[When
I read the long-delayed obituary of Go-won-go Mohawk in the New York Times last month,
I was immediately interested. I thought I’d
never heard of her, an indigenous actress who became a sensation on America’s
stages at the turn of the 20th century, and I wanted to know more.
[(As it turned out, I had run across the name Go-won-go Mohawk. She got a passing mention in “Superheroes on Native Land: Supplement – History of Native American Theater,” posted on Rick On Theater on 2 February 2024. “Superheroes on Native Land” is a series of five posts on Native American theater, published between 21 January and 2 February 2024.)
[I also wondered if there’s enough of her story on record to make a post for Rick On Theater, since a Native American actress from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th would be a perfect subject for my theater blog. So, I did a quick survey of the Internet to see what’s online—and I was happy to see that there are dozens of sites with at least a bit of information.
[I even did a quick scan of one of the newspaper databases on the New York Public Library site to see what old newspapers might yield, and I was delighted to find a number of reviews of some of Mohawk’s performances. (As students of the history of theater in the United States will know, plays toured all over the country in those years, so even small-town papers as well as regional dailies covered the shows that were the popular entertainment in the decades before movies and television—even if a popular figure like Go-won-go Mohawk weren’t a draw.)
[So, I set out to see what I could learn about this phenomenon. I’m going to start out with a repost of the Times piece, and then expand on that with what I’ve uncovered in my own research. I found the story of Go-won-go Mohawk fascinating. I’m sure you will, too.]
OVERLOOKED NO MORE:
GO-WON-GO MOHAWK,TRAILBLAZING INDIGENOUS
ACTRESSby Elyssa Goodman
[Elyssa
Goodman’s belated obituary of Native American
actress Go-Won-Go Mohawk ran in the New York Times of 12 November 2024 in section
B (“Business”/”Sports”); updated online, 13 November 2024. It’s part of “Overlooked,” a series of
obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went
unreported in the Times.
[There doesn’t seem to be any rationale for the variations, so I will select one arbitrarily. Except in quotations from published material, within which I must conform to the original usage, I will use “Go-won-go.”]
In the 1880s, the only roles for Indigenous performers were laden with negative stereotypes. So Mohawk decided to write her own narratives.
For a long time, theatrical roles for Indigenous characters were laden with stereotypes: the savage, the tragic martyr, the helpless drunk. And it was rare in stories of any kind, on the page or on the stage, for an Indigenous character to have a starring role.
By the late 1880s, the actress Go-won-go Mohawk had had enough. “I grew tired of being cast in uncongenial roles,” like meek princesses or submissive women who were restrained in corsets, she told The Des Moines Register and Leader in 1910. So she decided to write her own roles, ultimately carving out a groundbreaking career in which she told stories onstage about Indigenous people as the heroes of their own lives. And she did it while performing as a man.
Mohawk’s primary work was “Wep-ton-no-mah, the Indian Mail Carrier” (1892), which follows the title character, a young Indigenous man, as he saves a young white woman from a stampede, winning her heart and earning the respect of her family.
The woman’s father, a colonel, offers Wep-ton-no-mah a position as a mail carrier, which he initially turns down. “I could not start being under the control of anyone but the great Manitou,” Wep-ton-no-mah says, referring to the spiritual power of the Algonquians. “I want to be free–free–free like the birds, the eagles and deers — owning no master but one.”
Another man, Spanish Joe, plots to kidnap the woman, but when Wep-ton-no-mah thwarts his plan, Joe vows to kill him. Joe, however, accidentally kills Wep-ton-no-mah’s father, Ga-ne-gua, instead. Wep-ton-no-mah then takes the mail carrier position and later kills Spanish Joe in a knife fight.
The play presented themes of interracial coupling and Indigenous power and autonomy that were rare at the time.
[The five-act play, Wep-ton-no-mah: The Indian Mail Carrier, was first performed in Liverpool, England, in April 1893, and became incredibly popular. An 1892 copy of the script is held by the Library of Congress and has been digitized.
[All the later plays of Mohawk (after she started creating her own male characters), including those she didn’t herself write (see The Flaming Arrow, below), were labeled “border dramas.” These were plays focused exclusively on the performance and commercialization of an image of the “frontier”—wherever that was located at the time each play was set. Indeed, “border play” and “frontier play” were terms commonly used synonymously.]
Mohawk herself played Wep-ton-no-mah, riding horses, fighting and performing stage combat with knives. She was the powerful Indigenous woman in the role of the powerful man, the hero and not the villain or the victim.
“I said to myself that I must have something free and wild that would fit with my own nature,” she said in 1910. “I wanted to ride and wrestle, and I thought, ‘Well, I can’t do that as a woman, I must act a man, or better, a boy.’”
Mohawk started touring the show in 1889, in vaudeville shows across the United States and Canada and in England. The accolades rolled in. “She acts with intelligence and has the repose of an expert,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote that year of her performance, although the reviewer found the play ordinary and questioned whether she was actually Indigenous.
“Miss Mohawk is a clever actress,” The New Haven Morning Journal and Courier in Connecticut wrote a few weeks later. “She came entirely unheralded, and has already proven that she possesses unusual dramatic talent.”
Records vary, but Mohawk is believed to have been born on Aug. 11, 1859. She was known by the English names Carolina, Carrie and Carolina [or Caroline] A. at various times in her youth; she later permanently adopted her Indigenous name, Go-won-go, to remain connected to her heritage.
She was born in upstate New York, either in the village of Gowanda or on the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca Nation, according to the scholar Christine Bold’s 2022 book, “‘Vaudeville Indians’ on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s” [Yale University Press, 2022]. There is also a historical marker on a former residence of hers in Greene, N.Y., that was placed in 1935.
[Gowanda (guh-WAN-duh) is a village in western New York. It lies partly in Erie County and partly in Cattaraugus (cat-uh-RAWG-us) County. Its population in 1870, the earliest figure I could find, was 994. (By my approximation, there could have been as few as 728 people in Gowanda in 1860, the year after Mohawk was born.)
[The Cattaraugus Reservation is in the same area of New York State, covering today about 34.4 square miles in parts of Erie, Chautauqua (cha-TAW-kwa), and Cattaraugus Counties. Gowanda lies just south of the reservation's southeast corner. As of 1850, Cattaraugus Reservation had a population of 871; I estimate that its population might have been about 997 in 1860.
[At the age of one, Mohawk moved with her family to Greene, New York, a town of 3,809 in 1860, in Chenango County in the south-central section of the state, part of the Southern Tier region, just above the border with Pennsylvania. Her father, Dr. Allen (or Alan) Mohawk, a chief and medicine man of the Seneca Nation, set up practice and she lived there for about nine years until the death of her father. The historical marker is alongside the road in front of the house on South Chenango Street where Mohawk lived in Greene.]
Carolina’s father, Allen Mohawk (b. 1823), who was known as Ga-ne-gua, practiced herbal medicine. He died in 1869. (The character in “The Indian Mail Carrier” was named after him.) Her mother, Lydia Hale Mohawk, remarried, and Carolina entered a religious boarding school.
Her mother died when she was about 15, and a few years later she married James Rider [1846-?], a Civil War veteran 13 years her senior. Marrying a white man enabled her to change her status in the eyes of the law from a ward of the state into someone who would be able to navigate the complex American political landscape more independently, said Christiana Molldrem Harkulich, a professor of theater, film and gender studies at Eastern Illinois University. Mohawk began looking into a career in acting. (Her husband was abusive, and she soon left him.)
The roles available to Indigenous people were limited, and the few that were available often depicted them in a negative light. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling shows [1883-1913; William Frederick Cody (1846-1917)], for instance, showed Indigenous people attacking white settlers and exoticized their culture for entertainment purposes.
Mohawk wrote “Indian Mail Carrier” with her second husband, Charles W. Charles [1948?-1926], a former Army captain turned actor, whom she married in 1888. The play’s copyright belongs entirely to her, which was exceedingly unusual for a woman at the time, let alone an Indigenous woman (her husband’s contributions were relatively minimal).
“It is natural for me to write,” she told The Liverpool Weekly Courier in 1893 while on tour in England, “and besides that, I never had a part in a play which seemed suitable to me, and therefore I made one for myself.”
Mohawk was often billed as the “only living Indian actress,” or the first. But that was most likely a marketing tactic, said Bethany Hughes, of Oklahoma’s Choctaw Nation, an assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of Michigan.
Still, Mohawk was probably one of the first. “There’s going to be very few self-identified Native female actresses or actors in the time period that are understood as legitimate theatrical performers,” Hughes said in an interview.
Mohawk made her Broadway debut in 1900 as the lead in “The Flaming Arrow,” a five-act melodrama written by Lincoln J. Carter [1865-1926], playing a male Indigenous character named White Eagle who falls in love with a white woman.
[The Flaming Arrow opened at the Star Theatre on 17 December 1900. The closing date is unknown but the next show booked at the theater opened on 14 January 1901. (Short runs were the norm at the time and all the shows at the Star with both opening and closing dates recorded ran for five or six days, so Flaming Arrow probably closed on 22 or 23 December.) The Star, which was demolished in 1901, was at 844 Broadway at East 13th Street, south of Union Square.]
Mohawk copyrighted another work, a melodrama chronicling the push and pull of Indigenous heroism and interracial love called “An Indian Romance: A Forest Tragedy.” But it was never published, and there is no record of it ever having gone into production.
Mohawk became so popular in England that she toured the country for almost a decade, first from 1893 to 1897 and then from 1903 to 1908. On returning to the U.S., she and her husband settled in Edgewater, N.J.
By then, audiences had become fascinated with the degree of fame she had achieved. She had previously been serialized as a character in [Beadle & Adams] dime novels; the character was reinvigorated, and a song, “Go-Wan-Go Mohawk: Intermezzo in Two-Step,” was released as sheet music by Dewitt Bell of the Bell Music Company in 1910.
[Erastus Beadle (1821-94) started his pulp fiction publishing company with his brothers in 1850. In 1856, Robert Adams (1837-67) and his brothers joined the Beadle brothers’ company. Beadle & Adams became the foremost publisher—and pretty much the inventor—of the dime novel.]
She died of a stroke at her home on Feb. 7, 1924. She [was] around 64.
[Elyssa Goodman is a New York-based writer and photographer specializing in nonfiction writing and documentary photography about arts and culture. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, VICE, Billboard, Vogue, Vanity Fair, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, ELLE, and the online LGBTQ magazine them, among others. Her first book, Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, was published in 2023 by Hanover Square Press and named a 2024 Stonewall Honor Book.]
* *
* *
[Now, I’m going to try to expand on Goodman’s obituary profile of Go-won-go Mohawk. The details of Mohawk’s life and career are not well documented, considering both the era in which she lived and, on top of that, the fact that she was a Native American woman. I probably can’t clear up any conflicts or gaps in the record, but I can point them out.
[In addition, the New York Times focused mostly on Mohawk’s theatrical career to the detriment of other details, and I can try to fill that in a bit. Finally, there’s the fact that she went by four names, three English first names and an Indigenous name that was spelled at least four ways that I found, so there are information sources under most of them.
[I’ll
be posting Parts 2 and 3 on Thursday and Monday, 26 and 29 December. Please come back and see what I found out
about Go-won-go Mohawk, the Native American actress and playwright of the turn
of the last century.]
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