The Created Life of Charles Eagle Plume

Charles Eagle Plume. A man of mystery from his unclear beginnings with the Blackfoot Native American Tribe in Montana right up until the clock stopped at his store in Allenspark, Colorado at the exact moment he died. 

Billed as America’s foremost Indian dancer and interpreter of Indian culture and folklore, Eagle Plume, like any great writer, was true to the life he created. 

No one knew how old he was. Throughout his life, Eagle Plume used age to serve his purpose. When it was best to be a young college student, he was young. He was advertised as twenty-two years old in newspapers spanning at least six years. Later, when it was best to have the romance of a very, very, very old man running a very, very old store, he hinted that he might be as old as 105, but who knew?

The story he told was that he grew up dirt poor on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park in Montana. His American name was Charles Burkhardt. His father was German and his mother was French with some Indian blood. He remembered going around in the winter with no shoes and his feet wrapped in gunnysacks stuffed with hay, and he remembered getting seriously burned and having pneumonia with no medical care. Growing up as a poor boy with very little schooling, he said that he learned to be tricky and to be sweet and lovable.  

Sometime in his early teens, he travelled south for warmer weather and an education in Colorado Springs. He graduated from high school in the spring of 1928.

It was his friend Ray Silver Tongue who wrote a letter inviting him to come to the Estes Park area where a couple who had a trading post was looking for workers.

Katherine Patterson and Marie Whitwer, two adventurous women from Topeka, Kansas, built the What Not Inn in 1917 south of Estes Park near Longmont and St. Vrain Mountains in the Tahosa Valley. They styled it after a Kansas farmhouse and served tea and offered a few rooms to rent. At some point, Katherine married O.S. Perkins, also from Topeka, and he bought out Marie Whitwer’s part of the What Not Inn and they changed the name to Perkins Trading Post. Some Native American art from the collection of Katherine’s father was the start of what was to become the Eagle Plume Collection.

When Eagle Plume first arrived in Estes Park, he slept on the floor of Mrs. Church’s store and rode out to Perkins Trading Post to ask O.S. Perkins, who liked to be called “Sheriff” because that was his job back in Topeka, and his teacher wife Katherine or “Kitty” Perkins, for a job. They couldn’t afford to pay him, but he agreed to chop wood, build the fires, and do odd jobs for room and board. 

Working with him was Ray Sanchez Silver Tongue who was born in 1903 in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, just north of Albuquerque. “He had a beautiful voice; he could sing almost with the power and the beauty of an opera singer,” said Eagle Plume in a 1977 interview. But singing was not Ray Silver Tongue’s only skill. “He ran from our front door past Charley Hughes’ old Hughes-Kirkwood Inn, past the Timberline Cabin at the base of Long’s Peak, and up to the top of Long’s Peak, and back to our front door, in four hours and twenty-five minutes. Nobody had ever equaled that record. We performed together, giving programs around Estes Park, for at least twelve more years.”

Eagle Plume and Silver Tongue worked during the day to have a place to sleep and passed a hat around at performances in hotels, lodges and libraries in the evenings. Eagle Plume, dressed in full Indian regalia and never missing a marketing opportunity, would shoot arrows at cars to get them to stop and then talk them into coming inside the store.  

In the fall of 1928, he attended the Colorado Teacher’s College in Greeley, now called the University of Northern Colorado. By the next fall, he transferred to the University of Colorado in Boulder because it had more of what he wanted to study. Anthropology.

As he learned about the history of humans, and especially about the history of the different Native American peoples, his performances became demonstrations and lectures celebrating Native ways of life.  Back then, they weren’t called Native Americans, but were instead savage and scary “Indians.” Eagle Plume’s mission was to teach people the customs, the dress, the dances, the songs, and the respect for nature and the earth that he so loved about the First Americans. He spoke passionately about the conditions on the reservations and the ways the Native American people had been tricked and lied to. He encouraged understanding and respect among peoples. 

Eagle Plume saved enough from what he earned performing to become one of the few college students to own a car. Every evening, he drove the length of Elkhorn Avenue in Boulder with the top down on his yellow Ford Model A convertible with beautiful girls sitting in the rumble seat. He said it caused many a dear little lady to raise an eyebrow on Broadway. Sometimes, he would take the girls to a place where they could get dinner for ten cents. 

In 1929, a Greeley newspaper noted that Charles Burkhardt was chosen as one of 34 out of 189 students who auditioned for the Players Club, a drama organization at the University of Colorado.

In May 1931, one of his classmates fell to his death from the peak called the Third Flatiron when Eagle Plume happened to be leading a Boy Scout troop on a hike and saw the fall. An experienced mountaineer, Eagle Plume was able to bring the young man’s completely shaken friend down from the mountain. 

In 1931, Eagle Plume spoke to his first audience of importance at the Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder. As Eagle Plume told the story in a 1977 interview:

“I had given a few other talks around Boulder to little local church groups, one at a grade school building, and then a nice little man named Mr. Fine, who was at that time the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Boulder, in desperation one night contacted me and said, ‘We’re having our annual Spring Banquet for the Chamber of Commerce in the Boulderado Hotel. It’s a big affair. Everybody is there, and the speaker, a famous man from New York, has not arrived. I hear you can give a little talk about Indians. Would you come and help us? We’ll give you—’ and he sort of gulped and said, ‘Well, we were going to give the speaker $2,000, but you’re just an Indian boy living here in Boulder. We’ll give you $5.’ $5 and a free meal at the banquet! I grabbed the job. I also grabbed my feathers, and by God, my loin cloth, and we tore off to the Boulderado Hotel, just in time. They were finishing their dessert. And the man said, ‘Our speaker has not arrived,’ and Mr. Fine called out, ‘I have a boy here!’ And he pushed me right out into the middle of the floor. And there I stood, for the first time in my life with a rather important audience of grown up, prominent business people and their wives from the city of Boulder. But God was on my side. Out of the blue sky came a joke. I don’t know anything about the origin of the joke. I’ve used it at least four thousand times since. I don’t believe I’ve ever given any program but what it was the first thing I’ve used. A little story of no importance at all, but it won the crowd. The crowd was mine. I was excited and I gave one of my most beautiful, most brilliant, most colorful programs that night. When I was finished, the audience was standing on their chairs. And I was launched into the impoverished career of being a professional lecturer.”

In March 1931, Eagle Plume performed and spoke at a church in Fort Collins, Colorado in an address titled “The Gift of Christianity to the Indian.” A newspaper article stated that Charles F. Burkhardt, Blackfoot Indian, was known among his people as Eagle Plume, and that he was a junior at the University of Colorado studying journalism so that he could take the cause of the Indian before the American people. He spoke about the unjust way the Native Americans were treated. “He said the once proud Indian is now begging for his very existence, and he pleaded with the audience to take a personal interest in seeing that the Indian receives fair treatment. He said present conditions are undoubtedly the result of the lack of information on the part of the general public.” 

In March 1932, he made national news across the country, appearing in newspapers in such places as Scranton, Pennsylvania, Birmingham, Alabama, Fort Worth, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri. The article, based out of Denver, stated that Eagle Plume, American name Charles Burkhardt, spoke at the Denver Open Forum, declaring that a race of people worth one billion and a half in property and cash was starving. “He blamed the United States government for much of the hardships of the Indian.” The article reported Eagle Plume’s vision for his future: “Following his graduation in June, Eagle Plume intends to tour the United States, lecturing on behalf of his people.”

And that’s exactly what he did. Eagle Plume graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1932 with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. In his graduating year, Eagle Plume had the honor of performing a dance solo during the operetta “Being Bold-er.” 

Eagle Plume continued to work summers at Perkins Trading Post, performing at night in preparation for the mission ahead of him. There are newspaper articles about performances in the spring and summer of 1932, but not again until the fall of 1933. I don’t know what he did during that year, but my guess is that he went on his own form of vision quest and lived among the people of the pueblos and reservations, learning and dancing. 

In the fall of 1933, Eagle Plume began his mission in Kansas City. 

By December 1933, he had an unusual job interview. As the Kansas City Times reported on December 8, 1933 in a well-written article that is a joy to read:

Eagle Plume got a contract with the Kansas City School Board to give a talk in every school in the area at $5 per lecture. After Kansas City, he went to St. Louis with a letter in his hand to give to the president of the women’s club. She said she’d give him a try talking to the club for ten minutes. The talk went over and the attendees recommended him to other clubs, and he ended up with so many speaking engagements that he lectured all over St. Louis for three months.  

A February 22, 1934 St. Louis Post-Dispatch feature about Eagle Plume stated that “he is determined to learn a great deal and to help his people. To become an archaeologist, one active in the field work, and not shut up in a museum, is his ambition. So, he plans to get a doctor’s degree at Columbia University, and after that, he wants to go back to the mountains for a rest from civilization.”

After St. Louis, Eagle Plume returned to Perkins Trading Post for the summer, which did indeed become the place in the mountains where he later rested from civilization. 

Sometime in 1935, he went to Chicago and none of the lecture bureaus would listen to him, saying that they had plenty of Indians already. It was a little old lady in her 80s, a secretary for a professional association of lecturers, who gave Eagle Plume the chance to speak for ten minutes on a platform with some of the most famous people in America. She asked if he thought he could do it and Eagle Plume said he would try.

“And I did try,” said Eagle Plume in a 1977 interview. “And I made that crowd go wild. Harry Harrison, who was the president of the leading lecture bureau in America at that time, the Redpath Bureau, came to me and said, ‘I’ll have a contract on my desk. When can you come? First thing in the morning?’”

The Redpath Lyceum Bureau of Chicago hired Eagle Plume to speak and dance throughout the country. Carl Bachman managed his lectures and Eagle Plume stayed with the Bureau until Bachman died. For the next forty years, with a small break of a few years during WWII, he spent every winter traveling the Midwest to captivate spell-bound audiences in gyms, clubs, and lodges, teaching them about Native Americans. He wore a beaded buckskin and an eagle feather headdress, and he darkened his skin with makeup and wore brown contacts that made his eyes water. Dosed with humor to make the medicine go down, the tours were human rights crusades encouraging education and racial tolerance.

As Eagle Plume stated in an interview in 1977:
“Perhaps I’m a little conceited to think that my thousands of talks that I gave at that time influenced enough voters that somebody in Washington began to listen a little bit, became a little disturbed over complaints. But anyway, ultimately, we got a great man to be appointed commissioner of Indian Affairs…It’s so easy to pick out the little faults in the great men. All of us have them. But few of us have the dramatic power to sway the whole world and guide new routes.”

Once Redpath hired him, Eagle Plume lived in Chicago in the winters and at Perkins Trading Post in the summers. He travelled throughout the Midwestern states, particularly Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan. The Redpath Bureau advertised him as “America’s foremost Indian dancer and interpreter of Indian lore, life, and culture.” 

Eagle Plume’s lecture/performances had a typical format: First, he identified and explained the purpose for each piece of native apparel: headdress, breast-plate, etc. Second, he shared the music of Native Americans, explaining that the sound was strange to European ears because of the use of quarter tones, which he said was like singing in the cracks between the keys of a piano. Third, he performed the dances of the Native Americans: sun dance, ghost dance, eagle dance, and sweetheart dance. Fourth, he talked about social customs, especially the role of women, stating that the oldest maternal grandmother was the head of the family and if a woman wanted to divorce a man, all she had to do was set his moccasins outside the door and he had to go back to his own people. Fifth, he shared some Native American sign language. And sixth, he talked about the important contributions of Native Americans to civilization: the concept of democracy from the Iroquois, the introduction of new foods, and the concept of the number zero. He ended his lectures with the reminder that he and his audience members were not the first to travel this way: “Other people have built their campfires here before us.”

He also continued to plead for peace and understanding among peoples. A South Bend, Indiana newspaper in 1937 wrote: “Decrying racial hate as the seed from which grows many ill-conceived and improperly nurtured attitudes of men toward one another, the speaker endeavored to show the necessity for replacing that hate and prejudice with racial gratitude and compatibility.” (The South Bend Tribune. South Bend, Indiana. February 13, 1937.)

“Men should respect each other’s traditions,” he is quoted in a Battle Creek, Michigan newspaper, “White men have often made fun of the Indian’s feeling toward nature, but when an Indian talks to the trees and the wind it means something fundamental to him.” (Battle Creek Enquirer. Battle Creek, Michigan. March 20, 1936.)

And this message from Eagle Plume found its way to a Jackson, Alabama newspaper, “There is much peace and happiness in quiet things. Moonlight on rippling water. The glowing embers of an open fire. Pine trees whispering together on a hill top. The silent stars, like flickering candle flames in heaven. The Indian trail to happiness is worth following. There is healing for jangled nerves and tired minds in the woods, the hills, the singing streams and the mountain tops.” (The South Alabamian. Jackson, Alabama. September 14, 1938.)

“Eagle Plume advised his young audience to avoid pride and prejudices: ‘They are what we are fighting against in this war: hate ideas, but never people.” (Battle Creek Enquirer. Battle Creek , Michigan. March 27, 1942.)

“So comprehensive and sympathetic was the speaker that most of the audience felt that something immediate and permanent should be done about the fate of our ‘First Americans.’ This can be done, said Eagle Plume, by those interested contacting their congressmen.” The Daily Sentinel. Woodstock, Illinois. March 9, 1948.

In 1939, Mr. Perkins passed away. Eagle Plume continued to work with Mrs. Perkins and made an effort to do all those things that “a dear little old lady couldn’t do.”  

The WPA (Work Progress Administration) was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal as a way give people employment. Sometime after 1935, I suspect sometime after Mr. Perkins died, a team of men were employed to pave the highway that ran past Perkins Trading Post. To keep the men employed, once the paving was finished, they would tear it up and repave it, again and again, which was making it difficult for tourists to visit the store. So, Eagle Plume wrote President Roosevelt a letter stating that the country people didn’t need a new highway every month, but they did need new outhouses. 

As Eagle Plume told the tale in 1977: “And then I forgot all about writing it. But some months later, three gentlemen, typical government officials in blue serge suits, well-pressed and a little slick and seamy, nice white shirts with black ties, appeared. ‘Mr. Eagle Plume, we have a letter directly from the White House saying that you need an, um, ah…’ And I said, ‘Do you mean an outhouse?’ And they said, ‘Ah, er, ah yeeees…’ Well I said, ‘Good. That’s what we need.’ So, we walked out in the backyard and I picked a place and they said, ‘It will be built. Mr. Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, happened to be talking to Roosevelt when your letter was read. And Mr. Ickes said, ‘I know that rascal.’ And Roosevelt therefore said, ‘Well, let’s build him an outhouse.’ And so, it was built. It still stands here.”

It turned out that the trading post had to pay for the materials: lumber, shingles and paint. Eagle Plume was told that he could help repay the cost of the labor if he would inspect the outhouse every month and every evening for one month and report the number of flies and how badly it smelled. Eagle Plume reported “no flies and no smell” twice a day for a month. It was an experimental outhouse and with the good report, it became the model for federally built outhouses in parks and campgrounds across the country. The sign on the door of the Outhouse says “His, Hers, Undecided.”

Charles Eagle Plume went to war in late 1942 after checking in with Mrs. Perkins and getting her set up in town. He spent three and a half years in the army in the Solomon Islands where he served as a scout and developed a newspaper for his unit. When Eagle Plume returned in November 1945, he started his lectures again with the Redpath Bureau, wintering in Chicago, and summering in Estes Park.

Long before Mrs. Perkins died in 1965, she turned the trading post over to Eagle Plume and, after her death, he changed the name to what it is today, Eagle Plume’s. 

He would set up a tipi outside every summer so that people traveling through had a place to stay. Those who worked with him remember that he was a generous man.

He loved to make people laugh. One of his favorite games was “Pick a Number.” 1, 2, 3 or 4. Apparently, there was a statistical probability that people would choose 3. Eagle Plume had a card in his wallet with the statement that people who choose the number 3 are sex maniacs. He greatly enjoyed making pretty women blush by presenting this card.

He loved children and would give every child either a feather or an arrowhead depending on the child’s age. 

One man, now a grandfather, remembers meeting Eagle Plume in his trading post when he was a boy. Eagle Plume immediately engaged him in conversation, offering a beautiful arrowhead.

“How much do you think this arrowhead is worth?” the enterprising salesman asked. 

The boy, about seven or eight, ventured an outrageous guess. 

“Do you want to know how much this arrowhead is worth? It’s worth the value of our friendship, and you can’t put a price on that.” And he handed the arrowhead to the boy.

Charles Eagle Plume lived until September 8, 1992. Legend has it that the clock in the trading post, a gift from Mrs. Perkins that Eagle Plume was always harping on everyone to remember to wind up, saying “when that clock stops, I die,” froze right at 6:20 pm, the moment of his death. To this day, local residents gather each year for a Toast to the Ghost on September 8 at 6:20 pm. 

Eagle Plume’s carries on today with those children he befriended returning year after year with their own children and even their grandchildren. The place is a multi-generational landmark. Eagle Plume passed the trading post down to the family who was by his side during his older years: Dayton Raben, his wife Anne Strange Owl, and their daughter Nico.

I visited the store in the fall of 2017. Heavy with history, warmth, and artistic beauty, it was the sort of place you don’t want to leave. There was a room upstairs dedicated to Eagle Plume, almost like a shrine with newspaper articles about when he got an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado Boulder and different times he spoke, old photographs, old maps, drums, pottery, ceremonial clothing that must have been his, and an old fashioned ragged straight-backed armchair under a lamp, empty, waiting for him to return and sit down. 

Wrapped in a shawl, Anne Strange Owl sat in a little chair by the fire and I spoke with her a little. When he found out I was Pansy Stockton’s great-granddaughter, Dayton brought out the sun painting she made called “Ghosts.” It was an abstract piece, unusual for my great-grandmother, with two trees intertwined. How it found its way back to Eagle Plume’s, I didn’t know, but certainly Eagle Plume’s is where it is meant to be. 

And that begins another story…

SOURCES:

“Charles Eagle Plume Oral History Interview.” 1979 and 1981.

“Colorado Boy Dies in Fall Over a Cliff.” Albuquerque Journal. Albuquerque, NM. May 18, 1931.

Colorado Springs High School Yearbook 1928. Colorado Springs, CO. 

“Eagle Plume Makes Appeal for Indian.” Fort Collins Coloradoan. Fort Collins, CO. March 9, 1931.

Greeley Daily Tribune. Greeley, CO. February 22, 1932. 

“He Speaks for a Dying Race.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. St. Louis, MO. February 22, 1934. 

“Indian Culture Helped U.S. – Eagle Plume.” The Daily Sentinel. Woodstock, IL. March 9, 1948. 

“Indian Seeks Better Race Understanding.” Battle Creek Enquirer. Battle Creek, MI. March 20, 1936. 

“Oral History Interview with Charles Eagle Plume.” Boulder Public Library. 1977. 

“Society.” The South Bend Tribune. South Bend, IN. February 13, 1937. 

Strange Owl-Raben, Ann and Arms, Sharon L. Ann Strange Owl: A Northern Cheyenne Memoir. 2017.

Steiner, David E. “On the Death of Charles Eagle Plume.” Allenspark Wind.

The Coloradoan Yearbook 1931. University of Colorado Boulder. 

The Coloradoan Yearbook 1932. University of Colorado Boulder.

“The Indian Trail to Happiness.” The South Alabamian. Jackson, Alabama. September 14, 1938.

“Whoops For A Contract: Routine of the School Board Changed by Indian Dancer.” The Kansas City Times. Kansas, City, MO. December 8, 1933. 

“Worth $1,500,000,000, Says Race is Starving.” The Scranton Times. Scranton, PA. March 4, 1932. 

“Youngsters, Dads Learn Indian Lore.” Battle Creek Enquirer. Battle Creek, MI. March 27, 1942.