July 2012 – Page 4 – The History Blog

Lost silent film with all-Native American cast found

July 16, 2012

Modern(ish)

The Daughter of Dawn, an 80-minute feature film, was shot in July of 1920 in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, southwest Oklahoma. It was unique in the annals of silent film (or talkies, for that matter) for having a cast of 300 Comanches and Kiowas who brought their own clothes, horses, tipis, everyday props and told one of their traditional stories from when the United States Cavalry wasn’t even a gleam in the British cavalry’s eye. It was a love story, a four-person star-crossed romance that ends with the two main characters together happily ever after. There are two buffalo hunt sequences with actual herds of buffalo being chased down by hunters on bareback just as they had done on the Plains 50 years earlier.

The male lead was played by White Parker; another featured female role was played by Wanada Parker. They were the son and daughter of the powerful Comanche chief Quanah Parker, the last of the free Plains Quahadi Comanche warriors. He never lost a battle to United States forces, but, his people sick and starving, he surrendered at Fort Sill in 1875. Quanah was the son of Comanche chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, the daughter of Euro-American settlers who had grown up in the tribe after she was kidnapped as a child by the Comanches who killed her parents. She was the model for Stands With a Fist in Dances with Wolves.

Written and directed by Norbert Myles, an opinionated, hot-tempered West Virginian whose conflicts with studio bigwigs led him to seek work outside of Hollywood, the movie was produced by the fledgling Texas Film Company whose founder, Richard E. Banks, had worked and lived with Indians for 25 years. It was Banks who ensured the script told an authentic story from the perspective of the Plains peoples instead of the already clichéd cowboys-vs.-Indians shoot-em-ups.

In one scene a young buffalo bumps into one of the riders. The Kiowa is knocked from his horse to the rocky terrain of the Wichita Mountains area.

“The rider just gets back up, and goes on,” said Matt Reed, a curator at the Oklahoma Museum of History. “You’re like, ‘Wow, you’re in a breechcloth and moccasins and riding at full speed you just fell from a horse and it didn’t even faze you.’ These are some tough, tough people.”

According to the October 17, 1920, issue of the influential industry trade magazine Motion Picture News, an exclusive preview of The Daughter of Dawn had been shown earlier that week at the College Theater in Los Angeles to great critical acclaim. It was an “original and breath-taking adventure” which had “hardly been duplicated before.” Notwithstanding the fine notices, it doesn’t appear to have gone much further than that. There’s no evidence that the movie was ever nationally distributed.

Many silent pictures, even the ones that were immensely popular, were lost over the years, and it seemed that The Daughter of Dawn had suffered that sad fate. The reservation tribes people knew about the movie from word of mouth; there were 36 production stills in the Museum of the Western Prairie and a complete script in the Library of Congress, but that was it.

In 2005, Brian Hearn, the film curator at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, received a phone call from a private investigator offering to sell him a silver nitrate film that he had received as payment from a client. The PI hadn’t watched it, but he thought it was The Daughter of Dawn. The museum did not have a film collection at that time, so Hearn enlisted the aid of the Oklahoma Historical Society. After copious fundraising, the OHS was able to purchase the reels and restore them so this priceless record of Comanche and Kiowa history, Oklahoma history and early film history could get the audience it never had a chance to get in 1920.

The Daughter of Dawn was screened for the first time in almost a century last month at the deadCENTER Film Festival in Oklahoma City. Future screenings haven’t been scheduled yet, but keep an eye on the website for news. The Oklahoma Historical Society also plans to release the movie on DVD and Blu-Ray, complete with features on the history of the film and one particularly important artifact therefrom.

As staff visited with Kiowa and Comanche friends who identified people in the movie and described some of the objects brought from their homes to the set, one object in particular stood out. It was a tepee with bold horizontal stripes positioned at a key spot in every scene. The Kiowas said it was an especially significant tepee that disappeared in 1928.

Just a few years ago, while one of their curators was going through collections at the Oklahoma History Center, he pulled a canvas tepee off the shelf, unrolled it, and recognized it as the tepee in the movie, Blackburn said.

“If he had never seen ‘Daughter of Dawn,’ the tepee might still be undiscovered,” Blackburn said. “And next year, the tepee will be used in a new museum exhibit.”

That tipi was given to the Kiowas by the Cheyenne in the 1830s as a symbol of peace between the peoples. In 1916, new images were painted on it by artists Silverhorn and Steven Mopope, the latter one of the famous Kiowa Five, a team of artists who became internationally known for their virtuoso skills in the traditional arts. You can see the tipi at the Oklahoma Historical Society in the video at the top of the linked article.

Here are the first ten minutes of The Daughter of Dawn. Dawn is played by Esther LeBarre. Her father the Chief is played by Hunting Horse. Her lover, White, is played by White Parker. Wolf, the man who loves her unrequited, is played by Jack Sankeydoty. Red Wing, who loves Wolf unrequited, is played by Wanada Parker. The score is by controversial Comanche symphonic composer Dr. David Yeagley.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVU3L39cU8s&w=430]

Legendary early center of Viking power found

July 15, 2012

Medieval, Treasures

According to the Royal Frankish Annals, the small port town of Sliasthorp by the Baltic Sea bay of Schlei in southern Jutland was expanded into a powerful military center by the early, possibly the first, Viking King Godfred in 808 A.D. Historians have interpreted Sliasthorp as the trading settlement of Hedeby, the largest Scandinavian city of the Viking era, or as a legend with an unknown factual basis.

An archaeological team from Aarhus University in Denmark have found the remains of an elite Viking town near Schlei Bay that they believe is King Godfred’s Sliasthorp. It all began in 2003 when then-student archaeologist Andres Dobat decided to investigate the area near Hedeby by the Danish-German border looking for other Viking settlements. He took a metal detector to locations where Viking artifacts had been discovered before and near the Schlei Bay town Füsing, he found a gold bracelet. Other metal artifacts from the Viking Age followed indicating a possible settlement.

He then had the excellent idea to fly over the area so he might be able to spot signs of Viking homes. The soil is more fertile over Viking walls, apparently, so if you see a checkerboard of taller, fuller, longer-lived crops, you could well be seeing a map of Viking settlement. Dobat took aerial pictures of cornfields which upon examination revealed the outlines of houses, probably Viking pit-houses. Archaeologists from Dobat’s school, the University of Kiel in Germany, confirmed his work using geophysical surveying tools which found there were at least 100 pit-houses under the soil.

In 2010, Dobat, now a prehistoric archaeology professor at Aarhus University, received a grant to excavate the spot. The excavation is now in its third season and has born exceptional fruit. They have found about 200 houses filled with artifacts like beads, glass fragments, amulets, metal riding equipment, knives, axes, arrowheads and caltrops, large pointy jacks-like items that were dropped in fields to stab the feet of enemy forces.

In addition to the pit-homes, they also discovered the remains of ten smaller longhouses and one longhouse 100 feet long and 30 feet wide that had been burned down during the 10th century. The weapons found on the spot indicate it was destroyed in battle.

The attack took place long after King Godfred’s death. But even if he had been alive, it’s still unlikely that he witnessed the attack. Back then, kings were always on the go and rarely spent long periods at Sliasthorp.

As a consequence, the daily running of the town is likely to have been administered by the town chief, who lived in the lavish longhouse. [..]

The king wasn’t the only one travelling in and out of the Viking town. The town’s population figures fluctuated several times within the same year, depending on whether there was a need for craftsmen and soldiers in the area. Only a select group of the absolute elite Vikings lived in Sliasthorp over extended periods.

Based on the industrial design and the building style, Dobat reckons that a majority of the houses in the town were only used a few weeks a year. At times there were 100 people in the town; other times perhaps over 1,000.

The town was in use for about 300 years between approximately 700 and 1000 A.D. Dobat believes the town was an elite power center, populated by religious military leaders who would then found larger trading centers nearby. The dating supports his hypothesis. Sliasthorp was founded 100 years before Hedeby which is about three miles away. At least one other large Viking Age town, Birka, near Stockholm, seems to have been founded and run by small neighboring elite settlements, not by the merchants who would inhabit it.

Andres Dobat believes this means that the entire urban development in the northern German/southern Denmark region began with Sliasthorp.

“This is common European history. We have actually found the origins of what we today call Hamburg,” says Dobat.

“When the Vikings built this town and Hedeby, they were a precursor of Schleswig, which in the early Middle Ages was the great trading city in the region. Schleswig, in turn, was the precursor of Lübeck, which today has given way to Hamburg. We’re digging at the roots of world economy.”

Philly’s Rodin Museum returns to its original glory

July 14, 2012

Modern(ish), Museums

After a three-year, $9 million renovation of the grounds, museum and sculptures, the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia reopened Friday restored to the original 1929 vision of its architect Paul Crét. The Rodin Museum was founded by movie theater magnate Jules Mastbaum who in 1926 hired the French-born Crét and landscape architect Jacques Gréber to create a sophisticated Beaux Art building with a formal French garden that would showcase, both indoors and out, the sculptures by Auguste Rodin he’d been collecting since he was first introduced to the artist’s work in Paris in September 1924.

Although Mastbaum died that same year, when the museum was completed in 1929, his wife honored his commitment to gift it to the city of Philadelphia. Thus Philadelphia became home to the largest collection of Rodin’s works outside Paris, including more than 140 original marble sculptures, plaster studies and bronze castings made before and after Rodin’s death in 1917. (Most of the extant Rodin bronzes around the world were actually cast from his original stone and plaster work after his death.) There are also original prints, letters, books and over 600 drawings in the collection.

The bronze casting of The Gates of Hell, a set of monumental doors inspired by Dante’s Inferno that Rodin worked on for 37 years and for which he first created some of his most famous figures, like The Thinker, The Kiss, Adam and Eve, is one of three originals cast from Rodin’s plaster model in 1917. It was made specifically for Mastbaum. The Gates hold pride of place in the museum in the entrance gallery, emphasizing the connection between the doors and the later sculptures Rodin derived from them. A bronze of The Thinker stands watch outside the main entry to the museum.

All of the other sculptures that were originally placed on the grounds have been returned to their original spots in the French garden. They had been brought inside in the late 1960s to protect them from the acid rain that had eaten away at their surfaces. Curators were able to restore the original finishes and to apply protective coatings that will keep the sculptures from suffering the same fate again. Only one piece, The Burghers of Calais, is still in need of refurbishment. It’s been put in place outside and conservators will work on it in situ.

The museum building itself was also thoroughly restored to its period condition but with updated systems like brand new air conditioning for the first time in its life, something that will make summer vacation visits far more bearable. Restorers stripped off layers of paint and faux marble that had been applied in previous renovations to the inside walls. They returned the original paint colors and replicated the original linen wall coverings in the museum’s central gallery. They also removed the paint from wood architectural elements and restored them to their original finishes.

Sally Malenka, conservator of decorative arts and sculpture, spearheaded the archaeological dig into the museum’s past, discovering the original painted wall surfaces and other obliterated elements through examination of paint chips, Crét’s drawings and accounts, and contemporary newspaper descriptions.

“It’s interesting that for a building as recent as 1929, some of the history of what the original interior looked like is really not known,” Malenka said. “We had some old black-and-white photographs and some correspondence. So we knew there was fabric on the walls. We didn’t know at that time that the rooms were red, so there was a combination of looking for archival materials and other historical or contemporary accounts, and also investigating what the finishes were by what remained in situ.”

It’s astonishing how quickly current events become nebulous ancient history. Who’d have thought you’d need to do archaeological research to restore a museum that is only 83 years old.

The Rodin’s Museum website is excellent. You can browse pictures of the sculptures in the collection, or explore them grouped together in relevant themes.

For a fascinating voyage through The Gates of Hell, you simply must view this video from the Canal Educatif a la Demande (CED). Registration is free, and trust me, it is more than worth the price of admission. It’s a riveting story exceptionally well told.

Guns taken from Bonnie & Clyde’s bodies for sale

July 13, 2012

Modern(ish)

Two Colt handguns that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were carrying when they were ambushed and killed in a hail of bullets on May 23, 1934 are coming up for auction in September. RR Auction in Amherst, New Hampshire has already opened Clyde’s Colt .45 1911 Government Model semi-automatic pistol and Bonnie’s Colt Detective Special .38 revolver to online bidders; the auction closes on Sunday September 30, 2012.

Unlike the Winchester shotgun and the Thompson sub-machine gun confiscated from the Barrow gang’s Joplin hideout that were sold at auction earlier this year, these handguns are directly connected to Bonnie and Clyde, and not just directly connected but intimately so. Former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, the leader of the six-man posse that hunted down and ambushed the infamous outlaws, retrieved Clyde’s Colt .45 from the waistband of his pants after he was felled in rural Bienville Parish, Louisiana.

With the Colt is a notarized letter from former Special Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, Jr., dated December 18, 1973 in which he states that this pistol, #164070, was removed from the “waistband of Clyde Barrow’s trousers the morning that he and Bonnie Parker were killed by my father in Louisiana.” He goes on to say “This pistol is also described and pictured in my father’s book I’m Frank Hamer. He also states that “this pistol was believed to have been stolen from the federal arsenal in Beaumont, Texas,” and that the federal government gave this Colt to his father. Although Clyde Barrow had many guns during his notorious career, there cannot be any with a closer association to him than this one carried at his death.

Bonnie’s Colt .38 is downright salacious. She kept it taped to her inner thigh which is where Hamer found it after she was killed.

A notarized letter from former Special Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, Jr., dated December 10, 1979, identifies this gun and states, “On the morning of May 23, 1934, when my father and the officers with him in Louisiana killed Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. My father removed this gun from the inside thigh of Bonnie Parker where she had it taped with white, medical, adhesive tape. My father said that one reason she had the gun taped to the inside of her leg was that, in those days, no gentlemen officer would search a woman where she had it taped…Sometime later, my father gave this gun to Buster Davis who had been a Texas Ranger and was, at the time, an FBI Agent.” Included with this gun and mentioned in this letter is a framed handwritten note from Frank Hamer, written on the back of an old Texas Ranger Expense Account form, reads “Aug/1934 Davis hold onto this. Bonnie was ‘squatting’ on it. Frank.”

Hamer got to keep both weapons as part of his compensation for hunting down Bonnie and Clyde. He had quit the Texas Rangers after 27 years on the force two years earlier and in 1934 was working private security for oil companies, mainly breaking strikes. Texas Department of Corrections Chief Lee Simmons commissioned Hamer to find the Barrow Gang, but he could only offer $180 a month. Hamer was making more than double that doing easier work for the oil companies. To sweeten the pot, Simmons allowed Hamer to keep all the guns recovered from the gang and whatever of their possessions he wanted, in addition to his sixth of the reward money (which turned out to be a meager $200.23).

The weapons are being sold by the estate of Robert E. Davis, a Texas collector who bought them from the Hamer family. The pre-sale estimate for each gun is between $100,000 and $200,000, but it’s highly unlikely they’ll go that cheap. The Winchester shotgun sold for $80,000, the Tommy Gun for $130,000. These pistols are in a whole other category of macabre collectability.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR2osFor40E&w=430]
Footage of Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-riddled car and bodies taken by posse member and Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Ted Hinton five minutes after the ambush.

Rare, pristine whiskey bottles found in Missouri attic

July 12, 2012

Modern(ish), Treasures

When Bryan and Emily Fite bought an 1850s home in St. Joseph, Missouri last year, they knew it needed work. One of the first projects they undertook was installing central heat and air, which they had to rewire the house to accomplish. Bryan pried up some floorboards in the attic to lay the new wires and underneath found mysterious tubes wrapped in paper with writing on it. His first thought was they were old steam heat conduits from when the house was first built that were wrapped in paper insulation. When he unwrapped the paper, instead of century-old pipe he found a century-old bottle of whiskey. Then he found 12 more of them.

There are three different brands — Hellman’s Celebrated Old Crow whiskey, Guckenheimer Pennsylvania rye whiskey, W.H. McBrayer’s Cedar Brook whiskey — all of them bottled in 1917 and distilled four or five years earlier. On January 16, 1919, the eighteenth amendment to the US Constitution was ratified and Prohibition became the law of the land, decimating the whiskey distilling business. None of the makers of the Fites’ whiskeys survived.

The 1917 Hellman’s Old Crow might have been some of the last bottles ever sold. Hellman’s was sued for trademark infringement by W.A. Gaines and Company, a Kentucky liquor company which had produced a very famous brand of “Old Crow” whiskey since 1835. It was named for Doctor James C. Crow, a Scottish medical doctor who moved to Kentucky and in the 1830s used his knowledge of chemistry to invent the sour mash process for creating bourbon. The aged runs became known as “Old Crow” and were massively popular. After Dr. Crow’s death in 1856, W.A. Gaines and Co. continued to sell his original stock for as long as they could. When they ran out, they made a replica, although Crow’s exact formula was lost.

“Old Crow” was the favorite brand of many notable 19th and 20th century figures like President Andrew Jackson, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, Confederate general John Hunt Morgan, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Hunter S. Thompson. It had a huge reputation, a reputation W.A. Gaines and Company was keen not be sullied by the St. Louis blend the Hellman Distilling Company had been selling as “Celebrated Old Crow” since 1863 when the Civil War choked off liquor shipments from the South. Hellman’s countered that they owned the trademark to the name and the case dragged on in the courts for almost a decade until in 1918 the Supreme Court of these United States ruled decisively in Gaines’ favor.

~ Tangent time! ~

Edson Bradley, a New York financier and the son of a prosperous Connecticut shoe manufacturer, invested in the Kentucky whiskey business in the 1880s. When W.A. Gaines and Co. incorporated in 1887, he was appointed vice president. It was he who registered the first company trademark to “Old Crow” in 1887, and all the subsequent trademark registrations done to try to muscle out the many, many copycats.

Eventually he became president and was widely known in the press as the richest liquor baron in the country. By 1907 he was Scrooge McDuck rich and since this was the Gilded Age, he bought a city block on DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. and built a French Gothic mansion complete with entire rooms ripped out of actual Gothic mansions in France. It had a chapel that could seat 150 and a complete multi-story 500-seat theater. It was known as Aladdin’s Palace and was the largest, richest home in D.C.

When Prohibition hit, the Gaines Company struggled along for a few more years until it was dissolved in 1922. Bradley was 70 years old by then, so in February of 1923 he decided to retire to Newport, Rhode Island, along with all the other Gilded Age barons. In the epitome of Gilded Age baron style, he brought his palace with him. Over the next two years, the DuPont Circle house was dismantled stone by stone and shipped to Newport.

He bought a property along the Cliff Walk which already had an 1885 Elizabethan Revival mansion on it called Sea View. No problem. Architect Howard Greenley just integrated it into the new house. Sea View became Seaview Terrace, with the old mansion now acting as the east wing of the composite mansion. Greenley gave it an integrated look with turrets inspired by the Loire Valley chateau of Chambord. Two years and two million dollars later, Seaview Terrace was completed.

Edson Bradley died 10 years later. In 1930, Bradley deeded Seaview Terrace to his daughter Julie, but she lost it to the City of Newport during World War II when she couldn’t keep up with the taxes. After that it passed through various hands, was used by two different schools, and most famously, between 1966 and 1971 the exterior was used as the outdoor set for Collinwood Mansion in the vampire soap Dark Shadows.

The estate was purchased in 1974 by Martin and Millicent Carey who restored it, but a building like this is constantly in need of more restoration. It is now known as Carey Mansion. Martin and Millicent’s daughter Denise Ann Carey lives there now, and luckily she’s an architect.

~ End Tangent ~

After the Repeal of Prohibition on December 5th, 1933, the Gaines plant in Frankfort, Kentucky and the rights to the Old Crow label were bought by the American Medicinal Spirits Company, who in turn sold them to National Distillers Products Company in 1947. National was bought by Jim Beam in 1985 who still produce an Old Crow label, although not out of the Frankfort plant which they closed.

Bryan Fite thinks the 13 bottles might have been a stash hidden by the first owner of their home. According to a history of the house they received when they bought it, the first owner lost the house after he was put in a sanitarium for alcoholism. Perhaps he was planning a party for his return from rehab, a party he never got to have.

The Fites do not plan to sell the whiskey. They’re history buffs and they love that they’ve found liquid gold under the floorboards of their attic. They might break the label on a bottle or two in 2017 to celebrate the centennial of their purchase, but otherwise, the whiskey is staying in the house where it was first stashed almost a hundred years ago.