Barnum felt a lifelong tension between the comforts of domesticity and the excitement of the exotic, the satisfactions and responsibilities of family life and the challenges of business, and even the patriotic love of his homeland and the attraction of foreign lands and cultures. This tension was drawn tightest in his three heady but sometimes lonely years away and in the period immediately afterward. Barnum then spent his first half dozen years back in America struggling with the same predicament.
As early as August 1845, midway through the European interlude and feeling homesick, he had written to Charity in detail about buying land in Fairfield for a house he wanted to build. He urged her to get the project going if that was something she felt ready to do, only asking her to let him know the cost of any land she bought before finalizing the purchase. A native of Fairfield, Charity apparently approved of settling there. Barnum’s half brother, Philo, had recently been named deputy postmaster of bordering Bridgeport, and Charity and the children had also at times rusticated there while Barnum was in Europe. In April 1846, he returned for a visit to New York, where he met his new daughter, Pauline, who had been born on March 1. By then, Charity had scouted out the land for the house, and now he bought it, seventeen acres just yards from what was then the border between Fairfield and Bridgeport.1
While he was home on this visit, he expressed his weariness with some of the very things in Europe he had eagerly described in his Atlas letters. In late May, Walt Whitman, who had recently become the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, left his second-floor office overlooking the Fulton ferry and rode it across the East River to interview Barnum in Manhattan, where they talked about the showman’s time in Europe and “his intercourse with the kings, queens and the big bugs,” as Whitman put it.
We asked him if anything he saw there made him love Yankeedom less. His gray eyes flashed: “My God!” said he, “no! not a bit of it! Why, sir, you can’t imagine the difference—There every thing is frozen—kings and things—formal, but absolutely frozen: here it is life. Here it is freedom and here are men.” A whole book might be written on that little speech of Barnum’s.2
Barnum’s enthusiasm for the land he had spent so much time away from suggests he was tiring of Old World pomp, however enamored of it he had been for a time. But even if the attraction of the far side of the Atlantic had grown weak and his appreciation for the vigorous ways of his native land strong, life at home on that short return trip had apparently become difficult, even rancorous enough to send him back to England earlier than he had planned.
Barnum wrote to Tom Thumb on May 14 that Charity was “in very bad health—she does not go out of the house except for a short ride in a carriage two or three times a week.” Not only was she dealing with a newborn baby, having had to bury on her own her most recent child only two years before, but here was Barnum, bursting with success and self-regard, having spent most of the previous year squashing grapes, attending bullfights with a Spanish queen, and rhapsodizing about French landscapes in his Atlas letters. Charity had made it clear that even England was too risqué for her, so imagine her reaction when she read in one of his Atlas letters about the rapturous beauty of Spanish women, and then read his unpersuasive coda: “Suffice it to say this is a dangerous country to any except those who, like myself, have lived long enough to resist all temptations!” Does any wife, separated by an ocean from her husband, want to hear his loud protestations that he resists all temptation? To make matters worse, Barnum had continued to use Charity as an object of amusement in his letters, which, however forbearing she might have been, cannot have amused her.3
After his return to England in the summer, he wrote a letter to Kimball in Boston from Brighton on August 18, 1846, that is one of the most obliquely revealing letters of the many he wrote to his friend. In it, he apologizes for departing from the United States abruptly, apparently having left Kimball and others in the lurch in some financial way. He had intended to leave for England on July 16, he explained, but “in a fit of very desperation I resolved to leave the 25th June by G. Western.” If he had waited for the later steamer, he would never have returned to England because he would have found himself in an “insane retreat.” If that claim left any doubt, he added, “I never before experienced so much trouble, nay misery, in the same space of time as I was forced to endure during my stay in the States.” Now that he was in England seeking some peace of mind, he was “hard at work and not very happy.”4
Barnum never explicitly named the cause of all this misery, but if, as seems evident, the source was his relationship with Charity, this would explain his hesitation to say so to Kimball or anyone else. The purchase of the acreage in Fairfield and the idea of building a house there was well-timed as an attempt to mollify an irate Charity. But Barnum’s determination to return to England for another year would have opened up another channel for her rightful disgruntlement. Although he protested to Kimball from England, “I have less troubles than when I was home,” his continued unhappiness and his expressed determination to make things better next year, but not sooner, also suggest that his difficulties were domestic in nature. The final clue that Barnum was feeling the unremitting heat of Charity’s indignation is that the letters to the Atlas, several of which had been written aboard the Great Western on his trip home to New York in April, now stopped and would not resume upon his return to England. His concession of ending the epistolary career that had given him so much satisfaction must have been penance for his long abandonment of his family and for his having enjoyed himself so much without them.5
Barnum might well have laid on the misery a little thick in the Kimball letter, given that its main purpose was to mollify its recipient, who was clearly miffed at him for something. Barnum referred to his early departure as “a shabby trick” and pled guilty to “selfishness, selfishness, selfishness.” He also tossed Kimball a little pro forma flattery: “I hope you are succeeding in your stupenduous enterprise and that you will have a success exceeding your own most sanguine expectations, & I believe you will.” After his repetition of the word selfishness, he signed off with the equivocal confession, “I plead guilty to this general crime & can only give as my poor excuse that it is a part of human nature.”
The letter apparently did not succeed, for Barnum wrote Kimball again in October, alluding to his supposed friend’s having written of “not wishing to continue friendship or advice where it is not wanted.” But on January 4, 1847, Barnum wrote, “I am glad to see that you are willing to pull at your end of the yoke, and not let our correspondence flag,” and he promised that when the steamer carrying him and Tom Thumb home to America stopped in Boston in late February, he would certainly see “my dear Moses” there in person.6
THE PLAN HAD BEEN TO stay on in England well into the spring of 1847, but the wife of Fordyce Hitchcock, manager of the American Museum in Barnum’s absence, died early in the year. The man’s depression was so deep that Barnum feared he was “unable to manage business with his usual energy.” So Barnum booked passage on the steamship Cambria out of Liverpool on February 4. The Strattons were ready to return home with him, and a parade with marching band accompanied Tom Thumb to the ship, where the crowd gave him three cheers and a hearty round of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” A rough crossing took them first to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then to Boston, where Barnum presumably had his promised meeting with Moses Kimball, and then on to New York, where Tom Thumb began to appear at the American Museum before unprecedented crowds.7
Soon after Tom’s four-week run began at the American Museum on February 26, Philip Hone, who, like Tom, was the son of a carpenter, took his wife to see the general. In his diary entry for March 12, he wrote that the young general “performs four or five times each day to a thousand or twelve hundred persons; dances, sings, appears in a variety of characters with appropriate costumes, is cheerful, gay, and lively, and does not appear to be fatigued or displeased by his incessant labors.”8
Admission to the American Museum was still only a quarter, but Barnum was now making more each day than he had formerly made in a week, since the building was “thronged at all hours, from early morning to closing time at night.” Apparently he was able to reinvigorate Parson Hitchcock, who would not retire as manager of the museum for two more years.9
Once the triumphant run at the museum was up and the Strattons had returned to Bridgeport for a month of well-earned rest, Barnum induced the general to appear for two days in benefits for the Bridgeport Charitable Society, with which Charity was now associated. It was the first time the townspeople of Bridgeport were exposed to their most famous son since he had conquered Europe, when they could see that “a diffident, uncultivated little boy” had returned to them as “an educated, accomplished little man.” In short, at least in Barnum’s telling, he had in their eyes been “Barnumized.”10
Barnum’s own prosperity was such that the plans for his house had evolved into something more grand. He was now envisioning a stately pleasure-dome worthy of Kublai Khan, a fantasy of a mansion inspired by the minareted, multidomed Royal Pavilion of George IV at Brighton, which Barnum had visited and admired while in England. He had a London architect make preliminary studies inspired by John Nash’s elaborate Oriental plan for the king’s seaside palace. Back home, the Vienna-born architect Leopold Eidlitz designed Barnum’s house, which would rest on a small rise in a treeless field overlooking Long Island Sound not quite a mile west of the heart of Bridgeport. The ferry to New York now took only three and a half hours, and two railroads met the ferry, so beyond his own ties to the area, and Charity’s and Tom Thumb’s, Fairfield was convenient to the American Museum, and the adjacent Bridgeport was, in Barnum’s mind, a city “destined to become the first in the State in size and opulence.” Even as the “concurrence of my wife” about where to live had reassured him, the businessman in him could not help but weigh the possible financial advantages of settling in Fairfield.11
Although Barnum wrote that his sole concern was for the new house to be convenient and comfortable, unpersuasively suggesting, “I cared little for style, and my wife cared still less,” he admitted that his “eye to business” did influence the dramatic design he picked. If the house was distinctive enough, he realized, it “might indirectly serve as an advertisement of my various enterprises.” For the actual construction, Barnum employed what he called a “competent architect and builder” and bid him to spare “neither time nor expense” in completing the project. The builder, Thomas P. Dixon from down the coast in Stamford, must have been someone in whom Barnum initially had real confidence, since ground was broken even before Barnum returned from England, and then the showman went off touring with Tom Thumb for much of the time the house was rising.
The Tom Thumb tour began with a visit to the White House, where, on April 13, 1847, the general and the showman went to meet President James K. Polk, his family, and his cabinet, including future president James Buchanan. After that, they traveled for months throughout the United States and to Cuba. The little general appeared in Kimball’s grand new Boston Museum on Tremont Row in June, where the take exceeded $6,000. Barnum made occasional trips home during this tour, but by May 1848 he agreed with the Strattons that his time traveling with them was now at an end. He pledged, not for the first time, to “henceforth spend my days in the bosom of my family.”12
The exotic house on the edge of Bridgeport was completed in the late summer of 1848 and given the equally exotic name Iranistan, which Barnum translated as “ ‘Eastern Country Place,’ or, more poetically, ‘Oriental Villa.’ ” An advertising pamphlet produced in 1849 referred to the house as a combination of “the Byzantine, Moorish, and Turkish styles of architecture,” and here and there Chinese elements were tossed into the mix. At the end of August a piece headlined “Iranistan” appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle urging readers to hop on a ferry and go in person to Bridgeport to visit the mansion and its grounds, calling it “one of the most unique and magnificent structures in the country.”13
Made of reddish sandstone, the villa measured 124 feet across, with a terraced, three-story central structure flanked by two-story wings, each of which featured a glassed, multisided conservatory. Deep loggias with Arabic arches and elaborate scrollwork fronted every floor, stretching the width of the house. Iranistan’s most eye-catching aspect by far was its huge onion-shaped central dome, the top of which reached ninety feet above the ground, surrounded by four smaller domes and an endless series of diminutive minarets. In front of the main house was a large fountain in the center of a circular driveway, and in back was a pond with swans and ducks. The whole acreage was landscaped into a park with hundreds of mature fruit trees and what Barnum called “forest” trees, which because of their size had been transplanted at great expense. Outbuildings, including glass greenhouses to shelter tropical fruits, an elaborate gardener’s house, barns, stables, pavilions, and so on, were also built in Oriental styles amid walks, statues, and formal flower gardens.
Inside, on the first floor, a frescoed drawing room stretched the entire depth of the house; also on that floor were a library with a Chinese theme, bedrooms, bathrooms with running hot water, parlors, and a baronial dining room with walls of oak painted with representations of Music, Poetry, and Painting. Objects in porcelain, a tea set in gold, and a silver service, all from Paris, were on display in the dining room, which could seat forty. The wide main hallway and grand walnut staircase were populated with marble statues, and on the second floor were more bedrooms and bathrooms and Barnum’s princely study, dominated by a rosewood bookcase, its walls and ceiling lined with orange silk damask, and “window hangings, carpets, and everything else to match,” as a visitor reported in the Daily Eagle. “Elegant and appropriate furniture was made expressly for every room in the house,” Barnum wrote. The third floor featured a billiards room that could double as a ballroom, and above that, up a circular staircase, was the inside of the great dome, whose diamond-shaped windows, each a different color of stained glass, created a kaleidoscope effect for those sitting on a tow-stuffed circular seat that could accommodate forty-five posteriors.14
His interlocutor from the Eagle asked Barnum if he worried about burglars, given that the grounds were open to the public. Barnum responded that they would have to get past several ferocious bulldogs before breaking in, and warned that, only a few nights before, the dogs had “attacked one of [my] ponies, tore him in pieces, and by morning had eaten him half up.” Barnum, the master at attracting crowds through clever use of the press, here shows a facility for discouraging clientele of an unwanted sort, and one can hope that the half-eaten pony was only a useful fiction. But just in case the bloodthirsty bulldogs were not enough, Barnum had also installed a newfangled alarm system.
The writer in the Eagle, who signed his report only with the letter T, concluded his visit to Iranistan by praising Barnum as “one of those off-hand, whole-souled, generous men who take your good will by storm. And his excellent lady, though more quiet in her manners, very soon makes you feel at your ease.” As with anything published about Barnum, the suspicion always arises about whether he might have written the piece himself—was the T for “Taylor”?—or in some way dictated its contents. If he did not do so in this case, he at least displayed his ability to charm a visitor into writing an advantageous story.
Once everything “was finally completed to my satisfaction” and the family was ensconced, Barnum undertook “the old-fashioned custom of ‘house-warming.’ ” On November 14 a thousand guests, “including the poor and the rich,” arrived to inspect Iranistan, to see what $150,000 (the equivalent of a mere six hundred thousand tickets to the American Museum) and the exertions of five hundred craftsmen, laborers, and nurserymen could produce. But the finished house was not just the work of many hands, from the architects who made the drawings to the men who shoveled out the pond. It was also a work of imagination, of aspiration and inspiration, the dream come true of a boy from a country village in Connecticut who as a man had seen and absorbed the most elegant trappings of imperial Europe and re-created them only a few miles from that modest place of his nativity. Surely the showman was warmed by the admiration of those who came from near and far, and also perhaps by their envy. As for the house itself, if a thousand close-packed bodies could not warm the autumn chill, then its proprietor could easily open the dampers and feel the hot air rising from his gas-fired furnace.
NOW THAT CHARITY AND THEIR three daughters occupied Iranistan, there began an extended period when Barnum tried to stay home but didn’t always succeed. If it had not been obvious during her sojourn in Europe that Charity was no traveler, a less exotic trip she made with the family sealed her own intention to remain forever more a homebody. Some weeks before they moved into their new palace, Barnum had proposed a summer trip to Niagara Falls and Canada. They left on Barnum’s thirty-eighth birthday, July 5, and began shadowing the tour of a certain famous miniature general. Within two days of their departure, they attended one of Tom Thumb’s levees in Rochester, New York, and then joined him and his party crossing Lake Ontario to Kingston, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Caroline, at fifteen the eldest Barnum child, kept a journal of their trip, focusing on the fun she often had along the way with Tom, with whom she had become friends in Europe. Together, for instance, they blew bubbles out a hotel window in Kingston, below which a raucous crowd of his admirers had gathered. The Barnums and Strattons traveled up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, and then on to Quebec City, taking in the sights between Tom’s performances, before turning downriver and back to Kingston.15
Charity had become sick while in Quebec, but although she was now mostly recovered, she urged her husband not to start immediately back across the lake to Rochester. If she had a sense of foreboding, it was well founded, because after Barnum hustled them onboard anyway, the ship ran into a tremendous storm. Caroline, who would be a favorite of her father throughout his life and like him in her sense of humor, wrote in her diary that her mother became so frightened by the storm that “she forgot to be sick.” The Barnums eventually reached dry land in Rochester and made their way to the American side of Niagara Falls. On August 3 they decided to cross by ferry to the Canadian side, but to do so required walking down 250 steps to get to the river, something Charity had to be encouraged to do. Halfway down, she grew dizzy and refused to go farther. Barnum and the girls, having grown resistant to her complaints, left her on her own. As Charity made her way alone back up the steps, she fainted, and some nearby men performed the gallant task of accompanying her back to her hotel. It is not hard to imagine the human torrent that Barnum, Caroline, and Helen received when they returned later in the day.
Even leaving aside this dramatic example of Barnum’s inattention, Charity could hardly be blamed for any disenchantment with a family vacation that so closely resembled her unhappy experiences on tour with the Strattons in England and France. The exoticism of the new house in which her family now lived, with its evocations of Turkey, Persia, and China, could more than satisfy her underdeveloped interest in faraway lands. Her husband, having pledged himself to domesticity, would inhale it in a setting that reminded him each day of points on the globe where he had not yet been—the big world he was still culling for wonders to be displayed at his American Museum.
Whatever hard feelings the trip to Canada had produced or brought to a head in the marriage, the family seemed to be able to move beyond them and start to enjoy one another’s company in the months that followed. On September 19, Barnum, Charity, and Caroline attended one of Tom’s levees in Danbury, about thirty miles north of Bridgeport. It had begun at 10 a.m., and after it was over, the three accompanied Tom by carriage to the home of James White Nichols, a close friend of Philo Barnum’s who also counted “Tale” as a friend. Nichols kept a diary for many years and in it described this day in some detail. Barnum carried Tom into Oak Cottage, as the Nichols house was called, where the little man expressed his eagerness for dinner and showed it by running about, eyeing the cheeses and peering into a pot where chickens were stewing. After the initial greetings, everyone went out into the yard, where Barnum passed the time by tossing into the air apples he found under a tree, warning Tom, “All that’s up must come down / On the head or on the ground.” Tom scurried around to avoid being brained, eventually hiding beneath Charity’s apron. The meal was still being prepared, so Nichols led the party to the crest of a nearby hill, Barnum carrying Tom on his back. There they enjoyed the view until, “hearing a call for dinner from the house, we descended the hill, the little General being carried in Barnum’s arms at a speed almost equal to a locomotive.” Barnum tossed his small burden through a window of the house, and Tom was led right to the dining room, where he waited for the rest of the party. When they entered, he called out, “Come on, Barnum, I’m here.” To which Barnum responded, “Ah, the general is something like me, he’s not bashful.” Over dinner Barnum reverted to his role as the straight man for his little companion, who “indulged in all manner of jokes and sarcasms on his friend and protector Mr. Barnum.” Nichols found Barnum polished by his time in Europe, and the Barnum women amiable and diverting. After dinner, Tom, now ten years old, fished a cigar “almost as big as himself” out of Barnum’s pocket and smoked it with “gusto” until he had to set off for Danbury for another performance.16
At Iranistan, Barnum took up the role of country squire with all the energy he expended on other parts of his life, soon buying a nearby parcel of a hundred acres of land suitable for gentleman farming. There he would keep milk cows and swine, plus an assortment of chickens, geese, swans, ducks, and pheasant. On the strength of this purchase, his neighbors elected him president of the local agricultural society, a job he held for the next six years. In his memoirs he poked fun at himself in this role, relating that, when he was asked to address the society in 1849, he realized that he knew next to nothing about farming, so instead “I gave them several specimens of mistakes which I had committed, and entreated them to profit by my errors.” Besides giving speeches, Barnum’s chief role as the society president was to oversee the annual agricultural fair. He could not help but bring his showman’s flair to the job, deciding one year, when “a celebrated English pickpocket” was arrested at the fair, to put him on display the next day, after passing out handbills advertising this new attraction. Barnum modestly pointed out, “Our treasury was materially benefited by the operation.” He would bolster his arcadian credibility when he bought several acres of land just to the west of his Iranistan property and fenced it, creating a deer park featuring Rocky Mountain elk, reindeer, and other species.17
Barnum wrote of this period of his life, “I am frequently in New-York, and occasionally in other great cities, yet I am never so happy as when I return to my ‘homestead.’ ” Of course, like any other comparable period in his life, this one was also filled with dizzying activity. He went to New York each week to check up on the American Museum. And in 1849 he opened a museum in Philadelphia, at Seventh and Chestnut Streets, called P. T. Barnum’s Museum of Living Wonders. He spent many weeks there around the opening, sometimes joined by Charity and Caroline. The new enterprise was briefly in direct competition with his former partners the Peales, and when their establishment went out of business he and Kimball together bought its collection at a “sheriff’s sale, for five or six thousand dollars,” and divided the exhibits between Kimball’s in Boston and his own in New York.18
Still, while he remained engaged with his museums, Barnum implied that he was otherwise mostly at home. This stretch of time in the late 1840s was one of real contentment, of devotion and recommitment to family rather than to the intense striving that had come before it.
One source of his satisfaction was a dramatic change he made in his life upon returning from Europe, a change that led to better relations with Charity and to greater patience with domestic life in general, as well as a commitment to something bigger and more meaningful than growing rich and achieving fame. This shift was Barnum’s pledge to give up alcohol and promote the cause of temperance. That he would take this new path at the highest point yet in his professional career, at a time when many people feel that success has confirmed their worth and redeemed their sins, makes it all the more striking.
In the autumn of 1847, during the months of touring with Tom Thumb after their return from Europe, Barnum dropped in at the New York State Fair, where Tom was holding levees in Saratoga Springs. “I saw so much intoxication,” he wrote, “among men of wealth and intellect, filling the highest positions in society.” He asked himself then and there if he too might be on the road to becoming a drunkard. Barnum had been around alcohol all his life, and both he and his father had sold it in quantity. But even when he had worked as a young man at a porterhouse in Manhattan, at a time in life when many people are most susceptible to the temptations of Bacchus, he claimed never to have drunk more than a pint of anything alcoholic. Even now, he told himself, he drank spirits only when he was with friends. But then, he admitted, he was with friends almost every day. He decided at the fair to give up “spirituous liquors as a beverage,” by which he meant distilled liquors. At this point, he saw no harm in wine, which he had enjoyed immensely in Europe, where he “had been instructed . . . that this was one of the innocent and charming indispensables of life.” In a retrospective interview in the New York Sun when he was seventy-three years old, Barnum was asked, “Did you drink much prior to 1847?”19
“Well, I wouldn’t have allowed anybody to tell me so,” he responded, “but when I look back over that time I know now that I did.” He went on to say that, as proud as he was of Iranistan when it was built, he was “ten times prouder of my wine cellar than of anything else I had.” Even after giving up spirits, he drank a bottle of champagne, wine, or beer each day at the midday dinner, resulting in “after-dinner feelings” and a reluctance to do any business in the afternoons. When his mother-in-law would accuse him of being “heady” at those meals, he would get offended and threaten “to go back to whisky” if she said it again, because “I really considered myself quite a temperance man.”20
He was at least enough of a temperance man, never mind the wine and beer, that in 1851 he invited a friend, the Rev. E. H. Chapin, to travel from New York to Bridgeport to deliver at a local church a lecture on the perils of alcohol. As part of his talk, the reverend addressed the question of the “moderate drinker,” which Barnum realized was a pretty fair description of himself, although Chapin didn’t intend it that way, believing Barnum’s invitation to speak meant that he was already a teetotaler. Instead the speech made Barnum realize “the bad example I was setting,” and there followed a sleepless night at Iranistan.
“The next morning, I had my coachman knock the necks off all the champagne bottles I had in my cellar, some five or six dozen,” Barnum said, and “pour their contents upon the ground.” He gave away “the port and other medicinal wines” and sent the liquors back to the merchant. “I then called upon Mr. Chapin, asked him for the teetotal pledge, and signed it.”
When he returned home and told Charity what he had done, he wrote, “I was surprised to see tears running down her cheeks.” She “astonished” him by saying that she had cried on many nights, worrying that his “wine-bibbing was leading me to a drunkard’s path.” He continued, “I reproached her for not telling me her fears, but she replied that she knew I was self deluded, and that any such hint from her would have been received in anger.” That he could reproach her and she could profess to be afraid of his reaction adds more paint strokes to the unflattering self-portrait of the husband Barnum had become in the months and years before taking the pledge. Still, making a resolution not to drink and then keeping it took both discipline and self-awareness and constituted another serious effort to turn his marriage and himself around. When he made the pledge, he remembered late in life, “that was the end of my drinking.” And indeed, as best as can be known, he drank no more.21
The feeling of relief that came from forswearing alcohol gave his life a new sense of purpose. “I had been groping in darkness,” he remembered, “was rescued, and I knew it was my duty to try and save others.” On the very day he signed the pledge, he managed to gather more than twenty pledges from his neighbors. Like any evangelist, and true to his industrious nature, he was now full of the spirit and could not stop spreading it. First, he talked up temperance to everyone he saw in Fairfield and Bridgeport, then he went out to the nearby villages and towns, and then he spent the winter of 1851–52 traveling around the state of Connecticut, “at my own expense,” seeking converts. He estimated that these early efforts turned hundreds if not thousands of people to the temperance creed. Soon he was lecturing in other states and in New York City and Philadelphia. His effectiveness as a temperance speaker, at a time when public lectures were a popular and respectable form of entertainment, now matched the literary abilities he had displayed in his letters from Europe to the Atlas. If his skill as a promoter had made him notorious and his newspaper letters had made him famous, then the lectures were a bid to be taken seriously.
WHILE HE WAS STRIVING TO redefine himself as a better man at home and a moral exemplar in public, he still had a bit of the old Barnum to get out of his system. In the late 1840s, then, he perpetrated one of his last famous humbugs. The summer after returning from Europe, while accompanying Tom Thumb to Cincinnati, Barnum saw a local exhibition of a small horse covered with a curly, wool-like coat but lacking a mane or any hair on its tail—“withal,” as Barnum put it, “a very curious-looking animal.” Of course he had to have the beast. But he wasn’t sure, yet, what to do with it, so he kept it out of sight in a barn in Bridgeport. The following winter, he had an idea.22
John C. Frémont, the famous explorer known as The Pathfinder, was undertaking his penultimate great expedition in the West, attempting to find a route for the transcontinental railroad through the southern Rockies that would be passable even in winter. Frémont was a national hero who would soon run for president, so his expedition in southern Colorado was well covered in the press. In March 1849 Barnum managed to place a wholly fictitious news story claiming that a St. Louis merchant had received a letter from someone in Frémont’s party reporting that they had captured, after a chase of three days, a “nondescript” animal looking somewhat like a horse but having the tail of an elephant and the speed of a deer. This would be Barnum’s chance to make use of the animal fattening in his barn at home. What he did not know was that, within only a few more days, real reports would arrive in the East revealing that Frémont’s expedition had met with disaster in December and January, while trying to push forward through unusually deep snow and extraordinary cold, sometimes as low as thirty degrees below zero. Ten members of his original party of thirty-two had died of exposure or hunger, and everyone had suffered greatly. Men had been forced to eat their mules, then the leather tack for the mules, and had even boiled ropes for sustenance. A rumor later surfaced that when the leader of one small relief detail separated from the main group had died, his companions had eaten his frozen flesh.23
The news of the expedition created, Barnum wrote, using an unfortunate metaphor, a “ravenous” appetite for “something tangible from Col. Frémont.” Although Barnum’s scheme had been hatched before the sobering facts arrived, he apparently gave no thought to canceling his humbug out of respect for what the expedition had gone through. The public was in such a frenzy that “they would have swallowed any thing, and like a good genius I threw them not a ‘bone,’ but a regular tit-bit, a bon-bon—and they swallowed it at a single gulp!” His punning is almost gleefully disrespectful, but in fairness to Barnum, he wrote these words many years later, and it should be noted that Frémont himself spent little time grieving for his men; he was soon off to California chasing the discovery of gold near a ranch he had recently bought in the Sierra foothills.
By the middle of April, Barnum had rented a hall at 290 Broadway to exhibit “Col. Frémont’s Nondescript or Woolly Horse,” which, the ads said, combined characteristics of an elephant, deer, horse, buffalo, camel, and sheep. Following his usual pattern, Barnum warned in advertisements that the animal would be on display for only a few days before being shipped off to the Royal Gardens in London. Then, conveniently, a new ad announced that the ship was not ready to sail, so the public would have three more days to see the “anagogetical” animal. (Where Barnum came up with this obscure bastardization of the word anagogical, which means “mystical” or “allegorical,” is anybody’s guess.)Although the Woolly Horse never made it to London, it did tour some “provincial towns” and then went to Washington, where Barnum’s agent was arrested at the urging of Frémont’s father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, for falsely charging a quarter to see the horse. The case was dismissed, however, which allowed Barnum to add to his receipts until he decided, out of deference to the powerful senator, to put the horse out to pasture. Thus, even in these transitional years for Barnum, when he began to yearn for a measure of respectability, he could not resist the allure of a headline-grabbing humbug.24