UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations

UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Playing West: Performances of War and Empire in Pacific Northwest Pageantry Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56q7p336 Author Vaughn, Chelsea Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Playing West Performances of War and Empire in Pacific Northwest Pageantry A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Chelsea Kristen Vaughn August 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Molly McGarry, Chairperson Dr. Catherine Gudis Dr. Jennifer Doyle Copyright by Chelsea Kristen Vaughn 2016 The Dissertation of Chelsea Kristen Vaughn is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements Earlier versions of Chapter 3 “Killing Narcissa” and Chapter 4 “The Road that Won an Empire” appeared in the Oregon Historical Quarterly. Research for this dissertation was assisted by the following grants: 2014 History Research Grant, Department of History, University of California, Riverside 2013 Dissertation Year Program Fellowship, Graduate Division, UC, Riverside 2012 History Research Grant, Department of History, University of California, Riverside 2012 Donald Sterling Graduate Fellow, Oregon Historical Society iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Playing West Performances of War and Empire in Pacific Northwest Pageantry by Chelsea Kristen Vaughn Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in History University of California, Riverside, August 2016 Dr. Molly McGarry, Chairperson In April 1917 the United States officially entered a war that it had hoped to avoid. To sway popular sentiment, the U.S. government launched a propaganda campaign that rivaled their armed mobilization. Though many came to support the war effort, isolationist tendencies and the ready embrace of social distractions that followed the Armistice suggest a more complicated reaction to the United States’ participation in the First World War. As we approach the centennial anniversary of the nation’s entrance into WWI, it is essential that we reexamine that war’s legacy and question our understanding of the United States’ domestic responses. My dissertation, “Playing West: Performances of War and Empire in Pacific Northwest Pageantry,” does this through a close examination of the historical pageants staged in the Pacific Northwest during the five- year period immediately following the war. These large-scale civic spectacles found v widespread appeal during the Progressive Era in the eastern United States and Midwest only to wane in popularity in the war’s aftermath, yet in Oregon and Washington, pageantry enjoyed its greatest successes between 1919 and 1924 with shows that overwhelmingly employed themes of violence, sacrifice, and empire building, and that occasionally recreated the war itself. vi Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Staging a War: The First World War and the Rise of Historical Pageantry in the Pacific Northwest 15 The Bridge of the Gods 18 The Tradition of Historical Pageantry in the Pacific Northwest 40 World War I in Pageant Form 58 Chapter 2 The Pageant City: Saving Seattle’s Civic Image 73 The Wayfarer 76 The Wayfarer in Seattle 95 Americanus 116 Chapter 3 Killing Narcissa: Race, Gender, and Violence in Recreations of the Whitman Incident 143 Narcissa 147 Martyrs of Yesterday 168 How the West was Won 189 Chapter 4 “The Road That Won an Empire,” Commemoration, Commercialization, and the Promise of Auto Tourism at the “Top o’ Blue Mountains” 213 The Old Oregon Trail 217 The President 236 The Blanket 251 Epilogue 266 Bibliography 279 vii List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 Emma Wooten as Wallulah and Leo Wise as Multnomah in the Astoria Centennial version of The Bridge of the Gods (1911) 27 Figure 1.2 Nez Perce and Yakima performers (1911) 35 Figure 1.3 White actresses portraying “Indian Maidens” (1911) 39 Figure 1.4 A scene from the long-running Mission Play (ca. 1915) 45 Figure 1.5 Emma Wooten as Wallulah (1911) 56 Figure 1.6 View of Laurelhurst Park (ca. 1920) 61 Figure 1.7 Sheet music, Don’t Let Us Sing Anymore About War, Just Let Us Sing About Love Let Us Sing About Love (1918) 69 Figure 2.1 Reverend James E. Crowther, D.D., (ca. 1921) 77 Figure 2.2 “Representatives of all Nations in Final Scene,” (ca. 1921) 81 Figure 2.3 Abraham Lincoln speaks before a stage full of founding fathers (1920) 97 Figure 2.4 Men from Seattle’s Sikh community (1920) 99 Figure 2.5 Uncle Sam poses with other cast members from the pageant Democracy for all Humanity (1920) 100 Figure 2.6 “Angel announcing the resurrection to the two Marys,” (ca. 1921) 108 Figures 2.7 and 2.8 The Wayfarer (ca. 1921) and Americanus (1923) finales 118 Figure 2.9 Reverend Cleveland Kleihauer (1923) 122 Figure 2.10 Sophie Braslau (1918) 124 Figure 3.1 Audrey Speer as Narcissa Whitman in How the West was Won (1923) 148 Figure 3.2 Grace Dunn as the black-cloaked figure of death (1923) 151 Figure 3.3 Grace Lord as Narcissa Whitman in Martyrs of Yesterday (1919) 157 Figure 3.4 Grace Lord in scene depicting the attack on the mission. (1919) 169 viii Figure 3.5 Grace Lord in Whitman’s death scene (1919) 170 Figure 3.6 Guy Reynolds as Joe Lewis in Martyrs of Yesterday (1919) 179 Figure 3.7 Speer’s Whitman surrounded by white children in redface (1923) 194 Figure 3.8 Evelyn Sellers as Sacagawea in How the West was Won (1923) 198 Figure 3.9 Esther Motanic as Sacagawea in How the West was Won (1924) 202 Figure 4.1 Walter Meacham, Warren G. Harding, and Florence Harding (1923) 218 Figure 4.2 Crowd of 30,000 greets President Harding (1923) 222 Figure 4.3 Ezra Meeker in Meacham, Oregon (ca. 1923) 226 Figure 4.4 The Wilson Price Hunt party in the Old Oregon Trail Pageant (1923) 229 Figure 4.5 Autos and tourists in Meacham, Oregon (1923) 235 Figure 4.6 President Harding dedicating a monument (1923) 247 Figure 4.7 Indian encampment at Meacham (1923) 253 Figure 4.8 Poker Jim, Chauncey Bishop, and Cap’ Sumkin (1923) 255 Figure 4.9 Portrayal of Marie Dorian and the Wilson Price Hunt party (1923) 258 Figure 4.10 Local tribal leaders greet President Harding (1923) 260 ix Introduction The unprecedented violence of the First World War forever changed the trajectory of Western art, literature, and performance. It accelerated the development of artistic movements operating under the modernist umbrella, with the collective cultural critique of Dadaism emerging amid the war itself. Participation in the Great War generated a body of anti-war tracts written by those who had witnessed the conflict firsthand that challenged the notion of war as a heroic endeavor. This carnage ultimately led to a broader questioning of European cultural superiority that facilitated an acceptance of uniquely American art forms in both Europe and the United States. In the far northwest corner of the United States, the war’s traumas played out across historical pageantry stages, as the popular art form found new regional relevance in the Armistice’s aftermath. Contextualized against the broader cultural changes associated with the First World War, the popular embrace of historical pageantry by communities throughout Oregon and Washington can appear quaint. The form itself grew out of a prior era’s romanticization of a prior era—that is the Arts and Crafts movement’s antimodernist interest in medieval pageantry and masques.1 Appropriated by Progressive Era reformers, pageants served as tools to relay historical lessons across vast audiences through the apparatus of pre-amplification: pantomime, easily understood allegory, and song.2 The use of pageantry in the wake of WWI appeared antithetical enough to the forward 1 David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 35. 2 Ibid., 118-120. 1 momentum otherwise dominating art and culture that even pageantry’s one-time advocates were increasingly rejecting the form.3 So, why study pageantry? Particularly productions that occurred in a culturally remote corner of the country well after the larger trend had already passed? What claims to relevance can a study of historical pageantry make when juxtaposed against the period’s larger cultural and artistic movements? What does a study of pageantry offer to our understanding of World War I and its aftermath? First, these were not minor affairs. As both a Progressive Era phenomenon and amid its Pacific Northwest height, historical pageants represented a massive mobilization of people on the stage, in the choir, behind the scenes, and in the audience.4 Among the first large-scale pageants to emerge in the early-interwar era, the Pageant of Portland staged in its namesake city— Portland, Oregon, on August 21, 1919—included a cast of over 2,500 performers, represented a joint effort between the national organization War Camp Community Service and the city’s parks department, and attracted an estimated 50,000 to its single showing.5 The first major pageant to grace a Seattle stage, The Wayfarer, held over six nights each during the summers of 1921, 1922, and 1925, had a 3 Ibid., 286. 4 Ibid., 1. 5 Adah Losh Rose, “A Historical Pageant of Oregon” (nd), unpaged, in Walter Meacham Papers [hereafter Meacham Papers]., AX 065, box 8, folder 1, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene [hereafter U of O Special Collections]. These numbers are based on figures provided by the pageant’s author and director, Adah Losh Rose, in promotion of a subsequent pageant staged fourteen years later. Newspaper accounts of the Pageant of Portland support Losh’s cast estimate, but describe the audience attendance simply as “thousands.” This was a free event held in a city park without established seating.

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