Telling a Tall Tale, Family-Style -- Author and Cultural Historian Scott Sandage Delivers 17th Annual Levine Lecture
For all his traditional academic rearing, Scott Sandage readily concedes that the revival of narrative has brought a new vitality to the discipline of history. “It was long considered unintellectual to tell stories,” explained Sandage, an associate professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “But today, with the rise in history writers like David McCullough, it’s become a way to compete with them for people’s attention.”
Sandage, who presented the 17th Annual Levine Lecture at Rider University on October 16, arrived with a new twist on a story that had been often told on the old American frontier, but was unfamiliar to the capacity audience in the Sweigart Auditorium. In doing so, Sandage not only shone a new light on the social conceptions of race, but framed it in a surprisingly personal context.
A noted author and cultural historian, Sandage specializes in the 19th century United States and in the changing aspects of American identity. He spoke in support of his current book project, Half-Breed Creek: A Tall Tale of Race on the Frontier, which focuses on a little-known, mixed-race Native American reservation in southeast Nebraska and investigates how family folklore has shaped racial identity in the United States.
“This is a story of what race is and how Americans have determined what race a person belongs to based on what stories can be told about them,” Sandage began. He set the scene of the so-called Half-Breed Creek, a reservation established by the United States government in 1856 as a place for those who claimed partial, but not full, Native American lineage. “The thinking was that the smart, educated half of the half-breed would organize the Indians into making trouble” in the already tenuous location, situated in the only spot in the United States where slave, free and Indian territories met at the same time, he explained.
The Half-Breed Reservation’s central town of Barada, Neb., derived its name from Michel Barada, who according to a 1932 congressional report, was a French count charmed by the beauty of an Omaha Indian woman, known as Laughing Buffalo, on her visit to Paris. The report claimed that Barada, intent on marrying the woman, followed her back to North America, but mistakenly travelled to Montreal while she headed to New Orleans. Eventually, their paths met along the Missouri River, in St. Louis, and they married.
In fact, Sandage’s research revealed, Michel Barada, while of French descent, was a trapper who had come down from Canada for the fur trade. Government documents of the time reveal that he was actually illiterate, though was sufficient in enough of the Native American tongues to serve as an interpreter between them and the white traders.
Michel Barada and Laughing Buffalo – a name Sandage learned was a fanciful, fictionalized name for the woman coined by the government report to make the story more palatable – had a son, Antoine Barada, who would become a figure of mythic proportions who could dead-lift 1,800 pounds. The founder of Barada, Neb., the 6-foot-6 Antoine – known alternately as Mu-shu-numphasi, an Omaha word for “Moves Fearlessly – was also known by many as “The Big Indian,” a mountain of a man who blended in seamlessly as he moved from place to place.
Whether as a quarrier, a blacksmith, Indian scout, trapper, circus strongman, or a miner at the California Gold Rush, Antoine Barada travelled frequently between New York and California via the Panama Canal, spending plenty of time in sophisticated St. Louis in between. He was what Sandage called a “shape-shifter” – someone who could easily manipulate the identity of his own race to suit his need at a given time, and throughout the course of his life, alternately claimed to be white, Native American, Hispanic or Creole. To further confuse the Barada line was the fact that Louis Barada, the brother of Michel, fathered numerous children from slaves he owned in St. Louis.
As the Barada clan gained notoriety, and the government established the reservation, the “half-breed” population began to earn the attention of anthropologists like Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a founding member of the American Anthropological Association. She was the first in a long line to examine the race of the Baradas, and in 1883, determined that they were not sufficiently “Omaha” to reap the benefits of government-sponsored life at the Half-Breed Reservation.
Over time, the debate began to intensify, with Thomas L. Sloan, the nephew of Antoine Barada, and who had been the valedictorian of what is now Hampton University – a historically black university – in 1889, graduated and promptly sued the U.S. Government to retrieve what was owed his family by the Fletcher report. In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Sloan, and he was enrolled as an Omaha by the Office of Indian Affairs. “Only the government had the power and authority to certify someone as a member of a tribe,” Sandage said. “Not even the tribe itself.”
In the following year, however, Thomas and William Barada were evicted from the land by the Omaha Agency. In 1922, William – the son of Antoine – wrote a series of letters and memoirs about his life and that of his father containing many elements of the legend of Antoine. The story caught on throughout the 1920s and ’30s, with Native Americans and “half-breeds” gaining popularity and social cachet and, for a time, “it actually became fashionable to claim Indian Heritage,” Sandage said. The story of Antoine and the Barada clan became the stuff of songs and movies. It was even presented as a factual feature story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the 1930s as “When the Indian Girl Threw a Rose at the French Gallant,” a fanciful depiction of the original meeting of “the count” and “Laughing Buffalo.”
Sandage became interested in the story from his father, Joe Sandage, who had heard it all from his mother – Ruth Barada Sandage. Scott Sandage’s revelation that this was, in fact, his family history, drew a collective nod of delighted approval from the audience inside Sweigart Auditorium, as he finished the narrative by saying that he became “white” when his father identified himself as such on his military ID card upon his enlistment in the U.S. Army in World War II.
Much more than a family tale, Sandage said the story of Half-Breed Creek is a story of the mixed construction of race. “It’s determined by geography and borderlands, by history and anthropology, by law and bureaucratic policy, and by tall tales and family lore,” he explained. Sandage’s father left the reservation when he joined the Army in 1941, and today, only one family is left who is descended from the original allottees.
“For years, my dad knew only of the court case,” Sandage said of Thomas Sloan’s victory before the Supreme Court. “He was surprised to learn there was more to it than just a fairy tale. If only the fairy tale had been true, I could have spent the year in Paris, instead of Omaha.”
Recently named as one of America’s Top Young Historians by the History News Network, Sandage is the author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America which was awarded the 34th Annual Thomas J. Wilson Prize, for the best “first book” accepted by Harvard University Press.
The Levine Lecture Series at Rider University began in 1991 in recognition of Dr. Emanuel Levine, a member of Rider’s Department of History for nearly 40 years who specialized in ancient history and archaeology. Over the years, the Levine Lecture Series has brought an impressive group of scholars to Rider, including historians who are leaders in their fields and are the recipients of prestigious prizes and awards for their scholarship including multiple Pulitzer Prize winners. The Rider University History Department is especially thankful to Levine’s wife, Harriet Levine, and his family for making this annual distinguished lecture series possible.
