The Cherokee Kid: Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and the Making of an American Icon by Amy M. Ware (review)

Will Rogers was for a time one of the most dominant figures in American popular culture. The star of over sixty films and a populist philosopher whose columns appeared in hundreds of the nation’s newspapers, he attracted a huge and devoted following during his relatively brief life (he was killed in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935).

Amy Ware’s contribution to Rogers scholarship concentrates on the myriad ways in which his performances and pronouncements drew on his Cherokee background, something that has often been missed in biographies and accounts of his place in national entertainment history. Rogers’s fans, more often than not, thought of him as an Oklahoma cowboy, and it’s true that he cultivated this image, especially with his laconic delivery, Western dress, and mastery of stunt roping tricks. Further, his marriage to a white woman and his long residence in Hollywood didn’t encourage the popular media to pay attention to the many references he made to Native American culture.

Rogers acquired his concern for the complex issues that enveloped the Cherokee people throughout his lifetime from his family, who were distinguished leaders and landowners in Oklahoma. When Rogers was born in 1879—the youngest of eight children—his parents, both of Cherokee descent, had established a profitable cattle ranch where Rogers began his training as a master roper. He came to understand his people’s minority status better when he joined traveling Wild West shows that took him to South Africa, Australia, and the world’s fair. His subsequent career in vaudeville and then in the Ziegfeld Follies brought him into contact with other ethnic entertainers, whose comic performances showed how one could enter laughing into American cultural discourse.

Ware sketches these facts quickly, and then moves to a detailed presentation of Cherokee history and culture in late nineteenth-century Oklahoma, an essential for the remainder of the book; its main thesis is that Rogers, while ostensibly portraying a rope-wielding cowboy in his various acts, always featured Indian elements too. Ware tirelessly mines the many references Rogers made to his tribal homeland throughout his career and also asserts that he constantly presented Cherokees as superior to the other tribal peoples. Alternately complementing and complicating the argument of the book is the long, rather gnarled, and sometimes confusing account of the admittedly tangled web of Native-United States Government relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This early portion of the study needs to be there as a foundation, but it should have been treated with more clarity and explanation.

Further, we understand that the several existing biographies of Rogers obviate the need to rehearse his life in full, but an absence of key facts later in the book means that we don’t have as full a sense of the man himself; the lack of a detailed biographical skeleton creates some blank spaces that the reader needs to have filled in. Ware does, however, give us some wonderful pictures of Rogers’s ancestors early in the text, including quotes from a treasure trove of family letters. She also provides an exceptionally acute portrayal of the Rogers’s slaveholding history, something that deeply complicated Rogers’s later—and troubling—stance toward African Americans. There is virtually nothing, however, on Rogers’s marriage or the day-to-day life he lived in California.

Readers of this journal might get a bit impatient with the study, as Ware doesn’t get around to a detailed examination of Rogers’s humor until the last half of the book (admittedly, his use of comedy is not a major concern here). When she finally tackles this subject, however, we learn a great deal about his comic creations and conventions. As humor critics have revealed, Native Americans relish humor, and it has been part of almost every aspect of their...