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NLA News - home October 2005 Volume XVI Number 1

Big Chief Little Wolf

click to enlarge
Chief Little Wolf—Navajo Indian Wrestler
gelatin silver postcard;
17.5 x 16.0 cm
Part of: Portraits of Wrestlers, 1937–1938
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an13935890-7  

Barry York contemplates the legacy of a great mat-man

My first memory of the name ‘Big Chief Little Wolf’ dates to the early 1960s when, as a child in Melbourne, I’d play ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with my mates. The main Indian was invariably ‘Big Chief Little Wolf’. I did not know, at the time, that the Big Chief was a real person who resided only a bicycle ride away from my home in Brunswick, at the Mount Royal Special Home for the Aged, where he lay partially paralysed after suffering a series of strokes between 1958 and 1961. Nor did I understand his history: that he was a genuine Navajo, the greatest Native American professional wrestler to come to our shores, and a legendary showman. And, of course, I could not possibly have imagined that, decades later, I would undertake serious research into the Big Chief’s story, even succeeding in offering it as the topic a National Library Harold White Fellowship in 1997.

Big Chief was a cultural icon for scores of thousands of Australians of an earlier generation who owned radios and listened to men like Eric Welch and Norm McCance commentating on the fast-paced bouts between good guys and villains at the Sydney and West Melbourne stadiums.

click to enlarge
Chief Little Wolf—Navajo Indian Wrestler
gelatin silver postcard;
17.5 x 16.0 cm
Part of: Portraits of Wrestlers, 1937–1938
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an13935890-6  

He was a sensation from the moment he first disembarked in Australia, at Sydney in August 1937. His newspaper photograph displayed a broad, thick face set against a beautiful feathered headdress. Big Chief returned here to wrestle again in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1947, and then each year until settling in Melbourne around 1952. He continued on as an occasional mat-man until 958. He was at once the ‘noble savage’ and the beer-swilling ‘good bloke’: his public image morphed according to he role the promoters set for him in he ring. When he played a good guy obeying the referee’s instructions, the newspapers published images of him as a happy-smiling, almost cuddly type. But even when he played a rule-breaking villain, there was affection behind the crowd’s jeers. It was all part of the show. His flamboyance and loud, gregarious nature made him not easy to forget.

The Chief fell in love with Australia—its way of life, its people and terrain—and toured extensively in the early 1950s with a tent-show. He travelled with a caravan that displayed a large self-portrait on its side. In 1953, he claimed to have visited every big town from Perth to north Queensland. At each stop, he would give talks about the Navajo culture, and display wrestling holds.

Professional wrestling, perhaps even more than other forms of mass entertainment, relies on hyperbole to promote itself, and so there are difficulties in getting a grip on the real man behind the Big Chief persona. Perhaps a good example of promotional poetic licence was the Chief’s claim that his winning hold, a submission leg-lock called the Indian Death Lock, was based on a torture technique devised by the great Apache warrior, Geronimo. The same hold was also used by a contemporary of the Chief’s, a sub-continental Indian named Jagit Singh, who presumably had a different explanation for its origins.

click to enlarge
Matros Kirilenko
gelatin silver postcard;
17.5 x 16.0 cm
Part of: Portraits of Wrestlers, 1937–1938
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an13935890-8
 

click to enlarge

Sammy Stein
gelatin silver postcard;
17.5 x 16.0 cm
Part of: Portraits of Wrestlers, 1937–1938
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an13935890-4
 
click to enlarge
King Kong Cox
gelatin silver postcard;
17.5 x 16.0 cm
Part of: Portraits of Wrestlers, 1937–1938
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an13935890-3
 
click to enlarge
Don Noland
gelatin silver postcard;
17.5 x 16.0 cm
Part of: Portraits of Wrestlers, 1937–1938
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an13935890-2
 

My research, however, leads me to accept the following as facts about the real man. Big Chief was a Navajo Native American whose real name was Ventura Tenario. He was born at Hoehne, Colorado, on 25 November 1911. His mother was a Navajo and his father was half-Navajo, half-Spanish. His mother died when he was 12 and his father’s farm failed around the same time. Big Chief worked with his father as an itinerant agricultural labourer, and this produced the agility, strength and endurance required for his later profession. He joined a travelling troupe, taking on all-comers in boxing and wrestling—and earning his cauliflower ears.

Before coming to Australia to wrestle for the first time in 1937, Big Chief had fought professionally in the United States for eight years, going up against some of the world’s principal grapplers, including the legendary Ed ‘Strangler’ Lewis. His ring career peaked in 1935, when he unsuccessfully challenged Dan O’Mahoney for the world’s title at New York’s Yankee Stadium.

In 1937, the promoters in Australia rightly sensed that an exotic Native American would help fill the stadiums. People wanted an escape from the problems of the Depression, and the serial morality play in the wrestling ring provided it. Between 1937 and 1958, the Chief fought more than 100 different wrestlers in Australia, in more than 1000 contests. The best remembered are the feuds with Texan, ‘Dirty’ Dick Raines, who adopted a ‘cowboy’ persona. The National Library holds photographic portraits of the Chief and other opponents such as Matros Kirilenko, Sammy Stein, King Kong Kox, Don Noland, Hal Rumberg and Pat O’Shocker. His final wrestling match was a tag-team contest against Bruce Milne and Bruce Wyatt, with Crusher Webb as his partner, at Melbourne stadium on 2 August 1958.

There are a number of interviews in the Library’s Oral History Collection that touch on the Chief. In 1998, I recorded two: one with the abovementioned Bruce Milne (b.1932), and the other with historian and one-time tent boxer/wrestler, Alick Jackomos (1924–1999). Other reminiscences are contained in interviews by Rob and Olya Willis with entertainers Smoky Dawson and Frank Ifield, and with a former officer of the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria, Bob Morgan. Hazel de Berg’s 1974 interview with jazz musician Don Burrows also touches on the Chief’s popular impact; Burrows was a fan.

click to enlarge
[Simon Spiteri pulling a bus with a rope held in his mouth c.1960]
b&w photograph;
15.7 x 21.3 cm
Part of: Collection of portraits of Simon Spiteri, professional wrestler, strong man and sideshow performer, c.1960
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23182207

Another Big Chief connection is Simon Spiteri (1929–2001), a Maltese migrant who became a professional wrestler and showman. I interviewed him for the Library in 1994. Spiteri, known as ‘The Great Caramba’, was a strongman who regularly appeared at the Royal Melbourne Show. His feats included having a concrete slab placed on his huge chest and smashed with a sledgehammer. He wrestled internationally, going up against the likes of superstars Killer Kowalski and Andre the Giant. He described the Chief as a ‘master’, who taught him a great deal about wrestling, including the famous Indian Death Lock. He wrestled the Chief on several occasions, wearing a mask and using names such as ‘The Black Spider’ and ‘Diablo’. In the 1960s, Spiteri established his own side-show tent at the Melbourne Show on the spot previously used by Little Wolf. (When I visited him at his North Melbourne home he showed me some memorabilia, including colorful sign-boards he used to attach to the roof of his 1947 Oldsmobile as an advertising gimmick; and which I photographed for the Library.)

Sadly, Big Chief Little Wolf met a tragic end. The stroke he suffered in 1958 ended his wrestling career, and further strokes resulted in his admission to the Mount Royal Special Home for the Aged at Parkville, Melbourne, in 1961. He remained there until 1980, confined to a wheelchair, his face twisted, and the lid of one eye taped to an eyebrow to keep it open. In 1980, he decided his time had come, and he wanted to pass to the happy hunting ground back home in America. The news of his return to the United States was reported in all the main Australian papers, even though he hadn’t wrestled for 22 years. The Age ran the story on its front page. A similar level of reportage occurred in 1984, when he died.

click to enlarge
[Simon Spiteri with an unidentified opponent in a professional wrestling hold, c.1960]
b&w photograph;
21.5 x 16.7 cm
Part of: Collection of portraits of Simon Spiteri, professional wrestler, strong man and sideshow performer, c.1960
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23182233
click to enlarge
from left: Newscutting from Melbourne’s Sporting Globe, 12 July 1947; Big Chief Little Wolf, c.1956; newscutting from Melbourne’s Sporting Globe, 21 August 1948
Courtesy Barry York  

It amazed me, when I took the Big Chief project on board in the mid-1990s, that so many people not only knew of him but claimed some kind of connection. When I started to ask individuals of the right age group whether they had heard of him, invariably the response was affirmative, followed by an anecdote. In 1994, I sent letters to newspapers, and made a number of media appearances, including Bert Newton’s Good Morning Australia television show, seeking information from the public. I expected a few dozen responses and was staggered to receive about 700 letters, arriving initially at a rate of about a dozen a day.

The letters revealed that the Chief was much larger than life in the minds and hearts of many people. Indeed, he was a folk-hero: a man of the people who identified with battlers and outcasts, yet who was at the same time extraordinary. He was remembered not just for his ring antics and showmanship but also for his egalitarianism, love of life, and his charity work, especially with hospitalised children. According to his son, David Little Wolf, with whom I have enjoyed many years of correspondence, the big Chief always felt hat his greatest times were in the hospital wards meeting children stricken with polio and other crippling illnesses. He classed them all as ‘personal buddies’. According to David, the Chief just couldn’t understand why God had blessed him with a strong body, while that same God had passed over the sick kids.

One of his favourite sayings, sometimes used when autographing photos, was ‘Here today, gone tomorrow’. Despite that aphorism, the Big Chief is still with us in hearts and memories, long after his departure.

BARRY YORK is a historian, researcher, and writer with the Biographical Dictionary Unit of the Australian Senate. His email address is: garocon@pcug.org.au

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