He has been associated with red wagons and white canvas for many years, and there is no department of circus life in which he has not at some time excelled. As a clown his fame covered all parts of the country. He was, an old-time programme before me tells, “a grotesque, whimsical satirist. A wit brimful of ridiculously extravagant, fanciful mirth and eccentric humor, comic attitudes, funny songs, derisive sayings, quaint arguments and pleasant drolleries; entirely devoid of low jests and vulgar tricks and postures.”
The monkey cage is the most popular institution in our menagerie tent. We have outgrown the “variety cage” of old days, which was a collection in one den of monkeys, pigs, cats, dogs and rabbits. It was an interesting collection, I suppose, to country people, but an insufferable nuisance to the showman. Circus monkeys die in droves. The show which starts the season with one hundred and fifty of the animals and returns to winter quarters with twenty-five is fortunate. The climatic changes act with quick fatality upon the sensitive creatures. Tuberculosis, animal doctors call the killing disease. There is always a bully in the cage and always an inmate ready to give battle for the honor. The privileges of the bully are alluring. He takes for himself the choicest morsels of food, chooses the most comfortable perch or corner, gives orders and demands instant obedience, and cuffs and bites and annoys his fellows until one, rendered desperate, turns and administers a thrashing and succeeds to the position. The monkey cage at nightfall is a sure register of the degree of generosity of a community. In some towns they are gorged with food; the audience has fed them lavishly. Again, they give pleading indication of hunger; the place has probably a reputation for penuriousness. Those who believe in the Darwinian theory assert that the resemblance between the human race and the monkey is most marked in sick monkeys. Several scientists who watched our sick chimpanzee noticed many peculiarities of a child. It coughed like a child and made wry faces like one when asked to take medicine. Doctors felt its pulse and it received all the care and attention of a child of the rich.
Natural history is one of the most interesting and absorbing of all studies, and the visitor to our menagerie finds much zoological gratification. The hippopotamus, sleeping or floundering in his tank, and raising his head at intervals above the surface of the water for the purpose of respiration, is never without a wondering audience. His is a harmless disposition and he is a pet with the animal keepers. His den is too small for the water to cover him completely and frequently he is scrubbed with soap. He enjoys the operation immensely unless the soapsuds enter his cavernous mouth, which surely is annoying enough to provoke the most mild-mannered being. His skin is of a dark reddish-brown color, full of cracks, chaps and cross-etchings, with dapplings of irregular dark spots, and is probably two inches thick. He is more than ten feet long and nearly six feet high. When he gives voice, the lions are humiliated and the tigers acknowledge defeat. It is a deafening kind of interrupted roar, between that of a bull and the braying of an elephant. His daily diet is bushels of potatoes, apples, carrots, oats, bran, hay and salt. Keepers say that the only hippopotami born in captivity are in the zoo of one of the big cities. Ignorance permitted the first one which saw the light to die. Keepers feared to put it in the water, thinking it would drown, and tried to nurse it with a bottle. It was dead in ten days. Then it was decided not to interfere when the mother brought forth its next young. The result was the discovery that it nursed under water. The first genuine hippopotamus ever seen in America was exhibited by Barnum in his New York museum in August, 1861. He advertised the animal extensively and ingeniously as the “great behemoth of the Scriptures,” and thousands, including many biblical students, flocked to see it.
A “MAN KILLER,” PHOTOGRAPHED HALF AN
HOUR AFTER HAVING SLAIN AN ANNOYER.
Circus people will travel miles into the presence of a giraffe. They want the animal with the elongated neck to rub their hand with its tongue. They say that good luck is sure to follow the operation. The privilege is one rarely accorded, for giraffes are very costly and delicate, and, though popular menagerie inmates, are infrequently seen nowadays. The first one born in captivity in America saw the light of day in Cincinnati on October 20, 1889. It was five feet high. Daisy, measuring eighteen feet from the ground to the tips of her ears, and the last giraffe then on exhibition with any travelling show, was killed during a voyage to Europe—a lurch of the ship broke her neck.
Circus owners are vainly searching the jungles of India and the wilds of Africa for rhinoceroses. There are none in the open markets and the world’s visible supply is limited to twelve specimens. The market value of the beast ranged from $4,000 to $5,000 until the present shortage set in. Now a large circus would willingly pay many times that sum. The rhinoceros has always been a problem to animal keepers, for captivity generally results in early death. He is a beast so essentially of the wilds that all efforts at breeding in captivity have failed. Old showmen remember the attempt to take performing liberties with one of the spike-nosed monsters in a small town in Illinois in 1872. He killed two men, upset four dens of animals, tore down a museum tent, stampeded people for blocks and finally brought up in a vacant house, the door of which stood open. No fixed desire to exhibit a rhinoceros has ever since been displayed.
To many persons who go to a circus there is probably nothing that causes more wonder than to see the keepers of the lions, tigers, leopards, panthers and other wild beasts sitting in the cages among them, patting them on their ugly heads, slapping them on their saliva-dripping jowls, or fearlessly lashing them with their whips if necessary. Mastery expresses better than training what the keepers have accomplished with the beasts.
“There is a tremendous amount of work to be done in winter quarters, of which the public knows nothing,” explained our keeper, as he surveyed the scene in the menagerie tent early one August evening. “We are getting new wild animals all the time, and as they come to us there is not a man living who would dare go into the cages with them. During the winter we have to break those beasts so that we can handle them on the road. When they come to us they have thick leather collars around their necks, with heavy chains attached. The beasts are then more savage than they were before capture, that having served only to bring out all that is ugly in them. They will spit and growl at anybody who comes near their cage, and jump at the bars until they exhaust themselves. We begin to teach them manners the very day we get them, and they take a lesson in etiquette every day after that until the show starts out. My men catch the end of the chain fastened to the collar and secure it in such a manner to the bars that the beast can move only a short distance. Then I take a stout rawhide whip and strong club and enter the cage. I take a chair and sit down in a corner. The instant I get in, the beast will give a roar and spring for me. I would be torn to shreds if I were within reach; but the chain holds and instead of getting at me, the lion, tiger, panther or leopard is brought up with a shock that sends him in a heap to the floor and I give him a lash with the rawhide.
“The beast is at me again in an instant; again he goes down and again I lash him. I always keep the club handy, but never use it unless it is absolutely necessary. I keep drawing my chair a little closer to the animal as this goes on until I get so close he can touch me with his nose but cannot bite me. Then I just sit there and talk to him and you would be surprised at the power the human voice will finally be made to exercise over wild beasts. They seem to understand much that is said to them.