The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  The best known of all P. T. Barnum’s circus strongmen, however, were Hiram and Barney Davis, known professionally as Waino and Plutanor, the Wild Men of Borneo. Born in 1825 and 1827 respectively, they were a pair of very strong dwarf brothers who each grew to a full height of 40in. and a weight of about 45lbs. Despite this they were both enormously strong and could lift heavy weights, and wrestle and defeat grown men. Barnum claimed that they had been discovered on Borneo by a group of sailors, who only captured them after a titanic struggle in the jungle. In fact, both brothers had been purchased from their destitute mother and sold on to Barnum at a profit. At first the brothers conformed to their billing by running around muttering gibberish, but their strength acts were so impressive and popular that for much of the time they could concentrate on these. They stayed with the circus for more than twenty-five years.

  But despite Barnum’s skill as a showman, it was William Muldoon who lay best claim to having brought strongmen out of such freak shows and into the mainstream sporting arenas. He was born in Caneadea in upstate New York in 1852, although later he claimed that 1845 had been the year of his birth. A big youth, he grew even stronger from constant outdoor work on the land. Towards the end of the 1860s he arrived in New York City and secured employment driving a horse and cart for $12 for a sixty-hour week. Always keen to accumulate cash he also worked in a warehouse and had regular shifts as a saloon bouncer. In his spare time and given his obvious strength, he started wrestling in small clubs and arenas.

  Muldoon was introduced to professional wrestling, he claimed, when, as a part of his professional duties ejecting recalcitrant customers from dives and bars, he encountered one youth sporting a spectacular black eye. As he was being propelled into the street the young man told Muldoon proudly that he had received the bruise while earning $2 wrestling in a club on Houston Street. Sensing a chance to accumulate even more loot, the young bouncer dropped his informant on to the cobbles and wasted no time in hurrying to the club and offering his services there.

  He was engaged and soon attained a reputation in the city as a ferocious young grappler. He worked his way up to fighting in main events at Harry Hill’s notorious club, which offered its patrons, food, drink, boxing, wrestling and young women, and was a popular haunt of bucks and swells of all ages ‘hunting the elephant’, the current euphemism for voyeurism, or having a risky night out in unsavoury areas. The saloon had a rudimentary code of conduct and was indeed a cut above most of its dangerous contemporaries. The Police Gazette gave the establishment its ultimate recommendation: ‘It is ’Arry’s boast that no one has ever been robbed or killed in his place.’ Entry cost twenty-five cents for men and nothing for ladies. One of the patrons, the inventor Thomas A. Edison, personally supervised the installation of his patented electric light system in the saloon.

  At this time, grappling was just catching on as an attraction in urban areas. There had been a number of different regional styles, like the collar and elbow, practised in different parts of the country since the days of the early settlers. By the 1870s, the more spectacular catch-as-catch-can form was replacing the rather static traditional Greco-Roman in the favour of fans. The catch-as-catch-can form allowed holds below the waist and was the forerunner of the modern all-in and freestyle modes of the sport. The introduction in 1870 of padded mats meant that the more spectacular throws and falls of the catch-as-catch-can version could be practised with less physical damage to the participants, providing a cushion against the more violent throws.

  In the absence of an official governing body, championships could be claimed by anyone. Despite grandiose claims of large side stakes for bouts, purses were pitifully low and results were often pre-arranged to accommodate betting coups. From quite early in his career it was rumoured that Muldoon, often wrestling as the Iron Duke, could be bought, either to win or lose, if the price was right and his cut of the wagers acceptable.

  A fillip to professional wrestling was provided when overseas scufflers started arriving to challenge the local champions. Muldoon was quick to see the commercial value of international matches and encouraged these new arrivals. He even became the undercover manager of some of them, taking a slice of their winnings. One of the first of his protégés was a former Japanese sumo wrestler called Matsuda Sorakichi. Too small to hope for much success among the behemoths of the Japanese style, Sorakichi decided to try his luck in the US and managed to secure a job wrestling in a circus, where he was spotted by Muldoon.

  In order to build up his pupil’s reputation, Muldoon matched himself against Sorakichi in New York, taking care to lose so that a lucrative rematch could then be promoted. At least one sports writer commented on the surprise upset in their first encounter:

  Matsada Sorakichi, the Jap, is rapidly forging to the front as one of the best all-round wrestlers in the world, and the comparative ease with which he defeated William Muldoon, best three in five, while it surprised me greatly, at the same time forced this conclusion more firmly into my mind.

  In this instance Muldoon’s plotting came to nothing; Sorakichi was not really big enough for the burgeoning professional wrestling circuit. Instead he tried to establish himself economically with an advantageous marriage. This turned sour by 1885 when Ella, the wife of the Japanese wrestler, claimed that her husband and his friends had frittered away her inheritance, moved a girlfriend into the marital home and threatened her with violence.

  Sorakichi was only one of many arrivals from overseas who found the American strongman scene too hard and vicious. Another visitor was the towering Scottish strength athlete, Donald Dinnie. Dinnie flourished at such hitherto parochial events as tossing the caber and throwing heavy stones and hammers. He was at the same time a taciturn and avaricious man who once spurned the glory of performing before Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria, unless his usual match fee of £2 sterling was paid up front. He was 6ft 2in. tall, weighed 203lbs and at the time of his arrival in the USA was in his late twenties. He claimed to have won over 1,500 prizes at Caledonian Games events held in his native country.

  By the early 1870s, Scottish exiles to the New World were forming their own Caledonian societies all over the Continent and putting on annual versions of the Scottish Games, which drew large crowds. In 1872, Dinnie led the surge of homegrown talent across the Atlantic to compete for prizes at these events. When he appeared in Detroit his advertising handouts described him as the champion all-round athlete of Great Britain. His speciality events and personal bests were given as:

  Throwing the 56-pound stone: 22 feet 8 inches

  Throwing the 32-pound stone: 35 feet

  Throwing the 18-pound stone: 39 feet 7 inches

  Dinnie also challenged anyone at throwing the caber, a pole 18ft long and 6in. in circumference at one end, and 8in. at the other. He was also prepared to engage in sprint races and Highland wrestling bouts against all comers.

  While he was visiting New York, Muldoon persuaded the big man to take up catch-as-catch-can wrestling, dubbed him the Scottish champion and, again, arranged a number of lucrative matches for himself against the visitor. The cautious Dinnie insisted that at least some of these contests should take part in the Scottish grappling style, at which he was unparalleled, even if he did lose regularly in the catch-as-catch-can and Greco-Roman events against Muldoon and other Americans. Dinnie was never a good loser, causing one newspaper writer to comment after a bout: ‘Dinnie behaved himself with regard to one or two matters more like a spoiled child than a grown man.’ The big Scot never had the skill in the Greco-Roman and catch-as-catch-can styles to match his prowess in Highland Games wrestling.

  The growing wrestling and strongman industries were given constant publicity by the raunchy National Police Gazette. This was a lurid scandal sheet concentrating on reporting sport, crime, show business and sex. It was purchased in 1877 by Richard K. Fox, who became its publisher and a sponsor of all sorts of different sports. Its circulation boomed and it became famous for such regular
features as ‘Noose Notes’, reporting on public hangings, and the self-explanatory ‘Crimes of the Clergy’. For a time Fox even became William Muldoon’s sponsor.

  Always a careful man with a dollar, Muldoon started to look around for a sinecure of a day job which would at the same time provide him with a chance to train regularly for wrestling. Like many other far-sighted athletes, he joined the New York Police Department, enlisting as a patrolman in 1875. It was here that he started embellishing his biography, a trait he later developed almost into an art form. To gain credibility with his equally tough fellow officers, he claimed to have served throughout the American Civil War, starting as a young drummer boy and going on to fight in a number of engagements. Muldoon even averred that he had been present when General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appotomax. Frequently he would reminisce sanctimoniously about the horrors of war to reporters, declaring sadly in his biography, ‘The business of trying to kill one’s fellow man is not a pleasant memory.’

  To add credence to his claims of martial distinction, Muldoon started giving his date of birth as 1845, instead of the genuine 1851. In fact, on this estimation Muldoon would have been ten when the war started and fifteen at its conclusion, rendering it unlikely that he had first learned to wrestle in the army and then taken part in many victorious bouts against other soldiers. It was widely suspected that for the purposes of personal publicity and self-promotion Muldoon had started utilising the record of one of his brothers, who had served in the war and had been wounded in action.

  The former ploughboy did, however, do well for six years as a member of New York’s Finest. He co-established the New York Police Athletic Club and was allowed to train in its gym for three or four hours every day, further developing his muscles. He won the city police heavyweight grappling title and continued moonlighting at his professional fighting career, causing a considerable stir in the newspapers when he met and defeated a formidable touring English wrestler called Edwin Bibby. Still dressed in his police uniform – Muldoon had been walking his city beat all day – he pinned the Englishman twice with little difficulty and then for good measure lifted his groaning opponent from the mat and slammed him down with tremendous force.

  Bibby, who settled in the USA and kept a saloon in New Jersey, was already going through a bad patch having just been hauled up before a judge for beating his wife. The New York Times reported his plea of mitigation: ‘He said that his wife was a habitual drunkard, that she spends from $20 to $25 a week in the gratification of her tastes, and that her habit had provoked him until he struck her.’

  The New York Times also described the squalid background to the Bibby match, which was common to most wrestling bouts of the time, saying, with disdain, that the contest took place ‘in the presence of a howling mob which represents all the lower elements of society’.

  Throughout his long life, William Muldoon, within the limits imposed by his quick temper and almost neurotic demand for respect, took care to keep in with the right people. As previously mentioned, he became a protégé of Richard Fox, the influential editor of the Police Gazette, which backed Muldoon for some time – until, in a flash of bad temper, the wrestler fell out with the proprietor over an imagined slight.

  After six years, Muldoon became well enough known to retire from the police force and open a tavern, continuing with his wrestling. He defeated the well-known Theodore Bauer, one of the many reckless hard men who frequented the rings of the era, for a version of the world’s Greco-Roman title before a crowd of three thousand people. The co-owner of a New York beer shop, Bauer was once matched against a circus bear called Martin, who was muzzled and had its claws clipped. Understandably its aggressive instincts had been diluted by these handicaps and the beast was reluctant to fight. Bauer had done his best to antagonise the animal by swearing, but Martin still persisted in backing away. Finally, the wrestler managed to secure a grip on the bear’s fur and threw it unconvincingly to the ground, claiming the victory.

  Several of the Muldoon–Bauer matches had an over-rehearsed look to them, leading to post-match disputes between the participants and onlookers, and causing the Brooklyn Eagle to editorialise:

  ‘Out of their own mouths are they convicted’ is the exclamation made after reading the recent exposures of professional rottenness which has been made in the case of the Bauer and Muldoon quarrel. There cannot be the slightest doubt in the minds of any sporting man, after a perusal of the testimony published in the case, that there has scarcely been an honest wrestling match in the country for the past two or three years.

  Nevertheless, Muldoon was beginning to suspect that there was a financial killing to be made in the physical culture industry in the USA, similar to the one about to take off in Europe. In this he was assisted by the efforts of George Barker Windship, a Harvard-educated doctor.

  Apart from the technically minded Belzoni, the strongman-cum-archaeologist, most of the early strongmen were not intellectuals. Few of them seemed willing or able to devote much thought to their skills. This was changed by the advent of Windship, one of the first men to devote himself to the science of the accumulation of strength and an active proselyter in its cause.

  Ridiculed while a freshman for his lack of size – Windship was only 5ft 7in. tall and very thin – he was determined to improve his physique while at Harvard and spent most of his spare time engaged in gymnastics. One day, proud of the noticeable improvement in his physique, he tested his power on a commercial ‘try-your-strength’ weightlifting machine. He managed to register a lift of 400lbs on the coin-operated apparatus, but discovered to his chagrin that many others had scored higher on the register. He realised that, if he were to become really strong, a course of specific progressive weight training would have to be added to his agility routines.

  To this end Windship undertook a rigorous course of barbell and dumbbell lifting, and developed his own dumbbell to which extra weight could be added when needed. Having qualified as a doctor in 1857, he toured the USA and Canada demonstrating and selling his patented lifting exerciser. He gave his first public lecture in 1859, but was so overcome by stage fright that he fainted onstage. Gradually, however, Windship got better and bigger, with his own physique becoming so impressive that he was soon labelled the American Samson. He preached the gospel of students exercising for no more than an hour a day but employing increasingly heavy weights when they did so. The human body should be developed as fully as possible, with no weak points.

  The fact that a qualified doctor was lending his imprimatur to weight training attracted the attention of the young middle class, who followed Windship’s course in increasing numbers. By the beginning of 1861, he was ready for the ultimate test. Windship announced that not only would he give a public lecture at Bryan Hall on his methods of attaining strength, he would also accept any challenges from strongmen in the audience, presenting $200 to any man who could outlift him.

  The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 curtailed his touring activities and challenges to his audiences, but he continued to teach and write about the benefits of weight training, and opened a combined medical practice and gymnasium in Boston.

  Unfortunately, George Barker Windship died in 1876, following a massive stroke. His death proved a considerable blow to the advocates of training with heavy weights, many people blaming his rigorous exercising routines for the doctor’s untimely death.

  Nevertheless, Windship had made a segment of the American public strength-conscious and aware of the advantages of weightlifting as an aid to health and fitness, and William Muldoon was determined to build his own physical culture empire on these foundations. First, he decided, he needed another acquiescent foil and assistant, and soon settled on a wrestler called Ernest Roeber.

  Actually, Roeber was an enormously strong bartender with a day job in a tobacco factory who hated wrestling. At this time Muldoon was performing a combined strongman and wrestling act at Miner’s Theatre in the Bowery. One night a group of local thu
gs calling themselves the Gas House Gang called on Roeber and ordered him to accept Muldoon’s challenge to pay $25 to any man who could last for fifteen minutes against him in the ring. The bartender most definitely did not want to accept the challenge, but allowed himself to be coaxed into it. As he later told a writer for Ring magazine: ‘I am not stretching things when I say I stood a good chance of being dropped off a dock with a stone around my neck if I said no.’

  In the event, Roeber took a terrible beating but managed to last the distance, allowing the Gas House Gang to collect the winnings from the bets it had laid on the bartender’s survival. When he got home that night, his wife was so shocked by his battered appearance that she threw his wrestling tights into a stove. Nevertheless, Muldoon was so impressed by his opponent’s strength and fortitude that he recruited the bartender as an integral part of the touring stage show he was about to take round great swathes of the rural Midwest, paying him a munificent $25 a week.

  The far-sighted Muldoon also had another role in mind for Roeber. The former policeman was getting fed up with wrestling but wanted to keep control of its mechanics. Accordingly, he started to build up the other man’s reputation, with a view one day to handing over his title to him and maintain his influence over the championship as Roeber’s eventual manager and promoter. The fact that Muldoon had no strong claim to any sort of championship at the time did not enter into his calculations.