The Daughter of Dawn’s Vanished World

Things never really begin or end in Kiowa storytelling. Narratives commence without clear motivations and their conclusions are left purposefully open-ended, entrusting the listener to find their own meaning in what they’ve just experienced. It’s a nuanced tradition, and I’ve found it essential to comprehending the accounts of a certain ancestor who can still be recalled from within living memory.

On the southern plains in 1857, the world of the Kiowa people teetered on a knife’s edge between the divine and the apocalyptic. That summer was marked by a miraculous happening: a man named K’aya’nte (Falls Over a Bank) recovered a chinaberry staff that he had thrust into the ground after a ceremony a year prior and found that it had since grown roots and sprouted leaves, despite the wood being very old. The incoming winter would bring an epidemic of whooping cough throughout the tribe’s camps, a sign of things to come. It was in this maelstrom that Tso-Odle (Packing Rocks), my great-great-grandfather, was born.

He inherited his light eyes from his mother, a white captive raised by the tribe after being taken from her family of Irish settlers. His father was T’Doh Goole (Red Tipi) and one of his older brothers was Satanta (White Bear), the famous war chief who fought in the First Battle of Adobe Walls against Kit Carson. Satanta would later be one of the parties among the Kiowa and Comanche to sign the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867: an agreement with the federal government that brought an end to their war against the United States’ rapid encroachment and active theft of their traditional lands. It also enforced the cessation of their nomadic lifestyle on the plains, their religious practices, and buffalo hunting. Furthermore, the accord obligated the tribes to surrender more than 60,000 square miles of their territories in exchange for reservations in the southwestern corner of Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. This period saw the collapse of society as the Kiowa knew it, and its chaos shaped Tso-Odle’s youth.

It was an evening sometime around the end of the spring of 2018. I was sifting through some of Netflix’s more obscure corners of programming in the hope of finding something I hadn’t seen, and preferably to zone out to. It had been a long day. A title that caught my attention was The Daughter of Dawn, a feature-length silent drama from 1920, once lost and rediscovered in 2005, with a new restoration completed in 2012. It had been shot in western Oklahoma and boasted an all–Native American cast, many of them from my own Kiowa Tribe. I’d known about the film peripherally for some time, mostly due to its association with my people. As the preview video kicked in, my sight locked in on an extra in the near background. As I remember it, at that exact moment my perception of time began to blur like a slowed shutter.

With his braids wrapped in long otter skins and his eyes cast to the ground, this was a familiar face, one I had seen throughout my whole life, forever hanging on the wall above my grandmother’s chair in her living room. The background actor’s gaze rose to the screen, and it was in that moment that I realized I was looking at my great-great-grandfather, Tso-Odle, staring back into the camera. An ocean of time and family history melded into each other in that thirty-second clip, instigating some kind of psychic shift within me. In the time since, the closest I’ve been able to come to articulating this experience is through an excerpt from an 1895 review in La Poste of the Lumière brothers’ film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory:

When these devices become available to the public, when people are able to capture their loved ones, not still anymore but in motion, in action, in their ordinary movements, with their own words, death will cease to be absolute.

As this vertiginous state stabilized, it hit me that this film and Tso-Odle’s appearance in it had never appeared in any of our family lore. It could be chalked up to the film’s lost status for nearly a century, but it seemed like at least a mention of him appearing in a movie, any movie, would have been something of note to be passed down. I’d built a career in devotion to my cinematic obsessions, and yet somehow this was a complete unknown. The sheer odds of it all were too dizzying to wrap my mind around. There had always been photographs of Tso-Odle within our family’s possession to pin our stories to, but to witness such an unexpected moving image of him made me feel his historical presence in a new way. My grandmother, Tso-Odle’s granddaughter and the last of her generation within our family, was the only person I knew with firsthand memory of this ancestor and who might have some answers.

The Daughter of Dawn is a fairly straightforward tale of forbidden love typical of the silent era, but what made the film so unique was that it was a work of overt narrative fiction starring an all-Indigenous cast of non-actors, free of outsiders performing in redface. It appeared between two other historic works with all-Native casting, Edward S. Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) and Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922)—but, unlike them, it was neither produced nor sold as a documentary effort. Both Head Hunters and Nanook would later be debunked as having been largely staged, whereas Myles’s work was always meant to invoke a dramatic, scripted portrayal of life on the plains before white contact.

Much of the film’s power, however, comes from what it inadvertently documented: the performance of Kiowa and Comanche customs dating back to before the reservation period. Among these practices were a buffalo hunt, ceremonial dances, and the cast’s use of Plains Indian Sign Language, a manually coded language that was used for Esperanto-like communication among various tribes. With the inclusion of these elements, the participants were also engaging in criminal acts, as buffalo hunting and most Indigenous religious practices were still prohibited by federal law. Whether it was for budgetary reasons or a desire for authenticity, Myles’s picture also called for the cast to utilize their own regalia and tipis, despite the fact that they had been living on reservations in western-style houses for nearly half a century.

Whatever Myles’s intent, his film became a time capsule in which these people could share their recollections of the years when they came of age. Some of the elders in the film, like Tso-Odle, were effectively performing memories of the world of their youth—in ways that clearly went beyond the story that Myles aimed to tell. In one scene, Chief Cozad (Belo Cozad) calls the men of his camp together to prepare for battle against their neighboring tribe as a show of force—or at least, that’s how the intertitles frame it. As is common in silent film, physical actions are exaggerated for emotive effect, which is why the animated hand gestures of Cozad and the other elders can go unnoticed. Despite the scripted intertitles, the cast members were actually going off script in Plains Indian Sign Language, ad-libbing about horses, other actors, and their surroundings. A century after it was made, the film has become an even more invaluable record of the language as it was used by those who grew up conversing in it regularly.

Nearly all details of the development and production of The Daughter of Dawn have been lost to time. All that is known and can be confirmed is that at some point Myles was hired by a producer named Richard Banks of a Dallas-based production outfit called the Texas Film Company that folded shortly after the release of the film. Myles thanked him in the introduction to his screenplay, noting that it was inspired by Banks’s “knowledge of the Indian, and of his traditions, gained during the twenty-five years that he lived with them.”

On October 17, 1920, an audience at the College Theater in downtown Los Angeles were given a “sneak preview” of Myles’s epic. In its review, Motion Picture News called it “an original and breath-taking adventure.” For reasons still unknown, it dropped off the map after this single screening until it played in Topeka, Kansas, a year later, before disappearing once again, this time without a trace. Like 75 percent of all silent film, it was deemed lost—until a nitrate print was discovered by a private investigator in a North Carolina garage nearly a century after its last known screening. It’s believed that this was the only print to have ever existed.

The Liberty Theater would have been in operation back then. Built in 1916 in the rural town of Carnegie, Oklahoma, it is the oldest continually running theater in the state to this day. My grandmother frequented it throughout her youth in the 1930s and ’40s when her parents would travel into town on the weekends to fetch supplies for their nearby homestead. When I asked her if she had any memories of her grandfather mentioning anything about The Daughter of Dawn or him talking about movies at all, she took a moment to reflect and said she didn’t think so. She went so far as to surmise that he probably never saw a film in his life. Tso-Odle, who by then went by his federally assigned name of Henry Tsoodle, chose to never learn or speak English. It was a point of pride and something that was highlighted in his obituary in 1941. Many of the others who appeared on-screen would pass away in the coming decade as well, taking any recollections of their time on Myles’s film with them.

As far as what’s been recorded, the Kiowa and Comanche were never afforded a screening of The Daughter of Dawn. The reason was most likely tied to its unexplained disappearance after its initial screening. Among the other families of those who appeared in the film, there seem to be no surviving accounts passed down of their involvement or thoughts on the film. If anything, it was most likely an opportunity for the participants to make some decent money for a few weeks’ work off the reservation, and one that allowed them to relive an era when their world made more sense.

With little to no details found among the other descendants of the cast, I deduced that there was only one other potential avenue for information. If I couldn’t find more clues from those who appeared on camera, I’d have to search for the man behind it.

Image-making was in Myles’s blood and would come to define his life’s path. Born in 1887 in Wheeling, West Virginia, he came from a prominent, creative stock. His grandfather William Myles, an immigrant from County Cork, Ireland, developed a successful daguerreotyping and ambrotyping business that opened the door for his son John, Norbert’s father, to pursue his calling as a portrait painter. As a young man, Norbert built a stage career that included work in Shakespearean repertory, minstrel shows, and vaudeville before jumping into the early film industry with three shorts by the Kalem Company in 1913: The Dumb Messenger, The Fatal Shot, and The Electrician’s Hazard. The following year, he left to make early westerns at Eclair American’s studios in Tucson, appearing in twenty-six of them before moving on to work in a number of films at Signal, Victor Film Company, Universal Pictures, and then finally as a contract player at the Fox Film Corporation in Los Angeles in 1917.

Between his time at Fox and directing The Daughter of Dawn in 1919, Myles’s activity is a bit of a mystery. There are unfounded statements that he was blackballed by the studios for unspecified reasons, but the source that this was cited from has no record of existing. In the 1921 edition of The Motion Picture Trade and Studio Directory, Myles listed his profession as “Director.” Among his self-listed works, The Daughter of Dawn is notably and cryptically absent. His only other directorial credits on record would be Walloping Wallace, a now-lost 1924 Buddy Roosevelt western, and Faithful Wives, a 1926 capital-punishment drama. For reasons unknown, Myles returned to acting, and continued until the industry’s upheaval brought on by sound in 1927. His career turned a new leaf as he made yet another jump into a new calling as a makeup artist, and he went on to work on films by Frank Capra, Rouben Mamoulian, George Cukor, John Ford, William Wyler, and King Vidor, among many others. He’s best known for being the makeup artist for Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.

When I think of Gotebo Hall, I naturally reflect on my warm memories of that liminal space so focal to moments in Kiowa life. It’s been a place for all kinds of get-togethers, from Sunday services, holidays, and community dinners to weddings and funerals. As I remember the last of these, my thoughts drift to the dirt road just outside the hall that goes down a stone’s throw to the church’s cemetery. It’s where most of my family is interred, as well as where I expect I’ll most likely be laid to rest one day. Among the names within that garden of stone, you’ll find Tso-Odle’s etched in red marble, and an epitaph that reads: “Till We Meet Again.” With The Daughter of Dawn’s preservation, that inscription became a possibility on this side of paradise.

After finally pinpointing Myles’s burial place in Culver City’s Holy Cross Cemetery, I made my way to one of the grounds’ many hills. I passed by the graves of John Ford, Rita Hayworth, Bing Crosby, and people whom Myles worked with from Hollywood’s silent and golden ages. At the end of the trail, I found a curved tree bending south, providing shade over the final resting place of Norbert A. Myles.

As I looked down, I noticed an army of ants trailing out from the surrounding blades of grass, over the plaque bearing Myles’s name and up the tree. It reminded me of the Kiowa creation story, in which our people are said to have come from another realm, where they lived before the trickster Saynday transformed them into ant-sized beings and ushered them into this plane of existence through a log-like tunnel. For all the unanswered questions that The Daughter of Dawn leaves behind, it’s ultimately a film that has survived and been revisited because of our ancestors, who recreated an existence they once knew, as they remembered it. As in the tale of Kiowa origins, they crossed over from a different realm and into this one, transforming Myles’s film into a record, formed of silver nitrate on celluloid, of their defiance and survival.

The Daughter of Dawn’s Vanished World

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