Greetings absolutely awesome Enterprise-Tocsin readers and, as always, thanks for all the love and support. Next week will mark 1828 days (5 years) of my being at the top of the Enterprise-Tocsin.com’s most-read list for the year.
History, science and religious studies have always been my favorite topics and for this week’s column, I have a doozie. I hope you enjoy.
It’s August of 1895 – late summer – and former cowboy, Native American enthusiast, and America’s greatest traveling salesman, Clark Stanley, is on his way to Topeka, Kansas.
This former cowboy turned peddler of pots and pans – and just about everything in a can – was on a mission to transform his life from a real, hardworking cowboy, to that of a wealthy aristocrat.
The nickname of the man who could sell ice to an Eskimo was influenced and inspired by his mastery and showmanship of sales. But Clark Stanley is not just a traveling salesman, he’s the “Rattlesnake King,” the greatest snake oil salesman to have ever lived.
Snake oil was brought to America by Chinese construction workers on the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1800s to help alleviate muscle pain from the backbreaking labor. However what separates Clark Stanley from other traveling salesmen was his ability to entertain and tell amazing stories. He had established an amazing story of how he had learned how to make the perfect snake oil from the Hopi Native Tribe and he would always use a combination of Hopi, Navajo and Wabanaki sacred words to conjure the great spirits of healing whenever he made a presentation showcasing the magic of his snake oil.
Since Topeka, Kansas, was a religious town, and not too fond of the mystical magic of Native Americans, Clark Stanley devised a plan to pretend to be a preacher and tell the story of Jonah and the whale to a large crowd of spectators. However, while making his dubious and fraudulent presentation, he mistakenly used the Hopi/Wabanaki words, seeming to shock the crowd. However, instead of having Stanley arrested or tarred and feathered or even run out of town, the crowd considered the words as glossolalia, words of Providence, the language of the Lord.
Among those in the crowd was a 20-year-old former Methodist preacher named Charles Fox Parham. Parham would learn the meaning of the sacred Native American words from Stanley during their meeting at the snake oil salesman’s presentation. Then, sometime between September 1897 and September 1898, Charles Fox Parham and his young son, Claude, became violently ill with an unknown sickness similar to that of COVID-19, and were place in quarantine at their home. While several others had died from this mysterious illness, Charles Fox Parham and his young son would somehow recover and live. Parham would go on to say that he was divinely healed, while not only pleading to God, but also from speaking in the language of the Lord (speaking in tongues).
Parham would go on to form the Pentecostal church, along with the help of an African American preacher, William J Seymour. Seymour had a speech condition that caused him to stutter, so as a way to deliver his sermons he would masterly moan, groan, sing and give praise simultaneously, creating the way most African Americans preach today.
After years of successful growth of the Pentecostal church in the 1900s, rumors of Charles Fox Parham being a practicing homosexual began to surface. In 1907 he was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, along with a 20-year-old man by the name of JJ Jourdan, charged with same-sex sodomy. Three Pentecostal members, also believed to have been homosexuals, were killed after brutal exorcisms were performed on them. Parham’s leadership position was taken from him. In 1906, after an unprecedented spreading of the movement around the country, William J Seymour had been expelled from the Pentecostal Church because of his views and allegations of embezzlement and misappropriation of church funds.
Then in 1917, after the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, millionaire businessman Clark Stanley was fined $20 (valued today at $400) for false claims of his snake oil. In fact, the snake oil produced in his factories had absolutely no snake oil at all! Don’t you just love true history?
