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

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.

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.

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

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.

The two men could not have been more different. Hunt was a charming risk-taker, and came to regard the tribespeople as a commodity. Schneidewind, who had been married to a Philippine woman who died giving birth to their first son, treated “his” tribespeople like family. He invited them to his home to meet his son and to eat dinner with them.

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

In the winter of 1906, Schneidewind returned to the Philippines to collect another Igorrote group and embarked on a second tour of America. A third U.S. tour followed in 1908.

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.

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.