Arg
uably one of the least satisfactory characters of The Dragon Murder Case is Leland, the biracial son of “an Algonkian Indian — the Princess White Star, a proud and noble woman, who was separated from her people when a child and reared in a southern convent [and a] father [who] was an architect, the scion of an old New York family, many years her senior.”
Played by Lionel Talbot in the movie, Leland was “Over six feet tall, slender and wiry, [giving] the impression of steely strength, [Leland] had a dark, almost swarthy complexion, with keen calm black eyes that had something of the look of an eagle in them.”
Whatever one’s opinions about Leland, the Native American presence in the Inwood that van Dine would have known was real. 
Of course, everyone who’s ever lived in Inwood can point you to the location of the tulip tree, the largest on the Island, where, as legend would have it, Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan from a band of Native Americans in 1626 for the Dutch West India Company for a shipment of goods worth 60 guilders. By all accounts, it survived well into the twentieth century, being felled by a storm in 1933, only a year before S.S. van Dine picked up his pen in 1934.
And while the veracity of the actual transaction is uncertain, Alexander Crawford Chenoweth left us in no doubt that Native Americans, almost certainly the Lenape, inhabited the nearby caves. According to the report reprinted from the New York Sun by Alanson Skinner, in The Pre-Iroquoian Algonkian Indians of Central and Western New York:
Mr. Chenoweth dug away the dirt until he found an easy entrance to a chamber in which a man in stooping posture might crawl about with some difficulty. The chamber was dry, and the dirt on the floor was soft. Mr. Chenoweth began turning it through with his trowel. Many pieces of pottery, some as large as a man’s hand, a few as large as a man’s two hands, lay in little pockets of the sediment. After six hours of digging Mr. Chenoweth had all the fragments of six pots of curious forms and unique manufacture. As he pushed ahead the next day he found a dark exit from the first chamber to a second one. The exit was a hole in the rocks; half filled with dirt, and altogether so small that before being cleaned a man would have to crawl through it. With a torch Mr. Chenoweth discovered that the second chamber was about eight feet square by five feet high… The comparative regularity of the walls of the second chamber, its considerable size, and its difficulty of access led him to believe that it was the main room of a cavernous retreat.”
In his book, Indian Life of Long Ago in the City of New York (1934), Skinner’s co-author, Reginald Pelham Bolton, provided a detailed picture of Chenoweth’s findings.
But Chenoweth’s discovery was only the beginning. In 1936, Princess Noamie, a New Orleans native of Cherokee descent, opened a gift shop at the foot of the tulip tree, where, according to the New York Evening Post, one could “lunch with an Indian with a gold tooth for a quarter.”
Even more ambitiously, Bolton, himself a well-connected consulting engineer and antiquarian, came up with a much more elaborate plan. For he sought nothing less than to create an Indian Village right here in Inwood.
According to the New York Sun, January 21, 1926.
Indian Life Reservation
New York Sun
January 21, 1926
City to Have an Indian Village
Building Plans call for Birch Bark Construction in Inwood Park
A village of birch bark through the paths of which Indians will walk as they walked three hundred years ago and more is to be set down within the boundaries of modernity which is Manhattan; watch fires will burn as they burned before the coming of the white man under the shadow of Inwood Hill; moccasins will wear new paths whence ancient ones have vanished.
But fear not! The reservation:
Will Have Modern Improvements
These later Algonquins, however, will not be asked to live under the amazingly arduous circumstances which prevailed in other days. They will be given a modern cottage and modern food…
And perhaps a role in an impossible murder in a nearby stately home, when a man dives into a haunted Native American pool in full view of half a dozen witnesses? But how? Why? No worries, all will be revealed.
Coming soon: The answer to that and a dozen other questions, including the most important one: Are there really dragons in Inwood?
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