Standing six feet, one inch tall, with a thin face, high forehead, fair complexion, black hair, and dark eyes, Dedge was an imposing, even intimidating, figure and not just when striding toward patients with a pair of pliers. Even a longtime friend like George D. Lowe, Dedge’s physician, did not trifle with the dentist. After Lowe advised him to live at a higher altitude,
he solemnly petitioned the city fathers for permission to build a bungalow atop the city water tower and was very resentful when they turned him down. I thought it very funny and started to kid him about it, but he had a queer look in his eyes and I changed the subject.15
Nevertheless, he was as “good a dentist as ever drilled a cavity or crowned a tooth” and did other kinds of work, like vaccinating the employees of a lumber company.16 Dr. Dedge also owned a plantation (most likely pine trees for collecting resin) and a turpentine “place” (probably for distilling the resin), but his main interest was money. The dentist was willing to counterfeit coins, smuggle diamonds, or go into show business if it meant turning a profit, and his friend William T. “Doc” Brinson was an experienced exhibitor.
At six feet, four inches tall and weighing somewhere between six hundred and seven hundred pounds, Brinson was even more impressive than Dedge. He rode about in a “buggy” that “resembles more nearly an army wagon,” used “an enormous rocking chair, of cantilever construction, which has to be moved about with a derrick,” and had reportedly done quite well displaying himself at fairs and sideshows as “the fattest man in the world.”17 There is no knowing who originated the idea of showing a wild man, but Brinson’s experience and Dr. Dedge’s expertise and ruthlessness augured well for the undertaking.
Dentists were often involved with wild man shows. They created protruding fangs for “amiable Negro boys from about the circus lot who are trained to growl, flash a set of fake tusks and eat raw meat . . . ,” but the quality of the workmanship varied.18 One nineteenth-century showman named Sam Ashbridge “had a good wild nigger, but his tusks didn’t fit him, and he worried himself to death. You see, Sam wanted a novelty, and he had all the coon’s teeth pulled. Then he got a set of false ones made—regular tusks, that came out over his lower lip. Why you never saw anything that looked more like a gorilla than that coon of Ashbridge’s did. He only lived a season, though.”19 “Novelty” was essential to a good exhibit.
Dedge’s partner in the venture, Charles J. Medders, was also an overseer on his plantation. Doc Brinson presumably took part, and there was J. C. English, but they needed one more; preferably someone not too bright and compliant enough to be the wild man.
“Zara, the Horned African Demon”
In August 1902, a reporter interviewed Mr. Calvin Bird, who had a strange story to tell. He said,
“Dr. John Dada found me down in Central America and he brung me ’long back wif him to Pearson, Ga. I was borned in Natchez, Miss., but I was working down where Dr. John found me.”20
Dedge pressured him into undergoing dental surgery, ostensibly to fix his teeth, and Bird, who had a superstitious awe of the dentist (“I tell you dat man got er powerful eye”), agreed. On Christmas Day, December 25, 1901, an operation transformed the reluctant patient into a “horned demon.”
Bird’s eyeteeth were removed and bridgework put into the openings—probably threaded gold crowns held in place with platinum posts extending into the root canal.21 The crowns served as points of attachment for oversized fangs of some kind, possibly alligator teeth, which screwed on and protruded over his lips.22
Dedge shaved Bird’s head, cut a rectangular flap into his scalp, and inserted a silver plate between the skin and bone. It was an H-shaped piece of metal, flat, but for a slight curve that allowed it to follow the dome of the skull, two to three inches long, and had two protruding threaded silver posts with eyelets. With that in place, the opening was sutured shut, except for the posts and eyelets, which were designed to protrude about half an inch through the skin. Bird woke to find “two little nubbins” on his head and, since he already considered the dentist a “hoodoo doctor,” his first thought was “maybe Dr. John done conjured me inter de debbil an’ den I’se skeerder dan ever.”23
When the incisions healed, Dedge “killed many innocent goats before finding a pair of horns suiting his purpose” and attached them to the exposed posts so that they appeared to be growing from Bird’s head.24 Dedge now possessed “a freak that outclassed most museum attractions in the whole country,” but there must have been rumors about what was happening, and the pair left town just before an “investigating committee” arrived.25
Calvin Bird was now “Zara, the demon,” the “Wild African Wonder,” and was displayed at North Carolina and Georgia until the tour was interrupted on March 15, 1902. “Zara” was arrested at Valdosta for firing a pistol in the street (he does not seem to have been wearing horns at the time). J. C. English was taken into custody and fined $52 for “exhibiting the negro, under charge of cheating and swindling.”26 Once their legal problems were settled, the show moved to Tennessee, where Dr. Dedge contracted with another exhibitor to show Bird up north. He went to Syracuse, New York, and was displayed at Kirk Park, which then had grandstands, stables, and fairgrounds.27
Bird recalled the spieler standing outside the canvas where he “would holler loud as he kin”:
“‘Walk up, right dis way fer to see de greatest livin’ curious thing in de hull world’—meanin’ me back dar in de tent, an’ I roll my eyes and look plumb hidgeous, I sure did.’”28
In addition to playing the wild man, however, he was expected to do manual labor, and after three months as “a wonder from Darkest Africa,” Bird hung up his horns and quit.29 Fearing that Dr. Dedge might track him down, he remained at Syracuse and eventually found his way to the Hospital of the Good Shepherd, where Dr. E. S. Van Duyn agreed to remove the plate; newspapers followed the progress of this unusual case.
On August 21, 1902, the operation began, but the anesthesia agitated Bird, who fought with attendants and, being “a big strong fellow,” ran from the operating room and had to be carried back.30 The surgery itself went smoothly, though the story has an odd postscript.
Calvin Bird was recovering on a cot in the ward with his head bandaged “in turban fashion,” when a circus performer and equestrienne calling herself “Louisa Demate” appeared.31 She gave the newspapers a very different account of him, claiming that
ten years ago, . . . this colored man saw a picture of a wild man with horns and became possessed of the idea of posing as “The Wild Man.” He went to the managers of Barnum’s Circus, for whom she was then working, she says, and asked to be made into such a freak as he had seen in the picture. By his request the operation was accordingly performed.
Miss Demate claims that the operation was performed by two Philadelphia surgeons, Drs. John Bunnell and Giles Crogdins. Bird was with Barnum for a time, and after that she left the show and lost all trace of him until she saw The Post-Standard’s account of the operations performed by Bird:
Miss Demate visited Bird yesterday as he lay in his cot in a ward at the Hospital of the Good Shepherd. “Hello, Charlie, old boy,” she said, for that was the name she said he used to go by.
The man didn’t recognize her until she told her name and where she had been, when he remembered her. The woman talked with Bird a few minutes and when she left promised to bring with her again some of his old acquaintances in the circus.32
Was Louisa Demate an old acquaintance, or was she there to intimidate Bird and divert attention from the story of “Dr. Dada”? Her account seems overrun with names and dates, and it would be interesting to know what she and the former wild man talked about. Even the promise to come back with “old acquaintances in the circus” might have been a veiled threat to return with Dr. Dedge, and, after Demate’s appearance, Bird drops into obscurity.
“Meet Me at the Fair!”
The Louisiana Purcha
se Exposition, better known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, was a massive display of new technologies and curiosities gathered from around the world that opened at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904 (it is remembered today for the song in which the singer instructs a male friend to “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis”). Among the attractions was a life-sized cast of a blue whale and, most famously, or infamously, the “Human Zoo,” an ethnological display that allowed fairgoers to meet Apaches (including Geronimo), Igorots from the Philippines, and Congolese pygmies. St. Louis was the ideal venue for Dr. Dedge’s wild man show, so he found a young man named Perry Werks (or Weeks) to take Bird’s place.
Werks shined shoes at Nicholls and agreed to have the necessary hardware installed in his head for $50.33 A description of how it was done appears as an amusing anecdote in the Illinois Medical Journal and, though the author does not claim to have firsthand knowledge, the description suggests that Dedge experimented with different ways of attaching horns. In Werks’s case,
[a]n incision was made over the vertex from one ear to the other, and a silver plate was introduced under the scalp about five inches long, in which there was a female screw, and then in the deer’s horn the male screw was inserted. When it was entirely healed a minute puncture was made for the projecting male screw, and no one could discover that the horns had not actually grown in that place.34
When the showmen arrived in Missouri, they were not allowed on the fairgrounds but spent several profitable weeks as part of a carnival company, entertaining some of the exposition’s twenty million visitors.35
Confusion apparently arose between Dedge’s alligator-fanged wild man, now advertised as being from South Africa, and the single most popular figure at the fair, a Mbuti pygmy named Ota Benga, whose teeth were sharpened to dagger points. (Ota Benga later lived at New York City’s Bronx Zoo and was exhibited in the monkey house with the orangutan, a juxtaposition between “low man” and “high ape” that points to the Great Chain of Being’s influence on race science.) The idea that Dedge’s wild man was “[a] featured attraction at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition” added to the show’s appeal, and it made so much money that Werks “was about to skip and join another show which promised a higher salary, when his Waycross managers decided to saw off his horns thereby ruining his chances for exhibiting as a freak.”36
If this story is true, Dedge must have changed his mind, since Werks returned to Georgia and continued to perform
in a steel cage and fed a diet of raw meat and some whiskey. When he let out a blood curdling growl and with the blood from the raw meat running out of the corner of his mouth, even the bravest did not care to tarry too long in his presence.37
At Valdosta, police raided the show, but Werks managed to slip away, escaping to Doc Brinson’s house at Waycross. Perry’s sister-in-law, Alalee Werks, “who lived in the Bolen Community in 1964, said Perry died in Waycross, Georgia about 1937 and was buried in the cemetery at Nicholls, Georgia.”38
After their St. Louis success, the partners talked about going to Coney Island; they just needed another wild man.39
Horns and Coins
The next to wear the horns was George Brown. Nothing is known about him before November 1905, when Brown applied to Dr. Walter Ryan of Springfield, Illinois, for help.
He told the doctor that a year and a half earlier, a plate was inserted in his head for holding goat horns, and since then he had been exhibited across Georgia as a wild man. There is no mention of Coney Island, or how Brown got to Illinois, but the plate had slipped and was causing him considerable discomfort.
Ryan assumed that the man was joking or crazy until he inspected Brown’s scalp and found the points. Neither the doctor nor anyone else outside the Hospital of the Good Shepherd at Syracuse had seen anything like it before, and when Dr. Ryan removed the plate at St. John’s Hospital, a number of local physicians watched the procedure. (Dedge’s work always drew a crowd. He later told George Lowe that everything had been going well until they “struck Evanston, Illinois, where the Humane Society raised a row and made him dehorn his money maker.”40 Springfield is two hundred miles from Evanston, and Dedge does not say when he had problems with the Humane Society, so connecting the two incidents is guesswork.) Meanwhile, the business partners returned to Georgia, having reportedly earned a fortune, and took a long holiday; perhaps Dedge decided to retire from show business altogether.
The next five years were presumably spent pulling teeth and distilling turpentine, but the calm was broken in February 1910, when U.S. Secret Service men arrested Dr. Dedge for being part of a counterfeiting ring.41
They discovered a box in his overcoat pocket containing fake $10 gold pieces, “apparently made of a white metal plated with gold,” the workmanship of which was “pronounced by the officers as about the best they ever saw.”42 The package arrived by mail, so when the case came before a grand jury the wily dentist claimed to believe that it contained “dental supplies which he had ordered, and that he did not know who sent him the spurious coins, or where they came from.”43 It sounded reasonable to the jury and Dedge was turned loose to begin work on his fourth exhibit.
Last of the Wild Men
Joe Wright’s account of his time as a wild man is the most complete and problematic.
It began in the now-familiar way, with a black man, Wright, arriving at the County Hospital of Thomasville, Georgia, with an unusual problem. The silver plate in his head had shifted, causing an infection, and he asked Dr. Arthur D. Little to take it out. His explanation for how the plate got there, however, was bizarre.
Several months earlier, four white men came to his house one night and, surrounding him with guns pointed, ordered him to come with them. Under the circumstances he naturally went, and was taken to the office of the doctor, where something was given him to put him to sleep.44
When he woke up, the knobs were sticking through his head and Dr. Dedge explained that they were for attaching goat horns.
Joe says that it gave him great pain, and after some time he managed to escape from the room where he was confined and made his way to a doctor, who took off the knobs but left the silver plate next to the skull. This he found very uncomfortable, and so he came to Dr. Little, the county physician, to have it removed, it not being his ambition to figure as a “horned man”; it looks as if he was in a fair way to be exhibited as a curiosity but for his timely escape.45
This story appeared in the newspaper on March 6. By the seventh, Wright’s account had changed, saying that he had actually spent years in Dedge’s employ working as a wild man. Dr. Little later published an article based on the revised version of the story titled “The Goat Man.”
He writes that the twenty-three-year-old Wright “had an acute attack of wanderlust”46 and got a job on a steamer, but the combination of hard labor and seasickness proved too much, and he was dropped off at an unnamed port. There,
[h]e found that he could hardly understand the language of his newly found people nor could he be understood, but finally some one met him and said, “Hello nigger.” He recognized an American white gentleman, who was later to play an important role in his life. Expressing much joy at seeing some one who could understand him, he followed his friend on a fruit steamer to South America, informing his newly found white man that he was henceforth his negro and faithful servant.47
Dr. Little’s article provides the most detailed description of how the plates and fangs were made. The dentist
hammered out an H-shaped plate from South American silver coin and, brazing on to it two threaded knobs, proposed to embed it beneath the scalp of his servant and put taps of magnificent goat horns in the butt ends so that the horns could be screwed on and off at will. He further proposed to put Logan crowns [posts going into the root canal with attached crowns] on his servant’s eye teeth and in this way attach two vicious tusks of the wild boar. These, likewise in a way that could be removed at will.48
The operation was performed at a log cabin on the banks “of a certain river” (probably at Pearson, Georgia) and, after Wright recovered and learned how to be a wild man, they began traveling from town to town. “Money came easy,” particularly after joining an unnamed “exposition,” and everything was going well until
[o]ne night, after closing, as the owner was sweetly dreaming of yachts and palaces, it occurred to the trainer that his wild man needed a little sight-seeing and refreshments. So, suiting the action to thought, he proceeded to administer spiritus frumenti to his man and himself, when lo and behold! his wild man became unmanageable [and] was causing a riot. The police interfered, and looking for the easiest point to control the goat man, a cop grabbed a horn and, who are we petty mortals to criticize the creator of this wonderful being that his horns were not made for rough handling, the horn came away revealing the metal tap in the butt . . . as soon as the owner heard that all was discovered he immediately gave bond for the new [sic] useless [exhibit] and both left the city post-haste.49
After leaving the sideshow, Wright worked at a sawmill, but the knobs “caused headache when overheated by the Southern sun.” He asked a blacksmith for help and, “laying his head near the anvil with the knobs lying thereon, the valiant blacksmith proceeded to trim the knobs to less inconvenient length.”50 This rough work caused a suppurative infection to set in, and “[p]us was easily pressed from around the knobs,” which brought Wright to the hospital.51
Dr. Little cut through the scars and, “with patience and perseverance,” removed the silver plate intact. It was later stolen from his office, but skeptics were told that there were “witnesses to the operation and many people who saw the plate.”
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 8