In “On the Frontier”,[1] I explored the life of John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero, a North American Indian actor, writer, and public speaker who was brought low by his inability to navigate the disconnect between his image of himself and the “stage Indian” persona he was expected to adopt in the public eye. In this article, I present short sketches of three performers who—for very different reasons—were better able to navigate that disconnect.

Yearning for his native woods and rivers after long months in the cities, Chief Os-ke-non-ton, the Canadian Red Indian singer, is going back to his home and his tribe when the run of “Hiawatha” at the Albert Hall, London, is ended.[2]

The annual Albert Hall productions of “The Song of Hiawatha”, a trilogy of cantatas on a North American Indian theme composed by a Black Briton from a poem by a White American, were for many years lent a spurious sheen of authenticity by the presence in the cast of a singer of genuine North American Indian heritage, the baritone, Os-ke-non-ton.

Os-ke-non-ton (1888—1955) (“Deer” or “Running Deer”) was of Mohawk heritage and had been born Rowi Tharakonnente (aka Louis Tarakonente aka Louis Deer) in Caughnanaga (modern Kawnawake), Quebec, Canada, around 1888. He first began singing in public in the US (New York) in 1914 and toured the US and Canada throughout the 1910s and 1920s, appearing at church events and “Indian fairs” and in stage musicals. In 1923, he made his first visit to the UK, and the following year, made the first of what would become annual appearances as the ‘Medicine Man’ in “The Song of Hiawatha” at the Albert Hall. He combined these appearances with performances around the country of “Indian songs, stories, war whoop, and fire-lighting”, appearances marketed using photocalls of him paddling his canoe across the lake in Regent’s Park. It is not clear how much of a claim he had to the title of ‘Chief’. He certainly had no claim to the Lakota Nation headdress and buffalo bone breastplate that he wore in public, and there are suggestions that other North American Indian performers found his act laughably inauthentic.[3]

However, these failings must be viewed through the lens of performers’ incomes being dependent on giving audiences what they wanted; and what audiences in England wanted from North American Indian performers was the North American Indians that they saw on stage and screen. And, so, Os-ke-non-ton, a performer of genuine North American Indian heritage, had to adopt a “stage Indian” identity to make a living. It was a price he was, at some level, willing to pay.

When considering the career in England of Os-ke-non-ton, the most direct comparison can be made with that of “Chief Carlisle Kawbawgam”, the “North American Indian Tenor”, who was active in Germany in 1912 and then in England from 1913 until 1918 and was billed variously as the “Red Caruso”, the “Indian Tenor and Ragtime Soloist”, and the “Ragtime Tenor”.[4] Kawbawgam was said to be the son of the famous Chief Kawbawgam of Marquette, Michigan, and a graduate of the Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania, and Yale Medical School. His voice was described as ‘of dulcet tone and more than useful range’, although not powerful, and he performed in full “Indian costume and warpaint” while accompanying himself on a grand piano. As his billing suggests, his act included ragtime numbers—which was not greeted well by critics on his first appearances in England who were expecting something more…operatic[5]—and he performed exclusively in music halls and not opera theatres or concert halls, although it was said that his ambition was to do just that. He and his wife, Alma—described as a “Chilean woman of distinguished ancestry”—and their two children, born in the UK, returned to America in 1921 when work dried up.[6]

At first glance, the story of Kawbawgam follows quite closely that of Os-ke-non-ton in the tension between the classical training and voice and desire to appear in concert and the prosaic reality of needing to make a living, which required creating a music hall act built around the persona of a “stage Indian”. However, modern scholarship has shown that “Chief Carlisle Kawbawgam” was, in reality, Craig Carlisle Williams (1882—1923), a man of African American heritage.[7]

This identification was made by researchers based on the matching of biographical details for Carlisle Kawbawgam, his wife Alma, and their two children, Carlisle Jnr and Alma, to those of Craig Carlisle Williams, his wife Alma Nash Pitts, and their two children, Craig Jnr and Alma. Critically, the researchers discovered that Williams grew up in Marquette, Michigan, the home of the real Chief Kawbawgam, and described himself as a singer in the 1900 US Federal Census. A search of newspaper archives confirms this identification, as Craig and Alma Williams were interviewed on their return to America in 1922.

Mr. and Mrs. Craig C. Williams, who spent 12 years abroad where they met with unusual success, have returned to America. Mr. Williams is an artist of unusual ability, as he composes, sings, plays and instructs. He has sung in all the leading cities of Europe and was heralded as the “Red Caruso”. He and his wife and two lovely children are the guests of Mr. Williams’ sister, Mrs. Berdie Parris, 3412 Vernon Avenue, for an indefinite stay. None of America’s artists ever received more recognition at the hands of all Europe than Mr. Williams.[8]

Armed with this confirmation, we can trace the career of Craig C. Williams before he became Chief Carlisle Kawbawgam. Although there is some evidence of Craig C. Williams being active as a church soloist, which I will return to, he made his stage debut in 1906, in the musical “In Abyssinia”, the Williams and Walker Company’s follow-up to their worldwide, history-making success “In Dahomey”.[9] Although it should be noted that there is no suggestion that Bert Williams, the co-leader of the troupe, and Craig Williams were related (Bert Williams was born in the Bahamas[10]).

By October 1907, now billed simply as “Craig Williams”, Williams was in the cast of “The Oyster Man”, the first Broadway show produced by and starring an African American performer (Ernest Hogan (1865–1909), the “father of ragtime”).[11] In a 1908 review of the play, the Freeman newspaper of Indianapolis praised Williams for his tenor singing and his range.

His voice is a deep, rich tenor, robust with one of the broadest compasses ever heard, and his manner of singing is pleasing, showing temperament and careful training.[12]

After the play closed (due to Hogan’s failing health—he would be dead within the year), Williams went solo. A year later, the Freeman reported that Williams had decided to settle in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

St Paul, Minn, News. Special to the FREEMAN. Mr. Craig Williams, lately of the Williams and Walker Company and a notable tenor singer, has come to our city to take up dentistry.[13]

The reference to dentistry is interesting, as Williams, in his Chief Kawbawgam persona, would later claim to have attended Harvard Medical School. We can also trace Williams to Washington, D.C., before his Saint Paul move: a newspaper report in early October 1908 reported that Craig Williams, a tenor soloist at St Luke’s Episcopal Church in the city, was moving to Saint Paul to take up a similar post at an episcopal church there.[14]

This Washington D.C. connection is significant as that is where Alma Pitts, Craig Carlisle Williams’ [future] wife, worked a school teacher in this period—we can place her in the city as early as 1901, which was when she qualified as a teacher at a school in the city, and as late as January 1910, which is when she resigned her post (although she had been on sick leave since the previous autumn, which would coincide with her marriage to Craig Carlisle Williams in Indiana in December 1909, precipitating her resignation)—and what’s more, she also appeared on stage, giving dramatic readings at church events, while in the city.[15]

Williams continued to perform as a solo tenor for the next few years. The most significant development in his career, from our perspective, is that, by 1911, he was billing himself as a “full-blooded Indian”.

Craig C. Williams who opened his engagement at the Orpheum, is all the management promised. Mr. Williams, who is a full-blooded Indian, possesses a big, rich tenor voice that completely fills the spacious theater.[16]

This development, just a year before Chief Carlisle Kawbawgam first appeared in Europe, is of particular interest. Was this an “exotic hook” designed to broaden Williams’ appeal to audiences? If this is the case then the  Kawbawgam/Williams story intersects with those of the stage magicians of European heritage who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries adopted East Asian stage personalities to exploit the vogue for Japanese and Chinese magicians—most famously, William Elsworth Robinson, who stole the act of genuine Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo (金陵福, Jīn Língfú) to create the fake Chung Ling Soo.[17]

However, there was, perhaps, with Williams, the added dimension of “ethnic switching” to evade prejudice.[18]

In the end, at this remove, we can only hypothesise about Williams’ motives. It is very probable that he knew enough about the real lived experience of North American Indians from his Michigan childhood to be aware of how fake his “performance” as Chief Kawbawkgam was both on and off stage. It may well be that ultimately he did not care because he knew that the audience did not care. He was giving them what they wanted, war paint and all.

Identity theft is a prominent element of the story of Edgar Laplante (1888—1944). Laplante was a vaudevillian and con man of French-Canadian heritage who, throughout the 1910s and 1920s, assumed the stolen identities of various prominent North American Indians, most notably, the Canadian runner and member of the Onondaga Nation, Tom Longboat.[19] In January 1917, Laplante, exploiting the fact that it had been widely reported the previous year that Longboat had joined the Canadian Army but there had been no reports since of his movements, for obvious reasons, made several public appearances in the American Southwest claiming to be Longboat, saying he had been wounded in combat and was in the USA convalescing.[20]

Laplante, masquerading as Longboat, inveigled his way into the confidences of a US Army unit and travelled with it to New Jersey after it was reassigned to guard duty at the docks at Hoboken. The charade fell apart when it was—incorrectly—reported in October 1917 that Longboat had been killed in combat. In writing a letter to correct this report, the real Longboat also made it known that he was aware that someone was impersonating him.

The Indian's animosity toward the man he thinks is impersonating him was expressed in this language: "I was over to front lines last night and I was sweating like an old horse. […] That made me real sore on this fellow having good time all over country on my reputation, so I am going to put an action against that man. I am going to have three charges against this man, one for making false statement, second for impersonation, third, intent to defraud the public at large. Now it's up to judge what kind of punishment to give for that.".[21]

The publicity put an end to Laplante’s game. Coincidentally, two weeks earlier, one of the US Navy transport service ships based at Hoboken, the USS Antilles, had been sunk by a German U-boat with a large loss of life.[22] Laplante was caught when he tried to obtain information on survivors, presumably in an attempt to steal the identity of one of the men killed in the sinking now that he could no longer pass himself off as Longboat.[23]

Of interest to us here, following his arrest, Laplante claimed that he began impersonating Longboat in late 1916 after fleeing fraud charges while working in a vaudeville show under the name “Chief Johnson” aka “Chief Ray Johnsson”, of the Cherokee Nation, an identity that may have been inspired, or even stolen from the baseball player of the period, George ‘Chief’ Johnson.[24] Of even more interest to us here, Laplante also claimed that his true identity was “Chief White Elk” of the Cherokee Nation, as it was in the guise of Chief White Elk, paramount chief of the Cherokee Nation, a “Yale University man” who held “degrees in medicine, philosophy, and the arts” that Laplante arrived in the UK nearly five years later, in December 1922, in an attempt to gain an audience with King George V.[25]

Laplante failed to talk his way into a meeting with the King and instead, began/restarted his career as a music hall artist and motivational speaker to gain access to society figures from whom he could extract money (usually women, and usually in the form of unrepaid loans). He left the UK at the end of 1923, a few steps ahead of his creditors. His activities finally caught up with him the next year when he was arrested and jailed in Switzerland. This was followed after his release with another arrest and an even longer jail sentence in Italy.[26] He returned to the USA on his release and died in 1944. It is doubtful he ever gave any thought to the people he impersonated and the damage he did to their reputations while reinforcing white stereotypes of the nature of Native Americans.

Although the outlier in this examination, being entirely fake in both persona and theatrical performance, Laplante serves as an example of how adopting the persona of a high-status North American Indian could be an entry into UK high society, and how seeming obvious inconsistencies—like performing in music hall while claiming to be a North American Indian chief with degrees in medicine, philosophy, and the arts—could be glossed over by pointing to the barriers that people of colour faced in England when trying to earn a living. This is something of which John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero was well aware. And, yet, this awareness was not enough to stop Brant-Sero from raging against his inability to make his way in the world regardless. Ultimately, what separates Brant-Sero from the three performers in this article is not that he was real and they were, to different degrees, “fake”,  as the identities of all four men were staged to different degrees; it was that Os-ke-non-ton, Kawbawgam/Williams, and Laplante found ways to reconcile the distance between the real and fake elements of their public personas, and Brant-Sero did not. That is his tragedy.

Jamie Barras, February 2025, Revised February 2026.

 Back to Staged Identities

Notes

[1] https://www.ishilearn.com/onthefrontier, accessed 13 February 2026.

[2] ‘The Brave Who Braved Our Cities Says—', Reynolds News, 13 June 1937.

[3] Rowi Tharakonnente: this is the name that Oskenonton travelled under; see, for example, the passenger list for the SS Bergengia, departed Southampton 25 June 1932, UK and Ireland, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960, ancestry.co.uk. Ancestry.com Inc, accessed 27 February 2025. Louis Tarakonente: this name is deduced from the Canadian Encyclopedia entry for Oskenonton, which gives his birth name as ‘Louis Deer’ and birthplace as Kawnwake (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/os-ke-non-ton, accessed 27 February 2025) and the entry for Louis Tarakonente Deer—a possible ancestor of Oskenonton—at ancestry.co.uk, accessed 25 February 2025. Oskenonton performing in the US, 1914: see, for example, ‘Indian Will Sing At Tree Of Light’, New York Tribune, 20 December 1914. Oskenonton’s first trip to the UK: see, entry for “R Tahrakonennte, Singer’, passenger list, SS President Polk, arrived London, 22 April 1923, UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960, ancestry.co.uk. Ancestry.com Inc, accessed 27 February 2025. Oskenonton’s appearances in Song of Hiawatha: https://momh.org.uk/exhibitions/chief-os-ke-non-ton-c-1888-1955/, accessed 27 February 2025. “war whoop”, etc.: West Middlesex Gazette, 6 February 1932. Canoeing in Regent’s Park, ‘Regent’s Park Canoeist’, Birmingham Mail, 30 June 1939. The distinctive Lakota headdress and buffalo bone breastplate that Oskenonton wore as part of his ‘clothing’ can be seen in the photo accompanying the latter article. Other North American Indian performers finding his act laughable: Molly Mullin, ‘Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 195—quote and citation from: https://mixedmuseum.org.uk/samuel-coleridge-taylor-at-the-brighton-dome/, accessed 27 February 2025.

[4] The “Red Caruso” billing, which belongs mostly to the early part of Kawbawgam’s career, can be seen in, for example: The Era, 9 April 1913; the “Indian Tenor and Ragtime Soloist” billing appears in 1917, for example: Halifax Daily Guardian, 10 February 1917; the “Ragtime Tenor” billing is also seen primarily in 1917, for example: Manchester Evening News, 31 July 1917.

[5] Review of Kawbawgam’s voice and performance, including calling his inclusion of ragtime ‘sacrilege’: ‘Red Caruso’, The Era, 9 April 1913.

[6] Beth Gruber, ‘Who Was Chief Carlisle Kawbawgam?’, The Mining Journal, https://www.miningjournal.net/news/2023/06/who-was-chief-carlisle-kawbawgam/, accessed 3 March 2025. Rainer Lotz, ‘Chief Kawbawgam, hoax Native American Singer (1881–1923)’,  https://jeffreygreen.co.uk/2023/06/15/285/, accessed 17 February 2025.

[7] See Note 5 above.

[8] ‘Mr. and Mrs. Williams', Chicago Defender, 11 February 1922.

[9] Williams in cast of “In Abyssinia”: ‘In Abyssinia’, New York Age, 22 February 1906. Williams and Walker: Karen Fishman, ‘All Going Out and Nothing Coming in’, https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2020/02/all-going-out-and-nothing-coming-in/, accessed 3 March 2025.

[10] Maya Phillips, ‘The Blackface Performer Who History Tries To Forget’, New York Times, 12 December 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/arts/bert-williams-blackface.html, accessed 6 March 2025.

[11] https://aaregistry.org/story/ernest-hogan-stage-minstrel-born/, accessed 13 February 2026.

[12] ‘The Oysterman’, Freeman (Indianapolis, Ind.), 2 November 1907.

[13] Freeman (Indianapolis, Ind.), 21 November 1908.

[14] Craig Williams, tenor, resident in Washington D.C., relocating to Saint Paul, Minn.: ‘Musis at St Luke’s Protestant Episcopal Church’, Washington bee (Washington D.C.), 10 October 1908.

[15] Alma Pitts: qualifying a teacher: ‘Qualified for Teachers’, Evening times (Washington D.C.), 15 June 1901; giving a dramatic reading: Evening star (Washington D.C.), 19 February 1904; on sick leave, Washington bee (Washington D.C.), 1 October 1909; resigning her post: Evening star (Washington D.C.), 29 January 1910. We know that his Alma Pitts is Alma Nash Pitts, Atlanta native and Craig Carlisle Williams’ future wife, because it was reported that she was visiting “Mr and Mrs Alfred Nash” (her maternal grandparents) in Atlanta: Washington bee (Washington D.C.), 4 January 1908.

[16] ‘At the Theatres: The Orpheum’, Journal Times (Racine, WI), 27 November 1911.

[17] Lyn Gardner, ‘How Not To Catch A Bullet’, Guardian, 9 June 2006: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jun/09/classicalmusicandopera1, accessed, 3 March 2025.

[18] Eva Marie Garroutte, “If You’re Indian and You Know It (but Others Don’t): Self-Identification.” In Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America, 1st ed., 82–98. University of California Press, 2003. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppp03.10., accessed 3 March 2025.

[19] Tom Longboat: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/tom-longboat, accessed 3 March 2025. Photographs of Laplante posing as Tom Longboat appeared after the false reports of Longboat’s death in action in World War One; see, for example, ‘Tom Longboat’, Americus times-recorder (Georgia), 22 October 1917. Longboat was understandably furious to learn that someone has been impersonating him while he was fighting in France: ‘Longboat Proves He Is Much Alive’, Sunday Star (D.C.), 28 October 1917.

[20] Tom Longboat joins Canadian army: ‘Tom Longboat To Become Soldier’, Richmond palladium and sun-telegraph (Richmond, Ind.), 25 February 1916. The story of Laplante’s movements as Tom Longboat is contained in the article reporting his arrest in January 1918 for impersonating Longboat and others: ‘Posing As Longboat’, Laramie republican (Laramie, Wyo.), 2 January 1918.

[21] ‘Longboat Proves He Is Very Much Alive’, Sunday Star (Washington D.C.), 28 October 1917.

[22] https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collections/photography/numerical-list-of-images/nhhc-series/nh-series/NH-103000/NH-103487.html, accessed 7 March 2025.

[23] This is contained in the account of his arrest. See Note 20 above, second reference.

[24] ‘Cherokee Indian Chief Addresses High School’, Silver state (Winnemucca, Nev.), 1 May 1917; the real Chief Johnson: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/george-johnson/, accessed 7 March 2025.

[25] ‘Chief White Elk’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 18 December 1922.

[26] The story of Laplante’s life is told in: Paul Willetts, ‘King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age’s Great Imposter’, (New York: Crown, 2018). For a contemporary account of the fall of Edgar Laplante, see, for example: ‘Actor’s Amazing Impostures’, Reynolds News, 5 July 1925.