Playing Indian and Buying Oriental:

Cycles of Racialized Performance and Persona in the American Medicine

Show

Hailey Scott
THEA 5308 Dramatic Theory
17 November 2021
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The American medicine show of the mid 19th and early 20th centuries represents the

unique confluence of medicine, performance, and racialized identity, the repeated pattern in

American society of playing Indian and buying Oriental1 was perfectly demonstrated in this

artform. Several people with an ambition for riches were able to take advantage of the

burgeoning patent medicine industry which thrived on the lack of government regulation on

“medical” products. Between the end of the American Civil War and the passage of the Pure

Food & Drug Act of 1906, numerous medical products, often of questionable efficacy, were

marketed via touring live entertainment acts, now called medicine shows. In post Civil War

America romanticization of rural life was on the rise, and information literacy remained centered

in urban areas.

Both of these facts created the perfect environment for medicine shows to arise. These

performances could offer a kind of edu-tainment to rural audiences, and tales of the wild west

and other mythicized places. The utilization of stage personas by medicine show pitchmen, and

women, took many forms but almost uniformly sought to evoke an air of authority on the

medicinal qualities in their products; from scientists, to cowboys, to quakers, to Chinese

princesses. Two of the most successful acts on the medicine show circuit were the Kickapoo

Indian Medicine Company, run by John E. Healy and “Texas” John Bigelow, and Violet

McNeal’s Princess Lotus Blossom act. This paper will explore how persona techniques related to

Orientalism and the Noble Savage Myth overlap with the performance of spectacle in the unique

artform of the American medicine show.

1 Lane, Jill.
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The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company: Selling the Contradiction

The settler American relationship to indigenous Americans has always been a complex

one. Particularly the use of Native imagery in the formation of American identity has fluctuated

greatly since the arrival of European colonialists. From the very beginning of proto-American

identity, the symbol and role of indigenous people proved to be a useful tool. The participants of

the Boston Tea Party very deliberately dressed as Mohawk Indians during the act. In this context

their choice of garb was a pointed rejection of British aesthetics, used to signal a conscious

division between them and the colonial power. Throughout American history Indians have been

used to signify the “Other”, however the intent and utility of the Other changes as the majority

white American sense of self has fluctuated. In the case of the Boston Tea Party it was in the

interest of the patriots to align themselves with Native American identity as a way of making

themselves wholly distinct from Britishness2.

By the time the United States was in its early history the common conception of the

Native people had been villainized in order to justify western expansion and Manifest Destiny.

Then following the end of the Civil War white populations living in Southern and rural areas

were resistant to urbanization and industrialization. In this climate there was a resurgence of

romanticizing Indigenous people; through the establishment of Indian fraternal organizations and

children’s camps white Americans were able to roleplay with Native identity in a similar way the

instigators of the Revolution had. Less overtly political than the use of Indigeneity in the Boston

Tea Party, this practice was more ideological in nature. Professor Philip Deloria states in his

book Playing Indian:

Their land safely secured, Americans were able to downplay the Jacksonian
savage and turn to guilt-cleansing criticism of the very policies that had emptied the

2 Philip , Deloria.
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landscape. Indians appeared not only as pieces of an incorporative American history, but
as nostalgic reminders of the good old days and as object lessons in the chastening
consequences of progress.3

Nativeness now largely represented a kind of purity untouched by the corrupting influence of

civilization. For better and for worse indigenous people were believed to be amore primal

version of humanity, more in touch with nature. This concept is most closely related to the

archetype known as the Noble Savage, “a term that both juxtaposes and conflates an urge to

idealize and desire Indians and a need to despise and dispossess them.”4 Roleplaying as

indigenous people allowed white Americans a way to access the romantic notion of closeness

with the Earth. The appeal of the Noble Savage was aspirational and more importantly

marketable.

In this same post-bellum era the patent medicine industry was taking advantage of the

cultural moment by using Native imagery in the creation of products. Evocations of Native

wisdom in conjunction with patent medicines was common, and among the most successful of

medicine show acts was the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company. Founded in 1881 by John

Healy and “Texas” Charles Bigelow5. Healy had been in the patent medicine show business

himself before his collaboration with Bigelow selling a product called King of Pain while

travelling with his group called Healy’s Hibernation Minstrels6. He teamed up with Charles

Bigelow, who had also previously apprenticed with another medicine show7, and “Nevada” Ned
3 YOUNG, JAMES HARVEY. The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent
Medicines in America before Federal Regulation. Princeton University Press, 1961.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0zs0.
4 Agnew, Jeremy. Entertainment in the Old West : Theater, Music, Circuses, Medicine Shows,
Prizefighting and Other Popular Amusements. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Incorporated
Publishers, 2011. Accessed November 14, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.
5 Agnew
6 Lane, Jill. “ImpersoNation: Toward a Theory of Black-, Red-, and Yellowface in the
Americas.” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1728–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501978.
7 Young
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Oliver to be his pitchmen for Kickapoo Indian Sagwa. The ingredients for this nostrum were a

combination of herbs and leaves along with alcohol.

Of course the real key ingredient for their product’s success was the employment of

actual Native Americans. The story went that Bigelow, stricken with an unknown sickness, was

brought back from the brink of death by the Sagwa provided to him by an Indian medicine man.

He was then able to convince the medicine man to share with him the secrets of this miracle

cure8. In their travelling show audiences would see a small group of real “Kickapoo” Indian men

gathered in a semi-circle while out front “Nevada” Ned Oliver or a similarly styled man in

buckskins would introduce each of them. The last of these men would perform a speech in a

Native language, it did not matter which one, because Oliver would then translate for the

audience the apparently authentic tale which “described the dramatic origin of the remedy which

had saved countless Indian lives and which was about to be offered, after great sacrifice, to the

white members of the audience.”9 Spectators could also see scenes of the Kickapoo Indians

gathering ingredients to create the Sagwa, or attacking white settlers10.

The actual authenticity of these performances is obviously questionable considering the

fact that of the cumulative eight hundred Native performers employed by the Kickapoo Indian

Medicine Company show, none of them were members of the Kickapoo tribe11. More important

than that material reality though, was the representation of a constructed reality. The legitimacy

granted not only by attributing an indigenous origin to their nostrum but also by physically

bringing Native bodies to the forefront of their advertising was significant. Ideas of the Noble

Savage archetype were very much at play here. The Indigenous people in these performances

8 Young
9 Price, Jason. “‘The Best Remedy Ever Offered to the Public’: Representation and Resistance in
the American Medicine Show.” Popular Entertainment Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp. 21–34.
10 Price
11 Deloria
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provided a window into a purer relationship with nature as well as an ancient wisdom that was

previously untapped. However, it was crucial that these Native performers not speak to

audiences directly. The white pitchmen were necessary translators and mediators between the

“savages” and their white audiences. The way Ned Oliver would converse with the Native men

onstage and convey what was allegedly said in their language sent the clear message that the

white pitchman was in control of the information in this act. White perceptions of Indigenous

languages at this time reflected this imbalance as well, “colonists thought that native languages

lacked the descriptive power of English and had to rely on the almost continual use of metaphor

to describe abstract ideas.”12 The fact that this translated mythology of Sagwa was present

alongside the theatricalization of Kickapoo Indians attacking white settlers is a perfect

demonstration of the contradictory duality of the Noble Savage.

Although the presentation of Native American subjugation by the Kickapoo Indian

Medicine Company was certainly less pointed than their live entertainment contemporaries such

as Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, they shared a performance style that purported to

combine education with entertainment through their use of actual Native people in their re-

enactments.13 Both of these acts built upon the now long standing tradition of playing Indian.

Rather than dress or act as Native people themselves, Healy and Bigelow, like Cody, instead

played with Indians. They orchestrated the arrangement and performance of Native bodies, and

were therefore able to speak through them, not the other way around as their translation routine

would lead spectators to believe. This more elaborate version of playing Indian comes with it a

plausible deniability, and a level of legitimacy essential to successful advertising. The Kickapoo

12 Welch, Christina. 2011. “Savagery on Show: The Popular Visual Representation of Native
American Peoples and Their Lifeways at the World’s Fairs (1851–1904) and in Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West (1884–1904).” Early Popular Visual Culture 9 (4): 337–52.
doi:10.1080/17460654.2011.621314.
13 Welch
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are the authority on Sagwa and the pitchmen are the authority on the Kickapoo. The participation

of Indigenous people reinforced the medicine company’s expertise and supposedly an

Indigenous endorsement of the entire construct. These Native participants were not without

agency, and may have chosen to take part for the monetary compensation14, or for the potential to

represent themselves to white audiences15. The impulse among some Native people to engage

with white pitchmen’s performances came with ambiguous results, “Although they might alter

Indian stereotypes, native people playing Indian might also reaffirm them for a stubborn white

audience, making Indianness an even more powerful construct and creating a circular,

reinforcing catch-22 of meaning that would prove difficult to circumvent.”16 Ultimately their

presence was most useful for contributing to the same construction of the Indian Other that had

been in place since the formation of a majority white American identity.

The expertise performed by Healy, Bigelow, and Oliver relied on its own dubious

construction of persona. The so-called “Nevada” Ned Oliver himself admitted to never having

been near Nevada in his lifetime17. The signifiers of a Wild West adventurer, a la Buffalo Bill

Cody, were enough to create a viable performance persona. Persona can be defined as “a

resignification of identity that relies on what is playable and performable in the public world...a

reinforced form of performativity that can produce a professional identity, a political identity, or

an entertaining identity for various individuals to inhabit”.18

The Kickapoo translating, banjo playing, buckskin wearing character created and

performed by former Yale student Ned Oliver, was understood by audiences to be an authentic

14 Price
15 Deloria
16 Agnew
17 CRAY, WESLEY D. “Transparent and Opaque Performance Personas.” The Journal of
aesthetics and art criticism 77, no. 2 (2019): 181–191.
18 Agnew
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representation of his identity. This type of construction is what Aesthetics scholar Dr. Wesley

Cray calls a transparent performance persona19. A transparent performance persona exists in

opposition to an opaque persona, which is understood to not offer any information on the actual

identity of the performer. The formation of the “Nevada” Ned character as uniquely fitted to

convey information on Indian Sagwa as opposed to the more traditional pitch doctor approach of

appearing as much like a medical doctor as possible, “in a black Prince Albert frock coat and a

silk top hat”20, lent him even more credibility. That persona acted as a useful liaison between the

world of the audience and that of the Kickapoo. The combination of the aesthetic of the

pitchmen, performance setting, and product created an effective advertisement strategy for the

company; as Cray states, “If… convincingness and sincerity are typically preconditions for other

aesthetic virtues, then the less convinced by his performance we are, the less likely we are to be

aesthetically moved by it.”21 Considering the enormous success of the company it is safe to say

their audiences were aesthetically moved.

Healy and Bigelow also utilized print advertising in addition to their touring

performances. The reliance on the Noble Savage archetype was prevalent in this medium. In

particular the Kickapoo Medicine Company invented a young female Kickapoo character, an

Indian princess named Little Bright Eye, who was an unofficial mascot for the company22. She

represented a distinct counterpoint to the savage masculinity presented in the live medicine

show. Her character was that of a demure feminine archetype who was depicted as “graceful,

friendly, and helpful.”23 Little Bright Eye was a constructed figure who was deliberately kept in

19 Cray
20 Price
21 Price
22 Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
23 Ma, Sheng-mei. Off-White : Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American Culture. New
York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2019. Accessed November 18, 2021. ProQuest
Ebook Central.
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print because their publications would bring advertisements directly into people’s homes. A

gentle feminine characterization of Native Americans would be much more fitting for the

domestic sphere than for the live performance. Little Bright Eye was another role with which to

play Indian, like the Native men onstage she was a proxy character used to deliver the

company’s cultural and advertising messages.

Princess Lotus Blossom: How White Women Sold The Orient

Spurred on by the influx East-Asian immigrants to the United States beginning in the mid

nineteenth-century, Orientalism in America formed from a combination of unease from majority

white Americans about this foreign population, with a fascination and curiosity with their

culture. These are related impulses, and two sides of the same coin. Orientalism is a cultural

force which serves to conflate a vast diversity of Asian cultures, simplify them, and package

them for easy consumption by white Western populations. It removes the human context of

Asian aesthetics, allowing for the projection and romanticization on behalf of white Western

consumers. This subsequently has the effect of allowing white people to partake in Eastern

cultures from a position of dominance, as Edward Said states in his seminal work Orientalism

that it, “depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner

in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative

upper hand.”24 Literal consumption has been one of the key manifestations of Orientalism in

America from the beginning; by co-opting the products of East Asian cultures, majority white

Americans are able to enjoy the creations of these cultures while also discarding the immigrants

who brought them over.

24 Moon, Krystyn R. Yellowface: Creating the Chinese In American Popular Music and
Performance, 1850s-1920s. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006. https://hdl-
handle-net.ezproxy.baylor.edu/2027/heb.90023. EPUB.
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Alongside the romanticizing influence of Orientalism, was the demonizing construct of

yellowface. The practice of yellowface performance, in which white performers in yellow-tinted

makeup and facial prosthetics in order to appear like a caricature of an East Asian person, was

akin to blackface minstrelsy25. Stereotypical impersonation of Chinese people specifically was

used to solidify their position as a population of unassimilable Other, just as blackface or redface

had done for African American and Indigenous people. The creation and reinforcement of

Chinese stereotypes through yellowface performance “as early as 1854...were a cruel way of

circulating ideas of difference and inferiority, all of which supported anti-Chinese attitudes.”26

These concurrent cultural practices combined to form the unique performance and

product line created by Violet McNeal, as Princess Lotus Blossom. Beginning in the early

twentieth-century McNeal and her husband Will traveled with their series of distinctly

Orientalpatent medicine products and matching performance acts. Violet’s agency in this choice

of avenue however, is questionable. Her relationship with Will McNeal began with him as her

boss, who decided to “mentor” her in the patent medicine trade and his own personal fascination

with Asian culture.27 They married and visited several major U.S. cities, along the way McNeal

closely studied medicine show pitchmen, forming relationships with them and learning their

techniques. After building up her knowledge of the industry, her husband decided to start their

own medicine show act and cast her in the pitchwoman role, specifically “a Chinese woman

25 Deloria
26 Marshall, P. David, and Kim Barbour. 2015. “Making Intellectual Room for Persona Studies:
A New Consciousness and a Shifted Perspective”. Persona Studies 1 (1).
https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2015vol1no1art464.
27 Bringardner, Chase. "Greasing the Global: Princess Lotus Blossom and the Fabrication of the
"Orient" to Pitch Products in the American Medicine show." Theatre Symposium 25, (2017): 49-
63,108. http://ezproxy.baylor.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/
greasing-global-princess-lotus-blossom/docview/1951910621/se-2?accountid=7014.
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seemed the natural choice—an exotic character that appealed to potential rural audiences

desiring the mysterious and foreign, to Will’s drug-addled visions, and to Violet herself.”28

As a performer McNeal capitalized on the gendered and racialized expectations that

would be projected onto Princess Lotus Blossom to set herself apart from the majority of

medicine show pitchmen by, “using soft vocal inflection and gentle hand gestures to appear coy,

to create a complex composite of a woman still suitable to an audience of prospective, proper

consumers.”29 In her second ever product pitch, for an impotence cure called Vital Sparks, she

began by reciting an apocryphal tale from China. While dressed in a “mandarin coat and a

Chinese skullcap” Princess Lotus Blossom dramatically regaled the crowd with the dire crisis of

male vitality in China, which threatened to stunt population growth to the point of extinction.30

We get a piece of her pitch from McNeal’s autobiography:

[A] story of peril, of overwhelming danger, of a dread and mysterious ailment

which threatened to wipe from the face of the earth the great people of the Chinese
nation...To the horror of all who were aware of this impending tragedy, it seemed
inevitable that this mighty race might perish. Its life force was gone. Its manhood no
longer possessed the strength for perpetuation of the strain which had existed throughout
history.31

The solution to this crisis was discovered when a wise man observed a specific species of turtle

in which the male turtles were outnumbered by females 1,000 to 1. This phenomenon was

apparently explained by an extra organ at the base of the turtles’ brains that could be harvested,

dried, powdered, and ingested to cure the lack of male vitality in humans.32

28 Bringardner
29 Bringardner
30 Young
31 Davidson, Levette J., and Violet McNeal. “Four White Horses and a Brass Band.” Western
Folklore 7, no. 2 (April 1948): 213. https://doi.org/10.2307/1497437.
32 Young
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McNeal’s pitch for this product was wrapped up in many Orientalist tropes and ideals.

Most obviously was the connection between Vital Sparks and common attitudes regarding

sexuality and Chinese people, “the ‘Asian’ female body that the impotent (Asian) man could not

satisfy. Yet for a predominantly white audience, her female ‘Asian’ body allowed white men to

displace their fears of impotency onto the cultural construct of the Asian man.”33 The popular

construct of both the Asian male body and the Asian female body in America already carried

significant baggage by the early twentieth century. Yellowface performances had already spent

decades reinforcing the stereotype of the emasculated yet dangerous Asian man.34 Meanwhile,

the racial archetypes attached to Asian women typically fell into two main categories: as the

aggressive dragon lady or the demure and submissive “geisha-type”35, of which McNeal would

primarily engage with the latter.

Much like the contradictory impulses contained within Orientalism, the structures created

and supported by yellowface performances like McNeal’s Vital Sparks pitch serve a specific

purpose for white audiences. Because in the performance of these archetypes, “Asian women are

only sexual for the same reason that Asian men are asexual: both exist to define the white man's

virility and the white race's superiority,”36 and subsequently white audiences were beguiled into

engaging with her products.

The intersection of yellowface and femininity also manifested in the Orientalist fantasy

McNeal was able to offer her audiences. By painting herself as the subservient, and potentially

sexually available, Asian female stereotype she further enticed the male members of her

audience without also violating expectations of propriety for women. Engaging with these racial

33 Bringardner
34 Moon
35Bringardner
36 Elaine H. Kim, "Such Opposite Creatures": Men and Women in Asian American Literature,
29 Mich. Q. Rev. 68, 70 (1990).
 Scott 12

stereotypes in performance did also have implications for women generally, “Yellowface female

characters are women acting the way society tacitly thinks all women should ideally act--as

stereotyped Asian women.”37 While at the same time her being a solo female performer on the

medicine show stage, without a man visually accompanying her, disrupted the gender norms of

this context. Simultaneously her performance of a submissive, disempowered woman facilitated

her existence as a financially successful woman at a time when that was a rarity.

McNeal’s position as a white woman engaging with Orientalism, especially in a

transactional context, existed as part of a larger trend. The increase of Oriental materialism from

the late nineteenth-century through the early twentieth-century was in many ways targeted at the

demographic of middle to upper-class white women for whom Asian goods were an important

signifier of class and taste. Because of the relative lack of opportunities for travel, education, and

independent wealth available to women, the ability to purchase, own, and display Asian goods

represented access to worlds beyond the strict domestic sphere white Victorian women were

expected to inhabit. Mari Yoshihara writes in their book Embracing the East:

The encounter with things Asian as spectacle and objects of consumption was an
index of the expansion of women’s/girls’ imaginary, if not physical, sphere. It suggested
a liberating potential for white, middle-class women whose rights and opportunities were
limited by their gender yet whose racial, class, and national identities made the world
come to them in the form of commodities.38

McNeal, as Princess Lotus Blossom, was able to access that realm of wealth by selling

supposedly Asian goods to the women using these same goods to signify status. While wealthy

white men accumulated impressive collections of Asian art, white women were marketed goods

37 Stewart Chang, "ARTICLE: FEMINISM IN YELLOWFACE," Harvard Journal of Law &

Gender, 38, 235 (Summer, 2015). https://advance-lexis-com.ezproxy.baylor.edu/api/document?
collection=analytical-materials&id=urn:contentItem:5GNM-4H70-00CV-001R-00000-
00&context=1516831.
38 Yoshihara
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which would appeal specifically to shaping their domestic space with the same sensibilities.39

McNeal’s selling of medical products exploited a unique overlap in the gendered association of

at-home medical care, and white women’s draw toward Asian goods at this time.

As a medicine show pitchwoman Violet McNeal was a master of navigating persona. She

was able to leverage all of the privilege of white womanhood while cashing in on the culture’s

fascination with Asian products and aesthetics. Princess Lotus Blossom could be understood to

be an opaque performance persona, because it was removed from and did not directly rely on any

connection to her actual identity. However, McNeal’s actual performance defies definitive

categorization under this model. As previously discussed McNeal’s performance in the role

Princess Lotus Blossom closely fell in line with the conception of Asian women as soft-spoken

and submissive.

She seemed to be acutely aware of the strict expectations of this archetype and would

choose moments to pointedly subvert them. During her pitch there would come a moment in

which she would pause her speech and boldly stare down her audience for a beat before

reassuming her shy, girlish character. This distinct break in the facade of her persona served to

challenge the audience and to wink at the lack of authenticity in her persona, which “highlights

the constructed nature of the performance and perhaps even reminds the audience that they play

a role as well.”40 By playing with the expectations of performance and persona McNeal was able

to interface with spectators in a unique way that encouraged their participation in the form of

buying her products.

39 Yoshihara, Mari. Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003. https://hdl-handle-net.ezproxy.baylor.edu/2027/heb.02736.
EPUB.
40 Bringardner
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Later in her career, after she separated from her husband, McNeal continued performing

on the medicine show circuit under a different opaque persona, this time without the use of

yellowface. She re-emerged as Madame V. Pasteur, who was a scientist dressed in a “fitted

academic robe and mortarboard.”41 In this iteration McNeal did away with racial and gender

stereotypes in order to fashion an independent and intellectual female character. Rather counter

to the mostly passive Princess Lotus Blossom, Madame Pasteur was a character with her own

drive and special skills, in that way showing a much closer resemblance to McNeal herself. The

flexibility with which McNeal was able to craft performance personas speaks not only to her

skill as a pitchwoman, but also to the rapidly shifting consumer landscape that all medicine

shows and performers had to navigate.

41 Bringardner