Barnum

by Robert Wilson

  Barnum had promised in his first autobiography to expose humbugs, and in a brief introduction to The Humbugs of the World he professed his wish to educate the rising generation so that they could not be tricked or swindled. But his chief incentive was almost certainly to prove that humbuggery existed on a scale ranging from harmless to dangerous, and that his own humbugs had been meant simply to entertain at a very modest price and had harmed nobody. In this book, he offered his own definition of humbug, “as generally understood”: “putting on glittering appearances—outside show—novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.” By this definition, most of the subjects he wrote about in the book were not humbugs, but never mind. If Barnum was to retain his self-imposed title of “Prince of Humbugs,” then he must alter the definition to suit his royal self.7

  At the same time that Struggles and Triumphs was coming out, Barnum engaged in what could be viewed as his last great humbug, or perhaps as his final commentary on humbuggery—or even as a metahumbug. Back in 1854, in a speech titled “The Philosophy of Humbug,” he had told the story of how he had once commissioned an eighteen-foot skeleton to be constructed out of old bones, with the intention of burying it and digging it up later as an archaeological find. But by the time it was completed, he had become so deeply involved with Tom Thumb that he didn’t have time to carry out the hoax, so he had the skeleton sold. Later, his story goes, someone offered to sell it back to him for $20,000, not realizing that Barnum had been its originator.8

  Now, in 1869, a very familiar-sounding scheme had entered the news via a man named George Hull. A cigar-maker from Binghamton, New York, Hull had stealthily carved in gypsum the ten-foot-tall likeness of a man, which was then “distressed” to look old and buried in a vegetable garden near Cardiff, New York. A year later he dug it back up and declared it to be a petrified giant. Public interest in the “discovery,” now dubbed the Cardiff Giant, was so great that Hull was able to sell the thing for $23,000 to a group of businessmen, who then began pulling in crowds while exhibiting it in Syracuse.

  The whole scheme caught Barnum’s interest, and he offered the owners $50,000 for the right to show the Cardiff Giant himself in New York City, with a $5,000 bonus if they could prove its authenticity. When the men balked, Barnum felt sure he had detected a humbug. In response, in true Barnum style, he had a small model of the giant made to show George Wood, and he suggested that Wood create and display in his museum a full-size replica in plaster, which Wood eagerly did.

  When the owners of the original humbug got wind of the replica, they went to court to try to enjoin Wood from exhibiting his forgery of their giant. However, the judge expressed his doubts that the original was really a petrified man—what harm is a fake of a fake, after all?—and he agreed to order an injunction only if the Cardiff Giant himself would testify. Before long, Wood was exhibiting two replicas, and Cardiff Giants were proliferating elsewhere.9

  Mark Twain could not resist the ridiculousness of the situation, writing in a sketch he called “A Ghost Story” how, one night as he was staying in a Broadway hotel, the ghost of the Cardiff Giant came to his room, saying he had been haunting the museum across the street because he was unable to get rest until his petrified body was reburied. To which Twain told the ghost that he was haunting the fake, and the real thing was now on display in Albany. “Confound it,” the Twain character says, “don’t you know your own remains?” The ghost admits to feeling like an ass and begs Twain not to let anyone know of his being taken in by the hoax.10

  * * *

  ONCE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPHS WAS written, Barnum began to chafe against retirement. He wrote, “Sometimes like the truant school-boy I found all my friends engaged, and I had no playmate. I began to fill my house with visitors, and yet frequently we spent evenings quite alone. Without really perceiving what the matter was, time hung on my hands.”

  A friend from England solved his problem by visiting with his older daughter, determined to see the sights in America. John Fish, a wealthy cotton-mill owner from Bury, near Manchester, attributed his success in business to having read and followed Barnum’s nostrums in the first autobiography. They had met in Manchester in 1858, when Fish introduced himself after one of Barnum’s lectures, and his professed admiration for the showman had begun their friendship. Once in the years since, Barnum had asked Fish to go to Paris to investigate a (living) giant said to be eight feet tall by the straightforward method of actually measuring him. At another time, Fish and his family had played host to Tom Thumb and his entourage when they were exhibiting in his town.

  Now, in 1869, Barnum found himself “just in the humor to act as guide and exhibitor.” Leaving Charity at home, he set off with Fish and his daughter Jane Ann to visit Niagara Falls by railroad. As they enjoyed the passing landscape, Barnum realized, “The contagion of their enthusiasm opened my eyes to marvels in spectacles which I had long dismissed as commonplace.” After returning to New York, Barnum felt the itch to roam again, and he set off with the Fishes in January 1870 to Cuba, followed by New Orleans, then up the Mississippi to Memphis and back to the East, where they visited President Grant at the White House.11

  Barnum enjoyed the company of his English friends so much that by April 1870 he had arranged a more audacious trip for them and a few others: to California by Pullman car, stopping in Salt Lake City. There Barnum lectured to an audience that included “a dozen or so of Brigham Young’s wives and scores of his children.” During a visit afterward at Young’s home, the two men joked about the possibility of the showman putting the prophet on display in New York. After giving his account of this meeting, Barnum hoped “Brigham” would have a new revelation reversing his position on plural marriage.

  When Barnum’s party reached California, spending a week in the San Francisco area, his “show fever began to rise.” Visiting Seal Rock, just off the Pacific shore of San Francisco, he had the notion of shipping ten sea lions to New York, where he could exhibit them in a pen in the East River off Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He also learned of a new little person named Leopold Kahn, smaller than Charley Stratton had been when Barnum first met him and “so handsome, well-formed, and captivating that I could not resist the temptation to engage him.” He immediately christened the boy Admiral Dot and had an admiral’s uniform made for him so that he could be introduced in it to the local press. Admiral Dot went on exhibition for three successful weeks in California before going to Wood’s Museum in New York. The country had an absence of little show people at that time, since Barnum had helped send the members of the Tom Thumb wedding party on their three-year world tour.

  On their way back east, Barnum’s party spent two weeks in Yosemite, having paused to see the giant sequoias at Mariposa and send Wood a thirty-one-inch-thick chunk of sequoia bark to put on display. They also stopped in Denver, where Barnum gave more lectures and made his first visit to the newly formed intentional community that his friend Greeley had helped found as Union Colony No. 1; it would soon take Greeley’s name, which it retains to this day. Planned as a farming community inspired by New England’s small towns, it would also be a place where alcohol was strictly forbidden.

  After Barnum’s party returned to New York in June, he and the Fishes joined Charity at Waldemere, where the Carey sisters visited for several weeks, staying at the Petrel’s Nest cottage. In September, Barnum, Fish, and eight other men went to Kansas to hunt buffalo. There, at Fort Hays, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer took a break from slaughtering Indians to support Barnum’s party in slaughtering the fast-disappearing bison. Custer “received us like princes,” Barnum wrote, fitting them up with horses, guns, and fifty cavalrymen for protection. Fish proved to be an incompetent horseman, while Barnum managed to kill two of the noble beasts and help kill a third. After only a couple of hours and the deaths of twenty buffalo, however, the party found the “wanton butchery” less pleasurable than they had anticipated, and called off the hunt.

/>   Soon after leaving Kansas, Barnum would have the opportunity once again to fall back into the sort of hunting he liked best—seeking not game but talent, rustling up new acts and curiosities across the land, another step in his return to the full-blown life of a showman.

  * * *

  BACK ON THE EAST COAST, Barnum answered a request from William C. Coup, a former employee who wanted Barnum to join him and a partner in putting on a large traveling show, a new iteration of a circus that the two men had recently begun. Born in Indiana in 1836, Coup had run off to join the circus at age fourteen, attaching himself to Barnum’s Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie when it passed through Terre Haute featuring Tom Thumb and other signature acts. By 1870 he had become an experienced circus manager and, along with a former clown named Dan Castello, had started a circus that plied the waters of the Great Lakes, sailing their show from port to port.12

  Now Barnum agreed to lend his name to Coup’s enterprise (for 3 percent of the receipts, the same deal he had with Wood), as well as his money and his talent for acquiring acts and oddities, to help create a new and better circus by the following spring. Under the agreement, Barnum would own two-thirds of the new show, and Coup and Castello would own the other third. Barnum spent the winter getting Admiral Dot “well trained,” bought from Wood the summer rights to his menagerie, and acquired other oddities, including one of the many Cardiff Giants now in circulation. Plus he felt he could profitably hire the Bunker Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, whom he had successfully exhibited in England, along with Anna Swan and others of his old museum attractions.

  Coup should come to New York himself, Barnum advised, and help in the preparations over the winter. Meanwhile the old showman sprang into action. Among many other efforts he wrote two letters to his Boston friend Moses Kimball. One said, in its entirety, “Have you got an Egyptian mummy in your museum that you will sell? If not, can you tell me where I can buy one?” In the second, he took time to offer some explanation: “I thought I had finished the show business (and all other), but just for a flyer I go it once more.” Then he inquired about live seals, saying he would write a Down East postmaster for suggestions if Kimball did not have any seals at his disposal.13

  Barnum wrote in a later iteration of his autobiography that he had known Coup for years and admired his judgment and “executive ability.” But when the man arrived in New York and saw the “thousands upon thousands” that Barnum was spending, Coup said he feared the costs “would ruin the richest man in America.” Barnum reassured him “that I was not wholly inexperienced in the show business, and that, in any event, I was to ‘foot the bill.’ ” He would leak to the press that he had spent $500,000 to $750,000 on the new show, but he felt confident that he could spend “money like water” because his name would be a bigger draw than traveling circuses could generally rely upon, and also because the three acres of canvas in his growing show could accommodate ten thousand people, more than enough to recoup the daily expenses for an enterprise that would require five hundred men just to get it from place to place.14

  As usual on matters of showmanship, Barnum was right. The show opened in Brooklyn on April 10, 1871, offering, in addition to the Coup and Castello circus, “a museum, menagerie, caravan and hippodrome.” For all of that spring and summer, as it traveled from New York into New England, up to three thousand people had to be turned away each day, and the press raved about what had been created.15

  It’s tempting to see this burst of energy as the beginning of Barnum’s second career, the one he is more famous for today, as a circus man rather than as a showman. But these activities were continuous with those he had been pursuing for more than three decades and represented the end of one of the few efforts at which he had not fully succeeded: being retired. Barnum had not stopped being a showman, public lecturer, or real-estate investor for any part of his attempted retirement, but the slower pace that had left him with time on his hands was, he now realized, at the ripe old age of sixty, not for him. It wasn’t that he was incapable of leisure, for he never stopped enjoying the pleasures of city life or of warm friendships or of clambakes by the shore during Seaside Park summers. Yet he always seemed to need a clear project to occupy him.

  Still, he would no longer be the hands-on manager he had generally been during his museum years. Barnum did not go along when the new circus left Brooklyn, and he would rarely accompany his shows on the road again in the coming years. Instead he would remain on the East Coast and manage as much as he could from there.

  In keeping with this new role, when the circus returned to New York in the fall of 1871, he prepared as warm a reception for it as he could. His advertisements for the “great travelling museum, menagerie, caravan, hippodrome, international zoological garden, and Dan Castello’s Mammoth Circus” made the customarily understated claim that it offered “a really colossal combination of amusements having no parallel in the world’s history,” with an entry fee of “only 50¢, the same as charged for an ordinary small circus.” He gave one of his patented off-the-cuff speeches when the show opened on November 13 at the Empire City Skating Rink, a huge structure at Third Avenue and Sixty-Third Street with a roof supported by cast-iron arches. He pledged to give people ten times their money’s worth and an environment free of vulgarity. He also talked up the new offerings at the Empire Rink, including a second chunk of bark from a giant California sequoia, this one a cross-section forming a ring large enough to enclose two hundred children.16

  The weeks-long run at the Empire Rink helped make the first year of his great show profitable. Although Barnum counted the season as a success, in February 1872 Coup and Samuel Hurd, who had now become an investor in the show, as well as its treasurer, approached him with figures intended to prove that his ambitious plans for the 1872 season, given what he intended to spend on more horses and more of everything, were likely to result in a loss of several hundred thousand dollars. The problem was the daily expense of employing so many people, upward of a thousand, when many days of the season would be wasted in transporting the show in cumbersome wagons over muddy and unreliable roads.

  Barnum responded that he had already seen this challenge and planned to meet it by transporting the circus exclusively by train. By doing so, a range of twenty miles a day could be extended to one hundred miles a day, allowing them to reach larger and more profitable towns and cities in less time. He predicted that using trains would give them the equivalent hauling power of “two thousand men and horses” if they had continued to travel by road. In response to Coup and Hurd’s concerns, Barnum wired railroads to see whether they were game, and the response came back as “generally favorable.” Using railroads to transport circuses was nothing new; smaller circuses had used this method as the railroads quickly spider-webbed the growing country after the Civil War. But nothing had been attempted on this scale before, and learning to efficiently load onto trains what amounted to a small city was a remarkable feat of organization that would be achieved only by trial and error. Coup later said that the first time they loaded the sixty-five cars making up the circus train, it took his workers twelve hours—far, far too long to allow enough time for travel, unloading, and constructing that rolling city in a new location in a timely way.17

  But after the first attempt, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, they soon got the hang of it. In 1872 they traveled down the Eastern Seaboard as far as Virginia, then as far west as Kansas, and finally ended up in Detroit. The crowds came by the thousands each day, often traveling long distances themselves on special excursion trains put on by the railroads, but also in wagons, on horses, and by foot. Barnum wrote that when the circus would pull into a new town before dawn, they “usually found wagon loads of rural strangers—men, women and children—who had come in during the night and ‘pitched camp.’ ” Although his expenses were $5,000 a day, or $780,000 for the season, Barnum claimed that the 1872 profits amounted to $1 million. In this first year that the circus traveled by train, he tried to jo
in it in the big cities, where he would often also give temperance speeches. He wrote in his 1872 edition of his autobiography that his circus associates believed the free temperance speeches, which were so crowded that people had to be turned away, were drawing off potential circus customers.18

  In October he made another trip to Colorado with John Fish and a friend from Fairfield named David Sherwood, intent on expanding his real-estate empire. He and Sherwood bought a large cattle ranch near Pueblo, and Barnum would continue to invest in the state for years to come. “I am charmed with Colorado,” he confessed, “the scenery and delightful air,” and especially with the “lively, thriving city of Denver.” He once again gave a temperance lecture in the city and returned to the teetotaling community now called Greeley. A not insignificant part of Denver’s appeal was that his daughter Helen now lived there with a new husband, a doctor she had married after divorcing Samuel Hurd in 1871. The circumstances of the divorce, which included rumors of infidelity on her part, apparently did not alienate Barnum from either party, because it was soon after Helen’s breakup with Hurd that Barnum invited him to join the circus business.19

  In August 1872 Barnum bought a building on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan called the Hippotheatron and had it fixed up to his specifications as a winter venue for parts of his circus and equestrian show and the beginnings of what was planned to be a huge museum and menagerie. It opened in the middle of November, drawing what Barnum referred to as “the better classes, for whose good opinion it has ever been my fortune to cater.” Just as he had helped make theatergoing palatable to those who had prior moral objections, he now through scrupulous enforcement and an onslaught of publicity assured the public that the circus and the hippodrome were also suitable to those who had been reluctant to expose their children, and themselves, to profanity, drunkenness, brawling, and other public displays of turpitude commonly associated with the circus.