The Real Story Behind the Igorrotes Village at Riverview Park in Chicago, 1906.

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In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

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FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY

When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:

• The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.

Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:

• "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
• "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
• "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM —

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.

 

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A group of tribespeople danced with jerky movements as a man, barefoot and wearing only a g-string cloth, dragged a dog by a rope. The mutt snapped and snarled. Then with one deft stroke, the man slit the animal’s throat before chopping its lifeless body into pieces and throwing it into a communal pot. This was the Igorrote Village at Coney Island, and in 1905, it was the talk of America.

The Igorrotes on show at Coney Island, New York, in the summer of 1905.

The Igorrotes, or Bontoc Igorrotes to use their full tribal name, were from a remote region in the far north of the Philippines named Bontoc. 

Truman Hunt, an opportunistic former medical doctor turned showman, envisioned transporting 50 Igorrotes to America and putting them on display in a mocked-up tribal village at Coney Island.

In early 1905, Truman Hunt traveled to Bontoc and made the Bontoc Igorrotes an audacious offer. If they agreed to leave their family and friends behind for a year and journey with him to the United States to put on a show of their native customs, he would pay them each $15 a month in wages.

Before long, the Igorrotes had made Hunt a fortune.

But he was spending money as quickly as the Igorrotes earned it. He had no desire to share his lucrative trade with anyone. But, hot on Hunt’s heels, another group of Igorrotes arrived in America. They were traveling with Richard Schneidewind, another Spanish-American war veteran and a former cigar salesman.

The two men could not have been more different. Hunt was a charming risk-taker and regarded the tribespeople as a commodity. Schneidewind, who had been married to a Philippine woman who died giving birth to their first son, treated “his” tribespeople like family. He invited them to his home to meet his son and to eat dinner with them. 

Schneidewind took his Igorrote exhibition group to the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon, then on to Chutes Park in Los Angeles, where they were a huge hit.

Hunt was furious. He split his tribespeople into several troupes to maximize his profits. Hunt’s groups toured the country, making dozens of stops lasting from a few days to several weeks.

The rivalry between Hunt and Schneidewind was intense. In May of 1906, Hunt and Schneidewind ended up at a competing park, Riverview Park in Chicago. There the two showmen did everything they could to undermine each other’s exhibits.

Hunt rubbished Schneidewind’s reputation with his newspaper friends. Schneidewind and his business partner, Edmund Felder, wrote to the head of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, the U.S. government agency located within that War Department charged with administering the nation’s newly acquired territories. Their letter reported that the village Hunt and his associates operated at Sans Souci Park in Chicago was in terrible condition. They wrote that the 18 men and women in Hunt’s group were crammed into three small A-frame tents in a muddy scrap of the land beneath the roller coaster. Though arguably motivated more by business rivalry than concern for their fellow human beings, their description was accurate.

A member of the public -- possibly put up to it by Schneidewind and Felder -- wrote to the Bureau complaining that the Bontoc Igorrotes were living in squalor. There were further rumors that Hunt had stolen the tribe’s wages, that two men in the group had died on the road, and that the showman had failed to bury their bodies.

Both Hunt and Schneidewind had brought their Igorrote groups into America with permission from the U.S. government, an entity with a clear incentive to portray the people of the Philippines as primitive. How could such a society govern itself if it was filled with citizens as “backward” as the Igorrotes?  If it was true that Hunt was mistreating the Igorrotes, the government could hardly afford to be engulfed in a major scandal that could turn public opinion even further against a permanent presence in the Philippines.

Alarmed, the chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, Clarence Edwards, and his deputy, Frank McIntyre, called in one of their agents, Frederick Barker, and asked him to investigate the claims.

When Hunt received a tip-off that the Bureau was sending a man to examine his Igorrote enterprise, he fled town. He went on the run, taking some of the tribespeople with him.

A manhunt followed as Pinkerton detectives, the government agent, creditors and a woman who accused Hunt of bigamy pursued the showman across America and Canada. Hunt proved himself to be a slippery opponent. Finally, in October 1906, he was arrested on multiple charges of stealing from the Igorrotes and sentenced to 18 months in the state workhouse after a sensational trial in Memphis.

With his rival out of the way, Schneidewind emerged as the leading showman in the Igorrote exhibition trade. In the winter of 1906, Schneidewind returned to the Philippines to collect another Igorrote group and embarked on a second tour of America. A third U.S. tour followed in 1908.

In 1911, despite vociferous opposition from Bontoc tribal elders and officials of nearby towns, Schneidewind was permitted to take a group of 55 Igorrotes to Europe, where they exhibited in France, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

Schneidewind and his associates were unfamiliar with the European entertainment business, and in 1913, after two years on the road, they ran into serious financial difficulties. What happened next was alarmingly reminiscent of Truman Hunt’s tour. According to American newspaper reports, in the winter of 1913, a group of starving Igorrotes was found wandering the streets of Ghent, Belgium. The group’s interpreters, Ellis Tongai and James Amok, wrote to President Woodrow Wilson begging for his assistance. In their letter, they complained that they had not been paid for many months and reported the deaths of nine members of their group, including five children.

Schneidewind told the Igorrotes that if they stayed on and continued working for him until the 1915 San Francisco Exposition, they would earn a handsome wage, allowing them to return home rich. Despite the hardships they had endured, about half of the group wished to stay in Europe, perhaps a sign that Schneidewind’s troubles owed more to incompetence than cruelty or a lack of compassion for the Filipinos.

But, fearing another scandal, the U.S. government was unwilling to give Schneidewind another chance and decided they must intervene. In December 1913, the U.S. consul in Ghent escorted the tribespeople to Marseilles to catch a boat back to Manila.

This disastrous venture did little to help the image of the Igorrote show trade. The Philippine Assembly took action and, in 1914, passed legislation that banned the exhibition of groups of Filipino tribespeople abroad. As a measure of the seriousness with which the Philippine lawmakers regarded the subject, the ban was included as an amendment to a new Anti-Slavery Act.

Schneidewind, like Truman before him, exited the Igorrote show trade. For a full decade, starting in 1905, the Igorrotes had been the greatest show in town, thrilling and scandalizing the American public and filling the nation’s newspapers. But in the intervening period, they disappeared from the public consciousness.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.