"Every Drop of Indian Blood": The Short but Ironic Life of Sylvester Long

Few Native Americans were as well and widely known in the early twentieth century as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. Editors eagerly printed his articles. Civic groups and historical societies invited Long Lance to address them. His 1928 autobiography, Long Lance, told of his "trail upwards" from humble beginnings. The book sold so well, and Long Lance had become so popular, that filmmaker Douglas Burden cast him in the lead role in his 1929 film, The Silent Enemy. Described variously as a "sepia edition of Rudolph Valentino" and "the Indian Sheik of Park Avenue," Long Lance had made it, from the wilds of Montana to the nightlife of jazz-age New York.¹

With immense satisfaction Long Lance noted in 1927 that he was "proud to be as much like a white man as I am, but I'm proud, too, of every drop of Indian blood that runs through my veins."² Throughout his career, Long Lance sought the acceptance and approval of white Americans, and he made a comfortable living by conforming to their expectations of what Indians were and what they ought to be. Consequently, important details of Long Lance's biography and identity became muddied, entangled with his performative self and obscured by his penchant for storytelling. Scholars now know him best for his lies, and he was indeed a skilled teller of tales. According to his most thorough biographer, Long Lance was a "glorious imposter."³ He stood accused by historians and his critics of racial imposture, of assuming identities, and of "playing Indian."⁴ In their attempts to explain why he chose to put a bullet through his brain late one night in 1932, they asserted that he "ended his life after his true identity was revealed." Guilty of "identity cross-dressing," Long Lance sought escape from "his own web of lies." He would rather die than live with the suspicion that he was Black.⁵ Even scholars like Eva Marie Garroutte and Laura Browder, who have presented in their work sophisticated explorations of racial identity in the American South, have missed important parts of Long Lance's story.⁶

It is unfortunate indeed that so many scholars, over so many years, have gotten Long Lance's story so wrong. They have overlooked the obvious: a sad story of a Native American man with a broken heart who no longer felt his life was worth living. No secrets revealed, lies exposed, or true identities uncovered are necessary to account for Long Lance's fatal final decision. It is time for a reconsideration of the stories Long Lance told, of how the various audiences for whom he performed received them, and of how these audiences' expectations limited his choices.

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Like George Copway, Eleazer Williams, and Okah Tubbee—fellow artists, performers, and professional Indians who capitalized on their sometimes slippery identities—Long Lance found it difficult to stray far from those lines of race and color, myth and memory, and ethnicity and expectation to which long-enduring forces in American history had tethered him.⁷ Born Sylvester Long in 1890 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, his parents once had been enslaved. That fate befell many southerners of Native American descent. He learned early about how difficult it was for Native peoples to find space in the racist American republic, and as a result, Long Lance knew about discrimination, bigotry, and the burdens that came with growing up "colored" in the Jim Crow South.⁸

Sylvester Long could stay in North Carolina, like his parents, or he could look for a way out. He always believed his parents' claims that they were Native American. In 1908, after attending Winston-Salem's segregated public schools, he left town and joined John Robinson's popular circus, which included, among other acts, a "complete Wild West," with "every known Wild West Sport and Pastime," including the "Battle of Wounded Knee," the hanging of a horse thief, a stagecoach robbery, and fifty cowboys and Indians (fig. 1).⁹ Over the course of the year he spent there he learned to ride...