TAHLEQUAH — The popularity of Will Rogers is not understood as it should be, according to Amy Ware, University of Texas, Austin, graduate student and assistant instructor.
Ware, who is working on her doctor of philosophy degree in American Studies, was on a panel at the Northeast State University Campus conference sponsored by the Cherokee Nation’s State of Sequoyah Commission. The two-day public conference commemorated Oklahoma History: Cherokee Nation’s 169 years and Oklahoma Statehood’s 100 years.
The title of Wares dissertation is “The Cherokee Kid: Will Rogers and the Tribal Genealogies of American Indian Celebrity”.
“By blood he (Will) was more white, culturally, he was a Cherokee,” she said. In many ways he “benefited from an upbringing in the Cherokee Nation.”
Will was just 10 during the time of the land run, but he writes of the run as “spoiling the best territory in the country to make a state.”
Ware tracked Will’s career in show business from his days as a Cherokee Kid. He applied for his Cherokee allotment through his father while he was making appearances on stage in South Africa. Comparing descriptions, on stage she said he was touted as a “tanned cowboy,” while in school he was known as a “swarthy Indian.”
On stage and in his movies he often mentioned his Cherokee heritage and his home state although he never lived in Oklahoma after it became a state.
Conference attendants numbering about a hundred laughed as Ware showed excerpts from the “Roping Fool,” which plays continuously at the Claremore Will Rogers Memorial Museum, as well as a silent picture “Two Wagons, Both Covered.”
Attacked by “escrow Indians” (Will’s words), before it was over the attackers armed with real estate contracts had confiscated their covered wagons, horses and worldly goods, leaving the travelers stranded near the area of the future Los Angeles.
Playing radio broadcasts, Ware pointed out how Will sometimes laughed at his own jokes and sometimes more than his crowd.
The mostly Indian crowd at the conference found the 1935 radio show funny when he told that people of Provincetown said that was where the Pilgrims landed, not at Plymouth Rock as Will had broadcast the week before. He said he hoped his Cherokee blood didn’t make him prejudiced and asked if the landing was reversed would the Pilgrims have ever let the Indians land.
Ware is spending a few days at the Will Rogers Museum doing research on her doctorate requirements, which she expects to complete in 2008. She has a bachelor of arts in American Studies from Smith College, Northampton, Mass., and a master of arts in American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is an associate instructor at the University of Texas, where she teaches a course entitled, “Killing John Wayne: American Indians in Popular Culture.”