Imitation and Identity
Born in Groningen, Netherlands, in 1873, Abraham Rutgers van der Loeff trained in commercial art in Amsterdam, where he filled his early diaries with cartoonish marginalia, short stories and plays set in exoticized Persian palaces, Indian jungles, and Chinese temples. His tales, such as “The Pagoda of Tshi” and “The History of Selin the Tiger,” featured stereotyped illustrations of Chinese figures in Fu Manchu facial hair, demons, and dragons, repeatedly invoking the phrase “Chineesch Spiritisme” (Chinese Spiritualism).^80
After settling in Spokane, Van der Loeff became a fixture of the city’s saturated fraternal life. Dubbed “Mr. Rotary” in his 1961 obituary, he was also active in the Spokane Athletic Club, the Oriental Masonic Lodge, the Cataract Commandery, the Mystic Club, and the El Kalif Shrine.^81 His art and affiliations are indicative of a city steeped in colonial symbols of empire and otherness. Although his diaries document that Van der Leoff visited the Spokane Athletic Club nearly every day, his social life revolved less around athletics than cards, billiards, and organizing events.
In 1913, he helped organize the club’s First Annual Minstrel Show, serving on the arrangements committee while the Elks Lodge supplied “colonial costumes.”^82 While blackface vaudeville review shows were not uncommon in the Pacific Northwest during this period, minstrelsy was deeply woven into Spokane’s cultural life.^83 The Orator, the city’s theater magazine, reported multiple blackface reviews in any given month, not only in major theaters, clubs and restaurants but also the Spokane High School, where “the boys always do everything with characteristic thoroughness.”^84
Just as blackface theater initially inspired Chris Rutt of the Quaker Oats Company to create the Aunt Jemima character, the popularity of minstrelsy in Spokane eventually embedded itself into commercial imagery as well.^85 One late-nineteenth-century advertisement for Centennial Mills depicted a domestic scene of a mother chasing a boy with a spoon, as he hides under a table smiling after having knocked over and consumed a plate of cookies.
Within the image, on a box of Wheat Manna (“For Breakfast”), we can see a similar “Mammy” character to Aunt Jemima, wearing a shawl with a fair haired little girl on her lap.^86 Author Marilyn Mehaffy attributes the prevalence of these types of characters in commercial imagery to larger national discourses in the post-slavery reconstruction era, concurrent with “plantation literature, the visual arts, and politics-mythologizing antebellum slavery as a more coherent, tranquil era “lost” to the uncertainties and upheavals of postwar urbanism, industrialism, and commercialism.”^87
Other print mediums contained antebellum allusions. The 1890 map of Spokane’s Northwestern Industrial Exposition promoted the “vast resources and unlimited products” of the Inland Empire, showing a fully rebuilt downtown even though reconstruction after the 1889 fire was still underway. Near signs for coal, hops, and timber, the map highlighted an area for “tobacco plantations,” even though the region’s climate would have made tobacco cultivation impossible.
The claim on the map’s reverse side that Spokane’s “tobacco plantations and rich fruit farms can supply all demands” was not factual but strategic, likely aimed at attracting Southern investors by evoking a mythologized, racialized agrarian past. This is what authors Maharawai and McElroy define as a “fantasy map,” which reflected the imagination and desires of real estate boosters and investors more than the actual environment.^88 Contrasting these fantasy maps against our current environment, they can help us understand the ways that these imaginings of the very few may have become the reality for many.
Spokane’s booster literature proudly reported eighty-seven fraternal lodges in the city with a combined membership of 15,300, nearly 20% of the population.^89 This included the Prince Hall lodges Inland Empire No. 3 and Crespus Attucks No. 2 for Black men, as well as women’s organizations like the Woman’s Woodcraft and the temperance-focused International Order of Good Templars.^90 In contrast to contemporary notions of “secret societies,” fraternalism was a cornerstone of civic identity in early 1900s Spokane.
Masonic emblems adorned Manito Park and members marched in full regalia during public festivals.^91 At the 1913 Pow Wow, “The March of the Mystic Men” staged a mobile evolutionary tableau that ranked fraternal orders as civilizational milestones—from “The Original Inhabitants” (notably, the all-White Red Men) and “The Discoverers” (the Colombo Society) to “The Pioneers,” “The Developers,” and finally “The Men of Today”: the Commercial Travelers.^92 The spectacle framed fraternity not as private ritual but as public theater of progress, curated and racially ordered.
Fraternal organizations served a vital, practical function of mutual aid in the era before health insurance and dangerous working conditions. Knights of Pythias was one of the more explicitly mutual-aid oriented fraternities. Named after the Greek myth about public execution and platonic devotion between the characters Damon and Pythias, the story served to teach friendship and “model interpersonal relations.”^93
A small leather case in the papers of Spokane real estate agent Charles Woodruff Clarke illustrates this commitment. Issued by the Fraternal Identification Co., the item states that “in case of accident or sickness which renders this person unconscious, helpless or unidentified, where assistance is required,” medical aid be provided and “the company will transmit such information to the friends and relatives of this person,” ensuring the member would be placed “in the care of friends or relatives.”^94
Beyond these practicalities, the surge of fraternal organizations between 1880 and 1920 also reflected deeper social shifts. Industrialization, women’s organization, and westward expansion had upended traditional domestic and labor roles, and lodges offered members a sense of performed order. As William D. Moore writes, “solemn fraternal ceremonies drew upon biblical and classical narratives to inculcate members with supposedly timeless systems of morality and ethics.”^95
In an era before radio, television and major film studio formation, fraternal lodges “served as both theaters and sites of worship,” to reinforce member’s identities through invoking archetypal and symbolic scenes in a combination of history and fantasy.^96 The increased private and public theatricality displayed in Spokane from 1890-1920 represented a departure from how organizations like Scottish Rite Freemasonry was practiced in the East. Possible reasons for this were the increased demand for new initiates, as Western lodges struggled into formation in new cities, as well as “the increased availability of quality scenery and costumes.”^97
The archive of the International Order of Odd Fellows in Cheney, Washington, sixteen miles outside of Spokane, contains a Henderson-Ames Co. catalog. Based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the firm’s six-story factory spanned an entire city block and housed specialized departments for costumes, regalia, helmets, embroidery, magic lanterns, flags, as well as a sword shop.^98 Despite the scale of operations, Henderson-Ames was only one of a handful of other major fraternal regalia makers operating in the US at this moment.^99
Spokane had its own supplier in the Miller-Dervant Company, a costume and wig shop founded on Thanksgiving Day, 1893. The company catered to Spokane residents in need of dress for “theatricals, ball masque, tableaux, cantata, living pictures, and similar occasions.”^100 Within the 1906 catalog are articles on wigs for baldness as well as extensive “practical hints on the art of making up,” that include guides for “Old Age, Irish Character, Chinamen, Negroes and Indians,” as well as a list of over 450 costumes for rental and purchase.
National and ethnic costumes were the most popular category at 19%, followed by military personnel (15%), literary and stage figures (14%), royalty and nobility (9%), and historical figures (5%). Within the national category, English and British characters dominated at 23%, with French and Italian characters at 9% each, and Black/African and Chinese/Asian characters at 6%. Notably, Dutch costumes made up 4%—a higher share than Irish, Greek, or Indigenous outfits, despite the far greater presence of groups in the actual population of the Pacific Northwest. The available Dutch costumes included the “Dutchman,” “Dutchman–Fat,” “Dutch Professor,” “Old Dutch Styles” for women, and “Dutch Girl.”^101
The inside cover of the Miller-Dervant catalogue features a circular illustration of costumed figures arranged around a band of musical notation. A Romani woman sings with a tambourine; a couple poses as French aristocrats; another woman holds a fan in a kimono. The assemblage breaks into exotic fantasy with a woman dressed as King Tut and posing in a hieroglyphic fashion, followed by a woman in a lei and Pāʻū hula skirt with wild, bobbed hair. At the top of the circle, a Dutch girl is pictured curtsying in a bonnet and clogs.
During the 1913 Spokane Pow Wow celebration, the Dutch were featured in two events. A photograph from “The Dance of the Dutch” shows hundreds of girls in Dutch bonnets, some more hastily folded than others, hoisting sticks above their heads. Many wore skirts with the red, white, and blue horizontal stripes evoking the Dutch flag. The photo was taken from the bleachers of Glover Field, then known as The Stadium, looking out onto the Monroe Bridge and the raging Spokane River.^102
The program for the second event, “The Story of Robin Hood,” described “24 milk maids in cute Dutch Bonnets, carrying milk pails and 24 Little Bo-Peep shepherd girls, each carrying a shepherd’s crook.”^103 This mimicry of Dutch culture on a mass scale is unique to parades in the Pacific Northwest during this period, as it was more reflective of the percentage of board members in the Spokane Chamber of Commerce than the state’s actual immigrant population.
A semantic drift complicated the presence of the Dutch in Spokane history. Because the German word for “German” is “deutsch” (pronounced “doych”), Americans conflated Germans with the already established Pennsylvania Dutch, after the major German immigration following the 1848 revolution.^104 A regional example in Spokane was “Dutch Jake,” a Frankfurt native who struck rich on a Bunker Hill mine.
He used the fortune to open the Coeur d’Alene Hotel and Variety Theater in Spokane, “one of the largest gambling and drinking establishments in the Northwest.”^105 This four-story mecca included a wing called The Dutch Mill, which featured musical waiters with accordions, saxophones, and guitars, as well as a menu of traditional German drinking songs for patrons to request.^106
While the most common display of Dutch iconography in Spokane’s theatrical and commercial landscape was the innocent, pigtailed young woman, German caricatures were often employed to ridicule. At initiatory services for the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, comedians impersonated both Germans and the Irish.^107
In the program for a Knight of Pythias event, a Knapp, Burrell & Co. advertisement featured a German caricature with a nearly inscrutable combination of iconography: a pot-bellied man wearing lederhosen pants and a mustachioed smirk held an ear of corn to the sky and extended a pair of angelic wings while standing on a log stump. The character provided an ethnically tinged advertisement for FLYER FLEXIBLE snow slides, declaring in a mock German accent, “Auf you vant a schled mit horses on, dey got some ghoot vones. Yah!” \“If you want a sled with horses on it, they have some good ones. Yes!”\
On July 22, 1904 the Leiden paper De Locomotief, announced that James J. Hill was offering a “study trip” for all of the members of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. The offer included free transportation on the Great Northern Railway from St. Louis to Kansas City, from Butte to Spokane, “a visit to the Falls, the use of water power for industrial purposes.” The journey continued to Tacoma, then Seattle where “Great Northern Steamers will sail to Japan” where merchants could “establish connections for inbound and outbound trade in the Dutch East Indies.”^108
From 1890 to 1910, Spokane’s “Oriental Alley,” which ran from Howard to Bernard Street, housed a large and active Japanese population.^109 According to an 1897 memoir, the neighborhood was a diverse mix of Chinese, Italians, Japanese, and Mexicans, with Chinese-run stores, tea houses, and hand laundries.^110 At the same time, the European American community engaged in widespread mimicry of these cultures.
Like Van der Loeff’s childhood fascination with “Chineesch Spiritisme,” residents depicted exaggerated imitations of Asian culture in parades, where White participants dressed as “coolie” figures and carried paper lanterns.^111 This mimicry was also commercialized. The Miller-Dervant company sold “Chinese Wigs,” a bald cap with a long, dark ponytail, as well as a tutorial on applying their “No. 16 Chinese color grease paint” to complete the look.^112
Spokane’s commercial industry was also engaging in a similar style of iconographic Asian impersonation. James J. Hill, the “The great railroad king”^113 actively cultivated Dutch investment to export Palouse wheat through the Dutch-owned Spokane Flour Mills via his Great Northern Railway and steamship lines to Asian markets under a series of exoticized brands.^114 In 1897, Hill reported to Dutch investors that the return on Palouse wheat had doubled in twenty years due to Asian exports.^115
Reporting to Dutch readers in 1896, the editor of the Spokesman Review confirmed that the majority of the city’s flour was exported to Asia.^116 As owners of the Spokane Flour Mill and the Phoenix Lumber Mill, Everwijn Lange Jr. and Dutch shareholders controlled the top two exports from the Palouse region to China and Japan during this period.^117
The designs for Spokane Flour Mills’ wholesale burlap sacks adopted a confused cultural tone, as a Dutch interpretation of how an American company would design a product for non-English speaking customers an additional 5,000 miles away. For the Philippine market, they partnered with the Genato Commercial Corporation, “exclusive representative in the Philippine islands,” and rebranded as “Suretidos Flour” and “Pato Flour,” with an image of a duck floating on the water, holding four sprigs of wheat tied with a banner in its beak, with the words “Purity” and “Uniformity” written on it. For Mexico, the company became Gallo de Pelea, or Fighting Cock Flour, with an image of a red and green Bantam Rooster with spikes attached to its legs.
For the Chinese market, Spokane Mills dressed up as the “Temple of Heaven Brand,” “Lantern Brand,” produced by “Siu Tai Cheong,” “Horse Brand” produced by the “Tai Chi Company.” This multilingual telephone game appears to have broken down in the “Orchard Brand,” where two loping orchids are depicted behind a rock and hanzi writing on either side extolls the virtues of “Superior Flour, Orchid Brand Trademark.”
In 1907, Louis W. Hill, who had taken over management of the Great Northern Railway from his father, was the keynote speaker for the Ninth Annual Convention of the Pacific Coast Advertising Men’s Association in Portland. In addition to representatives from San Diego to Vancouver, British Columbia, the article noted a particular group of “live wires” from Spokane “dressed as Native Americans,” led by Raymond E. Bigelow.^118 A former president of the National Retail Clothing and Furnisher’s Association and director of the Spokane Ad Club, Bigelow also credited himself as a key figure behind the creation of Father’s Day,^119 the creator of the 1912 municipal flag, the official city flower (aster) and the Miss Spokane contest, which had “brought much favorable publicity to the city.”^120
First won by Marguerite Motie in 1912, the contest continues to this day. Bigelow designed the campaign so that European American winners like Motie would dress as Indigenous figures, appearing in regional parades, fairs, exhibitions and conventions in costume. Until 1951, Miss Spokane winners were required to wear faux-Indigenous long braids at publicity events.^121
Motie (pronounced Mo-chee) was heavily photographed, often with arms outstretched and a blissful smile on her face, where it would be reproduced in both photographic and illustrated images into booster literature, frequently towering above the region’s natural resources. In the words of Katherine G. Morrissey, Miss Spokane became “a traditional mythical embodiment of abundance… a silent presence who invites the viewers into the maps and images with her open-armed gesture.”^122 The European American as Indigenous figure drew the attention of the reader and invited them to imagine the region’s potential.
In the 1913 Pow Wow program, Raymond E. Bigelow positioned himself prominently above Miss Spokane. Dressed in a feather headdress, beaded buckskin, and holding a long pipe, he pronounced himself “Big Chief I of the Pow Wow.” The event was a celebration of European Americans as non-White ethnicities on an incredible scale. The procession included “fifty Zulu cannibals,” “The Thirty Six Tribes of American Indians” and the entire Gonzaga College band dressed as Indigenous people. Spokane’s Lewis and Clark High School recreated their namesake event, which consisted of the expedition leaders, followed by children dressed as scouts, then trappers, and finally around 80 dressed in indigenous costume.^123
A few actual Indigenous people attended the parade. While Miss Spokane and Bigelow performed in brown face makeup and regalia, twelve chiefs from the Blackfoot tribes of Glacier National Park performed “The Dance of the Festival” at the Coronational Ball. A photograph from a future event documents an Indigenous person on horseback in traditional dress, also participating in a homesteader’s narrative, riding behind a White woman in a caravan.^124 The organization of the processions created a sequential narrative indicating the Inland Empire’s future belonged to European Americans and romanticized Indigenous people as a thing of the past.
A similar treatment appears in the Spokane booster booklet, The City Beautiful. A caption for a photograph of a long row of tipis set against rolling Palouse hills reads “The Wanders, temporary Indian Village on the outskirts of Spokane,” insinuating both an ephemerality and physical distance.^125
Indigenous people were also folded into classical narratives in Spokane’s architectural iconography. Amongst the interior flourishes of the Old National Bank Building, built in 1893, were a series of decorative lunettes mounted in the main banking room,^126 depicting a European Neptune, and Tyche, leaning on a rudder “signaling her ability to steer events.”^127 In the third lunette, an Indigenous woman, head bowed in sleep, as fruits and vegetables spilling out from the cornucopia she is holding onto the ground below.^128
As William Cronon noted, builders during this period “were reaching for a metaphor that lent their city the grandeur of past urban empires… They surely did not think it silly to view American history through the epic lens of classical civilization, or to imagine that the grandeur of St. Louis or Chicago might someday, in the not too distant future, equal Rome’s. To believe otherwise was to doubt the high destiny of America itself.”^129 In the case of the Old National Bank lunettes, the message was again communicated sequentially, suggesting a classical legacy driven by European Americans that Indigenous people failed to realize.
In January 1892, the Spokane Spokesman newspaper celebrated the new year with its first illustrated supplement and boasted that the work “may itself be viewed critically as a specimen of the finest bookwork yet attempted here.”^130 The only element not produced in Spokane was the illustration work, done by Fred C. Brisley, a St. Paul Press Club Member alongside Eugene Smalley, President of Northwest Magazine, the booster literature arm of Northern Pacific Railroad.^131 Brisley’s cover depicted a woman in a toga and laurels with books and wheat at her feet. She held a feather pen to a sheaf of paper propped on her knee, while behind her, winged cherubs floated near dual pennants bearing the state seals of Idaho and Washington, framing an image of Spokane Falls.
Allusions to classical Greek and Roman iconography were prevalent in Spokane’s visual culture from 1890 to 1910, as people decorated their bodies and buildings to evoke a sense of permanence and destiny. As historian Hal Rothman theorized, “American elites need to define a cultural heritage for themselves apart from the European legacy that they had long revered and sought to emulate, yet to which they felt inferior.”^132 The frequent depiction of women in these scenes may also be tied to the concurrent rise of portrait and commercial photography studios in the 1890s.
Prominent Spokane portrait photographers of the era included Charles “Chas” A. Libby, Samuel D. Owings, and the mononymous female photographers Laryea and Ihrig.^133 In a portrait from Owings studio on Riverside Avenue, a woman in a white gown holds a guitar, seated on and beside Greek-style statuary adorned with lion faces and cherubs. Set in front of a matte painting evoking a forested countryside, loose mats of horsehair simulated tufts of grass.
Royals and nobility were the fourth highest category of the 371 costumes available for rent in the Miller-Devant catalog, with options like Marie Antoinette for women and the Doge of Venice for men. In a series that may be from the Pow Wow celebration, photographs depict scores of Marie Antoinettes parading in front of the Rainier Grand Hotel, and in another, fourteen Antoinettes in nearly identical gowns vastly outnumbering a single, diminutive nobleman posed outside the E.J. Hyde Jewelry Company.^134 This act of class mimicry served a social purpose. As commercial art historian Jennifer M. Black theorized, Americans emulated European high culture to distinguish themselves in a rapidly changing social landscape.^135
Spokane residents also applied class mimicry to their homes, with a similar level of artifice as the cotton “pouf” Antoinette wigs. An extreme example appeared in the 1911 Inland Empire Architect, which featured a personal library adorned with doubled, stacked Corinthian columns and a fireplace mantel with a massive Aeolian Order outgrowth extending all the way to the ceiling.^136 It is likely these ancient evocations were simply plaster moldings built into the walls, painted matte white to resemble stone.
The book and paper merchant John W. Graham offered Spokane residents a less labor-intensive form of class mimicry through an extensive line of “artistic paper hanging”. Graham specialized in “imitations of materials,” producing paper versions of velvet, silk, and cretonne designed to mimic the look and feel of more expensive fabrics. These “tapestry papers” and ribbed green velvets were printed to create the illusion of texture and depth.^137
A.R. Van der Loeff also engaged in a similar act of interior design as costume, a contribution still preserved in the Davenport Hotel’s “Circus Room.”^138 The room is a tribute to Harper Joy, a Spokane businessman and mutual friend of Louis Davenport who began his career as a blackface minstrel and later toured with circuses.^139 Preserved to this day, the room features multicolored bulbs for overhead lights, meant to evoke balloons and interior, candy striped awnings, signifying the big tent and a mural cut from gray cardboard and painted by Van der Loeff.
In front of a stagecoach in the center of the mural, the artist depicted the back of an adult male figure with his hand in the gesture of an ‘M.’ In Doris Woodward’s Harper Joy; Spokane’s Man of Many Faces, the author notes this gesture is known within Masonic circles as the “sign of calling”, indicating another likely point of connection between Joy, Davenport and “Rotary Man” Van der Loeff.^140
W.L. Benham, a former salesman for the Northwestern and Pacific Hypotheek Bank, was the first figure to begin developing plans to irrigate logged over land outside of Spokane to sell to prospective orchardists.^141 The smaller of these agricultural ventures was the Arcadia Orchard Company, consisting of 1000 acres 22 miles north of Spokane, where apple trees were planted and marketed to “city dwellers, to superintend and care for it.”^142
The largest was The Phoenix Lumber Company in Stevens County, where manager E.F. Cartier Van Dissel sold over 6000 acres of logged off land between 1911 and 1913.^143 The principal corporations involved in irrigating this agricultural land for hobbyist orchard owners were the Arcadia Irrigation Association and the Inland Empire Irrigation Suburban Tracts Company, led by E.F. Cartier Van Dissel and long-running Hypotheek Bank manager Robert Insinger.^144
To market this land, Cartier Van Dissel became one of Everwijn Lange Jr.’s few appointed agents to emerge as a public figure in Spokane media. He first gained prominence as grand marshal of the 1909 Irrigation Parade, yet another procession depicting “the transformation of the Northwest from semi-savagery,” represented by members of the actual Spokane tribe, “to civilization,” symbolized by the members of the National Irrigation Congress. ^145
At the same time, Cartier Van Dissel led the formation of the Spokane Apple Show, appointing Great Northern successor Louis Hill as president and later Robert Insinger as a fellow trustee.^146 In print, the event was organized “to assist growers in the culture and marketing of the fruit and to create and supply the increasing demand for the apple… with a view toward the greater development of the industry,” as well as to market thousands of remaining logged-over acres across Arcadia and Springdale.^147
The agricultural exposition styled event featured ribbons and medals for model agriculture as well as $35,000 worth of irrigated and non-irrigated orchard land as prizes.^148 This plainly for-profit venture claimed the project was “not a money-making enterprise in any sense of the word,” framing it as a loss leader for Spokane’s economic development, and, as such, stating their annual deficit of $20,000 was “made good by the businessmen of Spokane.”^149
Illustrator W. M. C. Morris created a series of single-panel cartoons to promote the Fourth Annual Apple Show in 1911, when Van Dissel served as president. The series depicts a large group of racialized and gendered apple caricatures: Ark Black, a banjo playing Black character; Mackintosh Red, a bagpipe wielding Scottsman; Coos River Red, an Indigenous character; Herr Spitzenburg, a pot-bellied smiling German; and Northern Spy, a curious, plaid wearing Canadian interloper frequently muttering at the edge of the crowd.
The narrative eventually leads the group to the entryway of the Spokane State Armory where Van Dissel doffs his cap and greets “His Majesty King Pip IV” saying “Dee Pleashure iss all ours, ve assure you.”^150 Nearby, Herr Spitzenburg boasts to a companion, “Yaw, President Van Dissel und me iss fellow countrymens,” prompting the indifferent reply, “So?” Despite Morris failing to differentiate between his German caricature and Van Dissel’s Dutch origins, the implication is that even within this highly racialized parody, his European origins were not worthy of suspicion in the open field of commerce.