Mending Horses (44 page)

While Mr. Chamberlain's traveling show is fictitious, the stunts that his players perform are based on accounts of circuses of the time period. The famous John (a.k.a. James) “Grizzly” Adams (1812–1860) rode one of his trained bears much the same way as Mr. Lamb rides Griselda in the story. Popular equestrian acts included Billy Button, the Drunken Cossack, and the Incombustible Horse, while “learned” animals from pigs to dogs to horses were all the rage. Like Mr. Stocking, circus clown Dan Rice (1823–1900) would ask his learned animal (a pig rather than a horse) to select the biggest fool from the audience. Performers like the Ruggles family and Mr. Sharp and Mr. Dale were often multitalented, with acrobats also doing duty as jugglers, horseback riders, or comedians. Joe Pentland (1816–1873), who is mentioned by one of the performers, was a famous circus comedian of the 19th century. He was also a ventriloquist, a singer, a juggler, and a magician.

The 1830s was a time when circuses were just beginning to evolve into their present form. Circuses of the 18th century were primarily exhibitions of skilled horseback riding, and did not tend to travel. Traveling acrobats, magicians, singers, and jugglers generally performed separately from such shows. Menageries also tended to be distinct entities; at first they were more like traveling zoos than collections of performing animals. By the 1830s, however, show managers had started to bring together menageries, equestrian acts, acrobats, comedians, and singers into large traveling shows. Shows might include things we don't normally associate with circuses today, such as opera singers, displays of artwork, dramatic performances, or panoramas of historic events. Traveling tradesmen, peddlers, teachers, exhibitors, lecturers, and performers—what we might today think of as “sideshows”—often followed a circus in order to take advantage of the potential customers drawn by the larger show.

Like Mr. Chamberlain's Peripatetic Museum, shows that traveled through New England in the 1830s often advertised themselves as museums or educational programs in order to evade laws that either prohibited traveling performers or levied heavy licensing fees. In spite of such laws, newspapers, diaries, and other records show that acrobats, menageries, trick riders, and other traveling entertainers roamed throughout New England. Advertisements emphasized the educational merits of a show and assured readers that performances would be morally uplifting, artistic, and “chaste.”

Entertainers usually stayed in local taverns, inns, and hotels, rather than in tents or wagons. (Mr. Chamberlain is an exception because of his desire to maintain his disguise as Prince Otoo Baswamati.) Circus tents, called “pavilions,” could accommodate audiences ranging from several hundred to a couple thousand. Some circuses would perform evening shows as well as afternoon shows. If there was no evening performance, members of the company might put on “house shows” at the inn or hotel where they were lodging. A house show might include music, dramatic recitations, or magic tricks.

Going to a show would be expensive: twenty-five or fifty cents in an era when a day's wage for a laborer might be a dollar. While most performers would earn about six or seven dollars a week, a star performer could make a very good living—eleven to twelve dollars a week. Some shows traveled around New England from April to October, and then headed to a large city like New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore for the winter, where the show (often in a smaller format) might have a semipermanent home in an enclosed venue like a theater or an arena-like building. Others would spend the winter traveling in the South, or they might disband for the winter and reassemble in the spring.

Much of the information on traveling shows came from research at the Museum of the Early American Circus in Somers, New York, which has an amazing collection of posters, account books, and other material from shows of the early 19th century. Another excellent resource was the website of the Circus Historical Society (
http://www.circushistory.org
) which includes many firsthand accounts of 19th-century circus life. Most important of all were the works of Stuart Thayer (1926–2009), who wrote wonderfully detailed books and articles about pre–Civil War American circuses. His descriptions of circus pavilions and performances helped me create my Peripatetic Museum, and his transcripts of itineraries from early American shows helped me map out my performers' journey.