We were surprised to come across these three small photographs in a 1917 copy of The Graphic magazine the other day showing a group of Native Americans serving at the Front.
On further investigation, we discovered that 13,000 Native Americans served in the war - representing between 20% and 30% of those eligible to serve. Compare this to the 15% of American men who enlisted and the proportion is particularly impressive. Out of these 13,000, it is thought that somewhere between 2000 and 4000 Native American soldiers went to fight in France serving in all branches of the Army from cavalry to engineering, gaining special renown for their skills in scouting and reconnaissance.
The portraits shown here are of Lieutenant Onondeyoh Loft, ('Beautiful Mountain'), Sergeant Fox and their squadron in a camp somewhere behind the lines. They appeared on a page in the magazine entitled, 'From the Ends of the Empire - Some Overseas Fighters and Helpers,' which also included black staff of the South African Hospital as well as Australian V.C. winners Sergeant J Whittle and Private T. Kenny. Frustratingly, there is no further information about Lieutenant Onondeyoh Loft and his men.
One of the biggest contradictions of the participation of Native Americans in the Great War is the fact that many of them volunteered out of patriotism for a country,which their forefathers had fought against only thirty years previously. And while we may associate the Western Front and Gallipoli with the British Tommy, the French Poilu, the Anzacs and the Doughboys, these pictures serve to remind us of the surprisingly cosmopolitan mix of nationalities among the Allied forces.
Addendum: After posting this, @evangelineh on Twitter helpfully got in touch to share information on Lieutenant Loft from the Canadian Dictionary of Biography from which this excerpt is taken:
After the outbreak of World War I, Loft, a loyal supporter of Britain, had visited reserves throughout Ontario to promote recruitment. In 1917, with three years of active militia service in Toronto, he was commissioned a lieutenant in a "forestry draft" on account of his early experience in the lumber industry. To qualify for overseas duty he had reduced his age at enlistment from 56 to 45. The examining doctor accepted him at his word; he stood just over 5 feet 11 inches, weighed 170 pounds, and was in good shape. All his adult life he had taken excellent physical care of himself. He never owned a car, always walked, and, according to his daughter Henrietta, exercised every morning.
Although Loft went to Britain with the 256th Infantry Battalion, which then helped man the 10th Railway Battalion, he was later transferred to the Canadian Forestry Corps. In France, he liked the area and the people where the corps was stationed. "I have fallen in love with the country, its people and the language which I'm making every possible effort to familiarize by nightly study," he wrote on 6 Dec. 1917 in a letter to a civil-service friend in Canada. On 7 August, during his half-year absence overseas, the Six Nations Council had conferred on him a pine tree chieftainship, an honour given only to the most outstanding members of the Grand River Iroquois Confederacy. As the council's representative, he met with King George V at Buckingham Palace on 21 Feb. 1918, just before leaving for Canada.
Click here to read his full biography http://www.uppercanada.info/doc/dcb_nbr_8419.html
Luci Gosling