Cecil B DeMille of Hollywood…
Here’s a great story about Cecil B DeMille, the Tikah People and the making of the silent movie The Call of the North
Cecil DeMille, Call of the North & Tikah People – aka Tiger Indians.
“The Call of the North is the latest and beyond question the best of the Lasky photoplays produced under the direction of Cecil DeMille and Oscar C Apfel.” – The New York Dramatic Mirror, August 19, 1914.
“This one is set in the days when the Hudson Bay Trading Company exercised a sovereign and undisputed sway over the great fur-bearing country of the North. The word of the Chief Factor was law. Indeed, there was no other law!
“The Chief Factor plans a terrible punishment. He has Graeham Stewart brought before him and despite all his protests sentences him to La Longue Traverse. The Voyage of Death. This was a favorite punishment dealt by the Company. And the Factor vengefully inflicts it on Stewart. He who is to enter upon the fatal journey must go without food and weapons. An Indian called ‘the Shadow of Death’ is sent with him to follow close. For five days Stewart wanders through the wilderness and dies miserably in the trackless forest.
“Twenty years pass. Stewart’s son Ned is caught trading in defiance of the Factor. So he is, like his father, sentenced to the Long Journey. The Factor’s daughter Virginia, however…” Review of Call of the North by W Stephen Bush, The Moving Picture World, August 22, 1914. [1]
Cecil B DeMille, The Call of the North & the Tikah People — aka Tiger Indians…
Known best for his bankable box office blockbuster movies, Cecil B DeMille made 70 films in his career. Including The King of Kings (1927), Cleopatra (1934), North West Mounted Police (1940), Samson and Delilah (1949), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). And The Ten Commandments (1956).
His fourth film, The Call of the North (1914), was his first international smash hit.
And therein lies a tale.
Here’s the great story (I’ll make it a short one) of Cecil B DeMille, the Tikah People and the creation of the silent movie The Call of the North.
The critically acclaimed film had everything going for it. Based on a best selling novel, it was set in the then-popular Canadian Northcountry. Filmed in wilderness locations. And used real Native American actors. It caught the public fancy. [2]
Through 1914, director/screenwriter Cecil DeMille was quoted in a number of the informative “Talk Shop” columns in The Moving Picture World trade journal. He talked about the filming of The Call of the North. DeMille said from the first that he was determined to use “actual Canadian Indians” in his new Northwoods-set movie. [3]
When the film went into rehearsals, Western writer Stewart Edward White headed North. White’s novel CONJUROR’S HOUSE: A Romance of the Free Forest was the basis of DeMille’s screenplay. “White,” said DeMille, “with his intimate knowledge of the Canadian Northwest, and where he has spent practically all of his life, spent four weeks in Canada. Engaging Indians and various types significant of the Northern Woods.” [3]
Stewart Edward White, for his expertise in making this movie, is considered the first Hollywood Technical Advisor.
At that time, an impending “Great War” between the British and Germany dominated Canadian conversation.
Many Northern Cree and Algonquin men had already left their homes to enlist in the Canadian Army. But not a single Tikah had joined up, so author White was able to hire as many of them as he wanted, paying their expenses south.
The Tikah, or — as the Americans called them — Tiger Indians, were known as great canoe makers and paddlers. As well as builders of strong birchwood dog sleds.
The big beautifully decorated six-fathom North Canoes had long been used by the American Fur Company and North West Company voyageurs. As well as other, smaller independent fur traders throughout the forested Northcountry. DeMille described them as “a certain type of canoe now peculiar to the Tiger Tribe Indians.” The Hudson’s Bay Company had early-on changed from canoes to their bigger Orkney-designed York Boats.
The Tikah still made a few trade canoes into the early 20th Century.
In other “Talk Shop” columns, DeMille explained that “no stone was left unturned to make the picture absolutely true to the life portrayed.”
And that he had brought in “eighteen big Tiger Tribe Indians with authentic canoes from Ahitiba, Canada, far north of Winnipeg.”
But when the eighteen Tikah got off the steamship at San Francisco proudly carrying two big traditional freighting canoes, they were given devastating news. Demille’s assistant Oscar Apfel told them that they would be filmed paddling canoes made by the Lasky Company prop department. And he showed them sketches of the small decrepit “birch bark boats” used in the movie.
The Tikah reaction to this news was never printed.
Two of the prop canoes sank during filming.
This is the story told in the Ahitiba Northcountry for years afterward:
When the Tikah had fulfilled their acting commitment, they were offered railroad tickets to take them as far as Seattle, Washington, “on Canada’s doorstep.” It would still be a 1400 mile trip by steam train to get from Seattle to their home waterways. Six men accepted the tickets.
The other twelve asked about their freight canoes. And were informed that only one of their big canoes could be found. Those Tikah demanded that they and their North Canoe be trucked to the Pacific Ocean. On a still morning in late June, 1914, they launched their supplies-laden canoe from a bay north of San Francisco (possibly Humboldt Bay). From there, they bravely paddled north into the sweeping ocean. Facing their own long journey home. They were never seen again.
Days later, the first group of six “actual Canadian Indians” arrived in East Selkirk, Manitoba on the brand new Canadian Northern Railway. The six quickly purchased two Ojibway canoes and launched them on the Red River. As they paddled away they were heard singing, as one townsman reported, “old voyageur songs and some wild Indian chants.” They were still singing when they reached their own Ahitiba homes on what was then called Lac Angelique.
And years later an old Tikah with a face grooved like pine bark would softly say to those who would listen: “When I was young I went to Hollywood to be in a movie. The story it told was not true. And then it was.”
For more about the Tikah People, see my short story WOLFBLOOD.
Cecil B DeMille, Call of the North & the Tikah People – aka Tiger Indians.
“Live Free, Mon Ami!” – Brian Alan Burhoe
(A heart-felt shout-out to those venerable Hollywood screenwriters Burt Kennedy, Frank Gruber, George Wallace Sayre, Gil Doud, Frank Fenton and Cecil B DeMille. All of whom inspired my love of history and true national mythology, and showed me how to craft it. God Bless ’em! If you haven’t met all of them, just Google each name with “Mounties” after it.)
Did you enjoy this North Woods Short Story?
IF SO, YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ WOLFBLOOD — MY MOST POPULAR ANIMAL STORY: “HAPPY ENDING!”
“I JUST READ WOLFBLOOD AGAIN FOR GOOD MEASURE. ONE FOR ANY WOLF LOVER. ENJOYED IT BUT WISH IT WAS A FULL LENGTH NOVEL.” – Gina Chronowicz @ginachron
“GREAT SHORT STORY! DOES REMIND ME OF CALL OF THE WILD, WHITE FANG…” – Evelyn @evelyn_m_k
A “charming and captivating” tale in the Jack London Tradition of a solitary Timber Wolf and it’s longing for a place in the far-flung Northern wilderness. The lone wolf will meet a spirited husky and her owner, an iron-willed Tikah trapper… FREE TO READ ==> WOLFBLOOD: A Wild Wolf, A Half-Wild Husky & A Wily Old Trapper
PHOTO NOTES:
Header Photo: Cast & Crew of The Call Of The North, Big Bear Lake, 1914, on-location group portrait released by Jesse L Lasky Feature Play Company.
Photos showing Cecil B DeMille setting up a scene with actress Winifred Kingston for Call of the North on Big Bear Lake, and DeMille filming the “big Indian raid” of the movie, are from the Rick Keppler Collection.
“The Chief Factor plans a terrible punishment. La Longue Traverse.” La Longue Traverse image is a production still from DeMille’s The Call of the North.
Photo illustrating typical traditional Tikah design birch bark North Canoe (Canot du Nord) is from Heritage Ottawa Archives.
Photoplay Footnotes:
[1] Review of Call of the North by W Stephen Bush, The Moving Picture World, August 22, 1914. See Complete MPW Review.
[2] This movie, and the novel it was based on, revealed a cruel form of punishment in the pre-Mounties era in the Far North of Canada: La Longue Traverse.
As a shocked Bioscope reviewer would write: “There is a law in the North that, if a man commits murder, or helps one who has committed murder, the guilty party will be driven off into the snows and deprived of food, fuel or weapons until he is dead.”
The tyranny of the Fur Company Chief Factors was extreme. They were all-powerful businessmen with no training in judicial, police or military procedures (or self-discipline). Their “word was law,” even for women they wanted. La Longue Traverse, also known as The Journey of Death, was another result.
Often the “guilty” man thrown into the wilderness was innocent, just someone the arrogant Factor disliked or no longer needed.
As the Bioscope reviewer’s “There is a law in the North…” indicates, moviegoers were left with the idea that The Journey of Death was still being used in Canada. In reality, the arrival of small North-West Mounted Police detachments in the Northcountry in the 1890’s changed all that. The red-coated Mounties had discouraged this misuse of power by big trading company bosses. Whenever the Mounties were assigned to a new territory to establish Law & Justice they always made it clear that “The Law applies to All.”
When The Call of the North went into remake in 1921, a riled Hudson’s Bay Company launched a lawsuit against Famous Players-Lasky. And they won. The judge ruled that “The greedy and powerful Robber Barons of the North American wild frontier do not subsist in the Twentieth Century.”
As Pierre Berton concluded: “The court held that the movie distorted conditions in Canada as they existed after 1870…
“After that Hollywood was more careful about identifying its factors as Hudson’s Bay men.” (HOLLYWOOD’S CANADA: The Americanization of Our National Image, Pierre Berton, Pg 81, McClelland & Stewart Ltd, Toronto, 1975).
For more on the history of the Fur Trade, see The American Fur Company.
[3] In a letter to Samuel Goldfish (later known as Samuel Goldwyn), DeMille wrote, “I challenge anyone to find an incorrect detail in The Call of the North. The only point in this picture which I believe might be opened to criticism is that the piece of plug tobacco used in the second reel is wrapped in paper and paper was a rare article in Dog River. But Stewart Edward White, the author, sportsman, explorer informs me that it is not at all impossible that a special treasure might have reached Dog River wrapped in paper.”
About author Stewart Edward White:
[3] Michigan-born Stewart Edward White wrote 50 b00ks in the first half of the 20th Century. Most of them were set in the Canadian and American wilderness. Reader favourites include THE LAND OF FOOTPRINTS, CAMP AND TRAIL, THE BLAZED TRAIL, THE RIVERMAN, THE FOREST, THE SILENT PLACES (a personal fave). And CONJUROR’S HOUSE: A Romance of the Free Forest.
Among his fans was Theodore Roosevelt.
The illustration to the left is by Philip R. Goodwin, from White’s THE SILENT PLACES, McClure, Phillips & Co, New York, 1904.
I wrote this Historical Short Story to honour one of the early Hollywood scriptwriters who gave us amazing Northwestern epics. ==> Cecil B DeMille, Call of the North & Tikah People – aka Tiger Indians
