Ingraham’s own life sounds almost as flamboyant. Prentiss Ingraham in 1890, from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West - McCracken Research Library 909, 915, 921) while the British cheap publisher Aldine also capitalized on Mohawk’s theatrical success by reprinting the three volumes in their “O’er Land and Sea” Library. In 1896, during Mohawk’s British tour, Beadle’s Dime Library reprinted them as free-standing dime novels with new sub-titles emphasizing Buffalo Bill’s presence (nos.

The mini-series was first serialized in Banner Weekly as Red Butterfly, the Spy of the Overland or, The Nine Scouts' League (February 14 to May 9, 1891) Go-won-go, the Red-Skin Rider or, The Moonlight Marauders (May 9 to August 1, 1891) and Velvet Bill's Vow or, The Red Rider's Retribution (August 1 to October 24, 1891). Meanwhile, Ingraham wrote two more novels featuring his version of Mohawk, who ends up relinquishing male disguise, declaring that she is “now in my natural dress as a woman” and being “claimed” in marriage by Velvet Bill. Go-won-go Mohawk continued to play male roles in triumphal tours of North America and Britain, while circulating studio photographs that emphasized non-binary gender in combinations of Indigenous (sometimes Seneca-specific), wild west, male, and female clothing and poses. I wanted to ride and wrestle, and I thought, ‘Well, I can’t do that as a woman, I must act a man, or better, a boy’” ( Des Moines Register and Leader, March 31, 1910). Indeed, Mohawk began writing plays because she was tired of being cast as a woman: “I said to myself that I must have something free and wild that would fit with my own nature. The novel ends with the revelation that Go-won-go is a woman, a move that she never made on stage. In Red Butterfly, she goes from orphaned Indian maiden in the West, to star schoolgirl in the East, back to the West disguised as a young Sioux man who can out-trail, out-shoot, and even out-sail Buffalo Bill himself. Most intriguingly, he changed Mohawk’s Nation from Seneca to Sioux-an identity made internationally popular by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West-and insisted on her essential womanhood. Ingraham added further plot twists and a band of scouts led by Buffalo Bill Cody.

Ingraham’s plotline drew on Mohawk’s play, on tour since 1888: a heroic Indian mail carrier in the West revenges the killing of his father by an outlaw while undertaking dangerous missions as a pony express rider between a border town and a military fort.

431, published February 14, 1891.ĭime novels set in the American West routinely included stereotypes of Indians this is a rare case of a dime novel appropriating for its central protagonist, without acknowledgement, a budding Indigenous celebrity.

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