Running Wolf and White Elk, 1925 (Cinedrome Kinema)

On New Year's Day 1925, the patrons of the Cinedrome Kinema, one of Plymouth's finest cinematic establishments, were treated to the Western The Covered Wagon (you can watch the movie by following the video link!). This 98-minute silent film featured a buffalo hunt and "an attack by Indians on a white camp". The film was the first big-budget western (costing $780,000), and based on a 1922 book. It was about a wagon train heading from Kansas for Oregon and was filmed on location in Utah and Nevada – with wagons that had made the journey generations earlier. The cast, while predominately white, does feature an uncredited performance as the leader of the Native raiders by Richard Davis Thunderbird, one of the first significant Native performers in Hollywood. His co-stars included Native Americans from the Northern Arapaho Nation from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.

This showing of the film was significant as the film's promoter, Col. J. Raymond was in attendance, accompanied by two performers supposedly from the Bannock and Pawnee nations - Running Wolf and White Elk, who appeared in full regalia and performing dances and songs to accompany proceedings on screen. The visitors from Wyoming had been received at the Mayor’s Parlour on 30th December.

This promotional tour, which had visited much of the country in 1924, was a relatively common way of publicising early westerns, taking advantage of the significant numbers of Indigenous vaudeville performers then on tour in the UK. In terms of Running Wolf and White Elk, their links to Native nations remain unclear. They were sometimes identified as Sioux, other times as Bannock and Pawnee, often as coming from Wyoming, U.S.A., but occasionally as being Canadian.

The Cinedrome was opened in 1913 by William Linsdell. By 1931, according to the Kinematograph Year Book, it was owned by Thomas Hoyle. The 1940 edition listed Mrs M. Hoyle as the proprietor, possibly Thomas' widow. The cinema was badly damaged by German bombs in the blitz of 1941. It closed and did not re-open. The auditorium was subsequently demolished, but the façade has survived. Meanwhile, Gould’s Outdoors, a camping goods and clothing supplier, had been founded by Frederick E. Gould in the early-1900s. After trading from various sites in Plymouth, the business moved into the site of the former Cinedrome in 1955.