Joel Warner, who was formerly Adam Forepaugh’s advertiser, started a circus and menagerie on his own account in 1871. ‘He said,’ writes the gentleman who relates the story of the origin of Barnum’s show, ‘that he was “bound to have some money, or die;” and he added that he would “fifty per cent. rather have the money than die.” Well, he started out, and met with but poor encouragement; still his indomitable energy kept him above-water until he got into Indiana, when he found, to his utter consternation, that he was to meet with strong opposition. “Well,” he said, “there’s just one way to get out of this,” and Warner quietly disappeared. Two or three days after a travel-worn stranger stepped into the counting-room of Russell, Morgan, & Co.’s great printing house, in Cincinnati, and, sitting himself down in a chair, exclaimed:—“Well, here I am, and here I’ll stay.” It was Warner, and the way that man disturbed the placid bosom of quart-bottles of ink was a warning to writists. For two weeks he sat at a desk running off “proof” from his pen, while the printers ran it off from the press, and when he got through, J. E. Warner & Co.’s Menagerie and Circus was among the best advertised shows in America. He courted the muses too, and fair poetry shed her light upon Warner’s wearied brain, while she tipped his fingers with:—
“One summer’s eve, amid the bowers
Of Grand river’s peaceful stream,
Sleeping ’mong the breathing flowers,
Joel Warner had a dream:
Argosies came richly freighted,
Birds and beasts, from every land,
At his calling came and waited,
Till he raised his magic hand.”
The “magic hand,” was raised, and Hoosiers and Michiganders filled it with “rocks.” I met him in the summer at Fort Wayne. “Well, Warner, what success?” I asked. “Red hot!” was the answer, and off he started to hire every bill-board and bill-poster and newspaper in the town. As an advertiser he stands “ever so high,” and as a gentleman he is, as Captain Cuttle remarked of his watch, “equalled by few and excelled by none.”