The Feminine Fair: Suffrage at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition
By: Anne T. Kent California Room
Tags: San Francisco, Native Americans, Suffrage, Expositions, Local History

by Laura A. Ackley

Zintkala Nuni Allen who played the role of Sacajawea in a suffrage pageant at the Court of Ages during the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. Image courtesy Laura A. Ackley.

Excerpted from San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 by Laura A. Ackley

© Copyright 2020 Laura A. Ackley All Rights Reserved

Author’s Note: It is an honor to have my work excerpted by the Anne T. Kent California Room during 2020, this banner centennial of the 19th Amendment. Since publication of San Francisco’s Jewel City in late 2014, my knowledge of the early 20th century Women’s Suffrage movement has continued to improve. However I make no claim to be a subject matter expert on the topic and its vast network of connections and contexts. Even this selection from my book describes only a tiny fraction of the Suffrage activities at the Fair, let alone a survey of the nationwide effort. It was written to give the reader a basic gist of the movement’s status during the great World’s Fair. Inevitable space and scope constraints limited what was covered. For instance, in sketching Zintkala Nuni Allen’s tragic life, I only was able to capture a tiny fragment of the hardships she endured, as described in a number of articles published during her life. Even her involvement in the Suffrage Pageant at the PPIE (described subsequently) is problematic. She was a Lakota Sioux woman, recruited by her white adoptive mother to portray a Lemhi Shoshone woman in an extravaganza orchestrated by white women. For more on Nuni Allen, I recommend Renée Sansom Flood’s book Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota. (Scribner, 1995). An article I think is a standout among the many 2020 examinations of national women’s suffrage is National Geographic’s “For Black Women, the 19th Amendment Didn’t End Their Fight to Vote.” This excellent piece illuminated yet another aspect of American women’s battle for me. Learning about Suffrage at the Exposition lead me to meet some amazing women from that era… I hope you enjoy this excerpt and are equally inspired by these women! -Laura Ackley

Tower of the Court of Ages and the Court of Abundance at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition

Several conferences promoting women’s issues drew female celebrities to the Fair. Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, charmed local society when she presided over the International Congress of Women, which advocated human rights for women. In early July the Fair hosted the International Conference of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace. But no issue was discussed more than suffrage for women.

California had given women the vote in 1911, but national suffrage was still bitterly contested. The suffrage booth in the Palace of Education featured a registry for supporters, a display on the suffrage voting record of every congressman, and a large portrait of Susan B. Anthony. One of the Exposition guides even joked that the crowning female statue in the Court of Ages, Chester Beach’s Intelligence, was actually “the highest product of civilization-a suffragette.”

Inside Inn at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition

The toughest suffragist may have been Dorothy Morrell, bronco-buster at the 101 Ranch. The petite young woman had large, dark eyes and a winsome smile framed by a cloud of brunette hair. She was also the reigning women’s rough-riding champion of the world. During the second show on the afternoon of April 14, Dorothy’s leg was broken when she was thrown and trampled by her horse in the 101 Ranch arena on the Zone. She was told she would never ride again.

Morrell used the downtime afforded by her injury to support the vote for women. Because she was not performing, Morrell was able to speak at the first suffrage conference held at the PPIE, that of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. On June 2 she told a crowd in the ballroom of the Inside Inn that while she might not ride a thrashing horse again, she “would always be able to handle the ballot.” Eventually, she was able to do both, as by the next year she was literally back in the saddle and had years more rodeo success.

Several nationally known suffrage workers spoke at the Exposition, including Alice Park, Alva Belmont, Esther Pohl Lovejoy, May Wright Sewall, Ida Husted Harper, Crystal Eastman Benedict, Anita Charlotte Whitney, Alice Park, and Clara Bewick Colby.

Clara Bewick Colby, circa 1890

Few knew that the tall, striking Native American woman performing in the Federal Suffrage Association pageant in July was Mrs. Colby’s adopted daughter. Appearing on stage as Sacajawea, the stately Zintkala Nuni Allen presented an appealing picture of a young woman who had successfully integrated her Lakota heritage with modern American life. Newspapers described how she had been found in the frozen arms of her dead mother at the massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890 and was raised by Brigadier General Leonard Colby and his wife, Clara, a dedicated suffragist. Sunset magazine ran a full-page photo of Zintkala arrayed in an elaborate fringed costume, gazing solemnly past the reader. Her elegant appearance belied a life of tragedy during which she was never comfortable with or accepted by either of her cultures.

General Colby brought his National Guard regiments to Wounded Knee after the massacre and removed Zintkala Nuni, whose name means “Lost Bird,” from the Lakota survivors’ camp by duplicitous means, as a sort of human trophy. While the Colbys professed sympathy for the plight of Native Americans, they believed it would be best if Zintkala was removed from her tribe and educated in a Christian, Caucasian tradition.

Her adoptive father soon lost interest in the young girl, whom he termed “my relic of the Sioux War of 1891…” and after an affair with the family nanny that produced a son, he dropped in and out of the lives of Zintkala, Clara, and another adopted child, Clarence. Clara finally divorced Colby in 1906.

At sixteen, “Zintka” ran away from a school in Oregon and joined a wild west show in South Dakota. In 1908 her absentee adopted father incarcerated her at a “reformatory home,” where she gave birth to a stillborn boy. In 1909 she impulsively married and then divorced a man who gave her the incurable syphilis that gradually robbed her of sight. By 1914 she had married twice more and had two children, the younger of whom died in infancy. She struggled to survive as a Hollywood extra, in wild west shows, and in vaudeville with her third husband, Ernest “Dick” Allen.

When her adoptive mother traveled to the San Francisco for the suffrage meeting, the nearly destitute Zintkala jumped at the chance to perform in Clara’s pageant, which would depict the achievements of American women. Though also impoverished, Clara paid all of Zintka’s expenses and gave her $10. This was the last time they would meet. Clara died of pneumonia in 1916.

The lovely “Lost Bird,” who proudly represented her gender and her people in the flickering torchlight of the opulent Court of Ages, did not live to see thirty. Zintkala contracted Spanish influenza near the end of the 1918–20 pandemic and died February 14, 1920, six months before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and national women’s suffrage-Clara Colby’s lifelong dream-was granted.