contextualized embraces of Native people and culture differed significantly from the attitudes and interactions white Americans had with, for example, immigrant groups or African Americans, and many of the contours of appropriation and racism focused in some way on masculinity. In Playing Indian, Philip Deloria traced the ways in which non-Native Americans have appropriated and claimed Indigeneity alongside policies of assimilation and rejections of Indian sovereignty. As “oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self” and symbols of “instinct and freedom” in a liberating wilderness, Indians and the idea of Indianness, Deloria suggests, “[set] up a…dialectic of simultaneous desire and repulsion.”443 That dialectic has played out from the colonial era through today, but in the 1920s, the simultaneous modern and antimodern pulls came from processes and institutions already discussed—national population growth, urbanization, industrialization, and the imagined loss of the frontier that acted as a safeguard for rugged masculine individualism. Primitiveness tempered what mainstream American commentators thought were shortcomings of modern industrialized society: 443 Deloria, Playing Indian, 3. 227 effeminizing professionalism, unskilled labor, and soft city life.444 If not directly playing Indian, white observers might still want to learn from circulating perceptions of Native traditions. Anthony Rotundo insists that “the lessons to be learned varied a great deal,” ranging from chastity to relaxation techniques to wilderness survival.445 In every corner throughout white America, then, there were complexities in anti- and pro-Indian sentiments. Sport as an Arena of Influence In light of the value placed on primitive masculinity (for white men), early Indian mascots emerged to express the image in sports, but the image related to actual Native people both directly and indirectly depending on the team. It was apparent from American sports commentary that white men still viewed Native men as a threat to the status of “manliest” men by some popular metrics, even if they no longer represented Public Enemy Number One. The next chapter delves into this topic. And yet as city and national sports leagues segregated in the early twentieth century, forcing African Americans out, they often kept Indigenous athletes on board. John Tortes Meyers (Cahuilla) played catcher for the New York Giants, the Boston Braves (the team adopted this name in 1912), and the Brooklyn Robins. Jim Thorpe (Sauk and Mesquakie) played professional football from 1919 to 1926, and for two years of that period he played with other Native Americans on the Oorang Indians, an Ohio team founded in 1922. The Cleveland baseball team became the Indians in 1915. High schools and colleges 444 Ibid., 96. 445 Anthony E. Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 227-228. 228 continued to adopt Indian mascots in the 1920s and 30s. Indianness was not the same type of foil to whiteness it had once been, particularly in the West, where frontier warfare fed so thoroughly into regional histories and identities, but it had not faded into obscurity. It had, however, been appropriated. With the lingering presence of Indian people and communities came lingering, but ambivalent engagement with all the realities and myths that “Indianness” constituted. When marathon promotion referenced Indian “virility,” it incorporated Native men—represented by the runners of the Redwood Highway Marathon—into mainstream values of masculinity. This inclusion was particularly significant, as it was such an obvious reversal of Vanishing Race mythology that denied the prospect of Indigenous futures altogether. To be valued for perceived primitivity alone was a compliment rooted in misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and racism. By the 1920s, it had long been the case that white Americans caricatured Indigenous people as simple forest dwellers and free from the burdens of modern society. To extend masculinity rhetoric beyond that confining sphere and instead prize virility flew in the face of stereotypes. Though wrapped up in problematic notions of normative gender and sexuality, this rhetoric indicates white commentators’ positive valuation of Indian men, in this modern context of sports so utterly tied to discourses of masculinity. White athletes and sports fans had long expressed extreme anxiety—to the point of enforcing racial segregation—about the prospect of competing with athletes of color. That anxiety did not go away. In fact, the National Football League did not formally segregate until 1934. So how was this breakthrough moment in the Redwood Empire possible? Did the audience buy it? The following chapter has less to offer in the way of 229 glimpses of progress. It examines the ongoing anxieties and white supremacist backlash lurking just off screen when it came to the Redwood Highway Marathon, and blatant racist violence in a slightly larger context of extreme distance running happening at the same time in different geographies across the U.S. The history demonstrates two constants of race relations in the United States: the constant construction of double- standards to punish people of color, and ambivalence about Indigenous communities as possibly assimilable, possibly warranting respect in their own right, or altogether different and lesser than white Americans. 230 CHAPTER VII PROGRESS ON THE LINE: WHITE SUPREMACIST BACKLASH IN SPORT AND SOCIETY June 14, 1928 The runners had made it to San Francisco for the second annual Redwood Highway Indian Marathon. Most of them, anyway. Word came in shortly before the race that the highly anticipated Nicholas Qömawunu and fellow Hopi runner Myron Poliquaptewa, who had also made previous public athletic appearances, had both withdrawn. This was surely a blow to the athletes and spectators alike. Spectators along the Redwood Highway Marathon route had eyed Qömawunu with great interest as the marathon approached and were eager to share his glory.446 Competition in the June marathon would have offered a chance at redemption from recent setback and perhaps provided the event’s most promising flair. Alas, things don’t always go right in live entertainment. Some other last-minute news, however, helped lessen the blow of the Hopi withdrawal for spectators awaiting a show. Shell Gasoline announced they were entering a runner heretofore unknown. He was apparently a talented athlete “in a number of sports and once was an aviator” like the adored Charles Lindberg.447 Former Olympian and national and world champion cyclist Hans Ohrt was to be his manager and the 1920 Olympic runner Charlie Hunter was to be his coach. This runner was, like everyone else in the marathon, going to have a support caravan. Unlike the other runners, however, his 446 “Indian Leads in Cross-Nation Race,” Healdsburg Tribune, March 7, 1928. 447 “Shell Company Enters Runner in Marathon,” Santa Cruz Evening News, June 15, 1928. 231 caravan was to be stocked with “a shower bath, ice chest, bunks and lockers.”448 Also unlike the other runners, this runner, “Paleface Yellow’n’Red,” was white, and running not for a shot at the $5,000 grand prize that would, in any event, sacrifice his amateur status needed for elite competition outside of the professional circuit, but simply “to match the stamina of the Caucasian with that of the Indian.”449 If the specter of white supremacy continued to direct racist promotional coverage through harmful stereotypes, this living embodiment of it took to the starting line the morning of the marathon. Shell’s eleventh-hour stunt had dominated much of the coverage immediately preceding the race by offering a new, and yet familiar angle to the story. Athletic contests between Indigenous and white athletes invited the unimaginative comparison to the Western “Indian Wars” of the preceding century. One need only look at the mainstream press coverage that advertised sporting events between Indian boarding schools and predominantly white clubs or colleges to see the constant invocation of Indian primitivity and savagery against white civility and proper manhood. “The redskins are on the warpath and their trail leads to Franklin field,” wrote a Montana journalist anticipating Carlisle’s team in 1908.450 Almost two decades later, The Kansas City Times wrote, “mighty braves from the far reaches of Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska are making overtures to the gods of war that their young men, the Haskell football squad, may fare 448 “29 Indians, 1 White Man Start In 482-Mile Coast Marathon,” New York Times, June 15, 1928. 449 Ibid. 450 “Something About Great Indian Team,” The Butte Miner, October 23, 1927; Michael Oriard discusses the press surrounding Carlisle Indian School’s football team in Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 237-239; Also see Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 122-126. 232 well on the warpath against Loyola of New Orleans tomorrow afternoon.”451 Similar examples essentially amount to finding hay in a haystack. The absence of direct interracial competition in the 1927 Redwood Highway Marathon had not prevented journalists from invoking these tropes in their accounts, but that rhetoric more or less gave way to genuine coverage over the week-long athletic contest. The real-life rivalries were regional and inter-tribal rather than interracial. The addition of an unofficial white racer in 1928, equipped with extra amenities, invited more direct comparisons of racial athletic dominance. “Will the white man’s scientific training carry him through to victory?” posed the Santa Cruz Evening News, “Or will the red man nose him out as the result of their heritage of many generations of physical prowess?”452 Apparently, this “new sporting angle” became “the thrilling question [on] which public interest [was] centered.”453 Some papers even asserted, “It is hoped Paleface Yellownred will set a new mark for the 480 miles,” but they didn’t say who hoped this.454 Twenty-nine men toed the line amidst these game-time updates. Gamblers got their final bets in. With Qömawunu out, Mad Bull, “trimmed down to apparently perfect physical condition” and Flying Cloud, Mad Bull’s training partner and returning runner- up with something to prove, were the favorites.455 Cameramen and reporters readied their tools. Franck Havenner raised the starting pistol. He was not a former train robber like his 451 “Many Braves to See Game,” Kansas City Times, November 12, 1927. 452 “Shell Company Enters Runner In Marathon,” Santa Cruz Evening News, June 15, 1928. 453 Ibid. 454 “Lone White Competes in Indian Trek,” San Mateo Times, June 14, 1928; “Paleface Runner in Indian Marathon,” Marin Herald (San Anselmo, CA), June 15, 1928. 455 “Mad Bull is Favorite in Indian Race,” Santa Cruz Evening News, June 14, 1928; “Jamon Reaches San Rafael in Marathon Lead,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 14, 1928. 233 predecessor; he was an elitely educated San Francisco journalist and member of the city’s Board of Supervisors who eventually became a congressman. The lineup was as follows: 1. John Southard “Mad Bull” (Karuk) for the Grants Pass Cavemen 2. Henry Thomas “Flying Cloud” (Karuk) for the Grants Pass Cavemen 3. Manuel Cordova “Hummingbird” (Pomo, Mishewal-Wappo) for Healdsburg 4. James Donnelly “Silver Wings” (Klamath) for Requa 5. Nicholas Qömawunu (Hopi) for trainer Lorenzo Hubbel; DID NOT START 6. Arthur Pohequaptewa (Hopi) for trainer Lorenzo Hubbel 7. Myron Poliquaptewa (Hopi) for trainer Lorenzo Hubbel; DID NOT START 8. Dan Comahungnioma (Hopi) for trainer Lorenzo Hubbel 9. Eddie Vandervale “Chief Geyser” (Pomo, Washoe) for Cloverdale 10. Roy Van Pelt (Klamath) for Corvallis 11. Edward Green “Crescent American” (“Escholet”) for Crescent City 12. Lawrence Albino “Chief Konocti” (Pomo) for Lakeport 13. Walter McCovey “Klamath” (Hoopa Valley) for Klamath River Chamber of Commerce 14. Seymour Smith “Lightfoot” (Northern Maidu) for Plumas County Chamber of Commerce 15. Elder Barney “Thunder Cloud” (Karuk) for Packard Sales and Service in Eureka 16. Lutci “Chief Napaco” (Zuni) for the Board of Napa County 17. Melika (Zuni) for Willits 18. Elmer Whipple “Crescent Feather” (Tolowa) for Crescent City 19. Oscar Sheeka (Zuni) for the Golden Gate Ferry Company 20. Joe Meyer “Chief Ukiah” (Pomo) for the Ukiah Chamber of Commerce 21. Chochee (Zuni) for Santa Rosa 22. Jamon (Zuni) for “Marvelous” Marin County 23. Andrew Chimoney (Zuni) for the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco 24. Samuel Howard “Eagle Chief” (Karuk) for Happy Camp 25. Jasper Grant “White Horse” (Rogue River Tribes) for Arcata Chamber of Commerce 26. Irwin Chase “Flying Arrow” (Hupa) for Eureka 27. Name Unknown “Silver Fox” (Yoruk) for Eureka 28. Joseph La Fountain “Bad Land Charlie” (Tolowa) for Redwood Rodeo, Fortuna 29. Name Unknown “Red Robin” (Navajo) for Hopland 30. Name Unknown “Chief Golden Shell” (tribal affiliation unknown) for Ukiah 31. Guy Rockey “Petaluma Hawk” (Pomo) for Petaluma Unofficial: “Paleface Yellow’n’Red” for Shell Gasoline The field took off from the starting line at the sound of the shot. Behind an automobile caravan, they ran through the financial district to the ferry port and boarded a boat to Sausalito with their caravans and news crews.456 It was just after 10:30 a.m. 456 “Indian Marathon Runners Get Away to Good Start from Here,” Sausalito News, June 16, 1928. 234 They’d kick off the straight trek on the highway, “a long asphaltum and concrete stretch through the big tree country,” at 11:39 a.m., the start time on the official marathon clock.457 Figure 7.1. Runners start the 1928 Redwood Highway Indian Marathon in San Francisco. John Southard is at the far left. Several racing bib numbers identify many of the other runners. Caption reads: “Down to the ferry—Twenty-nine redskins, without war paint, were sent on their way to Grants Pass.” From the Mornin g Register, Eugene, OR, June 17, 1928. The Opening Stretch: That Afternoon and Evening Jamon repeated his impressive opening from the previous year and crossed into San Rafael, about ten miles north of Sausalito, at the head of the pack. The town was, after all, the county seat of “Marvelous Marin” for whom he ran (again). It had taken him an hour and a half, which matched the mark he set one year earlier. In terms of running pace, this was movement at just under nine minutes per mile—slow and steady, but with the important caveat that there were well over 450 miles to go. Very close behind was a cohort of other front-runners: Lutci, Chimoney, Sheeka, and Seymour Smith. Chochee 457 “Jamon Reaches San Rafael in Marathon Lead,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 14, 1928. 235 and Melika were sixth and seventh. Southard and Thomas were yet to crack the top ten.458 About ten more miles in, a pack of four Zuni runners led the field at what remained a pace that promised to break the previous year’s record if it could be maintained. First to pass through the town of Novato was Andrew Chimoney, followed closely by Oscar Sheeka, Lutci, and Jamon. Next came Thomas and Southard, who had evidently turned on higher gears through the day to settle into a comfortably competitive position. The Hopi runners and the final two Zuni runners trailed the Karuk pair. It was just after 3:00 p.m.459 The front pack of racers solidified into a tight group through Petaluma with some shuffling of the order. The Hopi pair of Pohequaptewa and Comahungnioma lead through the town once the Zuni runners stopped to rest. Lightfoot, Chief Napaco, and Flying Cloud rounded out the top five who exited the city, all within a half-mile of one another.460 Santa Rosa was just around the 50-mile mark. Pohequaptewa maintained his lead into that town, where many would stop for the night. In this race, fifty miles was a mere dent in the total distance. Could the Southwest runners maintain their strong showing, or would the returning Karuks repeat their podium finishes from the year before? And where was Paleface Yellow’n’Red? After the starting line accounts, he vanishes entirely from the surviving record of the event. Those who entered and trained 458 “Jamon Reaches San Rafael in Marathon Lead,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 14, 1928. 459 “Hopi Indian Leads Coast Marathon,” Klamath News (Klamath Falls, OR), June 15, 1928. 460 Ibid. 236 him intentionally concealed his identity, but pictures of the man ran in the press. Still, identifying him at the time was (and remains nearly a century later) seemingly impossible. He was an awfully big showboat to simply sink without any further comment. Unfortunately, the stunt (no matter what became of it) indicated frequent patterns in and beyond sports. The 1920s were an exceptionally racist decade defined by nativist fear of outsiders and robust efforts to exclude particular racial and ethnic groups from the perceived promises of U.S. citizenship. These biases certainly extended to California, and to American institutions ranging from employment to entertainment. The long tradition of white ambivalence towards Native people and cultures, however, complicated the exact position in racial hierarchies and within lines of demarcation that Native people would occupy in the eyes of mainstream American culture. By the 1920s, assimilation efforts had been well underway for decades and the most pressing racialized fears that white people held were directed towards African Americans and particular groups of immigrants. American racism in this period has been explored at length in scholarship, but rarely have key moments or components of the realignment of racist ideology in this era by and large been considered with reference to Native communities in modernity. This chapter will recount a few telling details in the history of 1920s white supremacy to highlight the contradictions inherent in racist ideology surrounding Indigenous communities. Per usual, it then shifts back to sport, which was a ripe arena to see some of these issues play out. While the Redwood Highway Marathon remains the vantage point, the chapter goes beyond the California context to, one final time, illustrate the importance of sport in the formation and expression of American culture and help weigh to what 237 extent the Redwood Highway Marathon was typical or atypical in what it produced. That question itself is answered in a short conclusion to follow, but this final foray reveals that although white supremacy was one of the underlying contexts that defined sporting events and popular culture, anti-Indian sentiments were sometimes subtle, ununiform, or challenged altogether. The Broad Strokes of Racism in 1920s American Society and Politics Two pieces of legislation, introduced in Congress a single week apart in 1924, revealed key contours of American racism at the time. The Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration to the U.S. based on strict quotas on national origins. In addition to curbing immigration from countries across eastern and southern Europe, it excluded would-be Asian immigrants as a follow-up to Chinese Exclusion enacted decades prior. Mae Ngai has demonstrated how the invention and persecution of the “illegal alien” category in U.S. immigration policy hardened lines of whiteness and targeted specific groups (most notably Mexican nationals) as undesirable and outside of a carefully constructed American racial and ethnic order. This legislation and the processes it established were fully designed to maintain whiteness and white supremacy in the United States after decades of immigration that filled an expanded labor pool in American cities and industries.461 A week later, the Indian Citizenship Act passed. Cathleen Cahill notes that legislators did not “make explicit links” between the two during the preceding debates.462 461 Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 462 Cathleen Cahill, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 255. 238 Certainly, though, the two were linked. Cahill continues, “Both pieces of legislation were part of the drawing of boundaries around citizenship and the nation’s population that occurred around the turn of the century.”463 While the Indian Citizenship Act expanded citizenship, the catch was that Native people retained their status as wards of the government. Frederick Hoxie discusses this element of guardianship in A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. He concludes that the legislation confirmed that “guardianship would define the proper “place” for Indians. It would hold them in a spot deemed appropriate to their racial characteristics, at once protecting them from exploitation and limiting their progress. Policy makers could now declare that the campaign for assimilation was complete.”464 The assertion that Native people were assimilable (and, eventually, assimilated) was inextricably linked to the prevailing notion in U.S. politics that immigrants were unassimilable. The expansion of the vote, then, was tempered by the endurance of the structures that had continually relegated Native people to second-class status in U.S. law and the larger context of white supremacy that directed U.S. society, culture, and politics. Cahill explains how some Native activists, like Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) worked to mobilize Native voters to make citizenship count. They had some success in state elections and demanded attention as a viable voting bloc in national politics. White policy makers and those in charge of voting apparatuses responded by ensuring disenfranchisement.465 Arizona’s Supreme Court explicitly referenced guardianship and reservation residency as constitutionally barring 463 Cahill, Recasting the Vote, 255. 464 Hoxie, A Final Promise, 238. 465 Cahill, Recasting the Vote, 256-260. 239 Native people from voting there.466 Citizenship, then, was symbolic in the way it rewarded (depending on one’s interpretation) Native people for their service in World War One and in the way it differentiated them from unwelcome, unassimilable groups that would face exclusion, barrier to entry, or deportation. Both the symbolic value and the practical application of white supremacy proved to be important moving forwards. The other major wing of racist policy was, of course, the Jim Crow structure of the American South and the emergent de facto segregation in the American North and West. The 1920s were a pivotal and crucial time for Black Americans, both for the incredible contributions they made to cultural institutions, the quickly changing demographics born of the Great Migration, and the terror of violent racism characterized by the apex of the Second KKK.467 In 1903, such authors as W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Laurence Dunbar contributed to the edited collection called The Negro Problem.468 Some of the authors would later greatly reconsider where the root of the “problem” was and how to overcome it, but certainly, American society in general came to pay far more attention in the twentieth century to the plights and perceived threats of Black Americans than Native Americans.469 The shift from one main “problem” to another was significant 466 Ibid., 260. 467 For more on these historical events, see James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), which discusses the Great Migration from the perspective of the migrants; the Pulitzer Prize winner, Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2010); Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017). 468 Booker T. Washington, ed., The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day (New York: James Pott & Company, 1903). 469 DuBois, for example, moved away from theories of racial uplift that placed the responsibility of improving social status on Black people. In his later career, DuBois discussed institutionalized racism. See Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 316, 335. 240 for Native people, who had to contend for visibility and cultural capital in their shifting social capacity. The pairing of this ubiquitous racism and the major cultural markers of the “Roaring Twenties” make it a particularly confounding decade in American history and historical memory. Scholars working on the 1920s still contend with the glamorized, iconic, and celebrated images of jazz, flappers, bootleggers, and prosperity. Gatsby has never left the public imagination, much more for his indulgent parties than for his ultimate demise. The dynamics of a nation in flux were visible in any given corner of American culture, and sports, particularly the distinctive sports scene of the 1920s, illustrate them as well as any other example. 1928: The Issues on Display in Sports Spectacles The year 1928 promised to be an enjoyable year for sports fans. First up was C. C. Pyle’s Transcontinental Race. That notorious event, doomed to fail from the beginning (more on that to come), would open a competitive running season in the spring, followed by the Redwood Highway Marathon, and capped off by the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam. All of these events featured Indigenous runners. Often called the “Golden Age” of American sports, the 1920s shaped enduring sports culture in major ways. Sports celebrities emerged and dominated the media. Bigger urban populations and spaces led to the advent of city leagues at recreational and professional levels. That process had begun decades earlier, but the sports hype crescendoed in the roar of the 20s. New to the sports scene were super-endurance contests. In some cases, boosters and businessmen took advantage of a public appetite for real-time entertainment to 241 promote various ventures through demanding sports spectacles.470 In other cases, a booming youth culture constructed competitions for entertainment and the chance to win alluring prizes as well as recognition among peers.471 Americans by and large wanted to rack up records and journalists were willing to provide the hype and space to celebrate faddish accomplishments in popular and obscure activities alike. Dance marathons, for example, became a recreational fad for couples. These multiple-days-long events might take place at small, local venues or the likes of Madison Square Garden. Contestants had to dance all day and night, with short, designated periods of eating and rest, often on the order of a quarter-hour at a time. These contests remained popular into the 1930s as a means to obtain shelter and a chance at prize money through the financial strife of the Great Depression. Famous pictures still circulate of contestants holding each other up while one appears to snooze, knees mere inches off of the floor and arms flopped over a partner’s shoulders. Dancing should be considered a legitimate athletic pastime, but people dreamed up all sorts of stunts that brought a new meaning to the concept of “sport” during this endurance activity cultural movement. People held contests for talking, gum chewing, and bizarre feats of eating.472 There were eventually contests in baby carriage pushing, rocking chair rocking, mountain peanut-pushing (in which contestants wore knee pads and a metal nose cone with which they urged along the 470 Kathleen Drowne and Patrick Huber, The 1920s, American Popular Culture Through History Series (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 146-147; Nancy Hendricks, “Endurance Fads,” Popular Fads and Crazes through American History (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2018), 124-126. 471 For more on “fad” culture in the 1920s, see Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 227-228. 472 Drowne and Huber, The 1920s, 149. 242 nut), and flagpole sitting, pictured in Figure 7.2.473 These zany stunts constituted a whole industry that was in full bloom by the end of the 1920s. Figure 7.2. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kel ly set off the trend of flagpole sitting in 1924. Pictured above in Union City, NJ, 1929. New York Public Library. Endurance contests weren’t just for the common man and woman, though. In many cases, world-class athletes fueled further competition and popularized serious events, many which are still contested. Gertrude Ederle, an American, became the first woman to swim the English Channel on August 6, 1926. Her victory was a remarkable breakthrough for women in sport and for popularizing endurance sports, particularly channel swimming, to a wider audience. Channel swimming was actually the 473 Judith Jenkins George, “The Fad of North American Women’s Endurance Swimming During the Post- World War I Era,” Canadian Journal of Sports History 26, no. 1 (May 1995), 53; Hendricks, Popular Fads and Crazes through American History, 124-126. 243 acknowledged inspiration for the Redwood Highway Marathon. In an effort to provide “athletic…contests of a character entirely different from any ever attempted before,” able to “be productive of…publicity,” the REA took cues from the Catalina Island swim in Southern California, which they continually mentioned as a model of success.474 First contested on January 15, 1927, the “Wrigley Catalina Island Swim” challenged swimmers to cross the twenty-two mile Catalina (or San Pedro) Channel, a distance about one mile further than its famous English counterpart. A man named George Young won in a time of nearly sixteen hours. He was the only finisher out of 102 entrants (a number that included fifteen women). The event produced publicity and intrigue for a new wave of tourists to the region and catapulted the Catalina Channel to a high-profile venue for marathon swimming in the United States.475 Though entertaining, super endurance events drew criticism when the spectacle outweighed the sport. Indeed, dance marathon scholar Carol Martin says, “In their heyday, dance marathons were among America’s most widely attended and controversial forms of live entertainment.”476 Competitions required on-site medical staff. “Police End Marathon at Academy Theater,” read a Pittsburgh newspaper on June 20, 1928. The city’s chief surgeon stepped in, fearing the health of the remaining couples, who had just passed the 300-hour mark (they had started dancing on June 7) to set a new world record, 474 “Minutes of the February Meeting Executive Committee, Redwood Empire Association,” February 11, 1927, Folder 2, Redwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum; “Quarterly Report of the Manager Secretary Before the Executive Committee in Conference with Directors,” January 25, 1927, Folder 2, Redwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum. 475 See Penny Lee Dean, “A History of the Catalina Channel Swims Since 1927,” Catalina Channel Swimming Federation, last modified 2012, https://swimcatalina.org/history-of-the-catalina-channel/. 476 Carol Martin, Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture in the 1920s and 1930s (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), xvi. 244 according to the press.477 New York City Health Commissioner Louis Harris tried to order a “dance Derby” closed mid-competition later that same month. A New York Supreme Court justice supported the call to cease, but the promotor sent the remaining couples on a ferry across the Hudson River to New Jersey, where such things would surely be allowed to persist.478 Naysayers might also decry the dance derbies for their public displays of other aspects of youth culture, like sexuality.479 In its design, the Redwood Highway Marathon was not an event in direct conflict with conservative-leaning preferences and fears of the time. While it featured such an obvious angle on race, it was not supposed to be an interracial contest. Before the PaleFace Yellow’n’Red stunt on the very eve of the 1928 event, the angle the press took did not usually reflect an explicit rumination on white versus Indian athleticism. But the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon in 1928 came on the heels of another, even longer marathon that managed to outrage sports fans from coast to coast. C. C. Pyle’s Transcontinental Race started in Los Angeles, traversed Route 66 to Chicago, and then headed East to Manhattan. That event was not structured like the Redwood Highway Marathon as a straight race. In the Transcontinental Race, runners covered a predetermined distance each day and a winner was calculated based on cumulative quickness. Another quality that made the two super marathons different was the fact that in Pyle’s race, (which came to be called the “Bunion Derby”), racial athletic dominance 477 “Police End Marathon at Academy Theater,” Pittsburgh Press, June 20, 1928. 478 “Marathon Dance Told by Court to End at Midnight,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 30, 1928. This article mentions two other dance marathons occurring simultaneously, one at Duquesne Gardens, the city’s premier sporting facility, and an all-Black competition at Motor Square Garden. 479 Martin, Dance Marathons, xvii. 245 was front and center in the public conversation—even the articulated goals of the runners themselves—surrounding the event.480 The field was international. Products of their country’s extraordinary long-distant running tradition, a troupe of talented Finnish runners entered, including the brother of three-time Olympic gold medalist Hannes Kolehmainen.481 The lineup had a few strong contenders who were Black, both from the U.S. and from Canada. There were immigrants and first-generation Americans. And there were favored Native entrants. The resulting reception of runners revealed much about the application of American racism in sports. Organized by the eccentric (and original) sports agent, C. C. “Cash and Carry” Pyle, the Derby combined spectacle and sport to perhaps the logical extreme. It is likely that Pyle got the idea for his race from the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon, though he never said that was the case. The REA knew of Pyle’s plans. “When the question came up as to how much cooperation should be given C. C. Pyle in his trans continental race,” REA marathon committee notes read, “it was decided that no time should be given the matter.”482 Perhaps the REA saw the writing on the wall for an epic flop, which the Derby inevitably became as runners trekked across the country and Pyle had neither the funds nor the organizational wherewithal to provide them with basic necessities. Pyle planned an eighty-four day race from the get-go. The stunt drew the attention of some high-profile runners. Like its Redwood counterpart, it also drew in men from the 480 For example, see “African Leads In Marathon Contest,” Post-Crescent (Appleton, WI), March 9, 1928; Charles B. Kastner, Bunion Derby: The 1928 Footrace Across America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 16, 18-19, 24. 481 This language is recycled from my master’s thesis, “Runners of a Different Race: North American Indigenous Athletes and National Identities in the Early Twentieth Century,” 134. 482 “Minutes of Marathon Committee Meeting at Cecilie Hotel,” September 26, 1927, Folder 1, Redwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum. 246 working class, who saw not only the race’s purse but the promise of free lodging and food throughout as a favorable economic opportunity. An official training camp housed some 275 hopeful entrants in the weeks before the race. The first practice scrimmage race—a fifteen-miler—catapulted its winner, Nicholas Qömawunu (Hopi), to the shortlist of likely winners.483 This is the context in which many Redwood Empire residents would get to know the Hopi star. Other similarly well-practiced Native men stayed on board to start the race, as well. A young, struggling “farm boy” of Cherokee descent, Andy Payne, reportedly almost missed the start but showed up just in time.484 The beginning of the Derby set the tone for the wild footrace to follow. The starter detonated what was essentially a small bomb instead of the standard blank pistol and the 199 men left enough undaunted by the haphazard training camp to participate took off around a muddy track. Qömawunu ran through some of the race’s earliest days at per-mile paces under seven and eight minutes—a pace that “tempted fate.”485 Then things went badly quickly for Qömawunu—and everyone else. Injuries slowed the Hopi frontrunner to a walk on the fourth night of competition. Kolehmainen was “disabled by swollen arches” in the heat of the Mojave. Neither man would finish, and they weren’t the only top contenders to drop out. A month into the race, the whole event had nearly dissolved. The New York Times reported, “3 Runners Strike in Distance Derby: Erickson 483 See Kastner, Bunion Derby, 33. 484 Ibid., 36. 485 Ibid., 43. 247 Lossman and Fegar Say They Are Through Unless Offered Daily Prize Money.” Worse yet: “ANOTHER HIT BY AN AUTO.”486 It came to light that the chaos ran deep. Pyle didn’t have the money to support his venture or the athletes. He had allegedly based his financial numbers off of “assessments” of the towns through which the marathon would pass, but it was up to local chambers of commerce to buy in or opt out of financial support once the race got going. As the event floundered, so did sponsorship.487 Ensuing press clippings tell the tale of the public perception of this zealous sport spectacle: “Runners on the Verge of Mutiny;” “The flop of the century;” and, at the very end, “If all goes well the quaint caravan that started in far off California…will trek into Madison Square Garden this evening and…gallop ten extra miles around the Garden for no good reason at all, which is quite in keeping with the spirit of the whole affair.”488 The public still followed the standings and respected the athletes, but the dominant narrative of the race stressed its disorganized, even abusive conditions. The event was proof for spectators that bigger was not always better. Things had, however, gone rather well for Andy Payne. He had started to pull ahead in the Southwest as other runners struggled. Papers often noted his Cherokee ancestry, but, in general, the American public was behind Payne, the Oklahoman yeoman. Part of the reason, surely, was that other top American contenders provided more of a big-picture threat to American masculinity standards. Running well from the very start 486 “3 Runners Strike in Distance Derby,” New York Times, April 15, 1928. The language in this paragraph is adapted from my master’s thesis. 487 John Kieran, “Sports of the Times,” New York Times, May 26, 1928. 488 “American Bunion Derby,” Western Daily Press (Bristol, UK), May 25, 1928; Kieran, “Sports of the Times.” The language in this paragraph is adapted from my master’s thesis, “Runners of a Different Race,” 136-137. 248 was Ed Gardner, a Black runner from Birmingham, Alabama. Gardner’s grandparents had been enslaved in that state and tragedy continued to shape his family’s story as infant mortality claimed all of Gardner’s seven siblings there. The footrace was a chance at a very different adulthood, but the roadblocks were, at times, nearly insurmountable for Gardner and his coach, George Curtis, who was also Black. White supremacists including members of the Ku Klux Klan routinely terrorized them as Gardner remained in high standing throughout the contest, pointing shotguns and threatening to burn the support car.489 Some of the worst and most direct confrontations came in Oklahoma.490 The racecourse passed through towns and states with strict segregation laws, and in some places where the threats of violence were particularly pronounced, Gardner and his coach had to weigh the risk and reward of continuing ahead. Other authors have examined Gardner’s story, which includes both tragedy and triumph. Fellow Black racers and Black communities along the racecourse showed solidarity and support in states throughout the Deep South. Gardner’s experiences revealed the anti-Black racism that identified Black Americans as the ultimate threat to white America—greater threats to white supremacy in 1920 than Native Americans.491 The violence against Gardner in contrast to the support for Andy Payne invites a few questions. In a nation so essentially tied to the appropriation of Indigeneity (see Deloria’s Playing Indian), how exactly did a group like the Klan, rooted firmly in white supremacy, conceive of Indigenous people? Surely not simply as American citizens equal 489 See Kastner, Bunion Derby, 84-85, 89. 490 Charles B. Kastner, Race Across America: Eddie Gardner and the Great Bunion Derbies (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2020), 81. 491 See Kastner, Race Across America, for an account of Gardner and the other Black runners in the Bunion Derby. 249 in status to the white Protestant Americans who constituted the Klan’s ranks. Did the larger ambivalence reflected throughout the country permeate Klan and other white supremacist circles? Organizations rooted in white nationalism hardly seem to be of the “support the lesser of two evils” persuasion, judging by their wide range of targets and constant deadly terrorist campaigns during this era, nor do they seem likely to be supportive of people of color in any capacity. The Klan of the 1920s (and other white supremacists) certainly did target non- Black people of color in addition to African Americans. Ken Gonzales-Day examined hundreds of lynchings perpetrated against Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans in California between 1850 and 1935.492 While not directly linked to the KKK in many cases, the proliferation of murder studied in the book suggest the character of larger currents of white supremacy. A few useful works have examined the activity of the Klan in Oklahoma, specifically.493 These may have been some of the men that tried to run Ed Gardner and his coach off the road. Carter Blue Clark’s 1976 dissertation on the Oklahoma KKK linked Klan violence to what had previously been expressed as frontier violence, and noted the great diversity of the state, which included many Native nations in addition to immigrants and “a scattering of Jewish merchants and Mexican-Americans,” as well as African Americans.494 The Klan of the era projected blame for anti-American 492 Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West 1850-1935 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 493 See Howard A. Tucker, History of Governor Walton’s War on Ku Klux Klan, the Invisible Empire (Oklahoma City: Southwest Publishing, 1923), 14, cited in David Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 253f.95. 494 Carter Blue Clark, “A History of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma,” PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1976, 2-3. 250 radicalism—in the vein of World War I-era dissent and enemy sympathizing—onto these communities, a pattern that resulted in “race relations [descending] to” the “lowest point in the nation’s history.”495 Most of the examples discussed in the dissertation did not target Native people, but the author discusses a particular case in which the state’s law enforcement delivered an unmarried Indian couple to a Klan rally, where a “whipping squad” doled out lashes for “immoral living.”496 David Chang’s Color of the Land also expounds on the KKK in Oklahoma. “The Klan…in Oklahoma,” he says, “targeted Native American people less frequently than African Americans.” Even the Klan, then—so obviously and overtly dedicated to white, Protestant supremacy—seems to have regarded Native people with some of the ambivalence characteristic of Americans by and large. Chang continues, “In the minds of many white Oklahomans, Native Americans had become picturesque reminders of a frontier past, not a real threat to white power…Klansmen and other white supremacists in Oklahoma no longer defined whiteness in opposition to Native Americans.”497 Oklahoma had a relatively large Indian population in the 1920s, given the state’s historical status as “Indian Territory,” the zone of relocation for so many eastern tribes removed from homelands nearly a century beforehand. The tempered animosity for Indian people by white supremacists in the state is all the more significant given these demographics. Of course, the state probably had more multiracial families than other regions, too. 495 Clark, A History of the Ku Klux Klan, 15. 496 Ibid., 133-115. 497 Chang, The Color of the Land, 199. 251 There’s other scattered evidence that the KKK in neighboring Texas supported organizations like the Boy Scouts, which is not surprising given the shared focus on Protestant American values, but it should be remembered that the Boy Scouts played Indian—a lot.498 Not exactly known for their subtlety, the Klan actually appears to have been ambivalent towards and nostalgic about Native people much the same way dominant society was. In addition to shifts in racist ideology, the manner in which Andy Payne presented himself—and how the press had presented him in turn—shaped the narrative surrounding him. He came across as an upstanding American who entered the race not as some far- fetched gimmick (like the men who had showed up on the starting line in tailored suits), but as an honest, hard-working farm lad from the Sooner State. He had what one Derby historian has called an “aw-shucks charm.”499 Papers explained that should Payne pull off a win, his prize money would go towards paying off a mortgage and getting married— respectable American goals that fit into the morality of the likes even of a group as prejudiced as the KKK, who tormented even white Oklahomans who lived with women out of wedlock.500 Payne, like others discussed in this dissertation, satisfied American nostalgia with his adeptness at a “primitive” athletic skill (one readily associated with 498 There is not much out there on this subject, but for links between the Boy Scouts and the KKK, see “Boy Scouts Celebrate the Opening of Mess Hall and Camp Recreation House Given Them by Ku Klux Klan,” Houston Post, September 4, 1921; “Port Arthur Citizens Behind Scouts’ Drive,” Houston Post, March 5, 1922; “Klan Helps Scouts,” Houston Post, April 16, 1922, all accessible through The Portal to Texas History at texashistory.unt.edu. For more on playing Indian in the Boy Scouts, see Philip Deloria, “Natural Indians and Identities of Modernity” in Playing Indian, 95-127. 499 Kastner, Race Across America, 85. 500 See, for example, John Kieran, “Sports of the Times,” New York Times, May 26, 1928; Chang, The Color of the Land, 199. 252 Native people), but also embodied values that American assimilationists shared. Some white onlookers saw Payne so totally enmeshed in American hopes and values that many simply considered him white and either saw his “one-eighth” Cherokee blood quantum as nostalgic or ignored it altogether. Amongst talented Black men and foreigners, Americans needed their homegrown hero, and Payne could fit the bill. Philip Deloria reminds us that different racial groups pursued different strategies in their ongoing struggles for justice during this time period, and so related to the United States at large differently. Native communities “clung to and looked toward autonomy and separation” as sovereign nations. “Other Americans of color,” however, “sought inclusion and equality” and expressed a “political dream of justice within an American political framework.”501 That dichotomy collapsed over time, but it created different spaces in American culture for each group to occupy. Deloria continues: In the early decades of the twentieth century, Indian people opened a small window of opportunity in which they might be valued and included in American culture. It should come as no surprise that black and Latino athletes sometimes passed as Indians or that…black tricksters like Buffalo Child Long Lance and Two Moons Meridas [performers who claimed Indian heritage] should claim redness rather than whiteness as their entrée into American culture and society.502 There was power and possibility in Indigeneity if one were to present it “authentically” and market it properly. There was, of course, also genuine and meaningful activism from Native women and men who demanded—and brought about—reform in U.S. Indian Policy and formed national organizations to advocate for Native people across a wide platform of issues. In this moment of potential, Andy Payne was poised to receive a 501 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 236. 502 Ibid. 253 positive reception from the American public. The heavy scrutiny placed on Black individuals, by contrast, made them targets. The focus had shifted from Indian warriors being the group that posed the greatest threats of the nineteenth century to hordes of immigrants and, especially, a recently emancipated Black population that could not be deported and who had potential power as citizens in the early twentieth, claiming new spaces and creative, rich, explosive cultural movements. It would seem, however, that mainstream cultural space for people of color was simply limited to one group at a time. The particular conundrum that emerged in the minds of white supremacists watching the Bunion Derby—whether to support a person of Native descent, a person of African descent (which was, of course, out of the question), or neither—ended up benefitting Payne and harming Gardner. The rising visibility of Black men in sports and other industries regularly led to ongoing segregation and public outrage. But Black people emerged as well-known celebrities far more often than Native people and began exercising considerable influence on American culture and society, particularly as new Black urban centers in Northern cities became centers of “black cultural production” through the 1920s. Deloria provides the example of jazz music, which “had been embedded from the start in a context of integration and appropriation.”503 He explains that “the black arts renaissance overwhelmed Indianness and quickly came to dominate and to transform American modernism…the Harlem Renaissance can be named as a discrete thing, which is more than can be said for the cohort of Indian writers, actors, dancers, and artists also active in the modernist 503 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 238. 254 movement.”504 Certain roles remained open for Native people, or, it might be more accurate to say Native characters in popular culture. One of the most visible places for Native people in popular culture would become the Hollywood Western genre. For decades, Apache enemies would torment white men on the silver screen. Native women would die trying to aid white society in their homelands. Of course, these characters might or might not be played by actual Native people.505 The increasing marginalization of Indigenous people and cultures probably removed targets that might have previously been put on their backs to keep them down or, conversely, catapult them to stardom or notoriety (like Sitting Bull in the 1870s). It would still be another few decades before American political and social narratives shifted from imagining vanishing Indians to just- about-vanished Indians with the termination of recognized tribes, which was the ultimate proof that there would not be safety in the margins. In this late-1920s moment, there was enough space for positive valuations of Native people in specific contexts—like sports— plus the constant expansion of anti-Black racism that became one factor in creating that space, and Black cultural influence that would eventually close it. All the while wreaking havoc, the Bunion Derby nearly fizzled out entirely. Andy Payne won in a combined time of just over 573 hours in front of the small crowd at the finish line. Eddie Garner took eighth. More than half of the field had dropped out before the finale. It became apparent that running events could draw sharp criticisms from crowds and commentators that—like with other sports—failed to be entertained, worried 504 Ibid. 505 Jacqueline Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Michael Hilger, Native Americans in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; Marubbio, Killing the Indian Maiden. 255 too much about the health and safety of the participants, or distrusted exploitative event promotors. No women’s participation or loud jazz music required. A New York Times piece mused that “the Puritans objected to bear-baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” This commentator called dance marathons painful, “frowsy” affairs that only a questionable audience would enjoy and condemned the Bunion Derby with almost equal gusto, lamenting that it should have been respectable since, “It was, after all, a striking demonstration of physical endurance.”506 Pyle’s tactics had been what rendered it problematic. It was against this backdrop that Redwood Highway Marathon promotors worked to differentiate and advertise their upcoming event. The obvious connection between the two events, like that basic structure of an absurdly long highway footrace and also the prominence of Native runners, meant that redwoods promotors had to distance their race from Pyle’s. The Healdsburg Tribune said that Pyle’s race “failed…because it was so plainly commercial in its nature.”507 An Associated Press release remarked that the Redwood Highway Marathon was a proper “straight foot race” that eliminated superfluous “creations of the late and unlamented trans-continental contest.”508 This was last-minute damage control, as the Derby wrapped up on May 26—not even three weeks before the Flag Day start of the Redwood Highway marathon. It seemed, however, that the West Coast race could avoid the pitfalls of Pyle’s overblown publicity stunt. 506 “Topics of the Times,” New York Times, June 13, 1928. 507 “Observations,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 11, 1928. 508 For example. “30 Indians Await Signal To Start Marathon From ‘Frisco to Grants Pass,” News-Review (Roseburg, OR), June 13, 1928. 256 As it drew near, the second Redwood Highway Marathon was an opportunity to comment not just on the excitement to come, but revisit what spectators had learned and enjoyed the year before. Having had a full year to process the public-approved spectacle and athletic success of the 1927 event, commentators articulated their anticipation of the rematch in terms of what they remembered from the inaugural marathon and the ways they viewed the runners according to standing stereotypes, but in the context of modern sports. Deloria notes that, “Almost mystically balanced and stoic, Indian athletes seemed to ride the jumbled tide of modernity with calmness and equanimity, giving life to the intuitive notion that the most current and the most primitive could be one and the same.”509 Indeed, both coverage from the inaugural race and promotion for the second remarked on perceived stoicism, unwavering preparedness, physical toughness, and athletes’ and coaches’ confidence that the runners would finish in good form and without drama.510 In truth, the event was not an airtight endeavor. Money had been a concern through the event’s planning, and the whole thing was, after all, tourist entertainment. One paper’s promotion mentioned that “the recent cross country crawl” (The Bunion Derby) had spawned “insinuations…that Indians cannot stand the pace of long distance running,” no doubt referring to the trouble that Qömawunu had had in the desert.511 Then, Paleface Yellow’n’Red’s surprise appearance coopted the competition angle. Then, when 509 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 122. 510 “‘Heap Big Injuns’ Who Will Compete in Redwood Empire Indian Marathon,” Marin Herald, May 18, 1928; “Local Doctor to be Official in Indian Race,” Healdsburg Tribune, May 25, 1928; “Indian Sure of Repeating Win,” San Bernardino Sun, June 13, 1928; “30 Indians Await Signal To Start Marathon From ‘Frisco to Grants Pass,” News-Review (Roseburg, OR), June 13, 1928. 511 “Runners Must Travel 480 Miles in 10 Days to Get $10,000 Reward,” Bismarck Tribune, June 12, 1928. 257 things looked like they might be on track after the first stretch of the race, Johnny Southard felt a burning sensation on his thighs. It eventually became too intense to ignore. Papers noted “great difficulty” for Southard by mid-day on June 15. He ran in fits and starts, “suffering variously from chafed legs and strained tendons.”512 Four days later, he was still in the race, but far behind the leaders, dealing with ongoing pain and discomfort.513 It came to light that this misfortune was the result of sabotage; someone had contaminated Southard’s shorts as he slept, either with small shards of glass or acid.514 Likely, the motivation had been an unknown gambler’s fear that Southard was about to pull ahead. Other rumors circulated about the leader taking rides—rumors that the marathon committee firmly quashed.515 The trappings of spectacle and vice had certainly gripped the Redwood Highway Marathon. And yet the runners continued to put on a show that seemed to satisfy crowds. It was, in truth, another fantastic display of athleticism from start to finish. At least in Healdsburg, people were able to follow the action ever closer than the previous year as it progressed. The Tribune and other storefronts in town updated “graphic maps” with the daily “positions of the runners…given most accurately, the result of direct telephone communication with official sources several times daily.”516 The Tribune and 512 “Flying Cloud Leading Race,” San Bernardino Sun, June 16, 1927. 513 “Flying Cloud’s Lead Cut at Noon by Zuni,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 19, 1928. 514 Gaye LeBaron, “Indian Marathon Touted Redwood Highway,” Press-Democrat (Santa Rosa, CA), August 8, 2004; “‘Legends’ Marathons,” Games of Skill, Power and Chance in Native California (August 14-November 7, 2004), The Grace Hudson Museum, Ukiah, CA; Southard’s descendants confirmed that this was Johnny’s understanding of the events as well. 515 “Flying Cloud Wins Indian Marathon,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 21, 1928. 516 Ibid. 258 others put out morning and evening editions with updates. It was as close to real-time entertainment as anyone could construct from an event that spanned a state line and took nearly a week to complete. It was not unfolding exactly as planned, but it was not the bombastic Bunion Derby. Conclusion: The Basics of Backlash Public appearances for Indigenous people were precarious. If one didn’t look, behave, or perform in the “right” way, commentators had centuries of fall-back insults to insinuate racial inferiority and condemn perceived antimodernism. His trouble in the Bunion Derby did not win Qömawunu praise. Criticism was most likely to occur in circumstances in which Native athletes competed directly against whites. This had been true for decades.517 When appearing able, wholesome, and marginally better than the Black man next to him, men like Andy Payne might garner real support and pride. The men who ran in the Redwood Highway Marathon upset commonly held stereotypes of Native people, but they did so as they provided larger-than-life entertainment for an eager audience and competed in a sphere consisting only of other Native men (again, we must assume that Paleface Yellow’n’Red withdrew early, and that coverage simply did not dwell on it, whether from genuine lack of interest or willful ignorance). The white supremacist backlash in the immediate context of the Redwood Highway Marathon proved ineffective and never erupted into physical violence, unless we leave the possibility open that the attack on Mad Bull was a hate crime and not a 517 Famous runners Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett (Seneca) and Tom Longboat (Onondaga) competed against white runners are routinely faced unfavorable coverage that cast them as uncivilized savages. See “Deerfoot and his War-Whoop,” Whitby Gazette, April 26, 1862; Davis, Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush, 169, 174-75. 259 gambit to win money in gambling rings. The Bunion Derby did erupt into physical violence, though that violence targeted only Black athletes and its perpetrators voiced explicit support for a Cherokee descendant. White supremacist ideology dictates that all men of color rank inferior to white men, but the extreme acts of violence targeted the men of color who apparently posed the greatest threat to the status of white men and not those that didn’t. The emergent racial hierarchy of the 1920s, codified by acts such as the Immigration Act and the Indian Citizenship Act, established a special category for Indigenous people that maintained the ambivalence with which Americans had long regarded them. There was room for praise, appropriation, and pending disinterest. Native people across the country still often lived under the threat of violence from white supremacists and continued to be subjected to the inherent violence of practices like forced government schooling, religious persecution, and insufficient access to public health. The Meriam Report came out in 1928 while runners prepared for the year’s events. It found that Indian policy had failed in its central goals to protect Native people and assets like land and resources.518 This was hardly news to anyone who had had direct experience with the BIA or its forerunner, but the report stressed that conditions were dire and in need of reform. Citizenship alone had not elevated Indian Country to the standards American officials might have imagined. Plus, there was a great deal of diversity in the Indigenous experience in the 1920s. Men like Johnny Southard and Henry Thomas were proof of the fact that not all Native people lived on rural reservations, worked vocational jobs in urban centers, or lived at 518 Lewis Meriam, The Problem of Indian Administration: Report of a Survey Made at the Request of Honorable Hubert Work, Secretary of the Interior, and Submitted to Him, February 21, 1928 (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, 1928). 260 boarding schools. Popular culture had carved out places for images of Indianness, but Native people forged their own places in all areas of society. The subtleties may have been too complex for many white commentators to grasp, so they kept standard narratives running even as new possibilities (like Indian virility) surfaced and as they appropriated the images they found most desirable. The appropriation of Black culture had already started, too. White Americans had identified Black art forms and recognized Black celebrities. With increasing cultural capital came increasing scrutiny. As Native people no longer held quite as much cultural capital as they used to, they fell more and more to the margins, with a wide array of outcomes. Visibility was powerful in the way it denied the Vanishing Race myth but white people maintained control over mainstream media outlets and circulated sensationalized stories. As the finish line of the second Redwood Highway Indian Marathon drew near, the competitors could trust that they would not be heckled at gunpoint or outright insulted in the press coverage. Fans received them along the route with wonder and cheer. The crowd had long been exposed to steadfast stereotypes about Native people but had also— for two years now—beheld Indian talent, celebrity, and modernity, and perhaps even ruminated on some implications of those things as promotors moved to make the event perpetual. Positive valuations of Native people emerged, but they existed within a larger context of white supremacy and a government that continued to craft its control of Native people and communities. As we celebrate and honor the achievements and interventions of the Native participants in the Redwood Indian Marathon of 1927 and 1928, we should also keep in mind the conditions with which they contended to emerge as accepted local 261 heroes and symbols of modernity. They might not have realized how precarious their positions were, or even have said that they aimed to capitalize on nuanced opportunities that would elevate the status of their people in society or politics. They did not undertake the work of the archetypical activist. They did, however, navigate a complex web of ambivalent American sentiments in an era frightfully committed to white supremacy across all U.S. institutions. The space they found—and forged—allowed for the construction of important, enduring legacies. 262 CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION On Day Two of the marathon, Henry Thomas pulled ahead. He’d never look back. By the time he reached Ukiah on the second evening, he was already twelve hours ahead of the mark from the previous year and well ahead of the other competitors.519 He maintained a ten-to-twenty-mile lead over second-place Melika through the final hundred miles while “Chief Ukiah” trailed in third. They would finish in that order. Thomas’s last mile of nearly five-hundred was reportedly “clipped off in five minutes and 12 seconds,” a stunning pace for a fatigued ultramarathoner.520 He had smashed the course record by completing the trek in 167 hours and 51 minutes (six days, twenty-two hours, and fifty- nine minutes), just breaking the seven-day mark. The finish line was a familiar scene, but luckily for the viewers in Grants Pass this time around, the breaking of the tape happened in daylight. Hundreds of cars lined the road for miles outside of town, honking and yelling as the victor strode to the finish.521 Again, “Princess Redwood Empire [Dorothy Allen] was waiting…and as Flying Cloud crossed the line, she kissed him roundly” and wrapped him in a tribal-patterned blanket.522 Photographers captured Thomas in front of a bucket full of gold and silver pieces—the photogenic representation of his $5,000 prize (though he received a check, made out to both “Henry Thomas Jr.” and “Flying Cloud,” from the Redwood Empire 519 “Flying Cloud is Leading in Redwood Race,” Klamath News, June 16, 1928. 520 “Flying Cloud Wins Indian Marathon,” Times Recorder (Zanesville, OH), June 22, 1928. 521 “Flying Cloud Wins Indian Marathon,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 21, 1928. 522 “Flying Cloud Wins Indian Marathon,” Times Record (Zanesville, OH), June 22,1928. 263 Association).523 People crowded around him, including those fur-clad Cavemen who again could claim a winner under their sponsorship.524 At some point, someone fitted an eagle feather headdress to Thomas’s head (visible in Figure 8.1). That ceremonial regalia was, of course, culturally important for Plains peoples and iconic in the “Indian” image that Americans held, but it wasn’t Karuk. Figure 8.1. This photograph likely ran as a postcard after the marathon and is widely available on the Internet. 523 Check no. 1339, dated June 15, 1928, Carton 63, The Redwood Empire Association Records, the Bancroft Library. 524 “Henry Thomas (Flying Cloud) and crowd,” People’s Center Collection of Historic Photographs, PeoplesCenter_PCCHP_2821, Sípnuuk Digital Library, Archives, and Museum, Happy Camp, California. 264 To invoke the old tradition of messenger-running, Redwood Empire politicians had tasked runners with carrying notes to the Grants Pass Mayor. One such note came out of Healdsburg, where a well-known writer in town, Julius Myron Alexander, penned a message for Healdsburg’s Mayor Charles Sherriffs. “Those who have seen the letter,” claimed the Healdsburg Tribune, “state it is one of the finest contributions the gifted pen of the writer has made to humanity.”525 It read: FROM THE BIG CHIEF OF THE SOUTH TO THE BIG CHIEF OF THE NORTH Greetings! Our runners are warriors of our people. They are brave and strong of limb; quick of eye and more cunning than the wild beasts of the forest. They are out of the past: Warriors of that other age, Of Nature’s book—a written page. I look at the sky. Great birds go flying over, as swift as the eagle wings. I look out upon the roads and there are silent carriages that come and go over the long way. There are fast messengers of the sea that go with the wind and dip into the white foam. Lightning [sic] from the sun cloud comes to earth and toils for man. The air is filled with voices that speak to us from distant lands. It is the age of Paleface and the wonders from God are wrought for man into the useful, the beautiful and the sublime. It is good sometimes, that we delve into the past, so I have gathered my runners from that other age. They will give us a lesson in stalwart strength and endurance. Physical perfection is a stronghold of the nation, for it begets of manhood and character. I send my bearers to you over the great Empire Highway of the West. They will trod again their ancestral lands. They will see their meadows teeming with life that gives of clothing and food. They will pass through beautiful thriving cities along the way. Up there on the way of the race great trees will tower above them making shadows deep from the glint of the sunshine. Those trees are as a great army at rest from marching and they will be dressed in garments of red and will have banners and helmets of green. All about will be of song and the wild deer will look out from amongst the brakes and blossoms. From the sea will come the salt of the breeze and its waters will break upon the rocks and the sand. There will be glory in the beauty of the rivers that wind towards the setting sun. My messengers are all of nature and they go back to nature and bear to you and all of your people a message of goodwill and peace and friendship from all of my people. CHARLES SHERRIFFS, 525 “Local Greetings Reach Grants Pass,” Healdsburg Tribune, June 21, 1928. 265 Mayor of the City of Healdsburg, California.526 To read just this meandering collection of clichés and nature worship might lead to the sad conclusion that absolutely no progress had been made whatsoever in opening up conceptions of modern Native people in the eyes of white America. There is, so to speak, every problem in the book. The white writer claims Native people as his own; he directly equates them with nature; he directly equates them with the past; he locates the present in “the age of Paleface”; he invokes warrior imagery and defines manhood as “strength and endurance.” The stereotypical letter fits in with the collection of “Indian” artifacts and images that decorated the finish line: the blanket, the headdress, the Indian Princess, even the check made out to “Flying Cloud.” These were the burdens that followed Native people into their public careers. There was more to post-race coverage, however, than the pomp and appropriation at the finish line. Henry Thomas reportedly enjoyed an outpouring of support following his victory. Among the many congratulatory letters and calls to Grants Pass, where he remained after the race, came a particularly exciting “wire” from E. A. Smith, the vice president of the Reo Motor Company of California. Chapter VI noted that Reo’s new car on the market was—by happy coincidence—the “Flying Cloud.”527 It was an advertiser’s dream, and someone had the good sense to snap some pictures of the victor and the roadster side-by- side for the second year running (Figure 8.2). “It is with real pride that we acknowledge his victory,” said Smith, “of course, we are pleased to know that the winner bore the name ‘Flying Cloud,’ for this is the name that has come to designate the Reo 1929 526 Ibid. 527 “‘Flying Cloud’ Indian Runner, Given Praise,” Oakland Tribune, June 24, 1928. 266 offering, which also has set speed and stamina records in all parts of the country.”528 This union was an obvious comparison of man and machine because they shared a name, a propensity for speed and endurance, and even a place in the annals of motor tourism. Indeed, others published similar pictures.529 Figu re 8.2. “Two Flying Clouds,” Oakland Tribune, June 24, 1928. Newspapers.com There had been throughout the race and remained in the weeks to follow more side-by-side shots of the Native racers next to automobiles, just as there had been in promotional coverage. Several papers ran a picture of Seymour Smith, who finished sixth, alongside a Chevrolet and his support team—two young women named Vera 528 Ibid. 529 “Two Flying Clouds with Remarkable Records,” Tampa Bay Times, July 29, 1928. 267 Savidge and Opal Gorton.530 Smith wore a button-down shirt and dark slacks. Henry Thomas appeared in print not just crouched next to the Reo Flying Cloud but also in action-shots alongside various Pontiacs of a fleet that carried race officials (again, note the Indian-inspired model name) and in front of other roadsters.531 There was also the picture of Guy Rockey and a war-ready Pontiac car.532 As discussed earlier, the marathon gave a clear context for these types of images, but they remained, in the wider scope of public discourse, illustrations of a pairing not often seen, or staged only to be gawked at. The men that usually became national heroes for their mastery of and close association with technology in the 1920s were, as a rule, white. Native people were not among the “technological explorers” of the era, but a relatively high volume of press coverage in 1928 compared to 1927 delivered a final image of the event by depicting Native men and modern cars side-by-side and part of the same competition team. Henry Thomas, like Johnny Southard the year before, also bought a car with his winnings—a Chrysler. The marathon was creating Indian car owners and sending support caravans of unsupervised young women along the long road to Grants Pass. The white supremacist inkling to compare the stamina and prowess of “the white man” to that of the Indian died in the commentary when Paleface Yellow’n’Red vanished from the accounts. Though they displayed an obvious interest in the assumed primitive athleticism of Indian 530 See, for example, “Winner in the 1928 Redwood Highway Indian Race,” El Paso Evening Post, July 14, 1928; “A Winner In The 1928 Redwood Highway Indian Marathon,” Napa Journal, July 20, 1928; “A Winner In The 1928 Redwood Highway Indian Marathon,” Oregon Statesman (Salem, OR), July 22, 1928. Many other papers across the U.S. ran the photograph as well. 531 “Boy, Page C. C. Pyle!,” Chehalis Bee-Nugget (Chehalis, WA), August 17, 1928; “He Won the Wampum,” San Francisco Examiner, July 1, 1928. 532 “Many Prizes for Marathon,” San Francisco Examiner, May 13, 1928. 268 men athletes, commentators often cast those men in terms of modernity marked by cars and blow-by-blow sports coverage. Victory in high-profile sports, proximity to and ownership of cars, celebrity portraits in the national press—these were typically the purview of white men. Through the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon—particularly in the second iteration of that event—Indian men asserted their place in the public narrative surrounding their own people and modern society. So much of the coverage was still problematic, stuffed full of stereotypes and romanticized notions of Indian noble savagery and the myth of the Vanishing Race, but a collection of coverage that was quite the opposite emerged too, illustrating the race through photographic images of athletes in-action alongside modern technologies and Little Fawn the Indian flapper, and defining the event in a new vocabulary of Native futures. The marathon would not happen again. The Redwood Empire Association overextended planning and spending before the economy crashed in 1929, officially tanking the plans for a 1929—or any foreseeable—third Redwood Highway Indian Marathon. As individuals, families, towns, and businesses shifted their focuses to deal with the economic, demographic, and environmental changes of the Great Depression, the Redwood Highway Marathon quickly fell into obscurity. The publicity and REA notes surrounding the 1928 marathon became the last records that could reveal its immediate impact on the communities that hosted and witnessed the grand event. The two victors of the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon—inaugural champion Johnny Southard and the newly-minted track record holder Henry Thomas—stuck around Grants Pass after the race, though they’d both return to Happy Camp and other rural outposts throughout Northern California later. Again capitalizing on his ability to perform 269 well in regional rural industries requiring strength, stamina, and plenty of time outdoors, Southard began work in the timber industry. Fellow workers at Spalding (timber company) in Grants Pass remembered Southard for his kind and quiet demeaner coupled with his vociferous disdain for wearing gloves while setting chokers, a task which, by the way, required dexterity, speed, and the regular grasping of bark and cables.533 This was certainly a better fit for him than his brief stint in a different type of public performance had been. Allegedly, John Southard briefly traveled with a Wild West Show, one of the vestiges of the famous shows of the 1880s (like Buffalo Bill Cody’s) still alive in the 1920s. He reportedly left because the depictions of Native people in the show were so stereotypical and demeaning.534 Southard moved back to his hometown by the midcentury mark. He and his wife operated a junk yard on the road leaving Happy Camp—the one that, a few more miles down the road, skirted the bank of the Klamath called “Ferry Point” (Figure 8.3). He had grown up just across the river from the lookout there. He worked as a carpenter, he dug wells, and he performed other assorted tasks along with his brother, Marion (“Fighting Stag”). His other brother who had raced in 1927, Gorham (“Rushing Water”), had died in 1928. Another younger brother, Grover, appears to have gone to Sherman Institute in the 1930s and competed in boxing.535 533 Wayne Morrow (Former journalist; acquaintance of John Southard; organizer of 1987 reenactment run), in discussion with the author, October 2018. 534 Southard’s family has maintained knowledge of this moment in Johnny’s life, but none of us were able to turn up hard proof of the exact show or years of participation. That’s an ongoing mission. 535 James Berry, in discussion with author, April 2021. 270 Figure 8.3. Klamath River near Ferry Point, across the river from Southard homestead. Photo from author. Johnny lived to be an old man. His last home was just outside of Redding, California, he was an active member of his church, and he rarely talked about his week- long race through the redwoods that made him a star in his youth. When pressed, however, he could recall even in the last years of his life details about the race—down to where and how often he changed out his shoes for a fresh pair.536 In 1987, the cross country and track and field coach at Grants Pass High School, Wayne Morrow, tracked down Johnny Southard’s phone number to invite him to another finish line in Grants Pass. The 1987-88 schoolyear marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of Grants Pass High School, and Coach Morrow had been tasked with 536 Wayne Morrow, discussion, October 2018. 271 organizing a spectacle for the centennial celebration to be held at the fairgrounds. Morrow and five comrades were planning to run the Redwood Highway as a relay and finish at the centennial party. The highway was, by the late 1980s, a very different road than it had been in its early years, of course. The runners ended up having more than one nerve-wracking run-in with guard rails, cliff edges, and logging trucks. Southard agreed, however, to come see the end of that run and join in the festivities at the fairgrounds. He sat on an erected stage with other distinguished members of the Grants Pass community and met the runners after they had retraced his steps from 60 years prior. The school fitted Southard with a letterman jacket and a medal, and celebrated “Mad Bull” as the guest of honor at the finish line. Figure 8.4 shows Coach Wayne Morrow with Johnny Southard at the finish line celebration. Figure 8.4. John Southard and Wayne Morrow at the Centennial Celebration for Grants Pass High School, October 198 7. Photo from Wayne Morrow. 272 John Wesley Southard died on October 9, 1989. He’s buried in the family plot at Ferry Point, on a ridge above the Klamath. Henry Thomas’s story was tragically cut short. In just shy of fifty years of life, however, he set an ultramarathon record, became a local celebrity, and served in World War II as Private First Class in the 605th Engineer Combat Battalion. He had, like others around Happy Camp, worked in mills and mined gold for supplemental income.537 The exact details of his death are unclear, but a work-related dispute—likely a white man’s frustration that an Indian had landed a particular position over him—led an enraged acquaintance to murder him in 1957.538 Thomas’s family had always called him “Doddie.” He’s buried in the Happy Camp cemetery, a restful, hillside spot in the quiet town. Dorothy Allen pursued further education and career skills at Craddock Business School, a local operation, before finishing high school, not in Eureka where she had been sent to the office to become Miss Redwood Empire, but in Weaverville, California, about 100 miles east by the road. She worked for a while for the Forest Service before marrying a man named William Gaby, and the two owned and operated Gaby’s Service Station & Repair Garage in Willow Creek, California, for fifty years. “Bill” Gaby died in 1985. Dorothy Allen Gaby lived to be over 100 years old. She reflected happily at the end of her life about her various travels across the country and her time spent camping, fishing, 537 Charles Sarmento (descendant of Henry Thomas) and others, in discussion with author, July 2020. 538 Charles Sarmento and others, discussion. 273 and hunting in the woods. She wrote a portion of her own obituary in which she said, “I had a good life.”539 The surviving stories of the young lives of these three historical actors—and, where possible, their fellow Redwood Highway Marathon participants—has provided a vantage point from which one can reconstruct some nearly forgotten moments of the past and understand broader themes of Karuk, California, and United States history. Southard and Thomas were members of a people that had, since time immemorial, shaped the lands and lives within the region that would one day become the U.S. states of Oregon and California. The Upriver People had endured the coming of settler colonialism to their homelands, resisted, and survived to continue to influence their homelands and broader geographies in a modern country that sought to exclude them, or embrace them only along specific storylines and stereotypes. Modern Karuk people—many, in fact, though in this dissertation the focus was public figures and athletes connected to the marathon— interrupted these storylines and stereotypes. The resulting representation of them in the white press and overwhelmingly white public in the region reckoned with the conundrums, displaying ongoing ambivalence and practicing new narratives of modern, even future Indians. Native people shaped society, regional identities, and key economies. They forged spaces and identities that harkened to cultural traditions as they engaged in the ultra-modern. In systems shaped and maintained by white supremacy, they remained visible, active, and influential. These types of interventions doubtless were occurring all over the country. Native artists, performers, teachers, educators, activists, and so many others exerted influence in 539 “Dorothy Eleanor Gaby,” Eureka Times-Standard, September 9, 2012. 274 their respective spheres. Sports constitute a particularly culturally significant realm because Americans past and present prize them so much. The Redwood Highway Indian Marathon rests at the intersection of sport and other valuable spheres of analysis. Tourism was and remains an important industry in the redwoods region. The Redwood Highway merged goals of tourism with goals of preservation and conservation aimed at protecting the longevity of some of the oldest trees on earth. The trees, the stories told about them, and the carefully constructed presentation of the forest and its annual line-up of entertaining offerings helped shape regional identity as modern families rapidly populated growing Northern California towns and cities. Cars became nearly ubiquitous and acquired more and more layers of their cultural mythology and symbolism. Stories about these things—tourism, roads, cars, even modern California—typically exclude Native historical actors, yet Native people remained visible and active all the while. Philip Deloria opens and closes Indians in Unexpected Places with images and analyses of Red Cloud Woman, a Native woman photographed in various quintessential modern settings in the early 1940s. She gets her hair done in a salon. She sits in a car with her husband. She eats ice cream at a soda counter. Deloria concludes: We will probably never know…what Red Cloud Woman thought she was up to— her personal history of modernity will remain a secret history. But we owe her the courtesy of taking her seriously as a shaper of images, a member of a cohort, a participant in a politics of race and gender representation, an Indian person acting with intent and intelligence in one of many unexpected places.540 In part, this dissertation has been another story of “Indians in Unexpected Places.” Also like some of Deloria’s examples, though, once one uncovers the particulars of the historical moments in question, one finds that perhaps Native presence is not so 540 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 240. 275 unexpected. Native people had run for a variety of reasons and in a variety of forms for centuries. Why should that stop in the twentieth century? Popular culture was full of images of flappers. Why should a Native woman consuming those sources and shopping in stores not adopt aspects of the image? Native labor built many western cities and towns. Of course Native people participated in modern economies. White people looked for Indians. With an odd mixture of nostalgia, admiration, and paternalism, they evaluated them positively. With a racist mixture of superiority complexes, anxiety over gender normativity, and sheer ignorance, they might also insult, seek to control, or harm Native people. There are far too many tendrils of history that link those sins of the past to the present. In the time I researched and wrote this dissertation, national headlines captured the most visible moments of the ongoing Native freedom and justice movements: the efforts of the Water Protectors to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock; the efforts of activists in the United States and Canada to spread awareness of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement; the end of the Cleveland Indians mascot, the “Redskins” team name, and the Land O’Lakes Maiden. As the general American public continues to reflect on its violent past and present in increasingly mainstream vocabularies of intersectional feminism, global capitalism, and colonialism, the history discussed in this dissertation demands the increasing inclusion of Native people in the reckoning. And in the stories that make Americans proud—like those born into existence by the great athletes, the celebrities, the “firsts,” the ones that make history—Native people have offered countless contributions that still wait to be told. 276 Figure 8.5. Johnny “Mad Bull” Southard and Henry “Flying Cloud” Thomas. Postcard. 1927. 277 CHAPTER IX EPILOGUE THE LONG RUN Sunday, July 7, 2019 Old River Road in Ukiah, California, runs alongside the Russian River and through stretches of vineyards. In July, the grapes swell in preparation for a late-summer harvest. The road also runs parallel to Route 101, which, by the end of the twentieth century, had become a busy freeway up to four lanes wide in parts, with long swaths constructed to bypass the original road’s curves and climbs. A driver can still experience the silence and wonder of towering redwood tree-cover, but the sensation comes only in fleeting stretches when the freeway condenses into a two-lane road and the curves force a deceleration. The roads through the towns off of the highway, like Old River Road, better advertise the region’s natural charms. One day every summer, registration opens at 7:00 a.m. at River Union School for a special event. A commemorative footrace race starts at 8:00. It’s called the “Legends of the Redwoods.” Sponsored by the North Coast Striders running club, this 5K (in some years, there’s also a 10K) commemorates the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon. The Striders are a friendly, committed bunch who know and respect both history and running. Their president, Roger Schwartz, has long felt awed by the local running history and welcomes interested runners to the quiet out-and-back course, rumored to be a relic of the original Redwood Highway itself. 278 When I went to meet the group and run the 10K course in 2015, they invited me to speak about the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon at the starting line and chuckled at fact that a Eugene runner came down wearing a bright pair of “Nike ‘yellows.’”541 Eugene is, after all, “TrackTown USA,” and the birthplace of Nike. They sent me off with a new stack of local history sources and a few t-shirts from Legends races of years past. Imagine their delight, then, when the 2019 roster for the race included Jim, Sean, and Bryan Berry—nephews and great-nephews of Johnny, Marion, and Gorham Southard. Jim Berry has long collected family history and served his Yreka and Karuk communities in many capacities. He was a major contributor to my dissertation research and reflected on his uncles’ accomplishments at the Legends race. He toed that starting line with Sean, 27, and Bryan, 11. “The fact that I had three uncles run and one actually win the 1927 Redwood Highway American Indian Marathon makes me proud of my family’s athletic accomplishments,” Jim said. “In the early 1920s, my American Indian family from Happy Camp, California was known for its running abilities. To have the ability to travel 480 miles in a little over seven days on foot is amazing. To see some of these athletic abilities in my own sons makes me realize that genetics play a big part in athletic achievement.”542 Indeed! Sean won the race overall. He works for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Redding, California, and has accumulated some impressive running accolades over the 541 David Taxis, “Legends of the Redwoods foot race,” Ukiah Daily Journal, July 23, 2015. 542 James Berry, in discussion with author, April 28, 2020. 279 years. He says that he has kept his great uncles in mind, inspired by their mental and physical fortitude, as he has, by now, logged both marathons and ultramarathons.543 Bryan, a burgeoning talent in his hometown of Yreka, won his age group and took third overall in Ukiah. Jim took second in his age group.544 Johnny, Gorham, and Marion all ran the 1927 marathon. A trio of their descendants nearly a century later ran this small stretch of the same route, recalling them all the way. Jim said, “Knowing how competitive my Uncle Johnny was in his youth, I am certain he would have been proud to see his nephews do so well in this race.”545 Sean mused, “Perhaps my Great Uncle Johnny and his brothers were looking down and were excited for all of us representing the family and running strong!”546 The experience was positive even beyond the impressive finishes. Commemoration is tricky, particularly when events are so simultaneously empowering and exploitative, like the Redwood Highway Marathon was. To these descendants, however, the recognition of their ancestors’ achievements as the enduring essence of the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon is cause for gratitude and celebration. Jim said he was “happy to find that one of the communities where the Indian Marathons passed through actually acknowledges the feat that these young American Indian men achieved.”547 Sean expressed a similar sentiment, lauding the North Coast Striders for 543 Sean Berry, in discussion with author, May 20, 2020. 544 “Legends of the Redwoods results,” Ukiah Daily Journal, July 11, 2019. 545 James Berry, discussion. 546 Sean Berry, discussion. 547 James Berry, discussion. 280 hosting a race that, to him, stood out in his memory on a long list of races ranging from three to thirty miles.548 Acknowledging the achievement also acknowledges a larger history of Native contributions to modern institutions. As Jim concluded, “It is important to remember these ‘ultra’ races and recognize what American Indians have contributed to distance running in our country.”549 Distance running, once a practical means to multiple ends, then the public marker of raw athleticism and manly worth, has continued to grow on this continent and all over the globe. It shapes private realms of individual lives and continues to fuel the public imagination. It has come a long way since its Indigenous roots but has never branched away from them entirely. The 1920s advertised endurance athletes as celebrities. Professional running does not gross the revenue or fandom of Americans’ favorite team sports, like football and baseball, but the greatest races—like the Boston Marathon— outlasted economic Depression, international warfare, and draw wide viewership. Track and field remains a marquee event that captivates the world at every summer Olympic Games. Kenyans and Ethiopians entered the competitive world circuit to leave Africa’s indelible mark on the international running scene in the 1960s, developing the sport astronomically. Then the jogging revolution or “running boom” of the 1970s and 80s drove millions of Americans in ‘trainers’ to paved streets on weekends. Running remains a site for competition, for fitness, for charity, and much more. 548 Sean Berry, discussion. 549 James Berry, discussion. 281 Inspiring Performances A handful of standout Native runners won national and international events in the decades following the Redwood Highway Indian Marathons. Ellison “Tarzan” Brown (Narraganset) won the Boston Marathon in 1936 and in 1939. Both races and finishes were drenched in drama (in 1939, the runners were also drenched in rain). Brown’s 1936 victory birthed the term “Heartbreak Hill” still used today to describe the last rolling hill on the city course. The nickname is in honor of Brown’s final surge past runner Johnny Kelly on the hill after Kelly had passed Brown just moments before and patted him on the back.550 Brown also qualified for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. His 1939 Boston Marathon victory marked the first time a runner broke 2:30:00 on the modern course. He again qualified for the Olympics in 1940, though the Games were canceled due to the outbreak of World War II. Billy Mills (Oglala Lakota) came from behind to win the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo—a race widely considered to be one of the greatest upsets in Olympic track and field history. His running careers at the Haskell Institute and the University of Kansas hinted at greatness but not at world-leader status. Mills’s influence on Indigenous running circles is hard to overstate. He’s a hero. Rarámuri (“Tarahumara”) runners from Northern Mexico ran against the most talented American runners in the emerging ultramarathon and extreme sports scene in the American West in the 1980s and 90s. The visitors won a brutal 100-mile, high-altitude race in Leadville, Colorado in 1992 and 1994. Author Christopher McDougall featured 550 For more on Heartbreak Hill past and present, see Robert James Reese, “Just How Bad is Heartbreak Hill?” Runner’s World, February 27, 2019. 282 their stories in his 2010 bestseller Born to Run, which put Indigenous running back in the minds of a public readership in the new century. The stardom is not only at the highest level of competition, though. The place of running for Native individuals and communities is not the province of the upper echelon alone. Two of the most consistently talented high school cross country teams hail from Navajo Country in Arizona. Filmmaker Brian Truglio released a documentary of the rivalry between the two teams, the Tuba City Warriors and the Chinle Wildcats, in 2010. The film, “Racing the Rez,” reveals how the structure and act of competitive running helped the high schoolers cope with the struggles of reservation life and harness skills long sacred to their Indigenous communities. New York City filmmaker Henry Lu also documented running in Indian country around the same time. In 2008, he assembled a team and embarked on a nineteen-month filmmaking excursion to Navajo Country. The crew followed three high school seniors’ personal stories of chasing scholarships through cross country and track and field amidst high rates of diabetes, suicide attempts, and poverty in their community. In the film and the website dedicated to it, RuntotheEast.com, Lu presents running as a source of hope and fulfillment—an entity that disproves “news headlines all over the West [that] reinforce negative stereotypes of Native Americans.”551 Major publications within and beyond the sports world have covered running in Indian Country over the past few decades. Runner’s World has run articles on challenges plaguing prospective NCAA student-athletes from reservations and biographical pieces 551 “Run to the East: A film by Henry Lu,” 2020, RuntotheEast.com. 283 on former and current runners from Indigenous communities across North America.552 Ultrarunning Magazine has similarly paid homage to running history on the continent.553 Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run most decisively invested public interest in Indigenous running by presenting the running prowess of the Rarámuri in the southwestern borderlands and suggesting that their long history of sandal-clad running holds the answers for a generation of American recreational runners suffering from splints and stress fractures in chronically weak ankles and feet stuffed into clunky running shoes. “Barefoot” running the likes of the Rarámuri, he suggested, strengthens and improves basic running mechanics and lower-extremity health. In running circles, the jury is always out on this theory when applied to the average recreational runner. Certainly, though, the practice has worked well for centuries of Rarámuri runners. One of my favorite sources on Indigenous running and its intersections with, as the website says, “community, land, and culture,” is the Grounded Podcast with Dinée Dorame.554 The host, Dinée Dorame, is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and of Indigenous Mexican and Yaqui descent. The podcast explores many important and interesting issues and amplifies the voices of a diverse set of interviewees who can, from a variety of perspectives, reflect on running and other elements of personal life and society. Truly, running is all over Indian Country. Several years of reading news from both running outlets and Indian news outlets has revealed some key patterns to the ongoing practice in every corner of the Indigenous U.S. 552 For example, “Challenges & Opportunities for Native American Runners,” Runner’s World, November 1, 2000; Roger Robinson, “Footsteps: Deerfoot,” Runner’s World, October 6, 2008; Joe Kolb and Bruce Barcott, “Native Son,” Runner’s World, April 30, 2015. 553 Andy Milroy, “In the Beginning: Native Americans,” Ultrarunning Magazine, August 15, 2013. 554 See GroundedPod.com. 284 Running for Public Health and Healing Using running as a tool for physical and mental health is not unique to communities across Indian Country, but the health benefits are particularly pronounced in communities that have both a historical tie to running and disproportionately high rates of obesity, diabetes, and teen and adolescent suicide. In the American Southwest, running culture in Indigenous communities has persisted through the generations following the Hopis and Zunis discussed in this dissertation, still in both traditional ways and in adaptive way that place the act of running in thoroughly modern contexts. Eastward morning runs for the Diné (Navajo) remains an important cultural practice with spiritual and physical dimensions. Public Health expert Ariel Shirley (Diné) explains, “Running not only grounds us to our culture, but is a tool used to maintain physical health. Like many Native American tribes, loss of culture is a threat to the Diné way of life. With high rates of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart diseases and cancer, returning to foundational teachings is a way to address these health issues.”555 Regularly scheduled Diné events feature running centrally. There’s a Diné Runners running clinic and an annual “Running for a Stronger and Healthier Navajo Nation” wellness campaign. Participating runners in that event often run for various specific causes related to public health and community. The event spans several days and takes the form of a relay across Navajo Nation. There’s also the Run for Hope, a local race that supports Navajo healthcare services, and the prestigious Canyon de Chelly 55K 555 Ariel Shirley, “Running at Dawn: A Diné Cultural and Health Teaching,” The Healthy Dose, The University of Arizona Health Sciences, https://uahs.arizona.edu/blog/2019-04-22/running-dawn-dine- cultural-and-health-teaching. 285 ultramarathon that takes place “in the heart of the Navajo nation,” through important spiritual sites within Diné homelands. That enormous event educates outsiders on Navajo running and the profits benefit Diné runners.556 Diné runners in the Wings of America program, a nonprofit based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, often echo these sentiments as they take their community running practices and apply them to a larger competitive sphere. Wings extends its crucial reach nationwide. The organization aims to “Strengthen Native youth and their families through running…Inspire youth to become mentors for the next generation…Encourage Native student achievement and success…[and] Reinforce cultural identity and personal values.”557 For Wings, benefits are found in the very act of running, but the strength and confidence can propel pupils to any number of triumphant ends. An internal survey in 2000 found that Wings runners attained comparatively high levels of education and made healthier decisions than non-participant peers.558 The group offers multiple programs, from local camps and clinics to their own Junior National Cross-Country team, a team that has, to date, logged over thirty national titles in individual and team events in about thirty years. Olympic legend Billy Mills helped create Running Strong for American Indian Youth, a charity that provides essential supplies and services to impoverished reservation communities according to the articulated needs of those communities. They offer several programs focused on Native youth that aim to build self-esteem and critical self- and 556 “Run with the Navajo,” Canyon de Chelly Ultra, https://www.canyondechellyultra.com/. 557 “About Wings,” Wings of America, WingsofAmerica.org. 558 Ibid. 286 community-supportive skills. Beneficiaries don’t have to literally run, but the charity exists because of Billy Mill’s platform, won on the track as much as his medal was. Far beyond reservations, Indigenous people might access the healing power of running through the larger scope of running culture in the United States in general. Back on My Feet is a non-profit that combats homelessness by recruiting unhoused people into running groups and offering community and opportunities for growing self-esteem, employment, housing, and more. The majority of the organization’s participants are people of color, including people who identify as Indigenous.559 They issued a solidarity statement for Black Lives Matter that expresses the desire to recruit, among other people of color, Indigenous leadership in the program.560 Because the act of running puts a human body in rhythmic, ritual connection with the land underfoot, many communities employ running to heal the spirit as well as the body. In the Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run, for example, the descendants of Cheyenne and Arapahoe bands brutally massacred by Colorado militia troops in 1864 run for several days. Participants cover the distance from Sand Creek, the site of the massacre, to Denver, crossing the once-bloody trail that the offending Colonel John Chivington and his troops took, Native body parts in tow, after the slaughter. The distance is nearly 200 miles. Modern runners have carried out the event since 1999. Initially holding it only for the immediately affected community, organizers have since opened the run to everyone, acknowledging the healing power of running. Some run the 559 See “Back on My Feet 2018 Annual Report,” Back on My Feet, 6, https://backonmyfeet.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/BoMF-AnnualReport2018_Final-1.pdf; “How It Works,” Back on My Feet, https://backonmyfeet.org/program/how-it-works/. 560 “Solidarity Statement,” Back on My Feet, https://backonmyfeet.org/westand/. 287 distance; others run in relay format; others walk. All participants undertake the three-day journey on Thanksgiving weekend, a fitting date to interrogate standing narratives about colonialism and cross-cultural cooperation.561 An annual Dakota 38 Memorial Run in Minnesota commemorates the 1862 execution of thirty-eight Dakota prisoners. That mass execution remains the largest of its kind in U.S. history. The run, also conducted as a relay, starts in Fort Snelling and traverses over seventy miles to Mankato, where the state hanged the Dakota warriors. The run takes place on December 26, the day of the execution, and has happened every year (with the exception of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), in Dakota’s snowy season since 1986.562 Runners have also commemorated one of the most well-known massacres in U.S. history: the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. Lakota runners start at the massacre site and follow a 180-mile path, following the escape route that the survivors of the massacre took. It takes several days for the runners to complete the journey, and invites reflection and, hopefully, healing to the descendants who continually contemplate their ancestors’ life-or-death trek and their enduring trauma.563 Nipmucs from Natick, Massachusetts created a joint Sacred Run and Paddle in 2010 that traces the path of forced removal that “Praying Indians” (Christian converts) of 561 See Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 115, 259. 562 See “Annual Dakota 38 Run Serves as Somber Memorial,” Belle Plaine Herald, January 1, 2020; Jeffrey Lee Meriwether and Laura Mattoon D’Amore, eds., We Are What We Remember: The American Past Through Commemoration (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 35-36. 563 See Kayla Gahagan, “Retracing the Route of Those Who Survived the Wounded Knee Massacre,” Al Jazeera America, January 1, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/1/running-and- retracingtheroutesurvivorstookatwoundedkneemassacre.html. 288 the Nipmuc Nation suffered in 1675. Their final destination, and that of the runners and paddlers, is Deer Island in Boston Harbor. Event organizers took inspiration for the event from Indigenous organizers in Maine, who carried out an 80-mile run to commemorate Abenaki removal and murder at the hands of the British in 1724.564 These stories span centuries, and commemoration-through-running is a common practice across U.S. states. These runs, evidently growing in popularity, are part of centuries-long healing processes and wider social reckoning even beyond tribal communities. Major news sources in cities across the U.S. have covered some of these events, as well as news sources produced by and for Indigenous people.565 Runs, especially long ones, continue to—as they did a century ago—serve the people running and the wider public in reexamining history or stereotypes taken for granted in mainstream American society. Activism and Advocacy A sphere very much connected to community commemoration and remembrance is the broad realm of activism, and many Native activists in the twenty-first century have utilized running as a site for advocacy, awareness, and protest. The Standing Rock effort to block the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 piqued American interest in Indian news much like events that drew similar coverage during the American Indian Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Perhaps it should be unsurprising by now that there were runners in 564 See Julia Spitz, “Nipmucs Add History to Memorial to Deer Island Internment,” Metro West Daily News, October 24, 2010, https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/article/20101024/NEWS/310249951. 565 Among the many outlets to cover the Sand Creek run, for example, are Colorado Public Radio, Indian Country Today, and the New York Times (in an Opinion piece written by Native historian Ned Blackhawk). See Carol McKinley, “Sand Creek Massacre Statue To Replace Torn Down Soldier Monument At Colorado’s Capitol,” CPR News, November 21, 2020; Rick St. Germaine, “Sand Creek Memorial Run Ignites Emotions; Cheyenne/Arapaho Runners Confront City of Denver,” Indian Country Today, October 20, 2005; “Sand Creek Healing Run Honors Ancestors, Heals Runners,” Indian Country Today, December 4, 2013; Ned Blackhawk, “Remember the Sand Creek Massacre,” New York Times, November 27, 2014. 289 the mix who utilized running as a means of raising awareness. Several young activists performed a Run for Peace near Bismarck, North Dakota. Bobbi Jean Three Legs (Standing Rock Sioux) organized multiple runs in response to the proposed pipeline. She ended up working with other Native organizers to carry out a 500-mile run from a North Dakota city just north of Standing Rock to Omaha, Nebraska. Three Legs then recruited even more runners to run the full 2,000-mile distance to Washington, DC, gathering petition signatures along the way. They ran in the heat of July and garnered massive media attention. They met more runners in DC and some met with government officials. This gathering of Indigenous youth provided crucial support and publicity to the resistance to the pipeline as the enormous gathering of nations converged at Standing Rock itself.566 More recently, Native runners in competitive running settings have used competitions as platforms to raise awareness of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women epidemic in the United States and Canada. Marathoner Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Daniel (Lower Brulé Sioux) ran the 2019 Boston Marathon with a red handprint painted on her face, over her mouth, and the letters “MMIW” painted down her leg. She prayed at each of the marathon’s mile markers for a different Native woman or girl that violent abductors kidnapped or killed. This was not her first public effort in a major race to raise awareness, but Boston looms in the minds and imaginations of 566 “The Voice of a Generation: Bobbi Jean Three Legs,” Voices of Indian Country, Native Hope, https://blog.nativehope.org/the-voice-of-a-generation-bobbi-jean-three-legs-part-1. 290 marathoners more than any other U.S. city because of the event’s rigorous standard and world-class field.567 The activism spread from there. Ethan LaDeaux (Lakota), Willi Bessette (Colville) and Duane Garvais (Colville tribal descendant), completed a cross-country run/bike ride to raise awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in conjunction with the four-hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock in the summer of 2020. Many runners joined for increments along the way in solidarity with the movement and its runners.568 This movement for recognition spoke to the talented Rosalie Fish (Cowlitz), who has run at the high school and college levels (so far). Running for Muckleshoot Tribal School in Washington, she won the state 3200-meter event in 2018 and would add 800- meter and 1600-meter gold medals to her repertoire. Her biggest accomplishment, however, might have been her own public display of the red “MMIW” and handprint at the high school state championship meet. She had lost a loved one to anti-Indigenous gendered violence and followed the lead of Three White Horses Daniel. She continues using her running platform to bring awareness to MMIW in college.569 For the Karuk Tribe, too, running activism has surged in the twenty-first century. In 2011, Karuk Tribal Member Crispin McAllister ran a 230-mile loop through ancestral homelands, raising funds for local track teams. This undertaking caught the attention of 567 Vincent Schilling, “Jordan Marie Daniel Ran and Prayed for 26 #MMIW Names at 26.2 Mile Boston Marathon,” Indian Country Today, April 23, 2019; JordanMarieDaniel.com. 568 Justus Caudell, “Group of Men Trek Across America to Bring Awareness to #MMIW Movement,” Tribal Tribune, January 7, 2021. 569 Erin Strout, “Rosalie Fish Ran for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. What’s Next for this State Champion?” Women’s Running, June 5, 2019, https://www.womensrunning.com/culture/people/she- ran-for-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-whats-next-for-this-state-champion/. 291 Michelle Obama, then First Lady of the United States, who was launching her Let’s Move! In Indian Country Program at the time. The Obamas invited McAllister and his family to the White House, and they accepted the invitation. In 2012, the Youth Leadership Council from the Tribe went to meet with senior staff.570 Doctors once told McAllister he would have trouble walking properly following injuries incurred in Iraq. “They told me walking would be hard, so I became an ultramarathon runner,” laughed McAllister in a 2019 phone call.571 His running, organization, and commitment to his Tribe (plus the help of his wife, Ashley) bloomed into an annual Salmon Run, also called the Spirit Run, that both honors the literal salmon run in the Klamath River and aims to raise awareness of suffering river health. Yurok and Hupa people, the other nations with Klamath River homelands, join in the effort. Over the past several years, runners have spoken about and carried banners identifying several major issues: dwindling salmon populations, the related concern of dam removal, and the proposed route of the Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline, which would cross the river near Klamath Falls. McAllister is careful to note, however, that the annual group of runners doesn’t necessarily describe the Salmon Run as a protest; it’s much bigger than an event merely designed to communicate concerns. McAllister instead describes it as “a rally for support,” and notes many instances of popular interest that spring up as Americans in towns and cars along the route see the runners with their large carved salmon figurines and banners, and wonder what the purpose is. He notes near “run-ins” with less friendly observers, but sees these confrontations and de-escalations as beneficial to young runners 570 Crispin McAllister, in discussion with author, May 2019. 571 Ibid. 292 who “[get] to see how this core group that my wife and I put together faces direct opposition, and they see how we handle that opposition.”572 Indeed, McAllister is particularly proud of the youth that come out to support the run, and he emphasizes the goal to “work towards positive change—that’s what we’re all about.”573 McAllister has certainly heard of the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon, though it was not his inspiration for taking to the road for the health of himself, his people, and the Klamath. In fact, he scoffs at the many absurdities that characterized it. “The names were way off,” he said. “There wasn’t even a way to say ‘Mad Bull’ in Karuk in the 1920s.”574 Having run over so many regional highways himself, McAllister also notes that roads have both positive and negative impacts on tribal communities. The Redwood Highway, and especially Highway 96, which goes to Happy Camp, must have represented “life changing experiences for the Tribe when [they] came through,” he says. Perhaps that influenced the runners’ decisions to participate in 1927 and 1928. Goals have undoubtedly changed in the near-century that separates the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon and the Salmon Run, but the means to achieving them has withstood the test of time. The Long Road Ahead Many goals of Karuk activists and Tribal members rest at critical junctures at the time of this dissertation’s completion. The Klamath River is supposed to experience a massive dam removal project, but it keeps getting stalled. The 2020 salmon run saw the 572 Ibid. 573 Ibid. 574 Ibid. 293 lowest number of fish ever on record. The future of the salmon remains uncertain in the region, and for the tribes that have fished the Klamath River for thousands of years, the impending loss of fish is an unthinkable catastrophe. There are also the forests to worry about. Karuk leaders have made national headlines, particularly in the Guardian, for expressing their fire knowledge amidst the forest fire crisis burning in the American West.575 During the final stages of writing this dissertation, the Slater Fire decimated stretches of Karuk homelands, including homes and buildings in Happy Camp. Regalia and baskets burned as people fled their homes in sight of the flames. The Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources is prepared to carry out a widespread return to traditional fire practices with enough state support, and with the ongoing fire crisis, more and more commentators contemplate regular burns instead of fire suppression.576 This dissertation, at its core, is about Karuk survival and social influence. Against astronomical odds, Karuk people outlived genocide and shaped the emergent modern society that sprung up in its wake. They shaped long distance running as a competitive sport (a sport that is now part of the regional identity of the American West that wants to be forever be rugged and outdoorsy), the redwoods tourist industry, and its regional identity. Where others forget their contributions and abilities, they remember. As the 575 See Susie Cagle, “‘Fire Is Medicine’: The Tribes Burning California Forests to Save Them,” The Guardian, November 21, 2019; Bill Tripp, “Our Land Was Taken. But We Still Hold the Knowledge of How to Stop Mega-fires,” The Guardian, September 16, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/16/california-wildfires-cultural-burns-indigenous- people; Vivian Ho, “Fire Tore Through the Karuk Tribe’s Homeland. Many Won’t Be Able to Rebuild,” The Guardian, October 23, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/23/karuk-tribe- california-slater-fire-insurance. 576 “The Karuk’s Innate Relationship with Fire: Adapting to Climate Change on the Klamath,” U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, Updated July 22, 2020, https://toolkit.climate.gov/case-studies/karuk%E2%80%99s- innate-relationship-fire-adapting-climate-change-klamath. 294 centennial anniversary of the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon approaches, the Karuk Tribe moves forward making similarly huge impacts, challenged but not deterred by the same structures that have plagued Indian Country for centuries, and new challenges that require ancient wisdom. 295 APPENDIX A STATEMENTS I asked Karuk Tribal members who gave interviews for this dissertation if they wanted to make statements about the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon to be reproduced in full. Buster Attebery and Jim Berry are both descendants of marathon runners, and they were both invaluable resources and generous friends to me. The following statements briefly explain the importance of this history in their own words. The 1927 Marathon Race from San Francisco, CA, to Grants Pass, OR, was designed to bring awareness to the new Highway 101, up the coast of Northern California. Native American runners were recruited to run the race and my Great Uncles Johnny, Marion and Gorham Southard all signed on to run. There were eight Karuk runners in the field. I remember Uncle Johnny telling me stories. He said the training was up and down the Klamath River road 60 miles in one day, but the worst part was having to jump into cold Indian Creek when they were done. The racing plan was to walk up the hills and run when on flat ground or downhill. Johnny won the 1927 race, I believe this great accomplishment exemplifies the culture these men lived: running the mountains in search of deer, hiking to mountain lakes for fresh trout, hopping the river rocks to get at salmon and steelhead. The Karuk Tribe is very proud of the accomplishments of these Tribal Members, then and now. Karuk Tribal Chairman Buster Attebery The 1927 and 1928 Redwood Highway Marathons, while used as publicity stunts for economic gains, provided a platform for American Indians across the West to showcase their physical strengths and abilities in a true ultramarathon that was well over 400 miles. These individuals covered sixty to seventy miles per day, over the course of a week's time. This feat is the equivalent to participating in at least eighteen full marathons in one week. Our American Indian runners from the Karuk Tribe exhibited an underlying edge of fierce competitive spirit. This competitive spirit was cultivated in a very secluded and remote part of California, where, at the time, there were not many activities to do, outside of hunting, fishing, mining, hiking, and running. The runners' physical attributes were born out of the necessities of everyday life. There were no cars owned by my family at that time to use for transportation. Many people walked or hiked, carrying their supplies, 296 sometimes 80 to 100 pounds, that were purchased in nearby Happy Camp, California, which was approximately twelve to fifteen miles away from their home. My family hunted the mountains and canyons of the Klamath River Corridor. Hunting for big game in this region of the United States is unlike most other areas. Our people hunted year-round, at that time for subsistence, living on puufich (venison), as a major part of the diet. This, in part, was the way of life that helped lead to the competitive nature of our people. These athletes also developed a mental toughness that allowed them to endure the long miles of this race. As any athlete will tell you, the mental strength used in athletics is a major part of success in all sporting events. The internal fortitude that these athletes exhibited was immense, and it brought great pride to the tribes and families they represented. Jim Berry Tribal Member and Southard Descendant 297 REFERENCES CITED Primary Sources Archival Collections: American Indians of the Pacific Northwest Images, Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and University of Washington Digital Collections Arnold Studio Photographs, Whitman College and Northwest Archives Greenville Agency Papers, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno, California Hoopa Valley Agency Papers, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno, California Indian War Papers, California State Archives, Sacramento, California Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC Meyers Collection, Wyoming State Archives Moorhouse, Lee Photographs, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon Photographs from the Collections of the New York Public Library, New York, New York Redwood Empire Association Papers, Mendocino County Museum, Willits, California Redwood Empire Association Records, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California Redwood Highway Papers, California Department of Transportation Library, Sacramento, California Roseburg Agency Papers, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno, California Sacramento Agency Papers, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno, California Save the Redwoods League Documents, Save the Redwoods League, San Francisco, California Sípnuuk Digital Library, Archives, and Museum, Karuk Tribe, Happy Camp, California Newspapers: Albuquerque Journal Anniston Star Berwickshire News and General Adviser Bismarch Tribune Blue Lake Advocate Borger Daily Herald Brooklyn Daily Eagle Butte Miner (Butte, MT) Chicago Tribune Chehalis Bee-Nugget Daily Alta California 298 Daily Iowan Edwardsville Intelligencer El Paso Evening Post Eugene Guard Eureka Times-Standard Grants Pass Daily Courier Harrisburg Sunday Courier Healdsburg Enterprise Healdsburg Tribune Houston Post Hull Daily Mail Humboldt Times Humboldt Standard Huntington Herald Kansas City Times Klamath News La Grande Observer Lincoln Journal Star Los Angeles Times Marin Herald Missoulian Modera Tribune Motorland New York Times News-Review (Roseburg, OR) North Adams Transcript Oakland Tribune Oregon Statesman Orlando Sentinel Ottawa Journal Petaluma Argus-Courier Petaluma Daily Morning Courier Pittsburgh Press Post-Crescent (Appleton, WI) Redwood Highway Bulletin Redwood Highway Review Reno Gazette-Journal Roseburg News-Review San Anselmo Herald San Bernardino Sun San Francisco Examiner San Jose Evening News San Mateo Times Santa Ana Register Santa Cruz Evening News Santa Rosa Press Democrat 299 Sausalito News Sotoyome Scimitar St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat St. Louis Post-Dispatcher Tampa Times Tampa Tribune Times-Recorder (Zanesville, OH) Traverse City Record-Eagle Ukiah Daily Journal Weekly Humboldt Times Western Daily Press (Bristol, UK) Whitby Gazette Other Primary Sources: U.S. Census Bureau. Siskiyou County, California. 1920 Population Census. Ancestry.com Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch. U.S. Census Bureau. Census of Manufacturers. California. 1920. Census.gov. “Anthropology Days at the Stadium.” In Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac for 1905, edited by James Sullivan, 249-263. New York: American Sports Publishing Co., 1905. Arnold, Mary Ellicott and Mabel Reed. In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-1909. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. A. J. Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest: A California Sketch. San Francisco: Bacon & Company, 1885 Coy, Owen C. The Humboldt Bay Region, 1850-1875. Los Angeles: California State Historical Association, 1929. Francis, Henry ed. Proceedings of the Second National Conference on State Parks at Bear Mountain Inn Palisades Interstate Park New York. Publication Committee, 1923. Gibbs, George. “Journal of the Expedition of Colonel Redick M’Kee, United States Indian Agent, Through North-Western California, Performed in the Summer and Fall of 1851.” In George Gibbs’ Journal of Redick McKee’s Expedition Through Northwestern California in 1851, edited by Robert Heizer. Berkeley: Archaeological Research Facility, Department of Anthropology, University of California, 1972. 300 Grant, J.D. Saving California’s Redwoods. Berkeley: Save the Redwoods League, 1922. Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race or, The Racial Basis of European History. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1916. Hawk, Diane. Touring the Old Redwood Highway: Del Norte County. Piercy, California: Hawk Mountaintop Publishing, 2006. Hawk, Diane. Touring the Old Redwood Highway: Humboldt County. Piercy, California: Hawk Mountaintop Publishing, 2004. Journal of the Fourth Session of the Legislature of the State of California. San Francisco: George Kerr, State Printer, 1853. Meriam, Lewis. The Problem of Indian Administration: Report of a Survey Made at the Request of Honorable Hubert Work, Secretary of the Interior, and Submitted to Him, February 21, 1928. Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, 1928. Muir, John. My First Summer in the Sierra. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916. “Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30.” Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919. Roosevelt, Theodore. “The Hopi Snake Dance.” Outlook 105 (October 1913): 364-373. Roosevelt, Theodore. “The Strenuous Life.” Speech. Hamilton Club, Chicago, IL, April 10, 1899. Sweetser, Kate Dickinson. Ten American Girls From History. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917. Internet Archive. Library of Congress. The National Forests of California, Miscellaneous Circular No. 94. Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, 1927. Wells, Harry L. History of Siskiyou County, California, Illustrated with Views of Residences, Business Buildings and Natural Scenery, and Containing Portraits and Biographies of its Leading Citizens and Pioneers. Oakland: D. J. Stewart & Co., 1881. Secondary Sources Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. 301 Akins, Damon B. and William J. Bauer Jr. We Are the Land: A Native History of California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. Andrist, Ralph. The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indian. New York: Macmillan, 1966. “Annual Dakota 38 Run Serves as Somber Memorial.” Belle Plaine Herald. January 1, 2020. Archuleta, Margaret L., Brenda J. Child and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, eds. Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000. Phoenix: Heard Museum, 2000. Ashe, Arthur. A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete. New York: Penguin, 1993. Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Basso, Matthew. Meet Joe Cooper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s WWII Home Front. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Bauer, William J., Jr. California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. __________. “Native Californians in the Nineteenth Century.” In A Companion to California History, edited by William Deverell and David Igler, 192-214. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. __________. We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Bay, Mia. Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. Beck, David R. M. Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Behnken, Brian D. and Gregory D. Smithers. Racism in American Popular Media: From Aunt Jemima to the Frito Bandito. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2015. 302 Berkhofer, Robert. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Book, 1979. Billings, Andrew C. and Jason Edward Black. Mascot Nation: The Controversy over Native American Representation in Sports. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018. Bird, S. Elizabeth. “Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular Media.” Journal of Communication 49, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 61-83. Blackhawk, Ned. “Remember the Sand Creek Massacre.” New York Times, November 27, 2014. Bloom, John. To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sports at Native American Boarding Schools. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Bloom, Lisa. Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Brasseaux, Carl A. and Michael J. LeBlanc. “Franco-Indian Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley 1754-1763: Prelude to Pontiac’s Uprising?” Journal De La Société Des Américanistes 68 (1982): 59-70. Britten, Thomas. American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Browne, Ray B., Richard H. Crowder, Virgil Lokke, and William T. Stafford, eds. Frontiers of American Culture. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1968. Buckley, Thomas. Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Buff, Rachel. Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945-1992. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Buford, Kate. Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Cagle, Susie. “‘Fire Is Medicine’: The Tribes Burning California Forests to Save Them.” The Guardian, November 21, 2019. Cahill, Cathleen. Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 303 __________. Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Carby, Hazel V. Race Men. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Carnes, Mark C. and Clyde Griffin, eds. Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Castaneda, Terri. “Salvaging the Anthropologist-Other at California’s Tribal College.” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Spring, 2020): 308-319. Catton, Theodore. American Indians and National Forests. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. Caudell, Justus. “Group of Men Trek Across America to Bring Awareness to #MMIW Movement.” Tribal Tribune, January 7, 2021. “Challenges & Opportunities for Native American Runners,” Runner’s World, November 1, 2000. Chang, David. The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Clark, Carter Blue. “A History of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma.” PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1976. Cleman, John. “The Belated Frontier: H. L. Davis and the Problem of Pacific Northwest Regionalism.” Western American Literature 37, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 430-451. Cothran, Boyd. Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Craig, Maxine Leeds. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Cronin, Marionne. “Richard Byrd, Technological Explorer: Polar Exploration, the Machine, and Heroic Masculinity in Interwar America.” Technology and Culture 57, no. 2 (April 2016): 322-352. Custalow, Linwood “Little Bear” and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star.” The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2007. Davis, David. Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze. New York: Thomas Dunne Books of St. Martin’s Press, 2012. 304 Dean, Penny Lee. “A History of the Catalina Channel Swims Since 1927.” Catalina Channel Swimming Federation, last modified 2012. https://swimcatalina.org/history-of-the-catalina-channel/. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Avon Books, 1969. Deloria, Philip J., Jr. "American Master Narratives and the Problem of Indian Citizenship in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era." The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015): 3-12. __________. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. __________. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. DeMallie, Raymond J., ed. The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. Deverell, William and David Igler, eds. A Companion to California History. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Dilworth, Leah. Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1997. Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. Dodge, William A. Black Rock: A Zuni Cultural Landscape and the Meaning of Place. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Donegan, Moira. “The Temperance Movement Linked Booze to Domestic Violence. Did it Have a Point?” The Guardian, January 3, 2020. “Dorothy Eleanor Gaby,” Eureka Times-Standard, September 9, 2012. Dowd, Gregory Evans. War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Drowne, Kathleen and Patrick Huber. The 1920s. American Popular Culture Through History Series, edited by Ray B. Browne. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Drucker, Philip “The Tolowa and their Southwest Oregon Kin.” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 36, no. 4 (October 1937): 221-299. 305 DuBois, Ellen Carol and Lynn Dumenil, eds. Through Women’s Eyes: An American History, 5th ed. New York: MacMillan, 2019. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne and Dina Gilio-Whitaker. “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths about Native Americans. Boston: Beacon Press, 2016. Emmerich, Lisa. “‘Civilization’ and Transculturation: The Field Matron Program and Cross-Cultural Contact." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 15, no. 4 (1991): 33-47. __________. “Promoting Homemaking on the Reservations: WNIA Field Matrons.” In The Women’s National Indian Association: A History, edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes, 84-101. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. __________. "'To Respect and Love and Seek the Ways of White Women': Field Matrons, the Office of Indian Affairs, and Civilization Policy, 1890-1938." Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1987. España-Maram, Linda. Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Estes, Nick. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso, 2019. Farmer, Jared. Trees in Paradise: A California History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013. Fass, Paula. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Fenelon, James. Redskins?: Sports Mascots, Indian Nations and White Racism. New York: Routledge, 2017. Findlay, John M. “A Fishy Proposition: Regional Identity in the Pacific Northwest.” In Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, edited by David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner, 37-70. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Gahagan, Kayla. “Retracing the Route of Those Who Survived the Wounded Knee Massacre.” Al Jazeera America, January 1, 2014. Games of Skill, Power and Chance in Native California. Ukiah, CA: The Grace Hudson Museum, 2004. Gems, Gerald. The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 306 George, Judith Jenkins. “The Fad of North American Women’s Endurance Swimming During the Post-World War I Era.” Canadian Journal of Sports History 26, no. 1 (May 1995): 52-72. Gilbert, Matthew Sakiestewa. Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain Between Indian and American. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. Gonzales-Day, Ken. Lynching in the West 1850-1935. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Gordon, Linda. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. New York: Liveright, 2017. Gotaas, Thor. Running: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Green, Rayna. “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture.” The Massachusetts Review 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1975): 698-714. Grillot, Thomas. First Americans: U.S. Patriotism in Indian Country After World War I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Guiliano, Jennifer. Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Hamlin, Kimberly A. “Bathing Suits and Backlash: The First Miss America Pageants, 1921-1927.” In “There She Is, Miss America”: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant, edited by Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin, 27-52. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Haskins, Victoria K. Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson, 1914-1934. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2012. Hendricks, Nancy. Popular Fads and Crazes through American History. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2018. Hilger, Michael. Native Americans in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Hill, Colleen and Steele, Valerie. Exposed: A History of Lingerie. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 307 Hinsley, Curtis M. and David R. Wilcox, eds. Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World’s Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Ho, Vivian. “Fire Tore Through the Karuk Tribe’s Homeland. Many Won’t Be Able to Rebuild.” The Guardian, October 23, 2020. Hodge, F. Webb. “A Zuni Footrace.” American Anthropologist 3, no. 3 (July 1890): 227- 232. Holm, Tom. The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Hoopes, Chad L. “Redick McKee and the Humboldt Bay Region, 1851-1852.” California Historical Society Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Sept. 1970): 195-219. Howe & Peters Consulting Engineers. “Engineer’s Report to California State Automobile Association Covering the Work of the California Highway Commission for the Period 1911-1920.” In The State Highways of California: An Engineering Study Conducted Jointly by the Automobile Club of Southern California and the California State Automobile Association. Los Angeles and San Francisco: Automobile Club of Southern California and California State Automobile Association, 1921. Hoxie, Frank. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Huntsinger, Lynn and McCaffrey, Sarah. “A Forest for the Trees: Forest Management and the Yurok Environment, 1850 to 1994.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19, no. 4 (1995): 155-192. Hurtado, Albert L. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Innes, Robert Alexander and Kim Anderson, eds. Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015. Ishii, Lomayumtewa C. “Hopi Culture and a Matter of Representation.” Indigenous Nations Studies Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 33-52. Iverson, Peter. When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching in the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Jameson, Elizabeth. All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 308 Jacoby, Karl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Jager, Rebecca Kay. Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Kastner, Charles B. Bunion Derby: The 1928 Footrace Across America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. __________. Race Across America: Eddie Gardner and the Great Bunion Derbies. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2020. Keegan, Tara. “Runners of a Different Race: North American Indigenous Athletes and National Identities in the Early Twentieth Century.” Master’s Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. __________. “Tom Longboat.” The Encyclopedia of Canadian Sport. https://encyclopediaofcanadiansport.org/tomlongboat/. Kelman, Ari. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books, 2016. Kessler, Donna J. The Making of Sacagawea: A Euro-American Legend. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Kilpatrick, Jacqueline. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Kolb, Joe and Bruce Barcott. “Native Son.” Runner’s World, April 30, 2015. Kozol, Wendy. “Miss Indian America: Regulatory Gazes and the Politics of Affiliation.” Feminist Studies 31, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 64-94. Kroeber, Alfred L. Yurok Myths. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Kroeber, Theodora. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. Krouse, Susan Applegate. North American Indians in the Great War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 309 Laderman, Scott. Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Laegreid, Renée. Riding Pretty: Rodeo Royalty in the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. __________. "Rodeo Queens at the Pendleton Round-up: The First Go-Round, 1910- 1917." Oregon Historical Quarterly 104, no. 1 (2003): 6-23. Lahti, Janne. “Silver Screen Savages: Images of Apaches in Motion Pictures.” Journal of Arizona History 54, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 51-84. LeBaron, Gaye. “Indian Marathon Touted Redwood Highway.” Press-Democrat (Santa Rosa, CA), August 8, 2004. Leechman, Douglas and Robert A. Hall, Jr. “American Indian Pidgin English: Attestations and Grammatical Peculiarities.” American Speech (1955): 163-171. Lewis, David G. and Thomas J. Connolly. “White American Violence on Tribal Peoples on the Oregon Coast.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 120, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 368-381. Liebmann, Matthew. Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2012. Lindsay, Brendan C. Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Lomawaima, K. T. "The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherit America." American Indian Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2013): 333-351. London, Johnathan. Fire Race: A Karuk Coyote Tale. San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 1993. Loofbourow, Leon L. In Search of God’s Gold: A Story of Continued Christian Pioneering in California. San Francisco: The Historical Society of the California- Nevada Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, 1950. Louter, David. Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Lu, Henry. Run to the East: A Film by Henry Lu. 2020. RuntotheEast.com. 310 Lumsden, Linda J. Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Luthin, Herbert W., ed. Surviving Through the Days: Translations of Native California Stories and Songs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Madley, Benjamin. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Margolin, Malcolm, ed. The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs and Reminiscences. Berkeley: California Historical Society, 2017. Martin, Carol. Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Marubbio, M. Elise. Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006. Mathes, Valerie Sherer, ed. The Women’s National Indian Association: A History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. Mays, Kyle, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. McConnell-Sidorick, Sharon. Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia’s Radical Hoisery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. McDonnell, Janet. The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-1934. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. McFeely, Eliza. Zuni and the American Imagination. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. McKegney, Sam, ed. Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014. McKinley, Carol. “Sand Creek Massacre Statue To Replace Torn Down Soldier Monument At Colorado’s Capitol.” CPR News, November 21, 2020. McNally, Robert Aquinas. The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Mellis, Allison Fuss. Riding Buffaloes and Broncos: Rodeo and Native Traditions in the Northern Great Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. 311 Meriwether, Jeffrey Lee and Laura Mattoon D’Amore, eds. We Are What We Remember: The American Past Through Commemoration. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Meyer, Stephen. Manhood on the Line: Working-class Masculinities in the American Heartland. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Middleton, Richard. Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2007. Milroy, Andy. “In the Beginning: Native Americans.” Ultrarunning Magazine, August 15, 2013. Morgan, T. J. “The ‘Field Matron’ Work Among the Indians.” Friends' Intelligencer 47, no. 48 (1890): 765. Nabokov, Peter. Indian Running. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1981. Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Norgaard, Kari Marie, Ron Reed, and J.M. Bacon. “How Environmental Decline Restructures Indigenous Gender Practices: What Happens to Karuk Masculinity When There Are No Fish?” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4 no. 1 (2018): 98- 113. O’Brien, Jean. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Oldenziel, Ruth. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999. Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scribner, 2010. Oriard, Michael. Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Ostler, Jeffrey. Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. __________. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 312 Otis, D. S. and Francis Paul Prucha, eds. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Oxendine, Joseph B. American Indian Sports Heritage. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Books, 1988. Parezo, Nancy J. “‘A Special Olympics’: Testing Racial Strength and Endurance at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition.” In The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism, edited by Susan Brownell, 59-126. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Peters, Kurt M. “Continuing Identity: Laguna Pueblo Railroaders in Richmond, California.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22 (1998): 187-198. Peterson, Jessie and Thelma Cox Knoles, eds. Pancho Villa: Intimate Recollections by People Who Knew Him. New York: Hastings House, 1977. Pochmara, Anna. The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011. Powers, Stephen. Tribes of California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Raibmon, Paige. Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth- Century Northwest Coast. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Rawls, James J. and Walton Bean. California: An Interpreptive History. 6th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1993. Reno, Dawn E. Native American Collectibles: Identification and Price Guide. 1st edition. New York: Avon Books, 1994. Riddle, Jeff C. The Indian History of the Modoc War and the Causes that Led to It. San Francisco: Marnell, 1914. Righter, Robert W. The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy: American’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Robinson, John. “The Redwood Highway: Part II—Building the Road.” California Highways and Public Works (July-August 1964): 24-33. Robinson, Roger. “Footsteps: Deerfoot.” Runner’s World, October 6, 2008. 313 Rohrbough, Malcolm J. Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Rosier, Paul C. Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Rotundo, Anthony E. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Ruby, Robert H. and John A. Brown. The Spokane Indians: Children of the Sun. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970. Ryback, Timothy W. “An American Bible,” in Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life. New York: Random House, Inc., 2010. Rydell, Robert. All the World’s A Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Sanchez, Victoria E. “Buying into Racism: American Indian Product Icons in the American Marketplace.” In American Indians and the Mass Media, edited by Meta G. Carstarphen and John P. Sanchez, 153-168. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. “Sand Creek Healing Run Honors Ancestors, Heals Runners.” Indian Country Today, December 4, 2013. Sandler, Michael. Barefoot Running: How to Run Light and Free by Getting in Touch with the Earth. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010. “Santa Fe Indian’s Band 2012 Reunion.” Old Trails Journal (Winslow Historical Society and Old Trails Museum) 3, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2013): 3. Scheick, William J. The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979. Schilling, Vincent. “Jordan Marie Daniel Ran and Prayed for 26 #MMIW Names at 26.2 Mile Boston Marathon.” Indian Country Today, April 23, 2019. Seaman, Rebecca M., ed. Conflict in the Early Americas: An Encyclopedia of the Spanish Empire’s Aztec, Incan, and Mayan Conquests. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2013. Sears, Edward S. Running Through the Ages. 2nd edition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015. 314 Sheinkin, Steve. Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team. New York: Roaring Books Press, 2017. Smiler, Andrew P., Gwen Kay and Benjamin Harris. “Tightening and Loosening Masculinity's (K)nots: Masculinity in the Hearst Press During the Interwar Period.” The Journal of Men’s Studies 16, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 266-279. Smith-Ferri, Sherrie. “The Development of the Commercial Market for Pomo Indian Baskets,” Expedition Magazine 40, no. 1 (1998): 15-22. Sousa, Ashely Riley. “Unsifted: Hawaiian Indian Coalescence in Central California, 1864-1970.” In Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past and Engaging the Present, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, Jeffrey Ostler, and Joshua L Reid, 117-138. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Spitz, Julia. “Nipmucs Add History to Memorial to Deer Island Internment.” Metro West Daily News, October 24, 2010. St. Germaine, Rick. “Sand Creek Memorial Run Ignites Emotions; Cheyenne/Arapaho Runners Confront City of Denver.” Indian Country Today, October 20, 2005. Standing Bear, Luther and E. A. Brininstool. My People, the Sioux. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. London: Willian Heinemann LTD, 1945. Strout, Erin. “Rosalie Fish Ran for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. What’s Next for this State Champion?” Women’s Running, June 5, 2019, https://www.womensrunning.com/culture/people/she-ran-for-missing-and- murdered-indigenous-women-whats-next-for-this-state-champion/. “The Karuk’s Innate Relationship with Fire: Adapting to Climate Change on the Klamath.” U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. Updated July 22, 2020, https://toolkit.climate.gov/case-studies/karuk%E2%80%99s-innate-relationship- fire-adapting-climate-change-klamath. “The Voice of a Generation: Bobbi Jean Three Legs.” Voices of Indian Country. Native Hope. https://blog.nativehope.org/the-voice-of-a-generation-bobbi-jean-three- legs-part-1. Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. 315 Thrush, Coll. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. __________. Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Tice, Karen W. Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry, Student Bodies, and College Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Tilton, Robert S. Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Torliatt, Lee. Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2001. __________. “Indian Marathons 1920’s Runners Go for Cash and Glory.” The Journal of the Sonoma County Historical Society 2 (1999): 6-9. Trafzer, Clifford E., Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, eds. Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Tripp, Bill. “Our Land Was Taken. But We Still Hold the Knowledge of How to Stop Mega-fires.” The Guardian, September 16, 2020. Tucker, Howard A. History of Governor Walton’s War on Ku Klux Klan, the Invisible Empire. Oklahoma City: Southwest Publishing, 1923. Tveskov, Mark A. “Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast.” American Anthropologist 109, no. 3 (September 2007): 431-441. Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Matters: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Vogel, Eve. “Defining One Pacific Northwest Among Many Possibilities: The Political Construction of a Region and its River During the New Deal.” Western Historical Quarterly 42 (Spring 2011): 29-53. Washington, Booker T. ed. The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day. New York: James Pott & Company, 1903. 316 Watson, Julia. “‘As Gay and As Indian As They Chose’: Collaboration and Counter- Ethnography in ‘In the Land of the Grasshopper Song,’” Biography 31, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 397-428. Whaley, Gray. Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. Willett, C. and Phillis Cunnington. The History of Underclothes. London: M. Joseph, 1951. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409. Wright-McLeod, Brian. “Songs of Transformation: Music from Screech Songs to Hip Hop,” in The World of Indigenous North America, edited by Robert Warrior, 265- 290. New York: Routledge, 2015. Zitkala-Ša. American Indian Stories. Washington: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921. 317