On another occasion, while going into Clinton, Iowa, with the biggest
show I ever owned, we were running about twenty miles an hour, when the
locomotive jumped the track and struck a tree. The shock threw all the
cars of that section on their ends. The Mississippi River was on one
side of us and a springy hill on the other. Here in this narrow place
stood the cars, laden with animals of all kinds. It was truly an awful
situation. We began to break up the cars in order to extricate the poor
dumb brutes. We were compelled to hitch ropes about the horses' necks
and pull them out, only to find perhaps that their legs were broken or
that they were otherwise hopelessly injured. No fewer than thirty-five
of my best horses were thus lost. The reader must remember that, as the
cars had been thrown on their ends, in each horse car twenty horses
were thrown into a struggling heap. Strange to say, the bronchos seemed
to have charmed lives, for not one of them was hurt, and I was enabled
to give a performance that day in spite of the accident.
The elephants were piled up in much the same way as the horses, and in
order to extricate them it was necessary to strip the cars
completely--a labor in which those huge animals assisted us. The camels
were unhurt. The loss, in crippled animals and destruction of cars,
amounted to several thousand dollars.
I cannot leave the subject of moving the big show without going back to
some of my earliest pioneer experiences.
No other human being can realize like the showman the volume of dread
hardship and disaster held by those two small words, "bad roads." At
the time of my breaking-in we were passing through a section of the
country in the southwest, over such wretchedly constructed highways
that the slightest fall of rain was sufficient to convert them into
rivers of mud. The heavy wagons would sink to their hubs in the mire
and the whole train would be stopped.
Then followed a scene too picturesque to escape the attention of even
the poor fellows who were half dead from lack of sleep. By the light of
flaring torches a dozen big draft horses would be hitched to the
refractory wagon. Inspired by the shouts, curses and sometimes the
blows of the teamsters, the animals would join in a concerted pull that
made their muscles stand out like knotted ropes. But often a battalion
of six teams would fail to start a wagon.