by Michael Daly
Within hours of landing in New York, Barnum’s elephants pulled the car up boisterous Broadway past Irving House. In one of the hotel’s front windows, Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, stood in review, back in America for a second Barnum-sponsored appearance.
The showman paired Tom Thumb with the calf elephant and sent them on the road along with the eight surviving grown captives, a lion tamer, an armless man, and wax figures of all thirteen U.S. presidents. Barnum himself stayed behind, saying he had “neither time nor inclination to manage such a concern.” He could send his name on tour without personally suffering the travails of the road. And he was busy with his museum as well as something even bigger. He had developed plans to build a utopian city for “the New Man” on farmland he had purchased across the Pequonnock River from Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Meanwhile, the show’s day-to-day operations were overseen by Howes, who, since his childhood days with Lil Bet, had become known as “the father of the American circus,” credited with erecting the first billboard and with being the first to use paste rather than tacks to put up posters. He was better at advertising than delivering, if what was billed as Barnum’s Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie was any indication. One of the early stops was Princeton, New Jersey, and local college boys drawn by the preshow hype were apparently less than wowed; even a whole herd of elephants was no longer enough to impress. The students expressed their overall disappointment by pushing the Car of Juggernaut into the nearest body of water.
The car was looking a little worse for wear when the show subsequently arrived in Brooklyn. A writer for the Brooklyn Eagle opined, “The Great Car of Juggernaut is a complete sham, being a wagon of the plainest ordinary construction and painted outside in the most irregular manner; the Hindoo deities or what is meant to represent them and figures of elephants . . . being intermingled which shows the artist’s beautiful ignorance of his subject.”
The writer noted that the procession was two short of the advertised ten elephants, the two rentals having been returned. He described the museum part of the show as “one of the most disreputable, shabby affairs in existence.” The wax presidents, he said, bore “not the slightest resemblance to the living reality.”
If the herd of huge beasts elicited only a yawn, the writer did find the diminutive Tom Thumb to be “worth the whole price of admission . . . quite a well bred little fellow, very well proportioned and as accomplished as a Parisian dandy.” The article concluded that “with the exception of Tom and the feats of the man without arms, it could not be compared with many similar exhibitions that are in the country.”
The ensuing reviews were even worse, but the show was always a day ahead of publication and it generated a handsome profit.
In New York, Barnum was distracted by yet another project, this one involving the British inventor of what was purported to be and what the showman actually believed to be a revolutionary fire extinguisher. Barnum opened an office on Broadway and soon sold $180,000 worth of Fire Annihilators, with the promise of a full refund should an upcoming public demonstration not prove completely satisfactory.
In the last days of 1851, Barnum erected a fifteen-foot-square wooden structure, rising one story and a loft, on a vacant patch of what is now Manhattan’s Upper East Side. A sizable crowd gathered as the structure was stocked with combustible material just after sundown. An assistant was preparing to set it alight when there came a cry.
“Don’t! Don’t! Let me out! Don’t burn me up!”
The voice seemed to be coming from the loft and an officer clambered up, finding nothing. Barnum gave the signal to go ahead, but the voice came again.
“Will you burn a fellow alive? Let me out!”
Another check found the loft empty and the crowd began to grumble that it was all just another Barnum stunt.
“Humbug!” a man called out.
“Joice Heth!” called out another.
“Mermaid!” called another, referring to the Feejee fake.
“Have a little patience, gentlemen, and we’ll proceed!” Barnum said.
As the assistant finally set the fire, a whole litany of sounds seemed to emanate from the building, not just voices but also the squeal of panicked pigs. Barnum had a sudden suspicion and scanned the crowd, spotting his friend the noted ventriloquist and magician, Signor Blitz. The mystery was solved, but in the chaos the annihilator was not applied until the fire had grown beyond the ability of any such device to extinguish it. Barnum honored his money-back guarantee, though he remained convinced the fire annihilator actually did annihilate fire. He announced the lesson learned.
“Real merit does not always succeed as well as humbug,” he said.
He still had the traveling show, whose name he changed in the second season to P. T. Barnum’s Grand Colossal Museum and Menagerie. The abysmal reviews and reputation then finally began to catch up with it and the net proceeds declined accordingly, prompting a hike in the price of admission from twenty-five cents to thirty cents in the North, fifty cents in the South. That produced a corresponding rise in dissatisfaction, and customers in Lynchburg, Virginia, rioted against this overcharging Northern show. The circus workers who witnessed the start of the trouble shouted what had become the traditional cry whenever conflict with locals threatened to turn physical.
“Hey Rube!”
The longtime circus hand George Conklin would later write, “This was the S.O.S. call of the circus, and everyone who could leave what he was doing would grab a stake and rush into the fracas. The town gang was always the loser. If it had not been, the circus could not have stayed on the road long. Black eyes, bloody noses, bruised heads and broken bones were common. Often there were more serious injuries and sometimes a man was killed. Very often, men connected with the circus were arrested, but they were seldom convicted, for in such a rough-and-tumble fight it was almost impossible to tell which man inflicted a particular injury and the authorities usually got the wrong one.”
However poorly the Lynchburg toughs fared, they critically injured three circus men and trashed much of the equipment and trappings. The ticket wagon was demolished.
The net profit fell from $71,000 in 1852 to $48,547 in 1853 to just $6,000 in 1854. The last show of the season was back in Brooklyn and Barnum decided to close it down. He sold Howes his share of the assets save for a single elephant.
In the Connecticut city of Bridgeport, train passengers riding through on the way to and from New York beheld the novel sight of an elephant pulling a plow. The stunt was timed to the train schedules and the only crop Barnum reaped was publicity, boosting both his American Museum and East Bridgeport, the dream city he was continuing to build. He was decent enough to warn away farmers who wrote inquiring about the benefits of elephant plowing.
“I began to be alarmed lest some one should buy an elephant,” Barnum later wrote. “I accordingly had a general letter printed, which I mailed to all my anxious inquirers. It was headed ‘strictly confidential.’”
The letter advised that the high cost of purchasing an elephant was compounded by the onerous cost of feeding one, which far exceeded its value as a working farm animal.
“He could not earn even half his living,” Barnum wrote.
The recipients apparently honored the confidentiality of the letter, for word of it did not seem to reach the newspapers. Barnum naturally did nothing to dispel the continued enthusiasm of the reporters who delivered firsthand accounts of his elephant plowing.
“Newspaper reporters came from far and near, and wrote glowing accounts of the elephantine performances,” Barnum later wrote. “One of them, taking a political view of the matter, stated that the elephant’s sagacity showed that he knew more than did any laborer on the farm, and yet, shameful to say, he was not allowed to vote. Another said that Barnum’s elephant built all the stone wall on the farm; made all the rail fences; plan
ted corn with his trunk, and covered it with his foot; washed my windows and sprinkled the walks and lawns, by taking water from the fountain-basin with his trunk; carried all the children to school, and put them to bed at night, tucking them up with his trunk; fed the pigs; picked fruit from branches that could not otherwise be reached; turned the fanning mill and corn-sheller; drew the mowing machine, and turned and cocked the hay with his trunk; carried and brought my letters to and from the post-office (it was a male elephant); and did all the chores about the house, including milking the cows, and bringing in eggs.”
Images of the plowing elephant appeared in newspapers across the country and beyond the sea as Barnum repeated the scene for passing trains.
“Heads were out every window,” Barnum wrote.
A farmer friend named Gideon Thompson asked to see for himself “how the big animal worked.”
“I knew him to be a shrewd, sharp man and a good farmer, and I tried to excuse myself, as I did not wish to be too closely questioned,” Barnum later wrote. “Indeed, for the same reason, I made it a point at all times to avoid being present when the plowing was going on. But the old farmer was a particular friend and he refused to take ‘no’ for an answer; so I went with him ‘to see the elephant.’”
Several gawkers were present when Barnum and the farmer Thompson arrived. The farmer watched silently for fifteen minutes and then strode into the field, sinking nearly to his knees in the oft-plowed earth.
“What is your object, sir, in bringing that great Asiatic animal on to a New England farm?” the farmer asked by Barnum’s account.
“To plow,” Barnum replied.
“Don’t talk to me about plowing!” the farmer said. “The ground is so soft I thought I should go through and come out in China. No, sir! You can’t ‘humbug me.’”
Thompson offered an expense versus efficiency appraisal of the elephant.
“He can’t draw so much as two pair of my oxen can, and he costs more than a dozen pair,” the farmer declared.
“You are mistaken,” Barnum said. “That elephant is a powerful animal. He can draw more than forty yoke of oxen, and he pays me well for bringing him here.”
“Forty yoke of oxen!” the farmer exclaimed. “I don’t want to tell you I doubt your word, but I would just like to know what he can draw.”
“He can draw the attention of twenty millions of American citizens to Barnum’s Museum,” Barnum said.
Among the draws at the museum were the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker from Siam, all the more spectacular for fathering twenty-two children by a pair of sisters. And there was What-Is-It?, also known as Zip the Pinhead, a young New Jersey microcephalic dressed in animal skins and displayed in a cage as having been captured “in the interior of Africa in a perfectly natural state, roving about like a monkey or Orang Outang.” He was billed as “the connecting link between man and monkey.”
And there was Josephine Boisdechene Clofullia, who festooned her six-inch beard with a diamond supposedly presented to her by Napoleon III after he learned she was styling her whiskers in the same manner as his own. She became front-page news when a man filed a lawsuit against the museum, seeking to recoup his twenty-five-cent admission along with damages on the grounds that the bearded woman was not a woman at all. The case went to trial and three doctors testified that they had examined her and that she was indeed a woman. Barnum prevailed, as he knew he would when he orchestrated the suit, which packed the museum with people anxious to judge for themselves.
Barnum was on the way to becoming America’s first millionaire showman, ensconced in a Bridgeport mansion he dubbed Iranistan, said to be the grandest private residence in America. His dream city appeared to get a big boost when the seemingly profitable Jerome Clock Company offered to relocate from New Haven to East Bridgeport and bring with it as many as a thousand workers. Barnum had only to provide certain financial guarantees to get the company through a slow period. He agreed after being shown records indicating that Jerome had nearly half a million dollars in reserves and nearly $200,000 in anticipated revenue.
“I had ‘East Bridgeport on the Brain,’” Barnum later wrote. “Whoever approached me with a project that looked to the advancement of my new city touched my weak side and found in me an eager listener. The serpent that beguiled me was any plausible proposition that promised prosperity to East Bridgeport.”
The “Prince of Humbug” himself became the victim of an audacious scam in which his guarantees were used to acquire company debts on his behalf, or rather to his detriment. The Jerome Company was in fact imploding and Barnum found himself owing more than half a million dollars. His dream city was never to be and he was left bankrupt at the age of forty-six.
“The gods visible again,” a humbug-hating Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Barnum’s apparent ruin.
Barnum had to give up Iranistan and board his family with a farmer in Westhampton on Long Island. He managed to pay the farmer only after he came upon a dead whale while strolling the beach. He transported the whale to Manhattan, where it was put on exhibit at the museum he had kept from creditors by “selling” the contents to two friends for a dollar. The friends gave him a cut of the modest profits brought in by a deceased creature presented as nothing more than itself.
Barnum retained a surplus of audacity and America’s most famous bankrupt went on tour giving lectures on “The Art of Money Getting, or Success in Life.”
Money he got, adding the lecture proceeds to tickets sales for tours by Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind, who both stepped forward to assist the showman in his hour of need. He reassumed official ownership of the New York museum in March of 1860 and, in a measure of how far he had quickly come from using a dead whale to pay off a farmer, he now acquired two living belugas, one fifteen feet, the other twenty. He installed them in a water tank in the museum basement.
“As it is very doubtful whether these wonderful creatures can be kept alive more than a few days, the public will see the importance of seizing the first moment to see them,” a broadsheet announced.
The public responded accordingly, as did the newspapers, an article noting of the beluga duo, “A long-continued intimacy has endeared them to each other, and they go about quite like a pair of whispering lovers, blowing off their mutual admiration in a very emphatic manner.”
One did indeed die, and a Barnum paean declared, “May both whales meet again in the open seas of immortality!”
A less likely love was presented by an exhibit that proved to be a big hit in a time when tensions were growing between the Northern and Southern states and partisan strife loomed. The museum guidebook described it thus:
THE HAPPY FAMILY. A miscellaneous collection of beasts and birds (upwards of sixty in number), living together harmoniously in one large cage, each of them being the mortal enemy of every other, but contentedly playing and frolicking together, without injury or discord. . . . The family comprises 8 doves, 4 owls, 10 rats, 2 cats, 2 dogs, 1 hawk, 3 rabbits, 1 rooster, 8 Guinea Pigs, 1 Raccoon, 2 Cavas, 1 Cuba Rat, 3 Ant Eaters, 7 Monkeys, 2 Woodchucks, 1 Opossum, 1 Armadilla, &c., &c.
Barnum had imported the Happy Family after seeing it in England and perhaps not even he knew how the exhibitor maintained such an improbable truce. Some observers guessed he selected creatures with particularly docile temperaments. Others figured the animals were intimidated with harsh treatment after hours and kept so overfed they did not contemplate eating each other.
Whatever the secret, the Happy Family offered a vision of harmony that was hugely popular. This same benevolent side of nature was suggested by the largest of land mammals, but the onetime part owner of nine elephants appeared to have lost faith in their money-getting potential. Barnum left Howes to make a solo attempt with a traveling circus. Howes then sold all but two of the herd to which he had taken full title, a male and a female.
The male was alre
ady named Romeo. Howes renamed the female Juliet and presented them at his new Franconies Hippodrome, a nineteenth-century version of the ancient Greek horse racing venue. Howes’s hope was to entice people to the show rather than have it travel to them, but even with these largest of lovers the Hippodrome shut after two seasons. The star-crossed elephants were sold off separately. Romeo was on his way to becoming known as America’s first “bad” or, in the parlance of the show world, “ugly” elephant.
FIVE
Ugly
Romeo was same big male who had demonstrated his high spirits and feisty temperament early on by going “rogue” on the dock in Ceylon after being captured by the Barnum expedition. The mahout who helped subdue him had clearly not endeared himself to the elephant during the long ordeal at sea. The elephant killed him shortly after arriving in America, perhaps the first such death here, one bit of unprecedented drama that Barnum kept from the newspapers.
At that point the elephant was named Canada, but it was changed to Romeo after he killed a keeper in Canada. A press agent subsequently sought to explain simultaneously one elephant’s apparent disappearance and another elephant’s ill temper by saying that Romeo had sought to save Canada during an accident on a bridge, holding on to the unlucky elephant for an hour before his strength gave out. The press agent said Canada had fallen to his death and Romeo had been left emotionally traumatized.
