“THE SHOW MUST GO ON!”
When Happy Brandon, our concession owner, came home from the mud and
muck and variegated troubles of a combat division’s lot in the Big
Muss, I noticed that there was no difference in the quality of his
grin, no evidence of hard times or bitter memories in his features,
and certainly no indication that he had been doing other than enjoying
life. So I began the inevitable search for a reason. Happy had been
where the shells hit hard, thick and often. He had seen mud and
privation and—
“But it didn’t strike me so bad,” he announced, with a shrug of his
shoulders. “I’ve seen a lot worse mud than we ran into over there.
Remember that time in Kansas City when the lot was so slick it wouldn’t
even hold up the seats?”
“And they fell? Yes, I remember.”
“Well, that was war that day, only we didn’t know it.” Happy became
emphatic. “Just a little bit worse, because women and kids got hurt,
and that’s a lot worse than seeing men get shot up—or even being
plugged yourself.”
“Pretty hard life though, at that?”
Happy slanted his head and grinned broadly.
“Quit your kidding!” he chuckled. “There wasn’t any of it half as tough
as that night when we closed the season at Fort Worth, in a norther,
with an eighth of an inch of ice over everything, three dollars in
the ticket wagon, and the Big Boss burning up the stages and ring
properties to keep the men warm enough to load the trains!”
“That’s true. But how about keeping your spirits up all the time and—”
“Spirits?” Happy laughed again. “Say, listen; remember that rainy
spring we put in up in the Dakotas? Remember the fact that I had
the juice joint during those glad and glorious days when it rained
twenty-five hours out of every twenty-four? Well, any guy who’s
tried to make a living selling ice-cold lemonade to half-frozen
audiences through five weeks of rainy weather—well, he ain’t going
to let anything faze him. Anyhow,” and Happy’s grin took on a more
confidential air, “nothing stops a circus guy!”
Whereupon I gave up Happy as a bad job,—in so far as romantic tales of
the horrors of war were concerned. Then, a day or so later I met Finn,
who once was a ticket seller, “fixer” and general all-around handy man
about the Buffalo Bill show.
“Gosh, I had a cinch!” he told me. “First they had me at a remount
station; that’s how I got my commission: from knowing more than the
captain about horses and how they ought to be handled to stand rough
going. Then they sent me out squaring up squawks from French peasants;
claims for damages and the like.”
“Pretty tough customers, were they?”
Finn jabbed me in the ribs.
“Where do you get that stuff?” he jibed. “Tough? To a bird who’s heard
squawks from professionals? There wasn’t one of ’em who could raise
half the row that most any native’ll kick up after his horse has gotten
scared of the elephants and run away and smashed up his new buggy. To
say nothing of arguing a hostile city council into cutting the license,
or smoothing down some nice domestic dame after a Squarehead skinner
has driven an eight-horse team and the hippopotamus den across her
flower garden. Nope, it was just pie to a circus fixer; I almost got
ashamed of myself!”
And it was about this time that I awoke to something,—that it’s a
mighty happy knowledge for a man to possess, the fact that once upon
a time he has lived the life of the circus, seen its hardships,
experienced the thousand and one stumbling blocks that are ever in the
path of the circus man, and been a part of that great struggle for
existence which goes relentlessly on every day of the circus’s season.
Perhaps you still imagine a circus to be solely a place of spangles
and tinsel and gold and lace; of blaring bands and funny clowns; of
beautiful equestriennes and sleek, graceful “rosinbacks”; of swirling,
fairylike aerialists, and shimmering beauty everywhere? That’s only
the veneer! A circus is a fighting machine of grueling work, of long,
hard hours which begin in the gray of dawn and do not cease until the
last torch has been extinguished down at the railroad yards late at
night; a thing which fights constantly for its very life against the
demons of adversity, of accident, of fire and flood and storm; a great,
primitive, determined organization that meets defeat every day, yet
will not recognize it; that faces disaster time and again during its
season, and yet refuses to countenance it; a place where death stalks
for those who paint the bright hues of that veneer which is shown the
public,—a driving, dogged, almost desperate thing which forces its way
forward, through the sheer grit and determination of the men and women
who can laugh in the face of fatigue, bodily discomfort, and sometimes
in the leering features of Death itself! That’s a circus!
It’s no place for a grouch,—this land of the tinsel and the white
tops. It’s no place for the person easily discouraged. He’s gone from
the ranks long before he has served even a period of apprenticeship.
It’s no place for the man who cannot grit his teeth and fight on when
everything’s against him, when the rain is pouring, when the circus lot
is hip deep in mud, yes, even when the great cars of the circus train
are piled in the ditch, and when the groans and cries of the injured
humans are mingling with the screeching yowls of panic-stricken,
fright-crazed animals. Far ahead, plastered on every barn and
billboard, are the multi-colored announcements of:
RAIN OR SHINE
THE WORLD’S GREATEST SHOW
WILL POSITIVELY APPEAR.
And the show must go on!
Late one night at Riverside, California, I sat in a private car wished
upon me by a soft-hearted circus owner who had named me, in a streak
of sentimentality, his personal representative. It was midnight, and
my boy was serving me the final meal of a day which had begun at four
o’clock that morning. This was the first section, loaded and ready for
the highball that would start the long train on its rocking journey
toward the next town.
Far away, I could see the calcium flares of the circus lot, where
hurrying canvas men, roughnecks and bosses were loading the seats
and paraphernalia of the “big top” for transportation to the second
section. Faint orders came from the distance; then, like some great
cloud, the big top floated to the ground, and in the dim light, I could
see the hazy forms of the canvas men as they rushed forward to the
unlacing of the sections of the tremendous canvas.
Ahead, the highball sounded, the wheels began to turn,—only to stop
with a jarring, grating crash which rocked the train. Voices sounded,
high, strident.
“Where’s the fixer? Get him off this section! He’s got to stay behind!”
Trouble! The “fixer” and I collided on the platform, and I threw him
his coat, shirt and hat as he dropped to the ground. Over there on the
circus lot, forms were clustered now about four figures that never
again would unlace a canvas. A cable had parted; one of the great
center poles had crashed downward in the darkness. Four men were dead.
The next afternoon, in El Centro, California, I stood at the padroom
entrance, watching the afternoon show. It was a “turn-away crowd”;
every seat was jammed, every available bit of straw that could be
sprinkled about the hippodrome track black with its covering of
close-packed humanity, and the show was “going” as only a show can
go before a capacity audience. Never was the circus moving more in
unison; the whistle of the equestrian director denoting the changes of
the acts brought forth greater and greater efforts on the part of the
performers; the clowns, as they tumbled into the ring, fairly seemed
to bubble with merriment. And in the midst of all this, I chanced to
glance upward.
There, on the gleaming brightness of the great canvas above me, were
blots against the filtered sunlight, blots which told a story of
tragedy. Great patches of dark red they were, the life fluid of men who
had loved this tremendous, generic thing which possessed the strength
to overcome even fear of death itself, the blood-stains of the men who
had died the night before, died as they worked, that the show, their
show, might go on!
And it isn’t that they don’t know, don’t realize. We’ll go back, for
instance, to the night in Fort Worth, of which Happy Brandon spoke,
the closing date of the season, with a “norther” cutting through the
canvas at a fifty-mile clip, bearing a mist which froze as it struck,
transforming the great circus into a thing of stiff, sheeted ice,
coating the canvas, glazing the wagons, while performers huddled about
a smoking wood fire in the dressing tents and the bandmen relieved
one another at playing to allow the warming of fingers cramped and
cold-stiffened. It was a time of desperation,—but the show went on.
Upon the seats were a scattered hundred or so overcoated persons in
a great expanse that would seat ten thousand. A few had paid their
way; the others were those who had received passes and who grimly had
resolved to get “their money’s worth” in spite of temperature, storm or
discomfort. And for these, the show went on.
The mercury stood at freezing; icicles hung from the eaves of the
tents, but still the band played, still the be-tighted aerialists shot
from one trapeze to the other, even though the filtering mist coated
the bars of the aerials themselves with ice and death chased every
leap. Then came night and the struggle to load.
Long ago the animals, every cage covered with canvas side-walling,
double bedding of straw in each den, had been hauled to the train. The
menagerie top dropped to the ground while frenzied men, their clothes
frozen through hours of exposure to the spray-laden wind, strove with
all their strength to roll it into some sort of shape in which it
could be loaded. In vain. A great, boardy mass, it no longer could be
shunted into the wagon which once had carried it, and the “spools”,
those tremendous canvas carriers of the circus, must be saved for the
more valuable canvas of the big top. And so the menagerie top became an
abandoned thing, to be left behind and sold for junk.
One by one, the great platforms and stages were lugged forth and
gasoline from the chandelier wagons poured upon them to start the
blaze. Men are only men; human endurance can stand so much, then it
breaks. And these workmen of the circus, accustomed to warm weather,
lightly clothed, were reaching the point where they could labor no
longer without warmth.
The hours dragged on, while plank after plank, property after property,
the paraphernalia of the circus, was brought forth from under the
shielding spread of the big top canvas, and loaded for the trip home.
Then the voice of Bill Curtis, lot superintendent, sounded, compelling
and vibrant above the shrill of the wind and the rattle of the sleet
against the frozen grass.
“Six good men! Shake a leg, now! Six good men who ain’t afraid to die!”
In the light of a gasoline flare they gathered, humped and shivering
and waiting. The cold gray eyes of the superintendent looked them over,
one by one. Then he barked:
“Well! Let’s see a grin on your faces! I don’t want any man who can’t
grin!”
There was a moment of uncertainty. Grins and the risk of death are not
usually easily coupled. A long wait, then a rumbling laugh. It was
Fullhouse—gangly, blubbery Fullhouse—who could eat more eggs, drink
more coffee, cram more bread than any other man who invaded the circus
cook house. Fullhouse had found a laugh, and the others joined him.
Bill Curtis’s hands went to his hips.
“Boys,” came quietly, “I ain’t kidding you. Those center poles have got
all the weight they can stand now. When the fall grips are released and
the canvas drops, that weight’s liable to break every pole. And when
that happens, somebody’s going to get killed. Anybody want to back out?”
He waited. There was no word of weakening. Bill swung the big torch
into position to light the interior of the big top.
“All right!” he ordered brusquely. “Each man to a center pole. Don’t
let the fall guys go until I give the order. Then turn ’em loose and
run to beat hell!”
The shadowy forms went forward. One by one, Bill checked them at their
stations. Out of the dimness beneath that stretch of ice-coated danger,
the answers came clear and resonant. The lungs of Bill Curtis filled to
their capacity. Then out burst the bawling order:
“_Let go!_”
Scurrying forms. An awful instant of waiting while the poles creaked
with their tremendous weight, and the canvas sagged downward. Then,
while Bill’s heart began to beat again, the big, sleety mass floated
to the ground, and six men ran forth to safety.
The poles had held. Six men had gambled with death and won. Ten minutes
later, it all was forgotten in a new struggle, as the spool wagons came
forward and workmen strove to make them cope with loads which tripled
in size and weight their usual capacity.
It’s all in a day when the game is that of a circus, and the best thing
to do is to laugh and forget!
And don’t think that the clowns are the only ones who can make money
by causing laughter around “the white tops.” There are times when
laughs are scarce, when laughs are valuable, and when laughs can mean
salvation. To wit, Fort Madison, Iowa, and a cloudburst.
Again it was Bill Curtis, bossing the gang on a lot knee-deep in water.
In the midst of the afternoon show the cloudburst had come, while a
panicky audience sloshed forth to the open lot and waded toward the
paved streets. Every inch of canvas bellied with water, while in their
efforts to save the whole great tissue from ruin, men with shotguns
banged away at the bulging “pockets” above, to open a way for the
escape of the water and to relieve the strain on center poles already
loaded far beyond their strength. Here and there about the lot, thirty,
even forty horses were hook-roped in the battle to move the tremendous
wagons. Hour after hour the struggle went on, the tragedy of a circus
in the mud,—and there are few enemies more feared in the tented world.
Horses went to their bellies in the mire and lay there, helpless and
gasping, while grim-faced men, their hearts aching at the pain they
caused, hitched other horses to them and dragged them bodily forth. The
retrieving of every wagon was a seemingly insurmountable task; yet it
was only the beginning.
Only the empty wagons had been dragged forth; the circus still was on
the lot, with only one method of salvation. It must be carried off by
hand!
Wet, mud-caked, tired, the men tried their best to obey the commands
which streamed from the lips of Bill Curtis. Already fatigued from
hours in the flood, they endeavored to whip their tired bodies to
greater effort; struggled to make their brains respond to the orders
which came to them. In vain.
From a hastily improvised cook house, high on a half-dry hummock, came
cans of steaming coffee; whisky was barred on the big circuses long
before the prohibition act. The hot stimulant aided efforts for awhile.
Then its effects died. The men lagged; the straggling lines drew
farther and farther apart.
“Fullhouse!”
Once again, as at Fort Worth, the gangly roughneck was slated for the
position of a life saver. Muddy, tired, bedraggled, he pulled his way
through the mire and faced the superintendent. That person jammed a
hand into a pocket.
“How big does five dollars look to you?”
“Big as the moon!”
“Good! Cokehead!” Bill Curtis had called a stubby, funny-faced negro
to him and had asked him the same question. Then a five-dollar bill
traveled into the hands of each.
[Illustration: STUCK! _Page 214._]
[Illustration: A RUNAWAY CIRCUS WAGON. _Page 232._]
“I want you two to work together. Get where the gang seems the most
tired. Start laughing and joking the minute you get there—and keep it
up! And when you’ve laughed up that money, there’s more waiting! Now,
hop to it!”
The value of a laugh! A circus was in the mud. Fifteen hours away
was another town, fifteen hours away were boys and girls—and men and
women—waiting for the glitter and sparkle of a parade, waiting for
the music of the circus bands, the shimmer of the sun upon the sleek
backs of parade horses, the long lines of elephants, the steel-throated
scream of the calliope. And now that circus was in the mud, with fifty
miles of railroading yet to be done, the whole, tremendous thing to be
carried out of a flood by hand. All that could save it was the chance
of a laugh!
Out into the lines of dead-tired workmen went Cokehead and Fullhouse.
The negro began to cackle, the white man to boom and rumble with forced
laughter. For a long time the other workmen only stared. Then the
foolishness of it all struck one, more gifted with a sense of humor
than the others. He grinned. Then he chuckled. Soon he was laughing
with the two “professionals.” Another joined him—then another and
another. Soon the whole line was laughing; nor could one tell the
reason. Some one, spurred by the infectious stimulant of laughter,
began to sing. Others joined him. The lines began to move with more
spirit, more speed. Steadily the lines moved now, in machine-like
rhythm, to the accompaniment of singing and laughter which made them
forget the mud, made them forget the chill of wet clothing, the ache
of stiffening muscles. By daylight and torchlight the singing and
laughter and work went on. And at two o’clock the next morning, a
tired trainmaster raised his hand in signal to the railroad men that
the trains were loaded at last; that laughter had done what cursing or
beating or whisky could not have done; that the show would go on; and
that those who waited in the next town would not wait in vain. Thus men
endured all under Bill Curtis.
As for Bill himself, I saw him last summer, hobbling around the
hippodrome track of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Shows, a cane aiding a leg
which had been crippled more than a year, the big frame a bit gaunt
from racking pain, the skin of the high-boned face a trifle more
tightly drawn than usual. But the genial old bark still was in the
voice and the quick straight smile on the lips.
“I got mine in the smash-up,” he confided cheerily. “It was a little
tough for awhile; couldn’t get around much. But,” and he waved the cane
toward the flashing performance, the glaring chandeliers, the rocking
“rosinbacks” in the rings and the tight-packed audience, “even that
jamboree couldn’t stop us. The old trick’s still moving!”
And “that jamboree” was something which made you gasp in horror when
you read about it, the wreck of the Hagenbeck-Wallace circus trains
near Gary, Indiana, with a casualty list which consumed columns.
Bill was in the last car of the circus train when the speeding troop
train crashed into it from the rear. Ploughing through the splintered
coach, the engine caught Bill on its cowcatcher and, unconscious, he
lay just beneath the extended front of the boiler as the engine carried
him on to the finish of its work of destruction. Another car was torn
to kindling, another and another, and upon the engine which caused the
destruction was the crumpled, limp form of Bill Curtis, lucky enough
to receive out of his wild ride of disaster only an injured leg. And
slight indeed is that, when compared to the death rate in every coach
which his carrier, the colliding engine, caused.
I saw others about the circus that day, one or two with arms or legs
missing; many who were scarred and weakened for life. But still they
were with “the old op’ry”, still working away that the show might go
on. And Bill was only an example of all.
Just for instance, you cannot charge up Bill’s circus faithfulness to
the fact that he can’t do anything else. Or to the lure of a large
salary, or the fact that he might not be able to find another job.
Many a big mechanical firm has tried to hire Bill. He gets about $75
a week on the circus, not more than $100, anyway. His offers have run
far above $15,000 a year, for Bill is the inventor of the “spool wagon”
which now carries the circus canvas, raises and lowers the poles, puts
up the big tent all by itself and saves the work of forty men. He is
the originator of the “chain system” of circus seats which can be set
up in the middle of a street without a single stake to hold them in
place. He invented the Curtis stake driver, and the Curtis “guy-rope
tightener”, the Curtis “fool-proof wagon” which saves many a man from
injury at the unloading runs. Everywhere about the circus on which
he works can be found the evidences of Bill Curtis’s genius, and the
inventions go with his salary. He is the type of inventor—the overnight
kind—to whom you can give an order one day and receive a model of the
invention the next, and who is sought after everywhere. But does Bill
listen to the siren call of other business and a soft job for life?
Hardly!
“I’d miss the excitement,” he says; “I’d feel kind of lost not to be
studying the skies to figure out whether or not a blow’s coming, or
whether we’re going to fight the rain and mud to get off the lot. I’d
miss the chugging of the engines when the show goes up in the morning
and the gamble against time. I guess I’d just wither and die in a soft
job.”
“You see,” comes his explanation, “a fellow stays in the circus game
because of the spirit of combat that’s in him. It’s a life where you
don’t know what you’re going up against from one day to the next, a
constant fight against time and against the elements. It means a lot
to a fellow to know he can do the impossible; and believe me, when you
roll into a town at ten o’clock in the morning, get up your tents,
feed six or seven hundred people, give a two-mile parade, put on two
performances and get away for your next town by midnight, well, you’ve
run rings around impossibilities, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in
it.”
And that is the life of the circus game,—to size up an impossibility,
grin, grit your teeth and whip it! The circus world is full of Bills;
that’s why, for one hundred and eighty days out of the year, the great
caravans grind away a mileage ranging from sixteen thousand to thirty
thousand miles, through mud, rain, fire, flood, hot weather, storms and
difficulties, rarely missing even a parade, and with less than a score
of lost performances for the whole season.
Figure it out for yourself. Take the biggest dry-goods store in New
York City. Figure that store to be open and doing business until the
last possible moment at night. Then, suddenly, it moves. The next day,
in Philadelphia, eighty miles away, transported on trains ranging from
thirty to ninety cars, that big store erects its own shelter, lays out
its goods, opens its doors and is ready for business again, to say
nothing of having erected its own restaurant, fed a thousand persons
and given a demonstration of its wares through the streets in the
morning. Add to all this the handicaps of weather, of railroad tie-ups,
of delays, of fire and accident, and you have a small idea of what it
means to transport a circus.
How is it done? By system, and by herculean grit that knows no master
in the way of obstacles. Moving, moving, moving, the circus is ever
traveling onward, ever fighting forward to the next stand. Long before
the menagerie doors are opened for the night performance, the horse
tents, the tableau wagons, the cook house and blacksmith shop have
been loaded and started on the torch-defined route to the “runs”, or
loading place in the railroad yards. By the time the bugle sounds for
the entry which starts the big show, hurrying animal men are closing
up the cages, while roaring tractors and clanking six-horse teams are
shunted into position for the trip to the trains.
Perhaps you’ve noticed, when you came forth from the big show at night,
that something is missing? It is the menagerie—tent and all—gone! While
the acts flared before you in the big tent, the menagerie tent has
fallen and been loaded. The cages have been transported to the trains
and loaded. More than that, the highball has sounded, and from one
to three trains, carrying the cook house, the parade paraphernalia,
the tableaus, half of the executive staff, the same number of
superintendents and straw bosses, the animals, and even a part of the
performers, are speeding on toward the next town, leaving only that
great tent and the seats of the main show to follow. It is only by such
speed as this that the great thing can move. And move it must in this
manner, in spite of every obstacle that Nature can throw in its way,
if the waiting throngs of the next town are to see the spangles and
tinsel on the morrow. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the circus man
laughs at impossibilities? Is it any wonder that the man with a grouch,
the man looking for a soft spot, the pessimist, or the growler against
the petty troubles of life, has no place in the circus world? A thing
that will even go deliberately into almost certain disaster to fulfill
its promises can not afford to harbor the weakling, either in grit or
physique. And I mean just what I say: a circus will gamble with its
very life and the lives of every one of the thousand or so persons who
go to make up its great family, to keep its word, to make good on its
billing of:
RAIN OR SHINE—POSITIVE APPEARANCE!
As evidence: It was late in the summer of 1915 that I sat in the
rickety, wobbling caboose of a local freight train on a corkscrew
railroad in eastern Kansas. In all my railroading I had never struck
rougher riding; it seemed constantly that the slow-running train must
leave the rails, even at its “speed” of less than five miles an hour.
I was ahead of my show—Sells Floto—and a week later the long, heavily
loaded trains of the circus must make this route, if it lived up to its
billing. I sought the engineer.
“How in blazes are those two circus trains going to get over this
road?” I asked. The engineer snorted.
“It’s suicide, man!” he growled. “This road’s on the hog. They’ve just
taken the circus’s money on the hope that God’ll pull ’em through. But
it can’t be done—not on this road! I don’t want to act pessimistic,
but I’m an old-timer on this line, and I’ve seen it go to pieces mile
by mile. They haven’t had a track-walker over it in three months, and
there hasn’t been a train heavier than ten cars on it in a year. Even
then it’s a gamble. So there you are; do what you please, but I’m
telling you that you’re playing with trouble.”
I hurried to the telegraph, to wire the general agent in Chicago:
Protect against almost certain wreck on Blank railroad. Worst road I
ever saw. We’re bound for the ditch sure if we try to make it. Advise
cancellation of towns on line.
And back came the answer:
Too late for cancellation. Folks are watching for us and we’ve got
to take the chance. Have insured on possible damages to train and
paraphernalia. Will do everything possible to safeguard trains; but
can’t disappoint. We’ll make the gamble.
ED. C. WARNER,
General Agent.
And a week later, into possible death for the six hundred or so
persons who composed the Sells Floto Circus, into the possibility of
destruction by wreck and the fire which inevitably follows, with the
consequent dangers of escape by the wild animals and all the horror
attendant upon a railroad catastrophe went that circus. Every one knew
what might come; every one was aware of the thing which threatened,—but
on they went. Three days later, in St. Louis, I got a telegram from
Warner, who had gone on to take the chance with the rest:
Show wrecked, but luck was with us. Ten flat cars went into the ditch
but no one hurt and only one day lost. No animals in turnover, and
everything salvaged. Damage about thirty thousand dollars.
ED. C. WARNER,
General Agent.
And there, I think, is typified the spirit of the big tops. A spirit
which finds its best expression in the story of the Barnum and Bailey
shows in 1906, as told by the simple note at the end of the route book
of Charles Andress, the official Boswell:
“As the forms go to press, the ‘greatest show on earth’ is having a
terrible battle with the floods of the Mississippi in the South, but
has kept up with its paper.”
In Hattiesburg, in Meridian, in Charlotte and Raleigh and Richmond
and two score more towns through the South, the great organization of
five trains had fought against constant rains, against floods and lots
knee-deep in mud, not pulling off of some of them until the dawn of the
next day, and arriving in the following town as late as four o’clock
in the afternoon. But it had kept its word, and through day after day
of grueling struggles, had remained abreast of its “paper” or billing,
forcing its way onward in spite of everything. Last year, one of the
big shows had only two days more to go before the end of the season.
Word came from Opelousas, Louisiana, that the danger of being mired was
almost certain. But did the circus cancel its last two days and go
home? It did not! It accepted the challenge of the elements and went
onward to the fight!
It lost. Wagons were sunk in the mud until one could not see the
wheels. Elephants, striving to rescue the great carriers, became
panic-stricken and stampeded. The only meals served in two days were
from a cook-house wagon, abandoned where it careened, hub-deep in the
mud. Horses, caught in quicksand, went over their heads, only to be
dragged forth by hundreds of men, tugging at lariats thrown about the
necks of the poor animals just before they went under. It cost $40,000
to make that losing fight,—but that fight was made. There is always the
chance to _win_, and anybody can be a quitter.
And please don’t think that this spirit of conflict is a thing which
arises only now and then. A circus’s season begins in the spring;
it ends in the autumn, and from the beginning to the end, it is one
constant struggle against every possible obstacle which Fate can
devise. But perhaps the story of just two months will give a better
illustration.
One season, in company with its owner, I joined the show late in
September for a “vacation.” The owner’s illness—and a too great faith
in me—made me his representative. And in those two months which
intervened between the date of joining and the happy morning when the
show train rolled into winter quarters, these little things arose to
add to the gayety of the occasion.
We decided to show Marshfield, Oregon, where no circus ever had
exhibited. Troubles followed, and many of them,—with broken crossings,
marshy spots on the haul to the lot, difficulties in obtaining water
and room for unloading the trains. But it carried its own reward. For
there were persons in Marshfield who had stayed up all night to greet
the circus, persons who had never even seen an elephant or a lion or
tiger!
Every one worked that day. Even the owner—and Dun and Bradstreet rate
him at something like fourteen millions—stood on the front gate, taking
tickets. A boy passed through an hour before the show began. Ten
minutes later he came forth, while the owner, Harry Tammen, yelled at
him:
“Hey, kid! Coming back?”
The boy stared.
“Maybe.”
“But don’t you want to see the show?”
“Oh,” and the boy grinned. “I’ve saw it.”
Tammen reached forth and collared that boy, who had walked around the
menagerie tent and believed he had seen a circus performance.
“You come with me, kid!” was his command, as he turned the
ticket-taking over to me. “I didn’t know there was an animal like you.
Gosh! You don’t even know what to look for in a circus!”
They went inside. Two hours later, as the chariot racers bumped and
careened around the rutty hippodrome track, I saw them again, the
millionaire owner and the wide-eyed youngster, sitting high on the
close-packed seats, both gummy with circus popcorn, both swinging
their feet—and watching with all the eye-power that a human body can
possess. And afterward—
“What were the receipts to-day?” I asked. Harry Tammen turned sharply.
“Darned if I know,” he exclaimed. “I don’t care whether we made a cent
or not. Just being with that kid and living his happiness with him at
his first circus,—that was reward enough for me!”
Then Harry Tammen turned away, but not soon enough to prevent my seeing
the gleam of something that bespoke sentimentality in his eyes. Which
proves also that it isn’t always the money which lures the circus on to
its yearly fight. Perhaps the show gets a part of its own reward from
giving joy to others? Stranger things have happened.
Onward, to a fight with an escaped lion at Medford, the threat of a
forest fire at Weed, California, which crept closer and closer to the
railroad over which we must depart, and which licked and spat at the
long trains as they shot through its smoky, threatening radius. On to
Riverside, where the poles fell and where four men died. On to Yuma,
Arizona, with its heat of 112°, and an afternoon show only, that we
might make the long, hard run to Phoenix.
The first section was loaded, but the train didn’t start. I sought the
reason and found it in a crowd of men struggling vainly to shunt two
escaped ostriches back into their cages. In vain; the ostriches were
fighting in a duel to the death.
Men beat at them, yelled at them, sought to rope them and pull them
apart, in vain. Kicking and leaping, the ostriches realized only one
thing, that one of them must die, and we settled down to the only
available resource, the watching the giant cock-fight and a hope for
a speedy ending. It came in one tremendous kick of the victor, and an
aggravated case of a decapitated chicken. The victor had beheaded his
rival. The duel was over, the recalcitrant ostrich was loaded and the
show went on, an hour late.
The puffing engines strove their best to make up time, then, far in the
night, stopped in the midst of the desert. Shouts sounded and yelling
bosses herded out the scrambling workmen. Fire!
Far ahead the sky was red from the glare of the burning train. A spark
from the engine had settled in a side-show wagon; the draught of the
train’s progress had done the rest. Miles from water, miles from aid.
If that train moved on, with its consequent pressure of air, it meant
the whole train must burn!
Rushing men dragged forth the steel cables which were used to guy out
the poles of the big top. Then, sharp orders came from smoke-choked
throats:
“Uncouple that car!”
Quickly the burning flat car was “spotted” with the rest of the train
safe on each side. Men, wrapped in wet canvas, struggled forward
against the heat to “lasso” the whole burning mass with the cables.
Out came the work elephants, their pulling harness slapping about
their shoulders as they were shunted into position. One by one they
were hooked to the cables. Bull-hooks gleamed in the red light as the
elephant men urged their beasts forward, straining against the taut
strands of steel. A moment of racking labor, then a crashing roar as
the blazing car tumbled down the embankment, its sparks and embers
scattering, its flare becoming greater than ever. And there we left
it, ten thousand dollars’ worth of lost effort, blazing away, as we
went on, minus one side-show, two parade wagons and a flat car. But the
crowds which lined the streets in Phoenix the next day and grumbled
because the parade was an hour late did not, could not know the reason,
and it is a part of circus ethics to keep one’s troubles to oneself.
Three days of peace with only such minor things as bad lots, long
hauls, bad connections of motive power at terminals,—only the everyday
happenings of circusdom. Then came Warren, Arizona.
The doors were opened late. There was a reason: a block away, a circus
wagon had collided with a fire plug, with the result that for two hours
a flood streamed in on the circus lot before the water main could
be dammed. The city of Warren, Arizona, collected a hundred dollars
damages. No one mentioned the fact that the trifling event had cost
the circus five hundred dollars additional for straw to cover the mud.
And no one cared. It’s all in a day, and later on, when a bibulous
circus goer wandered into the side show and insisted on saying unkind
things to the Half Man-Half Woman until the sensitive nature of that
duo-person rebelled to the extent of tapping the intruder on the head
with a monkey wrench, thereby precipitating a riot, no one did more
than shrug his shoulders. You can’t figure the mental workings of a
circus freak, so why worry?
El Paso, and a tent crammed with people who had come for just one
purpose,—to see our “feature”, a pugilistic champion who had trained in
El Paso a few years before. The announcer yelled forth his name. But no
“Champion of the World” responded.
Again, while frantic circusmen sought the star, in vain. He was gone!
The ticket men worked overtime refunding money, while hard-boiled
circus men searched for the pugilist and swore never again to have a
person on the show who didn’t have the circus spirit, no matter how
many dollars he might draw. Eighty miles away they found him, where he
had ridden cramped, and half-frozen, in a refrigerator car. Angrily
they learned his story,—of a debt of two thousand dollars he didn’t
want to pay, and an attempt to defeat the sheriff who was in the way
with an attachment, by hiding in a refrigerator car. Then the train
moved out, carrying a champion of the world with it.
The show fined him $2,500, but that didn’t make up for the lost
prestige of a promise unfulfilled. Better a wreck, or a blowdown or
anything, save a thing lost through being a quitter!
After that, a delayed train at San Antonio and a circus lot too small
for the show itself mattered little. Or the cloudburst at Bryant, the
cold drizzles at Tyler and Sheridan, or even the day at Wichita Falls,
with a gale blowing so strong that even to raise the big top meant
disaster. Those were things against which men fought and did their
best. The top did not go up, but the show went on, with a side wall
draped about the seats and the performance proceeding in the open!
Fort Worth. That norther, with its horrible barrier of ice. Then the
trip home; but even then, the difficulties did not cease. A spark in a
horse car. Another fire, and strong men ready to risk death to save the
best-loved things of the circus,—its horses!
And all that happened within two months. Every circus season can tell
treble that number of stories. But always there echoes that call which
means everything in the circus world: “The show must go on!”
And on it goes!
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 24 Changed: exhibited for years at the London Zoological Gardens
To: exhibited for years at the London Zoölogical Gardens
pg 93 Changed: The chimpanzee, the koola-kamba, the marmoset and
others
To: The chimpanzee, the Koolakamba, the marmoset and
others
pg 161 Changed: “Congo”, a giant Kula-Kamba of the ape family
To: “Congo”, a giant Koolakamba of the ape family
pg 201 Changed: the chimpanzee and the kula-kamba are more closely
related
To: the chimpanzee and the Koolakamba are more closely
related