I first wrote about Long Lance nearly 20 years ago. I ended that story by revealing his fraudulent Blackfeet identity. In my account, he was Black, not Native. Case closed.
But the case turned out not to be closed. He was Indian after all. The evidence was there, but I’d blinded myself to it because I still saw identity in black and white—or Black and Red.
As Smith detailed in Long Lance: The True Story of an Imposter, Long Lance’s mother, Sallie, had been born into slavery. Her grandfather Robert Carson was “a small-time slave owner.” Carson had been wild in his youth, but evidently “settled down after he bought a handsome Indian woman” at an auction.
Among the 20 children that Indian woman gave birth to was Long Lance’s grandmother Adeline, born in 1848. Long Lance’s maternal grandfather was a North Carolina state senator who visited Carson’s plantation often and fathered Sallie and another child with Adeline.
It turns out that Long Lance’s father, too, had Indian blood. He was born into slavery in 1853 and early on in life was separated from his mother. When Joe Long finally found his mother in Alabama, some 40 years later, she told him that his father was white—and that she herself was Cherokee. When Joe died, his obituary stated that he was “a member of the Catawba tribe of Indians.” In 1887, Joe and Sallie Long moved to Winston, North Carolina, where the racial codes were much more rigid: The only two categories for human beings were “white” and “colored.” The Longs fell squarely into the “colored” category. Were they Native? Yes. Were they Black? Also yes. Were they white? Yes again.
Long Lance elided the Black in favor of the Native. When he entered Carlisle, he was listed as half Cherokee and half Croatan. Over time, he slid away from his “mixed” identity; when he received a West Point appointment from President Woodrow Wilson, he claimed to be full-blooded Cherokee. After settling in Canada following World War I—he genuinely was wounded in battle—he began sliding away from his Cherokee-ness, too, eventually giving it up in favor of being Blackfeet.
I think I can understand the slide, and the lies it entailed. One identity, perhaps the most “authentic” one, is a story of enslavement and rape and subjugation, the details of which would relegate Long Lance to life as a second-class citizen. Another, almost entirely fictive identity would afford him freedom and adulation.