The Igorrote Tribe Traveled the World for Show And Made These Two Men Rich

In December, 1913, the U.S. consul in Ghent escorted the tribespeople to Marseilles to catch a boat back to Manila.

Despite the hardships they had endured, about half of the group wished to stay on in Europe, a sign perhaps that Schneidewind’s troubles owed more to incompetence than to cruelty or a lack of compassion for the Filipinos.

For a full decade, starting in 1905, the Igorrotes had been the greatest show in town, thrilling and scandalizing the American public, and filling the nation’s newspapers.

One of the few extant public acknowledgements of the Igorrote show is in Ghent, where an initiative to commemorate the city’s World Exhibition of 1913 lead to the naming of streets and tunnels after notable participants of this historical event, including Timicheg, one of the nine Igorrotes who died on Schneidewind’s European tour.

Both Hunt and Schneidewind had brought their Igorrote groups into America with permission from the U.S. government, an entity with a clear incentive to portray the people of the Philippines as primitive. How could such a society govern itself if it was filled with citizens as “backwards” as the Igorrotes? If it was true that Hunt was mistreating th

The Philippine Assembly took action and, in 1914, passed legislation that banned the exhibition of groups of Filipino tribespeople abroad. As a measure of the seriousness with which the Philippine lawmakers regarded the subject, the ban was included as an amendment to a new Anti-Slavery Act.

When Hunt received a tip-off that the Bureau was sending a man to examine his Igorrote enterprise, he fled town. He went on the run, taking some of the tribespeople with him.

What happened next was alarmingly reminiscent of Truman Hunt’s tour. According to American newspaper reports, in the winter of 1913 a group of starving Igorrotes was found wandering the streets of Ghent, Belgium. The group’s interpreters, Ellis Tongai and James Amok, wrote to President Woodrow Wilson begging for his assistance. In their letter, the

Finally, in October 1906, he was arrested on multiple charges of stealing from the Igorrotes and sentenced for 18 months in the workhouse after a sensational trial in Memphis.