Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  The same pattern may be seen in modified form in one of Cadman's high school operettas, Indian Love Charm (1932), whose title refers to a totem stolen from “the Red Chief” by “the White Chief” in retaliation for the abduction and (accidental) death of his white daughter. A young brave is thus deprived of romance, and he journeys far and wide to recover the love charm. Uncharacteristically, this Indian woos and wins a lover, after the deity Manitou takes pity on him. Cadman makes liberal borrowings from flageolet calls in the introductions and opening phrases of numbers devoted to love and longing. Once the falling fourths and iambic rhythms have sent up their musical smoke signals, however, they dissipate into the unmarked language of Cadman's sentimental songs. By contrast, the choral cries for vengeance are tomahawked home with declamation in parallel intervals and pentatonic melodies over unwavering double-drumbeat accompaniment. Less substantial, but equally characteristic, is Cadman's Naranoka, an eight-movement song cycle/cantata of the composer's later years. Again, the unmarked Indian lover is defeated by the marked Indian warrior, and a violent death cuts short the tribe's hopes for the future. Thus the “good Indian” traits of love, loyalty, and closeness to nature are dissociated from those Indians doomed by warmongering and superstition.

  Interestingly, Cadman also articulates this pattern in the “Indian Duet” he wrote specifically for Tsianina and Chief Yowlache in 1928. Titled “The New Trail,” its first half is devoted to memories of the native past. Introduced by Cadman's signature flageolet stylizations, the mezzo-soprano enters over a pulsing perfect fifth in the bass. The atypical triple meter of this “drum” becomes duple at the moment where the singer turns nostalgic: “Ah, the lodge is forsaken, the old days are gone.” The drumbeat fades away with the onset of chromatic harmonies, and when the baritone joins in, providing the texture of a love duet, the only remnant of Cadman's Indianist vocabulary is an overemphasis on the downbeats (weighted with two sixteenth notes). The pattern is repeated, but this time transformed into the vision of a new Indian future: “Let the old be remembered, a race proudly run, While our faces are turned to the dawn and the sun!” Here, even the word race appears strangely diverted from its expected “racial” meaning into a more generic figure of speech. The Indian lovers purchase their survival through a shedding of racial traits. They turn instead to look East.

  THE FOREST PRIMEVAL

  If Shanewis was anomalous for its present-day setting, it was also unusual among classical scores for its depiction of Indians on the plains (Oklahoma) and in the coastal Far West (California). In keeping with the towering figure of Hiawatha, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and the stage sets of German romanticism, the majority of U.S. composers' Indians appeared in woodland works, whether the timberland of the Rocky Mountain region or (more typically) the forests of New England and the Upper Midwest.

  Heroes may climb mountains and settlers may farm the plains, but the forest belongs to natural magic.1 In this sense, the forests of the Rockies and the Sierras are not so very different from Fenimore Cooper's Hudson River Valley and Thoreau's wooded Walden—or, for that matter, from the sylvan realms of the Brothers Grimm or Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Latitude, longitude, and tree species would seem to matter little in the face of the forest's potential to dislocate societal norms. For colonial and antebellum America, the forested places of New England and the Upper Midwest served as a narrative nursery for characters and themes that would be transferred to the American West after the Civil War: the scout, the captive, the outcast, and the wanderer. Among these characters must also be counted the descendants of Hiawatha, whose very name carries within it the throbbing double-drumbeat of later Indianist imitators. Michael Pisani has discussed in rich detail Hiawatha's lasting appeal as the hero of symphonic poems, sheet music, and cantatas; moreover, he has shown how tropes drawn from Longfellow and, by extension, from the Upper Midwest quickly spread through the whole interwoven fabric of Indianism regardless of their geographic appropriateness.2 The staying power of the supernatural Hiawatha helped fix the forest as a favorite setting for all things Indian.

  The linking of Indian action and the mythic forest reached a high point in Arthur Nevin's Poia. The composer and his librettist, Randolph Hartley, set the three-act opera in “the far Northwest”—an accurate reflection of its origins in Blackfeet lore, as collected by Walter McClintock. Brought West by his work as a photographer and land surveyor, McClintock had settled with the tribe on their reservation in Montana and recorded many wax cylinders. Although he specified in his proposed scenario that the stage setting should depict “an Indian camp upon the prairies, with its picturesque lodges and the snowcapped Rocky Mountains for a background,” Poia's forests also teem with the nocturnal sounds and symbols of German opera, as passed from Hoffmann and Weber to Wagner and Humperdinck. In fact, as it unfolds, Poia comes to resemble Parsifal ever more strikingly. The second act—in which the scarred hero (Poia) wanders in the wilderness on a quest to heal the wound he bears for the sins of his people—opens geheimnisvoll in a world of mysterious woodland murmurings. Healed and newly equipped with an enchanted flute, Poia returns to save his tribe and to redeem his beloved Natoya, whose beauty has been defiled by her inane laughter at Poia's plight and her association with the savage Sumatsi. Begging Poia's forgiveness, Natoya throws herself in front of Sumatsi's knife; her death achieves transfiguration as the Sun God raises Natoya and Poia to the stars.

  Cadman, too, wrote his share of woodland works, including his Hiawathan piano miniature “Wah-wah-taysee (Little Fire-fly)” (1912) and portions of his historical pageant The Father of Waters (1928). Consider, in addition, Daoma with its “Dance of the Willow Wands” and its climactic rescue scene, in which the forest shadows externalize the heroine's distress. Even in Shanewis, despite the genteel California salon and the dusty Oklahoma reservation, the opera's most famous excerpts, “The Spring Song of the Robin Woman” and especially the “Canoe Song” return us to a woodland world.3 Shanewis herself, at the moment when she retreats into a life of solitude, resolves to disappear among the trees—“Into the Forest, Near to God I Go (Indian Lament)”—a topographical alternative that is not exactly convenient to its original Oklahoman setting and still less so for the Californian productions that moved the pow wow scene to the deserts of Arizona.

  Cadman's longest forest idyll, discounting Daoma, was the three-act operetta Lelawala: The Maid of Niagara (1926), with libretto by George Murray Brown—not to be confused with Henry Hadley's cantata, Lelawala: A Legend of Niagara (1898). In the earlier score, Hadley's chorus tells of the maiden Lelawala, who sacrifices herself to appease the “Thunder Waters” and end the famine afflicting her tribe. In Cadman's tale, however, a variety of subplots push the story to a happy ending, in which the practice of Christian forgiveness that Lelawala has learned from a white missionary indirectly saves her from a watery end and a sacrificial canoe is repurposed for a nonviolent matrimonial ritual.

  Although the operetta is eventually infiltrated by white characters, they enter late and alien to the established atmosphere. Indeed almost the entire first act is given over to Indian action, starting with the choral proclamation “We Are the Tribe…We roam the forest,” and continuing with a recitation of “The Legend of Niagara” by Lelawala's father. Following in quick succession are a perfunctory love song, a duet called “Silent the Forest,” and the chorus “Lelawala Has Been Chosen,” responding to her conviction that by sacrificing herself to the “Thunder Waters” she will preserve her tribe from destruction by the warlike Delawares. Only after fifty pages of piano-vocal score does a non-Indian character take the stage.4

  Of course it is the scout Eagle Eye who leads the way with his quasi-Indian moniker (reminiscent of Cooper's “Hawkeye”) and his backwoods dialect. Alone in his familiarity with Indian ways, he is the only white character who has any real impact on the unfolding plot: he rescues Lelawala and her white friend Mabel after they are captured by Lelawala's frustrated lover, Shu
ngela. Yet even this crucial intervention suggests the operetta's overriding concern with Indians, for it modifies the racial makeup of the familiar “captivity narrative” to make the Indian maiden the target of the kidnapping; Mabel is taken along merely as her companion.

  Like Mabel, all the white characters except for Eagle Eye function mainly as foils for the Indian principals. Only the Indians are at home in the forest—a dramatic fact that is conveyed musically as well. More than two-thirds of the operetta's numbers are sung by Indians, and apart from a love-song vocabulary that is more or less common to Indian and white lovers alike, the Anglo interpolations seem distinctly out of place. “Why, father,” Mabel exclaims after she and Lelawala have been rescued from Shungela's encampment; “what moment could be more fitting for a minuet than right now, when we have safely returned from our adventure.” The Indians answer with a dance of their own, moving to the music of “We Are the Tribe.” While the white characters provide comic or romantic relief, the Indian chorus is fully naturalized.

  THE GOLDEN TRAIL

  If some of Cadman's lighter Indianist works are only vicariously “western”—through their use of character types that moved easily from eastern forests onto western ranges—other productions invite us to Arizona, San Juan Capistrano, Utah, or Sonora, sometimes in quick succession. Such is the case with Trail Pictures, a suite that Cadman composed at the MacDowell Colony in 1934, scoring it for “augmented orchestra, including xylophone, sleigh bells, Indian drum, and wind machine.”5 In the orchestral manuscript, the movements extend westward from “Stars over the Hills (New Hampshire),” to “The First Snow (Pennsylvania),” to “Cheerful Indian (Oklahoma),” and the mysterious “Red Rock Gnomes (Colorado),” before returning to Arkansas for a rousing fiddler-finale (“Evening in the Ozarks”). In practice, the composer omitted and reordered movements to suit the occasion. Nonetheless, when speaking with a reporter in Portland, he conveyed his original intent to chart a westward course that stretched all the way to the West Coast—farther than the finished suite would actually reach. “My Indian and folk lore work is a closed chapter, except for incidental music,” Cadman claimed. “Now I am trying to express contemporary life. Gershwin and Carpenter have admirably expressed the contemporary America of the drawing room and cabaret, but I want to go outdoors…. That is why I have been writing ‘Trail Pictures,' which will be given its world premiere soon by the Sacramento symphony orchestra. In ‘Trail Pictures' I depict the life on the road from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania, to Arkansas and Oklahoma on out to California.”6 Direction was everything in The Sunset Trail (where sunset serves as a metonym for the West and a metaphor for death) and in “The New Trail” (in which the Indian lovers turn East to find their future). For non-Indians, however, whimsy and romance seem to be the guideposts for travel through the postcard pieces of Cadman country.

  It would appear that Cadman's plans for an “Oregon Trail” Symphony never transpired, but he did complete one homage to travel and discovery: the Pageant of Colorado, slated for seven performances in May 1927 at the Denver City Auditorium. The poetic text, by Lillian White Spencer, takes the idea of travel as its structuring principle, dividing the history of her native state into three epochs, which Musical America described as follows: “‘The Coming of the Runner,' representing the triumph of the Red Indian over the brown cliff dweller; ‘The Coming of the Horse,' depicting Coronado's quest for the Seven Cities of Cibola; and ‘The Coming of the Wheel,' showing the settling of the West by white pioneers.”7Clearly, in this ever-accelerating march of civilization, the footman differs from the horseman or the wagon master not just in mode of transportation, but also in skin color.

  The pageant also contained a prologue and interludes that trace the more or less militant progress of civilization: from a Stone Age family to a “March of the Indian Tribes” featuring nine tribal groups, a “March of the Explorers,” and so forth. The interlude that follows Epoch Three is called “The Golden Trail,” and it commemorates the “discoverers,” “the gold rush,” and “the march of the cowboys,” not to mention the children of Denver, who scatter gold confetti. According to the Denver Evening News, the pageant culminated with “the discovering of the gleaming yellow metal, and on up to that crowning achievement of the ‘red state' when the backbone of a great continent was pierced and the East and West made one.”8 The epilogue hails David Moffat, a railroad and mining engineer (here called “the Empire Builder”), who spent a personal fortune laying tracks in and out of Denver to facilitate commerce from the Rockies to the West Coast.

  Like many Progressive Era community pageants, Cadman's Pageant of Colorado made visible the diverse populations drawn to the West in search of fame and fortune. Its final tableau shows the maiden Denver surrounded by a motley crew of explorers, pioneers, miners, and cowboys. The music seems to have matched the diversity of the crowd, according to the Evening News: “Eerie warwhoops split the air, weird chants, tribal dances—all woven into an absorbing story of high adventure and romance. Come the picturesque trappers, the gold seekers, the yelling cowboys firing their six shooters, and then those men of vision who built a towering city on the plains at the foot of the great peaks and drove their iron engines over the divides.” Cadman's “rollicking prospectors' chorus,” “Pike's Peak or Bust,” won special praise from Musical America, as did the impressive finale, in which all of the pageant participants reprise the alma mater refrain of the “Song of Colorado,” which proclaims Colorado “holiest and best…Queen and Mother of the West.”

  Although Cadman himself was unable to attend, the Pageant of Colorado assembled a cast of more than fifteen hundred citizens, many of whom were, according to the local press, “descendants of dauntless souls who crossed the perilous plains and who invaded a wilderness to serve a mighty empire.”9 The empire in question was partly a religious one. Yet as the plot turns to the Anglo pioneers, commercial motives come to the fore that were latent in the Cliff Dwellers' arts and crafts and Coronado's quest for the cities of Cibola. The quasi-legislative Proclamation in the Pageant program book makes much of modern Colorado's entrepreneurial spirit.10

  It is no accident, then, that the Pageant of Colorado ends with a “Ballet of the Golds,” which celebrates the region's rich natural resources: Forest Gold (timber), Black Gold (coal), Gray Gold (oil), Fairy Gold (the beauty of the hills), Green Gold (vegetables), and the like. The ballet thus diffuses the commercial impulse, realizing profit potential in a wide range of western commodities and averting the possibly negative boom-and-bust connotations of the metals mine. Yet by linking each natural resource to the ne plus ultra of western adventure, gold, the pageant still manages to capitalize on the excitement of prospecting and to validate an economy based on the “right of first discovery”—an ethic far removed from Farwell's in The March of Man. Though Cadman's pageant personifies the same species of rock and tree spirits, “Stone Gold” and “Forest Gold” do not fear the engineer or the tourist; on the contrary, they hail the “Empire Builder” precisely because he can extract them, uproot them, and bring them to market.

  As the Pageant of Colorado carries us along the “golden trail” toward the “golden West,” it also opens up common ground with other works more specifically devoted to the strange bedfellows brought together by the lure of the western mine. Operating outside the “mystic time” of the pageant, the characters we meet at operatic mining camps tend to announce their identities and to act in accordance with their “type.” Take Puccini's Fanciulla del West, for example. The “Preliminary Note” printed in the English libretto states that “people coming from God knows where, joined forces in that far western land.” In turn, the plaintive Jim Larkens sings of his homesickness for Cornwall; the shifty Australian Sid cheats at cards and is almost hanged; the generous but hot-tempered Sonora insults Sheriff Jack Rance with the epithet “yellow face” (faccia di cinese); the simple servant Wowkle delivers some of her opening song in Indian vocables (to which her mate Billy Jackrabbit
responds, predictably, “Ugh”); and the duplicitous José Castro (identified in the English libretto as a “greaser”) misleads Sheriff Rance and the ragazzi (“boys”) concerning the whereabouts of the bandit Ramerrez.11

  Except for Ramerrez, Castro, and the Indians (who sing only in Act 2), these diverse participants are united in the opening set piece “Che faranno I vecchi miei là lontano” (What are my folks doing back home, far away), which emphasizes both the transience and the foreignness of the mining camp. The number is introduced by the itinerant singer Jake Wallace, who appeared in blackface at the premiere but was merely a wandering “minstrel” thereafter. As Allan Atlas and Annie Randall have pointed out, Jake's ballad was adapted from a Zuni melody that Carlos Troyer arranged for the Wa-Wan Press; stranger still, the bandit Ramerrez sings material drawn from an African American cakewalk.12 This conflation of American types (black, Native, outlaw) notwithstanding, it is the miners' collective nostalgia that suffuses the scene, lending a it distinctly Old World melancholy. Sheriff Rance is the least nostalgic, but even he exclaims: “What a cursed place, this golden West!”

  The peculiar gender balance of the mining camp disrupts familial structures, placing Minnie as the lone soprano-mother-lover figure. One would think that gold would hold an equally powerful potential to upend social hierarchy. Yet this possibility seems to have held little interest for Puccini, Belasco, or any of the men charged with turning his play into a libretto. They treat gold primarily as an intensifier for questions of character: it is the tangible sign of what the community stands to lose to the gang of bandits and the objectification of everything that has been entrusted to Minnie's protection. According to the miners' moral compass, luck is as much a virtue as hard work, but abandoning the rules of fair play can have dire consequences, as Sid's narrow escape confirms. Once Dick Johnson is unmasked as a thief, it seems only natural that he should also be a murderer. How much more radical, then, is Minnie's act of redemption, when she cheats at cards to save Johnson's life.13