In the weeks after the second museum fire, Barnum did find “a way open through which I could retire to a more quiet and tranquil mode of life.” But what he would soon learn about himself was that retirement, even if it represented a slowing down from what had come before, was for him life lived at a more industrious pace than most people ever achieve. Once he had separated himself from the remains of the company that he and Van Amburgh had started, he did take part of the summer off. He could be found lolling in the White Mountains of New Hampshire or in a house he had built on speculation in Bridgeport, but even then he was not fully disconnected.
He was regularly corresponding with his friend George Wood in New York, who was starting a museum and theater in the Barnum mode at Broadway and Thirtieth Street. Wood induced Barnum to sign on as a close advisor and as someone who would not compete with him, sharing in 3 percent of the receipts for his involvement and for allowing Wood to advertise as Barnum’s successor. Barnum liked the freedom from responsibility this arrangement would give him and the freedom to “go when and where I chose”: “My mind especially would be employed in matters with which I was familiar, [and] I should not rust out. . . . The new museum would afford me a pleasant place to drop into when I felt inclined to do so.”1
When at the end of August 1868 all was ready for Wood’s museum to admit the public, its proprietor sent Barnum a telegram saying “he could not consider his list of curiosities complete unless I would consent to be present at the opening.” Not only did Barnum eagerly leave his White Mountains vacation and hustle down to New York; he even gave the inaugural address before the first matinee performance at Wood’s Museum and Metropolitan Theatre. The speech, which was printed in the next day’s Tribune, praised Wood for his “remarkable degree of Yankee go-aheadativeness and reckless expenditure” in collecting curiosities from throughout the world, making ample use of Barnum’s former agents. Barnum promised that he himself would often be available at Wood’s museum “to greet my old friends and the public at large.”2
Barnum had also continued to invest in real estate in Bridgeport and in that part of Fairfield near the Bridgeport line. Working with a small group of city fathers over a period of years, he had spearheaded the creation of Seaside Park. They had persuaded landowners along Long Island Sound to give or sell enough property to create a truly impressive public space, replete with a promenade along the shore, wide boulevards for walking and driving, a covered music stand, and new shade trees to augment those preserved on the land. A horse-drawn railway spur opened to serve the park, which soon became a favorite place for residents of Bridgeport and Fairfield to enjoy the views and catch the sea breezes. Barnum had himself purchased a thirty-acre farm and donated part of it to complete the sweep of park along the shore, and he later bought and donated several more acres to the western end of the park. The city recognized his role in the park’s creation by asking him to name it. In the summer of 1868, he decided to build a new residence on the remaining acres of the farm, on a rise that would catch those breezes and look down to the water. Ground was broken and the first stone in the foundation placed in October 1868, and with the help of “a regiment of faithful laborers and mechanics, and a very considerable expenditure of money,” the house was completed in eight months and ready for habitation for the 1869 summer season.3
Once again, Barnum hoped to build a house with all the modern conveniences for comfortable living, and he included a number of rooms for guests, each with its own dressing room and bathroom. In addition to the Victorian structure, featuring a large turret, wide porches, and a bakery’s worth of gingerbread, there would be two guest cottages, one of which would shelter his eldest and youngest daughters and their families during the summers. Perhaps to satisfy the ailing Charity, who continued to be prescribed as much fresh air as possible, the kitchen was semidetached in order to keep cooking smells at bay, and the stable was situated across an avenue. Lawns stretched out in three directions from the house, which featured the usual plantings of mature trees, in addition to a “large and beautiful hickory grove” Barnum had recently purchased, and gardens, flower beds, walks, and drives.
The main house was called Waldemere, a nod to that hickory grove overlooking the sea, and the cottages were called Wavewood and Petrel’s Nest. All three structures shared a view, owing to Barnum’s profitable philanthropy, of the happy pleasure ground of Seaside Park and the Sound beyond. His farm on the outskirts of Bridgeport, which he had owned for many years, had been the scene of a famous joke of his, putting an elephant to work plowing and replowing the same patch of ground each time a passenger train went by on a track adjacent to his fields, implying the unlikely notion that elephants made a good substitute for mules. Now this farm, minus its pachyderm, kept his “table constantly supplied with fresh fruits and vegetables, poultry, and that choicest of country luxuries, pure cream.” Barnum would live at Waldemere for two decades, enlarging and prettifying it from time to time. During those years many friends passed through his rooms. Mark Twain, who would become a friendly acquaintance if not quite a friend, and his wife would visit from nearby Hartford, and Horace Greeley would stay at Waldemere so often that one of the bedrooms was named for him.4
As his new house was being built—and as he was lecturing on either business success or temperance, consulting with Wood’s Museum, overseeing his real-estate investments, and tending to his wide circle of friends—Barnum also began rewriting and significantly expanding his autobiography. The decade and a half since The Life of P. T. Barnum had appeared provided him with a second lifetime’s worth of new anecdotes and cracker-barrel philosophizing. His narrative of this part of his life followed the sine curve of his fall from riches to bankruptcy and back to financial success, with the three major fires and his recovery from them part of the pattern. The new book’s title would reflect the cyclical nature of these years: he called it Struggles and Triumphs. The revision and expansion, however, did not go at the breakneck pace that had produced the first autobiography.
In late May 1868 he wrote to his friend George Emerson, “My life is dragging slowly so far as writing it is concerned.” Almost exactly a year later he would write to Whitelaw Reid that he was hoping to finish the book during the first part of the summer and wanted his help getting the manuscript ready for publication. Would Reid come to Waldemere for at least a week in July “to see what is needful to be done & what it is worth”? A well-known Civil War reporter and author who went to work for Greeley in 1868, Reid would take over the Tribune after Greeley’s death and run it until his own death many years later.5
Struggles and Triumphs or Forty Years’ Reflections of P. T. Barnum appeared in the fall of 1869. At nearly eight hundred pages, and including thirty-three engravings, it was almost exactly twice as long as the earlier edition. It would be sold through subscription agents hired by his Hartford publisher J. B. Burr. The reviews included one in the Sun, which called the book “interesting and conceited,” citing as an example of the latter quality Barnum’s quoting Thackeray saying, “MR. BARNUM, I admire you more than ever!” At the other extreme was the Bellows Falls Times of Vermont:
Barnum’s style is racy. He knows how to “point a period,” and tells a story inimitably. The lovers of fun will be delighted by the accessions which this work brings to their stock of humor; and they who care only for facts and practical good sense, will be equally grateful to Barnum for his autobiography.6
Perhaps because the book was not entirely new, it got far fewer reviews than the 1855 edition, and perhaps because some of the more indefensible episodes from the early part of his career had been softened, there were fewer expressions of shock that Barnum shamelessly owned up to his humbugs and the profits he made from them. The parts of the book that were entirely new were devoted more to sharing the wisdom he had acquired as a businessman and less to his pursuit of humbuggery.
In truth, he had lately been more attentive to the exposure of humbugs than to the creation of them, having written articles on the subject for the New York Weekly Mercury that were gathered into a book called The Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages, which had been published in late 1865. The subjects ranged from personal anecdotes to historical sketches. A well-polished example of the former described Grizzly Adams’s last days, when Barnum agreed to loan him an expensive new beaver-skin outfit he had had made, to be returned, Adams promised, when he was done with it. When Adams had himself buried in it, he took both the suit and the satisfaction of having humbugged Barnum to the grave. Historical chapters considered such episodes as the Dutch tulip mania and the more recent Moon Hoax. Barnum took special interest in spiritual hoaxes such as spirit-photos that pretended to show the ghosts of the dead in the background of photos of the living.
Barnum had promised in his first autobiography to expose humbugs, and in a brief introduction to The Humbugs of the World he professed his wish to educate the rising generation so that they could not be tricked or swindled. But his chief incentive was almost certainly to prove that humbuggery existed on a scale ranging from harmless to dangerous, and that his own humbugs had been meant simply to entertain at a very modest price and had harmed nobody. In this book, he offered his own definition of humbug, “as generally understood”: “putting on glittering appearances—outside show—novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.” By this definition, most of the subjects he wrote about in the book were not humbugs, but never mind. If Barnum was to retain his self-imposed title of “Prince of Humbugs,” then he must alter the definition to suit his royal self.7
At the same time that Struggles and Triumphs was coming out, Barnum engaged in what could be viewed as his last great humbug, or perhaps as his final commentary on humbuggery—or even as a metahumbug. Back in 1854, in a speech titled “The Philosophy of Humbug,” he had told the story of how he had once commissioned an eighteen-foot skeleton to be constructed out of old bones, with the intention of burying it and digging it up later as an archaeological find. But by the time it was completed, he had become so deeply involved with Tom Thumb that he didn’t have time to carry out the hoax, so he had the skeleton sold. Later, his story goes, someone offered to sell it back to him for $20,000, not realizing that Barnum had been its originator.8
Now, in 1869, a very familiar-sounding scheme had entered the news via a man named George Hull. A cigar-maker from Binghamton, New York, Hull had stealthily carved in gypsum the ten-foot-tall likeness of a man, which was then “distressed” to look old and buried in a vegetable garden near Cardiff, New York. A year later he dug it back up and declared it to be a petrified giant. Public interest in the “discovery,” now dubbed the Cardiff Giant, was so great that Hull was able to sell the thing for $23,000 to a group of businessmen, who then began pulling in crowds while exhibiting it in Syracuse.
The whole scheme caught Barnum’s interest, and he offered the owners $50,000 for the right to show the Cardiff Giant himself in New York City, with a $5,000 bonus if they could prove its authenticity. When the men balked, Barnum felt sure he had detected a humbug. In response, in true Barnum style, he had a small model of the giant made to show George Wood, and he suggested that Wood create and display in his museum a full-size replica in plaster, which Wood eagerly did.
When the owners of the original humbug got wind of the replica, they went to court to try to enjoin Wood from exhibiting his forgery of their giant. However, the judge expressed his doubts that the original was really a petrified man—what harm is a fake of a fake, after all?—and he agreed to order an injunction only if the Cardiff Giant himself would testify. Before long, Wood was exhibiting two replicas, and Cardiff Giants were proliferating elsewhere.9
Mark Twain could not resist the ridiculousness of the situation, writing in a sketch he called “A Ghost Story” how, one night as he was staying in a Broadway hotel, the ghost of the Cardiff Giant came to his room, saying he had been haunting the museum across the street because he was unable to get rest until his petrified body was reburied. To which Twain told the ghost that he was haunting the fake, and the real thing was now on display in Albany. “Confound it,” the Twain character says, “don’t you know your own remains?” The ghost admits to feeling like an ass and begs Twain not to let anyone know of his being taken in by the hoax.10
ONCE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPHS WAS written, Barnum began to chafe against retirement. He wrote, “Sometimes like the truant school-boy I found all my friends engaged, and I had no playmate. I began to fill my house with visitors, and yet frequently we spent evenings quite alone. Without really perceiving what the matter was, time hung on my hands.”
A friend from England solved his problem by visiting with his older daughter, determined to see the sights in America. John Fish, a wealthy cotton-mill owner from Bury, near Manchester, attributed his success in business to having read and followed Barnum’s nostrums in the first autobiography. They had met in Manchester in 1858, when Fish introduced himself after one of Barnum’s lectures, and his professed admiration for the showman had begun their friendship. Once in the years since, Barnum had asked Fish to go to Paris to investigate a (living) giant said to be eight feet tall by the straightforward method of actually measuring him. At another time, Fish and his family had played host to Tom Thumb and his entourage when they were exhibiting in his town.
Now, in 1869, Barnum found himself “just in the humor to act as guide and exhibitor.” Leaving Charity at home, he set off with Fish and his daughter Jane Ann to visit Niagara Falls by railroad. As they enjoyed the passing landscape, Barnum realized, “The contagion of their enthusiasm opened my eyes to marvels in spectacles which I had long dismissed as commonplace.” After returning to New York, Barnum felt the itch to roam again, and he set off with the Fishes in January 1870 to Cuba, followed by New Orleans, then up the Mississippi to Memphis and back to the East, where they visited President Grant at the White House.11
Barnum enjoyed the company of his English friends so much that by April 1870 he had arranged a more audacious trip for them and a few others: to California by Pullman car, stopping in Salt Lake City. There Barnum lectured to an audience that included “a dozen or so of Brigham Young’s wives and scores of his children.” During a visit afterward at Young’s home, the two men joked about the possibility of the showman putting the prophet on display in New York. After giving his account of this meeting, Barnum hoped “Brigham” would have a new revelation reversing his position on plural marriage.
When Barnum’s party reached California, spending a week in the San Francisco area, his “show fever began to rise.” Visiting Seal Rock, just off the Pacific shore of San Francisco, he had the notion of shipping ten sea lions to New York, where he could exhibit them in a pen in the East River off Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He also learned of a new little person named Leopold Kahn, smaller than Charley Stratton had been when Barnum first met him and “so handsome, well-formed, and captivating that I could not resist the temptation to engage him.” He immediately christened the boy Admiral Dot and had an admiral’s uniform made for him so that he could be introduced in it to the local press. Admiral Dot went on exhibition for three successful weeks in California before going to Wood’s Museum in New York. The country had an absence of little show people at that time, since Barnum had helped send the members of the Tom Thumb wedding party on their three-year world tour.
On their way back east, Barnum’s party spent two weeks in Yosemite, having paused to see the giant sequoias at Mariposa and send Wood a thirty-one-inch-thick chunk of sequoia bark to put on display. They also stopped in Denver, where Barnum gave more lectures and made his first visit to the newly formed intentional community that his friend Greeley had helped found as Union Colony No. 1; it would soon take Greeley’s name, which it retains to this day. Planned as a farming community inspired by New England’s small towns, it would also be a place where alcohol was strictly forbidden.
After Barnum’s party returned to New York in June, he and the Fishes joined Charity at Waldemere, where the Carey sisters visited for several weeks, staying at the Petrel’s Nest cottage. In September, Barnum, Fish, and eight other men went to Kansas to hunt buffalo. There, at Fort Hays, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer took a break from slaughtering Indians to support Barnum’s party in slaughtering the fast-disappearing bison. Custer “received us like princes,” Barnum wrote, fitting them up with horses, guns, and fifty cavalrymen for protection. Fish proved to be an incompetent horseman, while Barnum managed to kill two of the noble beasts and help kill a third. After only a couple of hours and the deaths of twenty buffalo, however, the party found the “wanton butchery” less pleasurable than they had anticipated, and called off the hunt.
Soon after leaving Kansas, Barnum would have the opportunity once again to fall back into the sort of hunting he liked best—seeking not game but talent, rustling up new acts and curiosities across the land, another step in his return to the full-blown life of a showman.
BACK ON THE EAST COAST, Barnum answered a request from William C. Coup, a former employee who wanted Barnum to join him and a partner in putting on a large traveling show, a new iteration of a circus that the two men had recently begun. Born in Indiana in 1836, Coup had run off to join the circus at age fourteen, attaching himself to Barnum’s Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie when it passed through Terre Haute featuring Tom Thumb and other signature acts. By 1870 he had become an experienced circus manager and, along with a former clown named Dan Castello, had started a circus that plied the waters of the Great Lakes, sailing their show from port to port.12
Now Barnum agreed to lend his name to Coup’s enterprise (for 3 percent of the receipts, the same deal he had with Wood), as well as his money and his talent for acquiring acts and oddities, to help create a new and better circus by the following spring. Under the agreement, Barnum would own two-thirds of the new show, and Coup and Castello would own the other third. Barnum spent the winter getting Admiral Dot “well trained,” bought from Wood the summer rights to his menagerie, and acquired other oddities, including one of the many Cardiff Giants now in circulation. Plus he felt he could profitably hire the Bunker Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, whom he had successfully exhibited in England, along with Anna Swan and others of his old museum attractions.
Coup should come to New York himself, Barnum advised, and help in the preparations over the winter. Meanwhile the old showman sprang into action. Among many other efforts he wrote two letters to his Boston friend Moses Kimball. One said, in its entirety, “Have you got an Egyptian mummy in your museum that you will sell? If not, can you tell me where I can buy one?” In the second, he took time to offer some explanation: “I thought I had finished the show business (and all other), but just for a flyer I go it once more.” Then he inquired about live seals, saying he would write a Down East postmaster for suggestions if Kimball did not have any seals at his disposal.13
Barnum wrote in a later iteration of his autobiography that he had known Coup for years and admired his judgment and “executive ability.” But when the man arrived in New York and saw the “thousands upon thousands” that Barnum was spending, Coup said he feared the costs “would ruin the richest man in America.” Barnum reassured him “that I was not wholly inexperienced in the show business, and that, in any event, I was to ‘foot the bill.’ ” He would leak to the press that he had spent $500,000 to $750,000 on the new show, but he felt confident that he could spend “money like water” because his name would be a bigger draw than traveling circuses could generally rely upon, and also because the three acres of canvas in his growing show could accommodate ten thousand people, more than enough to recoup the daily expenses for an enterprise that would require five hundred men just to get it from place to place.14
As usual on matters of showmanship, Barnum was right. The show opened in Brooklyn on April 10, 1871, offering, in addition to the Coup and Castello circus, “a museum, menagerie, caravan and hippodrome.” For all of that spring and summer, as it traveled from New York into New England, up to three thousand people had to be turned away each day, and the press raved about what had been created.15
It’s tempting to see this burst of energy as the beginning of Barnum’s second career, the one he is more famous for today, as a circus man rather than as a showman. But these activities were continuous with those he had been pursuing for more than three decades and represented the end of one of the few efforts at which he had not fully succeeded: being retired. Barnum had not stopped being a showman, public lecturer, or real-estate investor for any part of his attempted retirement, but the slower pace that had left him with time on his hands was, he now realized, at the ripe old age of sixty, not for him. It wasn’t that he was incapable of leisure, for he never stopped enjoying the pleasures of city life or of warm friendships or of clambakes by the shore during Seaside Park summers. Yet he always seemed to need a clear project to occupy him.
Still, he would no longer be the hands-on manager he had generally been during his museum years. Barnum did not go along when the new circus left Brooklyn, and he would rarely accompany his shows on the road again in the coming years. Instead he would remain on the East Coast and manage as much as he could from there.
In keeping with this new role, when the circus returned to New York in the fall of 1871, he prepared as warm a reception for it as he could. His advertisements for the “great travelling museum, menagerie, caravan, hippodrome, international zoological garden, and Dan Castello’s Mammoth Circus” made the customarily understated claim that it offered “a really colossal combination of amusements having no parallel in the world’s history,” with an entry fee of “only 50¢, the same as charged for an ordinary small circus.” He gave one of his patented off-the-cuff speeches when the show opened on November 13 at the Empire City Skating Rink, a huge structure at Third Avenue and Sixty-Third Street with a roof supported by cast-iron arches. He pledged to give people ten times their money’s worth and an environment free of vulgarity. He also talked up the new offerings at the Empire Rink, including a second chunk of bark from a giant California sequoia, this one a cross-section forming a ring large enough to enclose two hundred children.16
The weeks-long run at the Empire Rink helped make the first year of his great show profitable. Although Barnum counted the season as a success, in February 1872 Coup and Samuel Hurd, who had now become an investor in the show, as well as its treasurer, approached him with figures intended to prove that his ambitious plans for the 1872 season, given what he intended to spend on more horses and more of everything, were likely to result in a loss of several hundred thousand dollars. The problem was the daily expense of employing so many people, upward of a thousand, when many days of the season would be wasted in transporting the show in cumbersome wagons over muddy and unreliable roads.
Barnum responded that he had already seen this challenge and planned to meet it by transporting the circus exclusively by train. By doing so, a range of twenty miles a day could be extended to one hundred miles a day, allowing them to reach larger and more profitable towns and cities in less time. He predicted that using trains would give them the equivalent hauling power of “two thousand men and horses” if they had continued to travel by road. In response to Coup and Hurd’s concerns, Barnum wired railroads to see whether they were game, and the response came back as “generally favorable.” Using railroads to transport circuses was nothing new; smaller circuses had used this method as the railroads quickly spider-webbed the growing country after the Civil War. But nothing had been attempted on this scale before, and learning to efficiently load onto trains what amounted to a small city was a remarkable feat of organization that would be achieved only by trial and error. Coup later said that the first time they loaded the sixty-five cars making up the circus train, it took his workers twelve hours—far, far too long to allow enough time for travel, unloading, and constructing that rolling city in a new location in a timely way.17
But after the first attempt, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, they soon got the hang of it. In 1872 they traveled down the Eastern Seaboard as far as Virginia, then as far west as Kansas, and finally ended up in Detroit. The crowds came by the thousands each day, often traveling long distances themselves on special excursion trains put on by the railroads, but also in wagons, on horses, and by foot. Barnum wrote that when the circus would pull into a new town before dawn, they “usually found wagon loads of rural strangers—men, women and children—who had come in during the night and ‘pitched camp.’ ” Although his expenses were $5,000 a day, or $780,000 for the season, Barnum claimed that the 1872 profits amounted to $1 million. In this first year that the circus traveled by train, he tried to join it in the big cities, where he would often also give temperance speeches. He wrote in his 1872 edition of his autobiography that his circus associates believed the free temperance speeches, which were so crowded that people had to be turned away, were drawing off potential circus customers.18
In October he made another trip to Colorado with John Fish and a friend from Fairfield named David Sherwood, intent on expanding his real-estate empire. He and Sherwood bought a large cattle ranch near Pueblo, and Barnum would continue to invest in the state for years to come. “I am charmed with Colorado,” he confessed, “the scenery and delightful air,” and especially with the “lively, thriving city of Denver.” He once again gave a temperance lecture in the city and returned to the teetotaling community now called Greeley. A not insignificant part of Denver’s appeal was that his daughter Helen now lived there with a new husband, a doctor she had married after divorcing Samuel Hurd in 1871. The circumstances of the divorce, which included rumors of infidelity on her part, apparently did not alienate Barnum from either party, because it was soon after Helen’s breakup with Hurd that Barnum invited him to join the circus business.19
In August 1872 Barnum bought a building on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan called the Hippotheatron and had it fixed up to his specifications as a winter venue for parts of his circus and equestrian show and the beginnings of what was planned to be a huge museum and menagerie. It opened in the middle of November, drawing what Barnum referred to as “the better classes, for whose good opinion it has ever been my fortune to cater.” Just as he had helped make theatergoing palatable to those who had prior moral objections, he now through scrupulous enforcement and an onslaught of publicity assured the public that the circus and the hippodrome were also suitable to those who had been reluctant to expose their children, and themselves, to profanity, drunkenness, brawling, and other public displays of turpitude commonly associated with the circus.
Barnum went to New Orleans in the middle of December to attend to a part of his circus sent on a southern tour, a venture combining “my humanitarian feelings with my pecuniary interests” by sending to warmer zones the exotic animals in the show that were sensitive to cold weather. He was in New Orleans breakfasting at the St. Louis Hotel on the morning of Christmas Eve when another of the dread telegrams from Samuel Hurd arrived: “About 4 A.M. fire discovered in boiler-room of circus building; everything destroyed except 2 elephants, 1 camel.”20
As was by now a well-established habit, Barnum’s first move, at least as portrayed in his memoirs, was an act of supreme sangfroid. He sent out telegrams to Europe asking for more animals and more automatons, the latter having been especially successful with audiences of late in the show’s museum department. Then he telegraphed Hurd, asking him to tell newspaper editors that he had already committed half a million dollars to rebuilding his show and would have a “new and more attractive travelling show than ever early in April.” Only then did he permit himself to shudder at the thought “of the terrible sufferings of one hundred wild beasts, in their frantic, howling efforts to escape the flames.” He most regretted the loss of “four beautiful giraffes,” an especially delicate species, hard to keep alive in the United States in those days, which in their fear during the fire would not allow themselves to be moved to safety.
When he returned to New York a week later, he found Coup and Hurd looking glum, the latter predicting it would take at least till summer to get a show back on the road, and the former suggesting that they sit out a year and reopen in 1874. In his telling, Barnum laughed at them, and reported receiving telegrams from Europe that very day saying that both animals and automatons were being procured without a hitch. By February he could write that more curiosities and animals than he had ever owned before, including two giraffes, had arrived in New York, with even more to come in the following month. Hurd and Coup, he said, were now “in high feather.”