We’ve previously seen two menus — Indian scout and Blackfoot travois — that featured color photos of Indians on the cover with detailed write-ups by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, who claimed to be a full-blooded Blackfeet Indian. In fact, he was from North Carolina, his parents were actually a mix of white and Indian, and his real name was Sylvester Long. While Long was a talented writer and actor, many of the things he claimed about himself were lies told in an effort to escape racial prejudice.
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According to Long’s description, the photo on this menu from the Chung collection shows Chief Running Rabbit (whose Siksika name was Aatsista-Mahkan) standing on the riverbank and Drunken Chief mounted on his horse in the Bow River. This and other photos on the Long Lance menus come from lantern slides that Long used when he went on a lecture tour about western Canada. These slides are now in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, which says they were hand colored. It also identifies the standing person in the photo on this menu as “Duck Chief,” not “Drunken Chief.” Duck Chief was Chief Running Rabbit’s son.
The dot pattern in the cover photo reveals that CP used an early four-color printing process for these menus. The photo also has the name of the photographer of the original black-and-white photos, H. (for Harry) Pollard (1880-1968). Running Rabbit died in January 1911, so this photo must have been taken in 1910 or before. In 1924, Canadian Pacific hired Pollard to work full time taking photos on its cruise ships, for which he went around the world 14 times.
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While I can’t find a high quality version of the black-and-white photo used to make the lantern slide on this menu, above is one of Chief Running Rabbit that was obviously taken just a few minutes before or after that phot. I did find a low-resolution postcard that identifies the mounted Indian in the photo as a “Chief John,” not “Chief Running Rabbit” as Long said. However, I can’t find any indication that Aatsista-Mahkan was ever called John, so in this case Long was correct.
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Above is another black-and-white photo by Harry Pollard that was used as the basis of the Blackfoot travois menu cover shown here previously. The photo identifies the woman in the foreground as “Mrs. Duck Chief,” and the young girl behind her horse is her daughter. The mounted Indian behind her must be Duck Chief.
A biography of Sylvester Long written by a man named Donald Smith says that Long really went to Carlisle Indian School with Jim Thorpe, but lied about his age to get in. Though he later referred to it as “Carlisle University,” he only graduated the 10th grade at the school, and then finished the 12th grade at another school. He really did receive an appointment to West Point, but flunked the entrance exam. He really did serve in the Canadian armed forces in World War I, and was injured in an early battle and came back to North America. He then settled in Calgary and became a newspaper reporter, which allowed him to get to know enough about the local Indians to convince other people he was one of them.