Medicine shows had their origin in the Middle Ages in Europe, when circuses and theaters were banned, and swindlers traveled from town to town selling miraculous cures and offering street shows. In America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hucksters took advantage of three things: imported patent medicines were expensive, Americans believed that Indians were extremely knowledgeable about natural medicine, and they didn’t trust doctors.
Source: (New England Historical Society/colorized).
The peddlers in America began to bring medicine shows with them to attract customers and the shows began featuring “Indian agents” or “professors” in between Indian acts. These “professors” made outlandish claims for their “cure-alls.” The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company was not the only peddler of fake “Indian” medicine, but they were the most successful, with nearly 100 troupes on the road at a time, traveling west to Chicago, and south to the West Indies. During their shows, they peddled the Kickapoo Cough Cure and Kickapoo Sagwa which they claimed could cure any ailment.
Creating The Business
Source: (New England Historical Society).
One of the central figures in the Kickapoo Indian Medicine was a man named John E. Healy. He had been a drummer boy in the Union Army. He then sold vanishing cream and “King of Pain” liniment. He used his profits to put together Healy’s Minstrels and his Irish Thespians before joining forces with E. H. Flagg from Baltimore. Flagg played his violin on street corners to attract customers as he was selling his product, Flagg’s Instant Relief. They renamed the product Kickapoo Indian Oil and copied the liver pads that were originally being made by Percy G. Williams to revive the liver. In the fall of 1879, they hired Charles Bigelow, a long-haired sombrero-wearing man from Bee County, Texas. After meeting a phony Indian medicine man, who went by the name “Dr. Yellowstone,” Bigelow learned a magic skit and he and “Dr. Yellowstone” traveled together selling herbal remedies and sharing nonsense with the crowds. Bigelow, Flagg, and Healy traveled around with the Kickapoo Indian Oil Show until Flagg left the business. Bigelow took the stage as Doctor Lone Star, and they hired N.T. Oliver, who played the banjo under the stage name Nevada Ned.
Using False Claims To Sell Products
From one of the other medicine shows. Source: (Legends of America/colorized).
Healy and Bigelow made the claim that in medicine, “roots, barks, twigs, leaves, seeds, and berries are the most beneficial because they assist Nature in the right way to make their own cure.” The Kickapoo Indian Oils provided “quick cures for all pains,” and the Kickapoo Cough Cure was a cure for “all diseases of the throat and lungs.” According to the two, their Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, which they claimed was a product of roots, herbs, and bark, purified the blood and cured digestive system diseases. According to a fake endorsement by Buffalo Bill Cody, their product “is the only remedy the Indians ever use and has been known to them for ages.”
They produced their first medicine show outside a railroad station in Boston, the town where the show was headquartered from 1881-1884. They then moved to New York for three years, followed by New Haven, and then, finally, Clintonville, CT in 1901.
The Performers Were Indians, Though The Cure Was Fake
Donald McKay, one of their performers. Source: (Wikipedia/colorized).
To locate their performers, Healy and Bigelow contracted with federal Indian agents and the government sent up to 200 Indians at a time from their reservations to the Principal Wigwam. Although the performers were not members of the Kickapoo tribe from Oklahoma, they were from small Iroquois tribes or they were Plains Indians. One of the performers in the medicine show, John Johnson, looked and acted like a medicine man because he learned traditional practices from the Indians. He had been kidnapped by Mi’kmaq Indians from Nova Scotia in 1834 when he was a child in Saco, Maine. For more than 20 years, he believed he was a medicine man, and the Indians treated him as such. Eventually, he learned of his real identity but continued with the medicine show. In 1890, they housed 800 Indians in the Principal Wigwam in New Haven, which was actually just several buildings along the river.
How They Combined Sales And Entertainment
Oklahoma Charley with some of the performers. Source: (Cowboys and Indians/colorized).
The traveling show featured acrobatics, vaudeville acts, fire eaters, ventriloquists, trained dog acts, rifle shooting, and fake Indian ceremonies with some variations. During one, as the tuxedoed “professor” or the Indian agent lectured the audience on the efficacy of their products, the Indians whooped to interrupt the lecture and then ran down the aisles carrying baskets of their products. One of the other shows featured the agent on a platform in front of a backdrop. The Indians would sit in a semicircle while the agent introduced them and spoke of their lives. Then, as an Indian gave a speech in “Kickapoo,” which sometimes elicited laughter from the other seated Indians, the agent, who had no idea what was being said, translated. This was followed by the vaudeville show, interrupted by sales pitches.
The Slow Demise Of The Medicine Show
Another of the traveling medicine shows. Source: (Pinterest/colorized).
Other medicine shows popped up, imitating the original but never attaining their success; these imitators used their name, but their medicines were dangerous, and the shows were sub-par. The medicine shows slowly died out with the introduction of the motion picture and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which required medicines to have proper labeling. The legislation brought an end to the “remedies” that contained dangerous drugs, putting Kickapoo’s imitators out of business. Then, in 1911, although the Kickapoo Cough Cure was labeled “misbranded” because it contained more alcohol than it claimed, they continued to run until 1920 when it was sold; one of the other shows, the Hadacol Caravan, ran until 1951.
