Go-Won-Go Mohawk (1859-1924), Part 2

[Go-won-go Mohawk’s life and career were so interesting that I couldn’t even sketch them in in a single post.  I’ve therefore split my attempt to fill in some of the gaps in the New York Times obituary that constitutes Part 1 of this short series (posted on 23 December) into two installments.

[“Go-Won-Go Mohawk (1859-1924), Part 2” takes readers up to the composition of her first play, Wep-ton-no-mah: The Indian Mail Carrier.  Part 3 picks up at that point and brings ROTters to Mohawk’s retirement and death.  As Michelle S. A. McGeough, professor of art history, observes, after Mohawk’s death, she “faded from the public’s memory and consequently very little has been written about her”—until quite recently.  (McGeough’s dissertation was submitted in 2017 and Christine Bold’s “Vaudeville Indians” was issued in 2022.)]

GO-WON-GO MOHAWK: SUPPLEMENTAL BIOGRAPHY

The New York Times and I have already explained (see Part 1) that Go-won-go Mohawk went by different names at different times and under different circumstances, depending as well on the publication in which her name appeared.  The Times explained about the three variations of her English name: Carolina, Carrie, and Carolina (or Caroline) A.  I added that along with Go-won-go, her native name was often also written as Go-Won-Go and Gowongo.  I have also found documents in which the name was spelled Go-wan-go (with an a in the middle). 

It’s not even certain under which name Mohawk was born—though most accounts say that she didn’t use her indigenous name, which she said means “I fear no one” in the Seneca language, until later in her life when she began writing and performing her own plays in the 1880s.  Several sources indicate that Mohawk was called Carolina while she lived in Greene, New York (1860/61-1870/71).

The obituary in Part 1 gives the date of Mohawk’s birth as 11 August 1859, but numerous other sources, including the Library of Congress, give the year as 1860.  (Oddly, her gravestone is inscribed with the date of her death, but not her date of birth.)  The problem with this, aside from merely the accuracy of her date of birth and her age at the time of any given event, is that all dating information that follows from that is ambiguous. 

One case in point relates to the historical marker that designates the house in Greene, New York, as a former residence of the Mohawk family.  I found two sources that recorded that the Mohawk family moved there when Go-won-go was one year old.  It goes on to say that she left with her mother after her father’s sudden death at 46 in 1869, adding that Go-won-go Mohawk lived in Greene for eight years.

But that would only be so if she was born in 1860 and had moved to Greene in 1861.  If she was born in 1859 and moved in 1860, she’d have lived in Greene for nine years.  (The date of Allen Mohawk’s death is not in dispute.  Furthermore, almost all sources say that Lydia Mohawk left Greene with Go-won-go a year after her husband died, making it 1870, 10 or 11 years after the family moved to Greene.)

(I’ll be going by the date the Times uses; another source I found that uses 1859 as her birth year is Wikipedia—but that’s hardly conclusive since it gives the Times obit as the source of this datum.  Wikipedia does note that “Records vary on exact birthdate.”)

The place of birth for Mohawk is also unclear, but the consequences are much less pervasive.  As the obituary makes clear, some sources say she was born in the small town of Gowanda, New York, while others say she was born on the Cattaraugus Reservation. 

This is only a small issue, depending on how much store one puts on whether Mohawk was born in an American town or in an indigenous community within the Seneca Nation.  The fact is that the reservation is mostly rural and Gowanda is a town practically on its southeastern border. 

In any case, as I’ve noted, the Mohawks moved to Greene, 330 miles east of Gowanda, by the time Go-won-go was one year old.  Go-won-go Mohawk’s father, Allen (or Alan) Mohawk—also known as Ga-ne-gua (“Brave Man” in Seneca)—was an herb doctor and a well-regarded member of the community. 

(The marker in front of the Mohawks’ South Chenango Street house refers to Go-won-go as an “Indian princess,” an appellation she often used in publicity for her performances and appearances.  It was common at the time to use the title “princess” for female Indian performers, although Native Americans had no such concept.  Presumably, this comes from her father’s status as a chief of the Seneca Nation.)

A year after Allen Mohawk died, Lydia Hale Mohawk moved with her 11-year-old daughter to Painesville, Ohio, where she was from, and where she had family.  She married widowed blacksmith Robert Killey (1826-90), a non-Indian, in 1873, and gave birth to a son, William (“Will”) Henry Killey, the next year.  Sadly, Go-won-go’s mother, too, died in 1875, when Mohawk was about 15.

At her mother’s death, Mohawk was named the sole heir of Lydia Killey’s estate; her mother left nothing to Will or her husband.  The inheritance may have allowed Mohawk to enroll in Lake Erie Female Seminary in Painesville (which became Lake Erie College in 1908), a religious boarding school which she didn’t like.

In Greene, Mohawk had felt like an outsider at her school, presumably a regular public school where she was likely the only Indian student.  She dressed Indian style, she said, wearing moccasins and clad in a blanket.  At recess, she recounted, she stood alone while the other children played.  They sometimes asked her about her Indian life—based on the stories and myths about indigenous Americans told in newspapers and dime novels, and displayed in the popular wild west shows.

“When I think of those American children, the English ideas of Indians don’t seem so funny after all,” she said bitterly.  When she got to Paineville, she rejected institutional discipline and resisted enforced assimilation, wore her hair over her eyes, and eschewed hats.  The interviewer who elicited these recollections remarked that “she must have been anything but an elegant member of a young ladies’ seminary” (Christine Bold, “Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s [Yale University Press, 2022], 80).

(According to Wikipedia, citing two 19th-century newspaper articles, Mohawk later attended university.  That’s the only source I saw that stated she went to “the University of Ohio,” but no such school exists, and I couldn’t find any reference to a school in the 19th century that used that name. 

(There’s no telling how far off the references are, but there are only two similarly named universities in Ohio: Ohio State University, founded in 1870 in Columbus, the state capital, and Ohio University, chartered in 1787 in Athens.  I couldn’t establish any connection between Mohawk and either school.  Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the other large state school in Ohio, while it opened in 1824, was closed between 1873 and 1885, covering the period when Go-won-go Mohawk would most likely have been a college student.

(I can only surmise, but it’s possible that the reference to Mohawk’s having gone to college might be a reference to Lake Erie Seminary, which “offered an advanced curriculum that was more extensive than high school,” according to Michelle S.A. McGeough.  Her 2017 University of New Mexico PhD dissertation, “The Indigenous Sovereign Body: Gender, Sexuality and Performance” quotes a description of the seminary’s curriculum [p. 80] and describes other aspects of the school’s program.)

In 1879, when she was 19, Mohawk married Civil War Veteran James E. Rider (or Ryder) who was in his early 30’s.  She married under the name of Carrie A. Mohawk.  The marriage didn’t last long as her husband was abusive and Mohawk left him.  Rider, however, was the brother of well-known actress Louise Pomeroy (née Ryder; c. 1853-93).

Mohawk began her acting career in 1883, when her sister-in-law was the first person to cast her in a small role in a play.  (The play was reported as The Outcast, an adaptation from a French novel by Edmond About [1825-85].  It played at New York’s Fourteenth Street Theatre—on West 14th Street, west of 6th Avenue—in December 1884, but I wasn’t able to identify it any further since neither the novel nor the stage adaptation seems to be listed anywhere.)  Mohawk also worked at the Windsor Theatre at 43 Bowery in New York on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but I couldn’t discover what play(s) she did there, or when.

Over the next six years, Mohawk played various female roles in many European and American melodramas and comedies in cities such as New York and Philadelphia.  She was displeased with the parts in which she was cast, observing dismissively, “Indian parts?  No, indeed: roles of great ladies and suffering heroines, such as Isabel in ‘East Lynne’ and adventuresses in melodrama—adventuresses must be dark, you know” (Bold, p. 81).

(Melodrama is a form of drama that emphasizes emotion and heightens plot or action, stressing romantic sentiment and agonizing situations at the expense of characterization.  Its plots don’t follow the principle of cause and effect.  The characters are flat archetypes, usually of exaggerated disposition: evil villain, innocent victim, stalwart hero/savior; there are no such figures as antiheroes or conflicted bad guys.  Suggestive musical accompaniment often underscores scenes which are especially thrilling or pathetic.  It was arguably the most popular type of play in the Victorian era.)

(East Lynne, in Mohawk’s reference, is one of the many—at least nine—stage adaptations of the 1861 “sensation” novel by Ellen Wood [English; 1814-87], under the pen name Mrs. Henry Wood.  “Isabel” is the central character of the story, Isabel Vane, who’s beleaguered by many misfortunes and tragedies. 

(Considered the archetype of the Victorian melodrama, the most successful version was Clifton W. Tayleur’s [American actor and dramatist; 1831-91] adaptation of 1862; another popular version was the 1866 dramatization of John Oxenford [English; 1812-77].

(It was a much-disparaged—for its elaborate and implausible plot—but immensely popular melodrama of which one theater manager who produced it many times quipped: “No other play in its time has ever been more maligned, more burlesqued, more ridiculed, or consistently made more money” [Denis Meikle, Mr Murder: The Life and Times of Tod Slaughter (Hemlock Books, 2019)].  

(I found no information that Mohawk ever played in East Lynne, but it was often playing at another theater in towns where she was performing The Indian Mail Carrier or The Flaming Arrow.  Furthermore, I did find that Louise Pomeroy, who’d cast Mohawk in her first stage role around 1884, played Lady Isabel Vane/Madame Vine many times from 1879 on all around the U.S., including New York City, as well as abroad in Australia, New Zealand, and India.

(Pomeroy gave several performances of compilations of scenes from her many productions.  They always included Lady Isabel/Mme. Vine.  I posit that Mohawk might well have seen Pomeroy in that role, leading her to cite East Lynne as an example of the kind of characters leading actresses were asked to play on Victorian stages.)

During a production of Michael Strogoff, another adaptation from a novel, this one by Jules Verne (French; 1828-1925), in Philadelphia, she met her second husband, Charles W. Charles (1834-1926), who was also in the play.  (Charles was, like Rider, a former army officer.  He was a captain who had served with General George Armstrong Custer [1839-76].)  

The company presenting the production in which Mohawk and Charles performed—as “Sangarra, a gipsy [sic] woman,” and “Landlord of the Post Relay,” respectively (Daily Mail [Toronto, Ontario, Canada] 23 August 1887, as cited in McGeough, p. 82)—was Charles L. Andrews’s Minuet Carnival Company.

(Michael Strogoff is a stage adaptation of an 1876 novel, Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar [French: Michel Strogoff, initially entitled Le Courrier du Tsar].  I couldn’t definitively identify the version used in the 1889 Philadelphia production referenced above, but Verne staged his own adaptation, entitled in English Michael Strogoff: A Play in Five Acts and Sixteen Scenes, with playwright and novelist Adolphe d’Ennery [1811-99] in 1880.)

The Minuet Carnival Company went broke in Rochester, New York, as reported in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle of 24 February 1889, leaving the company members without jobs or funds (“Stranded Actors: The Michael Strogoff Company Disbanded with the Salaries not Paid,” p. 6). 

Mohawk and Charles were married in May of 1889—and this time, Mohawk signed the documents as Go-won-go Mohawk, proclaiming her indigenous status and her Seneca heritage.  (Despite her own accounts, the actress was often erroneously identified in the press as a member of the Mohawk people because of her name.)

According to several reports, when Mohawk and Charles married, neither of them was divorced from previous spouses. This caused a stir in 1892, as reported in the Paterson [New Jersey]  Evening News of 25 January, when Mohawk’s first husband, James Rider, confronted the couple in Newark, New Jersey, where they were scheduled to perform at the Grand Opera House.  Mohawk was arrested but discharged.

(Some biographical sketches of Mohawk state that she had been married to an “Indian-fighter.”  I haven’t been able to determine to whom that refers.  Brigadier and major general were brevet, or temporary, ranks Custer held only during the war [March 1865-July 1866].  As commander of the 7th Cavalry Regiment in the West [July 1866-June 1876], during the post-Civil War Indian Wars, he was a lieutenant colonel.)

Back in Greene when she was growing up, Mohawk kept close ties with the Seneca community until she was 10, when her father, who had grown up on the reservation, died.  Then her mother, who was only part Indian, moved away, 140 miles southwest of the Cattaraugus Reservation.  Her new stepfather wasn’t an Indian, and the girls’ seminary was an alienating environment for Mohawk.

Her father, an excellent rider himself, taught Mohawk to ride and fish.  She had enjoyed riding horses, running, hunting, fishing, and rowing, none of which were really the activities cultivated by genteel young Victorian ladies.  In an 1898 issue of Metropolitan Magazine, a monthly periodical published in New York City, Alice W. Eyre further described Mohawk as: “a clever shot, an able fencer, an excellent archer, and very skilful [sic] with the lariat” (“From Wigwam to Stage,” Metropolitan Magazine 7.1 [January 1898], 101-2).

Now fully adopting Go-won-go as her identity on and off stage, Mohawk was also obscuring her gender identity.  Her native name was gender-inclusive—perhaps in today’s terms, non-binary is more accurate—and at least one source notes that Mohawk shifted pronouns in her copyright documents (Bold, p. 300 [notes to pages 79-82]: note 17).  At the time of her marriage, as she took the name by which she’d be known for the rest of her life, she declared to the 31 March 1910 Des Moines Register and Leader (Bold, p. 300 [notes to pages 79-82]: note 15):

I grew tired of being cast in uncongenial roles.  I said to myself that I must have something free and wild that would fit with my own nature.  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.

(I can’t prove it, but I wonder if Mohawk’s notion of playing a male character in order to portray strong and heroic Native Americans on American stages might have come in part from seeing her initial mentor, Louise Pomeroy, play Hamlet with some success in the 1880s.  Mohawk’s sister-in-law performed the play several times, but her “doleful Dane” was also always part of her compilation presentations of scenes from her various productions.)

Once Mohawk was in charge of her own stage career—husband Charles W. Charles was her manager—she was frequently billed in programs, posters, newspaper display ads, and announcements of coming attractions as “The Only Indian Actress” or “The First Indian Actress,” though modern-day authorities assert that this was more marketing hype than historical accuracy.

In her PhD dissertation, Michelle S. A. McGeough, assistant professor of art history at Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), wrote that “Go-won-go, by all accounts, had a larger than life persona(s) that seemed to defy labels of any kind” (“The Indigenous Sovereign Body: Gender, Sexuality and Performance,” Ph.D dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2017, p. 68).

I find it noteworthy that Mohawk so stalwartly fought against the racial and ethnic stereotyping with which she’d been burdened in her nascent stage career—not to mention her daily life—but she apparently bought into, however begrudgingly, the gender typecasting to the extent that she had to cross-dress to accomplish a degree of self-determination—to play a strong and heroic character.  Perhaps she saw that fighting that stereotyping was just a losing battle, and she took the one victory she saw she could win.

Nonetheless, Mohawk’s construction of Native Americans, particularly Native American men, contradicted the common stereotypes.  In that Metropolitan Magazine of 1898 I quoted earlier, author Eyre reported that Mohawk’s “acting [of male characters] is so realistic that it is often hard to believe that she is a woman.”

Eyre, however, also declared: “She has overcome the thousand-and-one barriers which strew the pathways of any woman who starts out to fight her own battles . . . .”  The writer added, “Miss Mohawk is not lacking in purely feminine accomplishments.”

As I noted within the Times obituary, most of the plays in which Go-won-go Mohawk acted in her later career were border or frontier dramas.  (Frontier plays that featured horses, as did Mohawk’s—she was an accomplished horsewoman and trick rider—were called “equestrian dramas.”)  The genre of the frontier drama was the precursor of western movies—which were sometimes referred to as “horse operas.”)

The portrait of the frontier of these plays, as in other forms of literature, was not necessarily accurate or even realistic, despite being promoted as “based on real events.”  Not only was the setting a mythical place and time, but it was a vehicle for making socio-political statements.  The opposition of savagery and civilization, for example, functioned significantly as a way of distinguishing characters and motivating the plot in border plays.

Another norm was a hardworking, rough-hewn hero paired with a morally upright, and educated heroine.  The homespun hero (that would have been Mohawk’s part) was romantically linked to the refined heroine, and together they were pitted against morally bankrupt villains, who endangered the girl but were thwarted by the hero (who sometimes died in the effort).

While as a genre, border plays may be set anywhere where there was once a frontier, usually in Mohawk’s day, the plays were set in the West and almost always featured Native Americans.  In Mohawk’s scripts, however, Indians were portrayed in contradiction to their usual depiction.  

The violence and savagery in Mohawk’s plays, in contrast to, say, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West extravaganzas—contrary to the popular misconception, the word ‘Show’ was not a part of the title—wasn’t always the province of the Indians; often the savages were white men. 

“Did your father ever kill any one [sic]?” Mohawk’s schoolmates back in Greene had asked her, prompted by the images of Indian life in the stories and sensationalist wild west pageants.  “Well, did your mother ever kill any one?”  She answered no, but they’d just move away (Bold, p, 80).

Mohawk arrived in New York City in 1888, where she appeared on the vaudeville stages.  From the early 1880s until the early 1930s, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States.  A form of variety entertainment, close kin to music hall in Victorian Britain and variété on the Continent, a typical vaudeville show was a series of unrelated comic, musical, and acrobatic “turns” or “numbers” selected to appeal to a mass audience of mostly middle- and working-class people.

Almost immediately, indigenous performers—or faux-indigenous poseurs—became a staple of vaudeville.  Almost all were used to reflect the stereotypes of popular lore and, like other ethnic groups or communities (blacks, Jews, immigrants, country folk), made figures of fun and ridicule.  A few were presented to perform acts considered Indian expertise, such as throwing tomahawks or knives, ritual dancing, trick horseback riding (Mohawk’s forte), rope tricks (the specialty of Will Rogers—of Cherokee descent; 1879-1935), drumming, juggling, and so on.

The Native American performers were dubbed “Vaudeville Indians,” and Christine Bold, a research fellow at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, has published “Vaudeville Indians” to cover this phenomenon.  The book has a chapter on Go-won-go Mohawk and there’s an online version interested readers may access.

Indeed, Bold states in her introduction of Mohawk in her book: “Go-won-go Mohawk (1859-1924) can equally be celebrated as, in several senses, the mother of all vaudeville Indians” (p. 78).

Specialty acts, as the vaudeville turns were called in drama circles, that could be easily dropped into any plot drove play production.  In fact, as Bold reports:

“It was standard for stage melodrama to intersperse ‘specialty acts’ into its plotline. . . .  Precisely because the vaudeville acts changed, the script does not specify them, but it is clear from reviews that Mohawk did horse-riding tricks, whip routines, and fancy lariat work years before Will Rogers won fame doing the same; she also sang.  Her turns came among established vaudeville specialties: sand-dancing and minstrelsy by blackface Sam, sentimental singing by Nellie, piping and comic jigs by the Irishman, and “a roaring burlesque of the familiar serio-comic young woman of the vaudevilles” included (p. 88).

The humor of the vaudeville comic turns was low, based on racial and ethnic stereotypes that would be anathema today.  Though Mohawk turned the Indian characterizations on their heads, using the format of the vaudeville comedy to contradict its habitual message, she played into the portrayals of other ethnic Americans. 

Here’s a bit of a review of a 1902 performance of The Flaming Arrow, Mohawk’s later play (1900), written for her by Lincoln J. Carter (1865-1926), at the Camden Theater in Camden, New Jersey.  Note that the “specialties” to which the anonymous reviewer refers are the variety or vaudeville numbers commonly inserted into melodramas:

The specialties introduced in the third act were good and dovetailed naturally with the thread of the plot.  The Indian band won applause as did also Snow Ball’s coon song and dance, Jerry’s cornet solo and Sergeant True’s really clever work on the bugle (Camden Daily Courier, 4 March 1902: 8).

In case readers haven’t twigged to it, Snow Ball is an African American character, labeled earlier in the review as “a colored gent,” and Jerry is “one of the fighting Irish.”  They were stock farcical characters in the melodrama, along with several others—including Native American characters in the hands of white dramatists writing frontier melodramas. 

Sergeant True, who was in charge of the Indian band, was listed as being played by W. H. Killey, noted in one announcement of the play as “the world’s champion bugler” (“Two Big Productions,” Camden Daily Courier 26 November 1900: 8).  In case readers don’t recognize the initials, that’s William Henry Killey, Mohawk’s half-brother, her mother’s son born in the year before her death in 1875.  After his father’s death in 1890, Mohawk took him in as part of her household and company; he made bugling his specialty and appeared in both The Indian Mail Carrier and The Flaming Arrow.

A “coon song” was a type of musical number, adopted from minstrelsy, that made racist fun of a black character.  Snow Ball and characters like him were usually played by white actors in blackface.  (Indian characters in other frontier plays would be played by actors in red-face makeup.  There were professional non-indigenous performers who regularly performed as Indians on American popular stages; in a review of “Vaudeville Indians,” Benjamin R. Kracht dubbed them “‘pretendians’ and red-face poseurs” [American Indian Culture and Research Journal 47.2 (2024): 177; https://escholarship.org/content/qt2rk0k2kf/qt2rk0k2kf.pdf?t=shl6wv].  In Mohawk’s productions, Indian characters were ostensibly all played by indigenous actors.)

The mention of the “Indian band” in the Daily Courrier review needs a little explanation as well.  In the 19th and 20th centuries, there were scores of Indian bands in the U.S.  A band composed of and led by Native American musicians, sometimes playing music that incorporates elements of their traditional tribal sounds, stories, and instruments, they were a byproduct of the Indian boarding schools of the era, though many tribes organized marching bands that toured both at home and abroad. 

Though the bands were meant as a way to support assimilation of the Indians into mainstream American culture (“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”), the Indians were able subtly to subvert this plan under the radar of the dominant society.  Indians succeeded in nativizing and Indianizing the bands so that they became part of their indigenous culture.

The music Indian bands played was mostly American and European, though occasional indigenous music and even pieces by Indian composers, was included in the program.  I have no evidence for this supposition, but I posit that Mohawk’s performances were accompanied by bands playing more Indian music than was standard in the 1890s and 1900s—because that would match her intentions for the plays in the first place.

In addition, most Indian bands wore uniforms that were modeled on American military garb, but some wore native clothing.  Given Mohawk’s intentions for the theater she produced—remembering the level of control she maintained—I suspect, though again, I can’t prove it, that the bands she had for support in her productions wore Indian dress.

[This is a good place to break my report of the life and work on Go-won-go Mohawk, Native American actor and playwright.  I will post Part 3, which starts with Mohawk’s creation of her first original play, on Sunday, 29 December.  I hope readers will come back to Rick On Theater then to read the conclusion of this series.]