by Michael Daly
Hack Bailey put his loss at $30,000, but even an elephant of such value was the legal equivalent of a cow and Davis spent only two days in the town jail. The public outcry nonetheless exceeded what would have accompanied the shooting of most humans. Popular interest reconfirmed, Bailey soon acquired another elephant, a female Asian he named Lil Bet.
To set this third elephant in America apart from its predecessors, Bailey decided to teach her some tricks of her own beyond Old Bet’s ability to uncork bottles of stout, which was apparently self-taught. Lil Bet was billed as “the learned elephant,” able to bow and sit and stand on two legs and carry her keeper in her trunk.
That should have been enough, but Bailey hyped Lil Bet as not just learned but bulletproof, a claim that demonstrated a surprising lapse in his understanding of his own species. A group of boys may have decided to put the boast to the test as the elephant came to a bridge in Chepachet, Rhode Island. Or they simply may have been looking to replicate the sensation that accompanied Old Bet’s killing. Lil Bet’s demise meant that two of the first three elephants in America had been shot to death.
In the meantime, Bailey had further extended his résumé to include innkeeper as he capitalized on the Old Bet killing by building the Elephant Hotel in his hometown of Somers, New York. He erected a granite pillar topped by a gilded figure of an elephant out front as a monument to the murdered Old Bet.
The three-story redbrick hotel became a gathering place for other sons of Somers inspired to operate either a traveling menagerie or a circus. The circus men included Joshua Purdy Brown, a cousin of Hack Bailey, who elaborated upon the canvas sidewalls used by the menageries to prevent free looks. Brown’s circus is believed to have been the first to perform under a tent, this in 1825. His “pavilion” made the move from city to city easier and considerably less expensive than with the traditional wood structure. Brown was further able to stop along the way at small towns, where the potential audience had never warranted the cost and effort of a wooden venue. There were enough customers to fill a tent for a one-day stand, making for more revenue and less travel time between stops. Other showmen recognized the advantage; more and more tent shows formed and took to the road.
Menageries had already been visiting both cities and towns for some time. One run by another Somers man encountered Brown’s circus in South Carolina in 1832. The two joined to become the first combination to travel together.
Back at the Elephant Hotel, the major circus and menagerie operators formed the Zoological Institute, whose avowed purpose was “to more generally diffuse and promote the knowledge of natural history and gratify rational curiosity.” The more practical function was as a cartel that set routes and schedules among existing shows and kept out interlopers. The 135 signatories became known as the Flatfoots because, in the words of a local historian, “they put their foot down flat against any competition bringing a show into the eastern territory.”
The hotel’s grand ballroom was the scene of elegant soirees where eligible and hopeful young women mixed with showmen who were described by a newspaper as being “rich as grand Turks,” but who “set more value on a trained horse or elephant than the attentions of lovely women.”
Just two years after its formation, the Zoological Institute fell victim to a national financial calamity. The Panic of 1837—just like the Panic of 1873 to come—was the bursting of an economic bubble born of speculation so feverish it exceeded seemingly boundless opportunity. The ever-prescient Hack Bailey had sold the Elephant Hotel the year before and moved down to Virginia, establishing winter quarters for traveling shows at what is now called Bailey’s Crossroads. He returned to Somers, “the cradle of the American circus,” at the end of his life and was buried in the town cemetery. An obelisk marking his grave is chiseled with three watchwords: “Enterprise, Perseverance, Integrity.” The first two were embraced by his successors with considerably more fervor than the third.
THREE
Barnum
During his time in Connecticut, Hack Bailey occasionally visited the town of Bethel and stopped into a general store, where there was a boy behind the counter named Phineas Taylor Barnum. The brief encounters made real all the tales young Barnum had heard of the first great elephant entrepreneur. Barnum would later speak of Bailey as a kind of father figure, describing his actual father as “a man of many endeavors but few successes” who ran a failing hotel and a failing livery stable as well as a failing store.
Barnum’s maternal grandfather, also named Phineas Taylor, had imparted to the boy an early lesson in myth and deception. The grandfather expressed his appreciation for having the child named after him by announcing at the christening that he was deeding his grandson a five-acre parcel called Ivy Island. The grandfather would often declare that this made young Barnum the richest child in town, and the family encouraged the boy to consider himself landed gentry as he grew older. The father again and again asked him how it felt to have such wealth. The boy was ten when he got his first look at his estate.
“I saw nothing but a few stunted ivies and straggling trees,” Barnum would recall in an autobiography. “The truth flashed upon me. I had been the laughing-stock of the family and neighborhood for years. My valuable Ivy Island was an almost inaccessible, worthless bit of barren land, and while I stood deploring my sudden downfall, a huge black snake (one of my tenants) approached me with upraised head. I gave one shriek and rushed for the bridge.”
Further lessons in deception came at the store from suppliers who would stick stones and rubbish into bundles of cloth that were billed as pure linen or deliver loads of grain that were several bushels short. Young Barnum also learned all he wanted to know about routine drudgery, which he happily if briefly escaped at age twelve, when a drover hired him to help herd some cattle down to New York.
Barnum stayed at the same Bull’s Head Tavern where Old Bet had been displayed. He put his wages toward some firecrackers and a toy gun that fired a wooden stick, store-bought toys being considerably less common in this time before leisure came of age. He employed these purchases in what might be viewed as his first Manhattan show. He got one blow from the bartender after he fired a wooden stick at him and another from the proprietor after he startled some customers with the firecrackers.
Barnum then returned to the failing store his father was running along with the other failing enterprises. The father’s very health failed and he died at the age of forty-eight. His son had to borrow money to buy shoes for the funeral.
“At fifteen, he began the world not only penniless but barefooted,” an early biographer noted.
Barnum went to work in an uncle’s store, where he briefly managed to boost profits with a lottery in which the top few prizes were cash, the lesser and much more numerous prizes items that had been slow to sell. He went on to run an unsuccessful rooming house and to start a newspaper called the Herald of Freedom, which folded after he was jailed and fined for libel. He seemed destined to be too much like his father as he proceeded on through a series of unspectacular business ventures.
He had not forgotten Bailey’s example, but even if he had had the price of an elephant, the creatures were no longer such wonders that one in itself seemed likely to generate even a modest fortune. He then heard that the owner of a very different and considerably less pricey traveling exhibit was looking to sell.
The exhibit in question was Joice Heth, who was being presented as the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington. She was a human being, but an African-American one and therefore subject in slave states to being bought and sold no differently than an elephant, only cheaper. Her Kentucky owner had begun to see her value decrease as measured by the audience she drew, but he still wanted $3,000. Barnum bargained the price down to $1,000. He only had $500, but he managed to borrow the balance. He soon repaid it thanks to the powers of hype and advertising he had discovered while running a newspaper.
> “The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World” proclaimed the posters and ads.
One pamphlet read, “JOICE HETH is unquestionably the most astonishing and interesting curiosity in the World! She was the slave of Augustine Washington, (the father of Gen. Washington,) and was the first person who put clothes on the unconscious infant, who, in after days, led our heroic fathers on to glory, to victory, and freedom.”
Barnum clearly saw no irony in that invocation of freedom. The pamphlet went on, “To use her own language when speaking of the illustrious Father of his Country, ‘she raised him.’ JOICE HETH was born in the year 1674, and has, consequently, now arrived at the astonishing AGE OF 161 YEARS.”
Barnum began by exhibiting her in New York, describing himself as “proprietor of the negress” even though slavery had been abolished in that state seven years before. He raked in as much as $1,500 a week as he moved on to such venues as the Barnum Hotel, the still struggling inn his mother was now running in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Crowds kept coming to see a woman who, by Barnum’s own description,
from age or disease or both, was unable to change her position; she could move one arm at will, but her lower limbs could not be straightened; her left arm lay across her breast and she could not remove it; the fingers of her left hand were drawn down so as nearly to close it, and were fixed; the nails on that hand were almost four inches long and extended above her wrist; the nails on her large toes had grown to the thickness of a quarter of an inch; her head was covered with a thick bush of grey hair; but she was toothless and totally blind, and her eyes had sunk so deeply in the sockets as to have disappeared altogether.
Barnum added, “Nevertheless she was pert and sociable, and would talk as long as people would converse with her. She was quite garrulous about her protégé, ‘dear little George,’ at whose birth she declared she was present.”
Heth, of course, received no more share than would Old Bet of the proceeds, which began to decline after seven months. Barnum provided an early example of his particular genius when he planted a letter in a Boston newspaper signed only “A Visitor” stating that the exhibit was “a humbug,” but the truth was “vastly more interesting.”
“The fact is, Joice Heth is not a human being,” the letter went on. “What purports to be a remarkably old woman, is simply a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, India-rubber, and numerous springs that are ingeniously put together, and made to move at the slightest touch according to the will of the operator.”
Ticket sales surged as people flocked to see for themselves whether, as one writer later suggested, Heth was “a fake or a fake fake.” Barnum had recouped his investment many times over when she died, but he did not stop there. He announced a public autopsy and 1,500 people paid fifty cents each to squeeze into the City Saloon in Manhattan and watch prominent surgeon Dr. David Rogers dissect her. Rogers determined that she had not been much more than eighty, or half the age advertised. Barnum shrugged and arranged for an article in the New York Herald that suggested this was not really Heth at all, that she was still alive and out there somewhere.
Barnum then took on an Italian acrobat and tightrope walker named Antonio, whom he rechristened Vivalla. Barnum actually had to pay this person, and the twelve dollars a week was barely offset by the modest audiences as they traveled from city to city. Barnum had to pawn his watch and chain in Washington, D.C., just to secure enough funds to move on. He was nearing a crisis when he opened at the Walnut Theater in Philadelphia.
“And now, that instinct . . . which can arouse a community and make it patronize, provided the article offered is worthy of patronage —an instinct which served me strangely in later years, astonishing the public and surprising me, came to my relief,” Barnum later wrote. “And the help, curiously enough, appeared in the shape of an emphatic hiss from the pit!”
The hiss proved to originate from a performer named Roberts, who afterward told Barnum that he could easily match Vivalla’s feats and then some.
“I at once published a card in Vivalla’s name, offering $1,000 to any one who would publicly perform Vivalla’s feats at such place as should be designated,” Barnum recalled.
Barnum got Roberts to accept the challenge very publicly, with the secret understanding that the actual recompense was to be only thirty dollars.
“A great trial of skill between Roberts and Vivalla was duly announced by posters and through the press,” Barnum recalled. “Meanwhile, they rehearsed privately to see what tricks each could perform, and the ‘business’ was completely arranged.”
Barnum found that rivalry could be as big a draw as curiosity, with each performer attracting passionate partisans.
“Public excitement was at fever heat, and on the night of the trial the pit and upper boxes were crowded to the full,” Barnum later wrote. “The ‘contest’ between the performers was eager, and each had his party in the house. So far as I could learn, no one complained that he did not get all he paid for on that occasion. I engaged Roberts for a month and his subsequent ‘contests’ with Vivalla amused the public and put money in my purse.”
Barnum teamed up with Aaron Turner’s Traveling circus and toured from city to town. He was doing well enough to buy a new black suit, and he was striding around Annapolis in it on the day before a show when Turner pointed him out to some locals.
“I think it very singular you permit that rascal to march your streets in open day,” Turner reportedly said. “It wouldn’t be allowed in Rhode Island, and I suppose that is the reason the black-coated scoundrel has come down this way.”
Turner then told them the man in black was the Reverend E. K. Avery, an infamous Rhode Island murderer of a defenseless young woman. A mob roughly seized Barnum and was preparing to lynch him when Turner admitted that he had only been jesting.
“My dear Mr. Barnum,” Turner is said to have told his partner afterward, “it was all for our good. Remember, all we need to insure success is notoriety. You will see that this will be noised all about town as a trick played by one of the circus managers upon the other, and our pavilion will be crammed to-morrow night.”
The engagement was indeed sold out, but Barnum had soured on Turner. Barnum took his $1,200 cut and struck out on his own with Vivalla, along with a black entertainer named James Sandford and several musicians. Sandford abruptly left the show as they reached Camden, South Carolina, and Barnum sought to live up to the advance advertising by singing “plantation melodies” with a blackened face.
He was in blackface on another night when there was a commotion between two white men and he reflexively sought to mediate. One of the parties pointed a pistol at Barnum’s head and demanded to know how he dared to speak to whites that way. Barnum quickly rolled up his sleeve.
“I am as white as you!” he exclaimed.
Barnum took as a new partner Henry Hawley, famed both as a magician and as America’s most ingenious liar. Hawley had a standard response when one of his tall tales was challenged: “It’s just as true as anything I have told you tonight.”
Barnum returned to New York with more than double the $1,200 he made with Turner but declared himself “thoroughly disgusted” with life on the road. He placed an advertisement in the newspaper offering to invest $2,500 in a worthwhile venture and the many who responded included inventors, saloon keepers, pawnbrokers, lottery operators, even a counterfeiter who wanted to put the money into paper, ink, and dyes for “a safe and rich harvest.”
In keeping with a resolution to become a more conventional businessman, Barnum decided on a German immigrant who sold waterproof paste, bear grease, and cologne. Any profits from the joint venture disappeared with the German when he skipped back to Europe.
“A good-looking, plausible, promising—scamp,” Barnum later said.
In the meanwhile, Barnum chanced to meet John Diamond, a teenage dancer who
was among the first to combine the styles of the freed slaves and the Irish immigrants consigned to mutual squalor in the notorious Five Points slum in lower Manhattan. Diamond performed this “break-down dancing” in blackface, his visage smeared with burnt cork, a wooly wig on his head. He joined the percussive, lightning footwork of Irish step dancing and the full-body dance of Africa.
Barnum signed a deal with Diamond’s father and mother and hired an agent to take the teen on tour. Barnum remained behind in New York where he and his wife had two daughters, a two-year-old and a newborn. He sought to be a non-traveling showman by leasing the Vauxhall Gardens saloon, but proceeds were so meager he had to abandon it after just three months and join Diamond on the road.
“I dreaded resuming the life of an itinerant showman, but funds were low, I had a family to care for, and as nothing better presented, I made up my mind to endure the vexations and uncertainties of a tour,” he later wrote.
Barnum traveled with Diamond to Troy, Buffalo, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis. Great dancing did not translate into great profits and Barnum was barely covering his expenses when they arrived in New Orleans. He had just one hundred dollars, and, after a fortnight, that dwindled to the point that he had to put up his previously pawned and redeemed pocket watch as security for his dining bill. He then mounted a variation on the “contests” between Vivalla and Roberts. The poster read: “Challenge: Master Diamond, who delineates the Ethiopian character superior to any other white person, hereby challenges any person in the world to a trial of skill at Negro dancing in all its varieties for a wager from $200 to $1,000.”
Barnum cleared as much as $500 in a single night, but he and Diamond soon had a falling out. The dancer continued on his own and Barnum felt doubly betrayed when one of his associates set off with a fourteen-year-old orphan he had taken under his wing. The orphan was now foisted on the public as “Master Diamond.”