Shot on 60mm film. Footage lost, duration unknown.
Background: This footage was shot on 24 August, 1898 when the travel lecturer Burton Holmes and his cameraman Oscar Depue stopped over at Tolani Lake, Arizona, on their way back to the railroad station after filming the Snake Dance at the Hopi pueblo of Orayvi two days previously.
This was the site of one of the three trade stores that their guide, Frederick W. Volz (1856-1913) owned in the area and it was Volz who organised the tournament. Although the principal participants were local Navajos, some Hopi were involved also. Depue shot sufficient footage for three short films that would feature regularly in support of the lectures that Holmes would give over the ensuing years.
Although the footage is lost, as in the case of the Snake Dance material, it is possible to reconstruct its content on the basis of various sources: eyewitness accounts, including one by Holmes himself, the photographic record and, importantly, the descriptions subsequently offered in the press in the reviews of Holmes’ lectures.
Content: According to the newspaper reports, the first of the three films to be screened at Holmes’ lectures was of the “rooster plucking” or gallo race (gallo being the Spanish term for rooster or cockerel), as seen in the photograph above. This was a customary practice that the Navajos had borrowed within the previous two centuries from New Mexico Hispanos and/or Rio Grande Pueblos.
Normally, this event consisted of riders attempting to pluck out a cockerel buried in the ground as they galloped by at speed. However, on this occasion, the German anthropologist Paul Ehrenreich, who witnessed the event, reported that in deference to the sensitivities of the visitors, a knotted rope was used instead.
The second film, “Parade of Navajo Indians” would probably have shown the “grand march” described by Holmes, which was led by Volz, as the host, and a much-respected elderly Navajo chief.
But it is the third film, which although certainly not ethnographic, that is in many ways the most intriguing since it reminds us that the distinction between ethnographic film-making and other genres was not then firmly established.
Dubbed by Holmes as “one of the most thrilling motion pictures made in Arizona”, it featured a member of his travel party, the sixteen-year-old Rose Dougan, whose nickname was “Rattlesnake Jack”, being pursued on horseback by a large band of Navajos.
This chase was entirely in keeping with a common trope of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows since the 1870s, which had in turn arisen from a theatrical imaginary of “Indian-white” relations with antecedents in early 19th century stage performances and captivity narratives beginning even earlier. It also anticipates a common trope of the Western genre as it would develop in the early years of the 20th century.
By prior arrangement with Volz, the Navajos “failed” to catch “the girl from Denver” and in the film, she approaches the camera and salutes the spectators in triumph. In his text, Holmes illustrated this scene with prints of two strips of the 60mm film shot by Depue – the only frames of the film known to have survived.
The following year, on their way to the Hopi village of Wàlpi to shoot further Snake Dance material, Holmes and Depue returned to Tolani Lake and showed the tournament films to the Navajo participants. None of them had seen films before and they were both amazed and concerned that those who had died in the interim could still be seen apparently alive on the screen.
Holmes and Depue also showed material shot in the cities, and as has been reported elsewhere, when a train and then a fire engine approached the camera, many people in the audience took cover.
Texts: Ehrenreich 1899:172, Holmes 1901: 321-332, Depue 1947: 484-485, Henley and Whiteley ms.
You must be logged in to post a comment.