Struggles amd Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P.T. Barnum

“Call me a fool if I don’t earn the $500!” exclaimed Adams, with a triumphant laugh.

The “show” started off in a few days, and at the end of a fortnight I met it at Hartford, Connecticut.

“Well,” said I, “Adams, you seem to stand it pretty well. I hope you and your wife are comfortable?”

“Yes,” he replied, with a laugh; “and you may as well try to be comfortable, too, for your $500 is a goner.”

“All right,” I replied, “I hope you will grow better every day.”

But I saw by his pale face and other indications that he was rapidly failing. In three weeks more, I met him again at New Bedford, Massachusetts. It seemed to me, then, that he could not live a week, for his eyes were glassy and his hands trembled, but his pluck was as great as ever.

“This hot weather is pretty bad for me,” he said, “but my ten weeks are half expired, and I am good for your $500, and, probably, a month or two longer.”

This was said with as much bravado as if he was offering to bet upon a horse-race. I offered to pay him half of the $500 if he would give up and go home; but he peremptorily declined making any compromise whatever. I met him the ninth week in Boston. He had failed considerably since I last saw him, but he still continued to exhibit the bears although he was too weak to lead them in, and he chuckled over his almost certain triumph. I laughed in return, and sincerely congratulated him on his nerve and probable success. I remained with him until the tenth week was finished, and handed him his $500. He took it with a leer of satisfaction, and remarked, that he was sorry I was a teetotaler, for he would like to stand treat!

Just before the menagerie left New York, I had paid $150 for a new hunting suit, made of beaver skins, similar to the one which Adams had worn. This I intended for Herr Driesbach, the animal tamer, who was engaged by me to take the place of Adams, whenever he should be compelled to give up. Adams, on starting from New York, asked me to loan this new dress to him to perform in once in a while in a fair day, where he had a large audience, for his own costume was considerably soiled. I did so, and now when I handed him his $500, he remarked:

“Mr. Barnum, I suppose you are going to give me this new hunting dress?”

“Oh, no,” I replied, “I got that for your successor, who will exhibit the bears to-morrow; besides, you have no possible use for it.”

“Now, don’t be mean, but lend me the dress, if you won’t give it to me, for I want to wear it home to my native village.”

I could not refuse the poor old man anything, and I therefore replied:

“Well, Adams, I will lend you the dress; but you will send it back to me?”

“Yes, when I have done with it,” he replied, with an evident chuckle of triumph.

I thought to myself, he will soon be done with it, and replied: “That’s all right.”

A new idea evidently struck him, for, with a brightening look of satisfaction, he said:

“Now, Barnum, you have made a good thing out of the California menagerie, and so have I; but you will make a heap more. So if you won’t give me this new hunter’s dress, just draw a little writing, and sign it, saying that I may wear it until I have done with it.”

Of course, I knew that in a few days at longest, he would be “done” with this world altogether, and, to gratify him, I cheerfully drew and signed the paper.

“Come, old Yankee, I’ve got you this time – see if I haint!” exclaimed Adams, with a broad grin, as he took the paper.

I smiled, and said:

“All right, my dear fellow; the longer you live the better I shall like it.”

We parted, and he went to Neponset, a small town near Boston, where his wife and daughter lived. He took at once to his bed, and never rose from it again. The excitement had passed away, and his vital energies could accomplish no more. The fifth day after arriving home, the physician told him he could not live until the next morning. He received the announcement in perfect calmness, and with the most apparent indifference; then, turning to his wife, with a smile he requested her to have him buried in the new hunting suit. “For,” said he, “Barnum agreed to let me have it until I have done with it, and I was determined to fix his flint this time. He shall never see that dress again.” His wife assured him that his request should be complied with. He then sent for the clergyman and they spent several hours in communing together.

Adams, who, rough and untutored, had nevertheless, a natural eloquence, and often put his thoughts in good language, said to the clergyman, that though he had told some pretty big stories about his bears, he had always endeavored to do the straight thing between man and man. “I have attended preaching every day, Sundays and all,” said he, “for the last six years. Sometimes an old grizzly gave me the sermon, sometimes it was a panther; often it was the thunder and lightning, the tempest, or the hurricane on the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, or in the gorges of the Rocky Mountains; but whatever preached to me, it always taught me the majesty of the Creator, and revealed to me the undying and unchanging love of our kind Father in heaven. Although I am a pretty rough customer,” continued the dying man, “I fancy my heart is in about the right place, and look with confidence for that rest which I so much need, and which I have never enjoyed upon earth.” He then desired the clergyman to pray with him, after which he took him by the hand, thanked him for his kindness, and bade him farewell. In another hour his spirit had taken its flight. It was said by those present, that his face lighted into a smile as the last breath escaped him, and that smile he carried into his grave. Almost his last words were: “Won’t Barnum open his eyes when he finds I have humbugged him by being buried in his new hunting dress?” That dress was indeed the shroud in which he was entombed.

And that was the last on earth of “Old Grizzly Adams.”

After the death of Adams, the grizzly bears and other animals were added to the collection in my Museum, and I employed Herr Driesbach, the celebrated lion-tamer, as an exhibitor. Some time afterwards the bears were sold to a menagerie company, but I kept “old Neptune,” the sea-lion, for several years, sending him occasionally for exhibition in other cities, as far west as Chicago. This noble and ferocious animal was a very great curiosity and attracted great attention. He was kept in a large tank, which was supplied with salt water every day from the Fall River steamboats, whose deck hands filled my barrels on every passage to the

city with salt water from the deepest part of Long Island Sound. On his tours through the country the sea-lion lived very well in fresh water.

It was at one time my serious intention to engage in an American Indian Exhibition on a stupendous scale. I proposed to secure at the far West not less than one hundred of the best specimens of full-blood Indians, with their squaws and papooses, their paint, ponies, dresses, and weapons, for a general tour throughout the United States and Europe. The plan comprehended a grand entry at every town and city where the Indians were to exhibit – the Indians in all the glory of paint and feathers, beads and bright blankets, riding on their ponies, followed by tame buffaloes, elks and antelopes; then an exhibition on a lot large enough to admit of a display of all the Indian games and dances, their method of hunting, their style of cooking, living, etc. Such an exhibition is perfectly practicable now to any one who has the capital and tact to undertake it, and a sure fortune would follow the enterprise.

On the 13th of October, 1860, the Prince of Wales, then making a tour in the United States, in company with his suite, visited the American Museum. This was a very great compliment, since it was the only place of amusement the Prince attended in this country. Unfortunately, I was in Bridgeport at the time, and the Museum was in charge of my manager, Mr. Greenwood. Knowing that the name of the American Museum was familiar throughout Europe, I was quite confident of a call from the Prince, and from regard to his filial feelings I had, a day or two after his arrival in New York, ordered to be removed to a dark closet a frightful wax figure of his royal mother, which, for nineteen years, had excited the admiration of the million and which bore a placard with the legend, “An exact likeness of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, taken from life.” Mr. Greenwood, who was an Englishman, was deeply impressed with the condescension of the Prince, and backed his way through the halls, followed by the Prince, the Duke of Newcastle, and other members of the royal suite, and he actually trembled as he attempted to do the reception honors.

Presently they arrived in front of the platform on which were exhibited the various living human curiosities and monstrosities. The tall giant woman made her best bow; the fat boy waddled out and kissed his hand; the “negro turning white” showed his ivory and his spots; the dwarfs kicked up their heels, and like the clown in the ring, cried “here we are again”; the living skeleton stalked out, reminding the Prince, perhaps, of the wish of Sidney Smith in a hot day that he could lay off his flesh and sit in his bones; the Albino family went through their performances; the “What is it?” grinned; the Infant Drummer-boy beat a tattoo; and the Aztec children were shown and described as specimens of a remarkable and ancient race in Mexico and Central America. The Prince and his suite seemed pleased, and Greenwood was duly delighted. He was, however, quite overwhelmed with the responsibility of his position, especially whenever the Prince addressed him, and leading the way to the wax figure hall he called attention to the figures of the Siamese Twins and the Quaker Giant and his wife.

“I suppose,” said the Prince, “these figures are representatives of different living curiosities exhibited from time to time in your Museum?”

“Yes, your Royal Highness, all of them,” replied the confused Greenwood, and as “all of them” included very fair figures of the Emperors Nicholas and Napoleon, the Empress Eugenie, and other equally distinguished personages, the Prince must have thought that the Museum had contained, in times past, some famous “living curiosities.” On leaving the Museum, the Prince asked to see Mr. Barnum, and when he was told that I was out of town, he remarked: “We have missed the most interesting feature of the establishment.” A few days afterwards, when the Prince was in Boston, happening to be in that city, I sent my card to him at the Revere House, and was cordially received. He smiled when I reminded him that I had seen him when he was a little boy, on the occasion of one of my visits to Buckingham Palace with General Tom Thumb. The Prince told me that he was much pleased with his recent inspection of my Museum, and that he and his suite had left their autographs in the establishment, as mementos of their visit.

When I arrived in Boston, by the by, on this visit, the streets were thronged with the military and citizens assembled to receive the Prince of Wales, and I had great difficulty, in starting from the depot to the Revere House, in getting through the assembled crowd. At last, a policeman espied me, and taking me for Senator Stephen A. Douglas, he cried out, at the top of his voice: “Make way there for Judge Douglas’s carriage.” The crowd opened a passage for my carriage at short notice, and shouted out “Douglas, Douglas, hurrah for Douglas.” I took off my hat and bowed, smiling from the windows on each side of my carriage; the cheers and enthusiasm increased as I advanced, and all the way to the Revere House I continued to bow Judge Douglas’s grateful acknowledgments for the enthusiastic reception. There must have been at least fifty thousand people who joined in this spontaneous demonstration in honor of Judge Douglas.

When Douglas ran for the presidency in 1860, my democratic friend, J. D. Johnson, bet me a hat that the Judge would be elected. Douglas passed through Bridgeport on his electioneering tour down East, and made a brief speech from the rear platform of the car, to the people assembled at the depot. The next day Mr. Johnson met me in a crowded barber shop and asked me if I had ever seen Douglas? I answered that I had, and Johnson then asked what sort of a looking man he was. Remembering our hat bet, and knowing that Johnson expected a pretty hard description of his favorite candidate, I said:

“He is a red-nosed, blear-eyed, dumpy, swaggering chap, looking like a regular bar-room loafer.”

“I thought as much,” said Johnson, “for here is the New Haven paper of this morning, which says that he is the very image, in personal appearance, of P. T. Barnum.”

When the roar that followed subsided, I told Johnson I must have had some other man in my mind’s eye, when I answered his question.

One day I went out of the Museum in great haste to Tom Higginson’s barber shop, in the Park Hotel, where my daily tonsorial operations were performed, and finding a rough-looking Hibernian just ahead of me, I told him that if he would be good enough to give me his “turn,” I would pay his bill; to which he consented, and taking his turn and my own shave, I speedily departed, saying to Tom, as I went out: “Fix out this man, and for whatever he has done I will pay the bill.”

Two or three clerks and reporters, who were in the shop, and who knew me, put their freshly-dressed heads together and suggested to Tom that here was an opportunity to perpetrate a practical joke on Barnum, and they explained the plan, in which Higginson readily acquiesced.

“Now,” says one of them to the Irishman, “get everything done which you like, and it will cost you nothing; it will be charged to the gentleman to whom you gave your turn.”

“Sure and a liberal gintleman he must be,” said Pat.

“Will you take a bath?” asked the barber.

“That indade I will, if the gintleman pays,” was the reply.

When he came out of the bath he was asked if he would be shampooed. “And what is that?” asked the bewildered Hibernian. The process was explained and he consented to go through with the operation. Thereafter, moved and instigated thereto by the barber and his confederates, Pat permitted Higginson to dye his red hair and whiskers a beautiful brown, and then to curl them. When all was done, the son of Erin looked in the mirror and could scarcely believe the evidence of his own eyes. A more thorough transformation could scarcely be conceived, and as he went out of the door he said to Higginson:

“Give the generous gintleman me best complements and tell him he can have my turn ony day on the same terms.”

One of the newspaper reporters, who assisted in the joke, published the whole story the next day, and when I called at the barber shop a bill for $1.75 was presented, which, of course, I could do no less than to pay. The joke went the rounds of the papers; and after a few months, an English friend sent me the whole story in a copy of the London Family Herald– a publication that issues about half a million of copies weekly. Mr. Currier, the lithographer, put the joke into pictorial form, representing the Irishman as he appeared before, also as he appeared after the “barbar-ous” operations. After all, it was a good advertisement for me, as well as for Higginson; and it would have been pretty difficult to serve me up about these times in printers’ ink in any form that I should have objected to.

Meanwhile, the Museum flourished better than ever; and I began to make large holes in the mortgages which covered the property of my wife in New York and in Connecticut. Still, there was an immense amount of debts resting upon all her real estate, and nothing but time, economy, industry and diligence would remove the burdens.

CHAPTER XXXV.

EAST BRIDGEPORT

ANOTHER NEW HOME – LINDENCROFT – PROGRESS OF MY PET CITY – THE CHESTNUT WOOD FIRE – HOW IT BECAME OLD HICKORY – INDUCEMENTS TO SETTLERS – MY OFFER – EVERY MAN HIS OWN HOUSE-OWNER – WHISKEY AND TOBACCO – RISE IN REAL-ESTATE – PEMBROKE LAKE – WASHINGTON PARK – GREAT MANUFACTORIES – WHEELER AND WILSON – SCHUYLER, HARTLEY AND GRAHAM – HOTCHKISS, SON AND COMPANY – STREET NAMES – MANY THOUSAND SHADE TREES – BUSINESS IN THE NEW CITY – UNPARALLELED GROWTH AND PROSPERITY – PROBABILITIES IN THE FUTURE – SITUATION OF BRIDGEPORT – ITS ADVANTAGES AND PROSPECTS – THE SECOND, IF NOT THE FOREMOST CITY IN CONNECTICUT.