That anxiety Conklin alludes to led to some serious health problems for Bailey, including one breakdown in the mid-1880s that required him to leave the circus and sell out his share. On his own seventy-fifth birthday, Barnum wrote to Mrs. Bailey, expressing his concern for her husband and assuring her that he himself had had similar problems, having “overworked my brain.” His diagnosis was that Bailey too was suffering from too much “thinking” and advised her, “Mr. Bailey need not think of the show for six months to come.” He promised her that it was being run by good people and wouldn’t suffer from Bailey’s being away from it: “It will be well managed and make money.” It was an extremely kind letter meant to reassure the couple, and offered the parting advice, “Keep quiet in a cool place—don’t fret, but look on the bright side.” In that year, 1885, the circus netted $312,000, an improvement of about $35,000 over the previous year. Bailey did return in 1887 and would continue to manage the circus until his own death fifteen years after Barnum’s.12
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THROUGHOUT THE 1880S, BARNUM OFTEN mentioned his age in his letters, with a combination of wonder that he had somehow grown so old and pride that he was still both enjoying life and prospering as a showman. Soon after his health crisis, he also began to focus on his mortality, in a practical but not a morbid way. In early 1882 he filed his will, a seventeen-page document he wrote out in longhand, which he continued to work on in his remaining years.
But at just this time his life offered one last act to compare with his promotions of Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind: the enormous African elephant known as Jumbo. The great beast—weighing seven tons and reaching nearly twelve feet at the highest point of his back—was said to be the largest elephant in the world and was undoubtedly the largest beast most people had ever seen.
Jumbo had been a beloved feature of the Royal Zoological Gardens in London’s Regent’s Park for more than sixteen years when one of the circus agents asked the superintendent of the zoo, a friend of Barnum’s named A. D. Bartlett, whether the Zoological Society might sell him. To his surprise, and Barnum’s shock, the society said yes. Barnum had “often looked wistfully on Jumbo, but with no hope of ever getting possession of him,” because the elephant had for so long been such a great attraction, providing rides to thousands and thousands of British children, including the royal offspring of Queen Victoria. Even Barnum himself had ridden the beast years before with Tom Thumb.
What Barnum didn’t know was that Jumbo had reached a time in life when male elephants can become obstreperous, owing to a hormonal condition known as musth, and according to Bartlett, Jumbo had on occasion “commenced to destroy the doors and other parts of his house, driving his tusks through the iron plates, splintering the timber in all directions.” Although these “fits of temporary insanity” were few and far between, Bartlett had become so worried about them that he asked the Zoological Society for a rifle powerful enough to kill Jumbo if one of his fits endangered the public or his keeper. Given this, the society was all too willing to let the elephant go for £2,000, or $10,000, which Barnum eagerly agreed to pay, plus all expenses of getting him out of the zoo and across the Atlantic.13
When news of the sale hit the British papers, pandemonium broke out. The reaction was partly wounded national pride: could what had become a cherished British institution really be allowed to go to America, and at the hands of a man who had once threatened to buy and remove Shakespeare’s birthplace? But even more powerful was the simple affection that so many British children and former children felt for the beast. They believed his absence would diminish the whole experience of growing up British. As Barnum put it, “The newspapers, from the London ‘Times’ down, daily thundered anathemas against the sale, and their columns teemed with communications from statesmen, noblemen, and persons of distinction advising that the bargain should be broken at all risk.” Queen Victoria herself telegraphed Bartlett asking for the facts of the case, and the Prince of Wales demanded that Bartlett explain in person how the sale had taken place. Both royals then denounced it. The great critic John Ruskin, a fellow of the Zoological Society, also decried the sale as “disgraceful to the City of London and dishonorable to common humanity,” and declared himself “not in the habit of selling my old pets or parting with my old servants” because “I find them subject occasionally . . . to fits of ill-temper.”14
A legal challenge to the contract between Barnum and the society led to a temporary injunction preventing Jumbo’s removal, but the suit was soon rebuffed in court and the injunction lifted. British schoolchildren contributed to a subscription meant to buy Jumbo back, and the Daily Telegraph wired Barnum from London, asking the terms necessary to change the showman’s mind. Barnum’s reply was that he would not undo the deal for even £100,000—and as the paper’s cable had offered for him to “answer, prepaid, unlimited,” Barnum took the free opportunity to toot his horn as a showman and toss in some advertising language about his circus.15
At the same time, the London correspondents for American newspapers managed to rouse national pride in the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, then, what became known as Jumbomania broke out, with a flood of Jumbo-inspired paraphernalia, poems, songs, letters, and other tributes. People flocked to Regent’s Park for one last viewing, augmenting the zoo’s income, Barnum claimed, by £400 per day, which he regretfully and to his own mind graciously allowed the society to keep despite his now owning the exhibit.
In February an attempt was made to walk Jumbo from the zoo to a ship, but as soon as the beast got outside the gates of the familiar zoological gardens he let out a trumpet call, lay down in the street, and refused to budge. When Barnum’s agent cabled for advice, the showman replied, “Let him lay there for a week if he wants to. It is the best advertisement in the world.” But the next day Jumbo was allowed to return to his enclosure in the zoo, from which he would not move for several weeks. During this time he received visits from the archbishop of Canterbury and his wife, dukes and duchesses, and the Lord Mayor of London. It was also during this time that the hysteria to keep him in London reached a high point.16
Eventually Barnum’s agent realized that the reason for Jumbo’s stubbornness was that Matthew Scott, the keeper who had attended him since the elephant had first arrived at the zoo from France at age five in 1865, was working at cross-purposes with the attempt to get Jumbo moving. Not only had Scott received a substantial amount of income from the fare for each of what he estimated to have been “hundreds of thousands” of Jumbo rides that he had overseen, but many of his countrymen let Scott know that it was his patriotic duty to discourage his charge from decamping. First, Barnum’s agent offered to quintuple Scott’s wages, and when that didn’t work, he threatened to fire him. The very next day, March 22, Jumbo assented to leave his enclosure for a specially built box on wheels that would carry him to the ship and also serve as his new quarters throughout his journey to New York.17
According to Scott, “thousands of people, many of them women, tramped all the way to [St. Katharine] Docks, six long miles, to see him off.” Jumbo was fed more than the usual amount of buns and other unhealthy treats along the way, including two bottles of ale. After he was finally transported by lighter to the oceangoing vessel Assyrian Queen, the odd ritual of a luncheon celebration, with many invited guests from the Zoological Society, took place. At the luncheon, William Newman, a Barnum employee known as “Elephant Bill,” who had been sent over to England to help with the removal and transport of Jumbo, received a gold medal from the society “for his coolness and skill in managing the monster,” as the Tribune put it. Scott and Newman took turns on the fifteen-day voyage of sitting with their charge, whose cage was little bigger than he was. Although the passage was generally rough and for the first two days Jumbo was seasick and wouldn’t eat, much of the time after that was spent in eating or drinking. A typical day’s nourishment on the ship included “ten or fifteen loaves of bread, two bushels of oats, three quarts of onions, a bushel of b
iscuit, two hundred pounds of hay,” and as many treats as those onboard could feed him. “He was never stinted in his supply of liquor,” the Sun reported, “and when he condescended to drink water, took in ten to fifteen gallons at a time.”18
On the morning after his arrival at Quarantine, Barnum and Hutchinson went out by boat to meet Jumbo up the river near the Jersey City piers, where the Assyrian Queen had anchored. Its captain, John Harrison, hailed them with the shout, “Jumbo is all right; fine as silk.” Barnum “clambered nimbly” on board the ship, and “his eyes sparkled with boyish eagerness” to see Jumbo again. When he was led down to the big cage, he cried out, “Dear old Jumbo,” and “seemed inclined to weep.” He declared that he had spent $50,000 acquiring the beast, at which point Hutchinson coughed theatrically and suggested that the real amount was more like $30,000. Barnum asked those assembled how high the elephant could reach with his trunk, hazarding a guess of forty-nine feet. His figure was again challenged when a keeper responded that the real height was a mere twenty-six feet. To which Barnum complacently replied, “If I were a showman, I would have exaggerated it, but there’s nothing like the truth.” Barnum objected when Jumbo was given a quart of whiskey but did not prevent him from drinking it, and soon after he himself had drunk a ginger pop, he departed.19
It took the rest of the day and evening to get Jumbo to Madison Square Garden, as he was lifted in his traveling box onto a barge, which was pulled by a tug to a Manhattan pier, and then a derrick set the box on a flat wagon on land. All of these operations proved difficult and time-consuming. Barnum had sent sixteen horses to pull the wagon, but even with the assistance of two ropes, each two hundred feet long and manned by hundreds of people in the crowd, the wagon would not move. Elephants were then sent for from Madison Square Garden, but eventually the wagon was pulled to more solid ground and moved onto Broadway, only there meeting the two rescue elephants. It was 1 a.m. when Jumbo finally reached the Garden, but because the box was too large to fit through the entrance, he was unceremoniously left outside, his cage covered with tarps to protect him from the cold. The next morning, Scott coaxed him out of the cage, into the Garden, and around the hippodrome track to his new, if temporary home.20
Barnum wrote in his edition for 1882 that it took only two weeks of exhibiting “the most famous beast alive” to earn back his investment. Although he would travel tens of thousands of miles by rail for the better part of four seasons, Jumbo’s duties remained relatively few: to march in the circus parade into new towns, to give rides, to eat appalling amounts of treats, and to be on exhibit as part of the larger menagerie. Not for him the tricks and dancing of the thirty smaller performing elephants in the Greatest Show on Earth: given his extraordinary size, his dancing might well have been on a par with Barnum’s. Under the showman’s teetotaler management, Jumbo was no longer permitted to indulge his taste for whiskey, but he was allowed a nightly quart of ale alongside Scott, who would down his own quart.21
Something about his enormous size, coupled with his gentleness, opened people’s hearts to Jumbo, and he became the greatest attraction the circus offered for the time he was with it, drawing many people for the single purpose of seeing him. He would bring in more than a million dollars in the four seasons he was in America, Bailey estimated. So it was a tremendous emotional loss to two nations, and a financial loss to the Barnum show, when on the evening of September 15, 1885, Jumbo was struck by the engine of a Grand Trunk freight train outside St. Thomas, Ontario. Scott had been leading both Jumbo and a relatively diminutive elephant named Tom Thumb along a main track. The circus cars were on a track on one side, and a ten-foot embankment on the other. The train, which had been unscheduled, whistled down an incline, trying unsuccessfully to stop, first striking Tom Thumb and breaking his leg and then crushing Jumbo, who was unwilling to go down the embankment and was too large to fit in the space between the tracks. After being struck from behind, Jumbo was pushed a hundred feet. A disconsolate Scott tried to soothe his groaning friend for the long minutes until he was gone. Apparently unwilling to enlist the other elephants for the morbid task, those in charge rallied more than a hundred circus workers to pry and pull Jumbo’s corpse off the tracks and over the embankment, where the grieving Scott lay with it all night.22
News of the tragedy went out by wire to the far reaches of the earth, and Barnum heard it the next morning at his favorite hotel in New York, the Murray Hill. Whatever his true feelings about the death, he could not resist tastelessly telling a reporter that although he had planned to return Jumbo to England for a visit, “while men propose, locomotives dispose.” On the one hand, Barnum let it be known that he valued Jumbo at $300,000, but on the other hand it was to his competitive advantage to somewhat underplay the blow this represented to his show, especially at a time when Bailey was on leave for his mental health and ready to sell out his share. Barnum told the press that a taxidermist was hurrying to the site to preserve Jumbo’s hide and skeleton. Perhaps because so many animals died in the circus business, Barnum had had the foresight nearly two years earlier to make arrangements with Henry A. Ward, of Ward’s Natural Science establishment in Rochester, to be telegraphed immediately “if we lose Jumbo (which heaven forbid!)” so that he could immediately go about his work. Ward went to the site when learning of Jumbo’s demise, and Barnum wired him there, “Go ahead, save skin and skeleton. I will pay you justly and honorably.” It was one of the most heroic jobs of taxidermy ever. The skin alone weighed more than 1,500 pounds, and the tons of rotting remains were consigned to a huge bonfire as the skeleton was exposed.23
By the next season, both the hide (somewhat overstuffed to make Jumbo seem even bigger than he had been) and the skeleton were ready to go on display with the circus, mounted on wheels so that they could be pulled in the circus parade. Meanwhile Barnum had purchased from the Royal Zoological Society an elephant named Alice, which had been presented without much evidence as Jumbo’s “wife” before he had left the zoo in London and was now being called Jumbo’s “widow” in the British press. As the supposedly grieving widow, she followed the mounted Jumbo specimens in the parade, and other elephants meant to be her attendants followed her, having been trained to wipe their eyes in sorrow with black cloths. Eventually the stuffed Jumbo would go to Tufts College (whose athletic teams are to this day known as the Jumbos) and the skeleton to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in whose collection it remains.24
Bailey officially retired from the circus soon after Jumbo’s death, with Barnum and Hutchinson buying him out and bringing in a rich circus owner from Chicago, William W. “Chilly Billy” Cole, and Bailey’s former partner James E. Cooper, who ran the menagerie. Barnum wrote Bailey a friendly letter saying how much he admired him and expressing his hope that he would fully recover and eventually get back in business with him.25
The new arrangement did not satisfy Barnum as the old one had, in part because the new contract left him only a three-eighths owner, so for the first time he did not have majority control and had to negotiate with his three partners. He got along fine with Hutchinson and Cole, but he and Cooper tangled over what was to be done with the animals in the menagerie when they died. Cooper felt strongly that the dead animals should be sold and not given away to the Smithsonian or elsewhere, as it had been Barnum’s wont to do. What might seem like a minor problem deeply irritated Barnum. Although in 1886 the circus visited 144 cities in twenty-one states and the next year the number of cities was up to 175, the profits for both years were merely satisfactory.
By the end of the 1887 season, however, Bailey was indeed recovered and Barnum reached out to him. Yes, he was ready to return to the circus, and Barnum’s other partners took their share of the profits and “withdrew from the firm, with my free consent.” For $150,000, Bailey bought his way back into an equal share with Barnum, and one of the most famous partnerships in entertainment history, Barnum & Bailey, was officially born.26
TWENTY
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LAST YEARS
Less than a month after Barnum and Bailey signed their new agreement, the fifth and last great fire of Barnum’s lifetime occurred. It began on the night of November 20, 1887, in the main animal building of the Bridgeport Winter Quarters, and except for thirty of the thirty-four elephants in the show and one lion, all of his animals again perished in the flames. One of the elephants who died was the widow Alice, and another was a rare and much-publicized white elephant that Barnum had acquired from Burma in 1884. The white elephant had been led to safety, but for some reason went back into the burning building. He was “again and again” rescued, but each time went back into the fire, finally succumbing. Barnum concluded that he had “determinedly committed suicide.” One escaped elephant made a beeline for Long Island Sound, but died the next day of exposure. Even the poor lion who got loose did not live long. Having found his way into a barn, he was eating a cow and her calf when a neighbor of the barn’s owner shot him dead through a window. Barnum was once again staying at the Murray Hill Hotel when the blaze happened, and when Nancy read him the telegram describing the disaster, he said to her, “I am very sorry my dear, but apparent evils are often blessings in disguise. It is all right.” And with that, she recounted, he was back to sleep in three minutes.
This time it was Bailey who went quickly to work, asking agents around the world to help him replace the lost animals. Barnum said he saw Bailey eleven days after the fire, seated at his desk, which was cluttered with letters and telegrams. When Barnum asked him what he was doing, Bailey “coolly remarked, ‘I am ordering a menagerie.’ ” Bailey said he now knew from the correspondence on his desk where to get what they needed, and added, “In six hours we shall own a much finer menagerie than the one we have lost.” Whether or not this story is completely true, it makes clear that Barnum now realized, if he had not already known it, that he had found his perfect other half and needed no other. Less than eighteen months later, at the age of seventy-nine, Barnum wrote to Bailey, “I shall certainly stick to life & to you as long as I can. You suit me exactly as a partner and as a friend.”1
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