In March 1880 the first elephant conceived in America was born in Philadelphia, at the winter quarters of the Great London Circus. The glut of publicity surrounding the birth impressed Barnum, and when the baby was two months old, he telegrammed its owners, three Jameses surnamed Bailey, Cooper, and Hutchinson, offering $100,000 in cash for the mother, named Hebe, and her offspring, which would eventually be known as Little Columbia. As Barnum good-naturedly wrote, “They gleefully rejected my offer, pleasantly told me to look to my laurels, and wisely held on to their treasure.” Not only that, but they began an advertising campaign under the heading “What Barnum Thinks of the Baby Elephant,” reproducing his telegram with its lavish offer.1
Barnum was also impressed by how well the three younger men had turned the tables on him, using his own methods. “Foemen ‘worthy of my steel,’ ” he called them. The Great London had dogged Barnum’s circus in the previous season, often scheduling dates in the same towns to draw off his business. Even in Bridgeport itself they had outsold Barnum’s show two to one. “Barnum finally retreated to the West,” according to an 1891 article that had Bailey as its source, “and Bailey had the East to himself.”2
The aging showman realized he had finally met his match, and he concluded it would be wiser to join them than to continue competing with them. Difficult negotiations began, as Barnum decided at the same time to extract himself from his existing partnership, but by late August he had an agreement with Bailey and Hutchinson, their partner Cooper having withdrawn. The new arrangement would combine the two circuses, at least in the first year, with Barnum responsible for half of the expenditures and receiving half the profits, and the other two men each in for a quarter of the same. None of the three would draw a salary, and the two younger men, whom Barnum called “sagacious and practical managers,” would run the show with advice from Barnum, who would be encouraged but not required to be present at performances. Barnum also agreed not to sell the use of his name elsewhere, unless he decided to start another museum.
As the ink was drying on their agreement, Barnum, Bailey, and Hutchinson decided to combine their wintering operations on land Barnum owned in Bridgeport—the very same land where Barnum had years before so ostentatiously farmed by elephant for the benefit of passing railroad passengers. The site’s adjacency to a railroad line—the New York, New Haven, and Hartford—was its major advantage. A huge shed more than three hundred feet long went up in the fall of 1880 to shelter eight tracks containing scores of railroad cars. Other buildings contained what the cars transported: an elephant house; another for lions, tigers, and leopards; one with a large pond for amphibians (where, Barnum said, the elephants were allowed to visit for a bath); another for other caged animals; and stables for up to seven hundred horses. A nursery tended to newborn animals, and a number of shops repaired the equipment, from gilded chariots to harnesses. All of the structures were heated by steam to an appropriate temperature.
A circus ring was set up to give performers a chance to practice in the off-season. Many of the hundreds of performers—and those who supported them, who raised the tents and handled other equipment, and who trained and cared for the animals—would make their homes in Bridgeport or thereabouts, establishing the city as an important circus town well into the next century, a boon to rival the establishment of East Bridgeport three decades earlier.3
In the middle of November, while all of this frenzied construction was under way, Barnum was in lower Manhattan wrapping up his affairs with his former circus partners when “he was seized by a violent pain in the abdominal region” and “with much difficulty” gotten to Samuel Hurd’s house at 334 Lexington Avenue. Several doctors examined him, including his family doctor from Bridgeport, and they agreed that he had a blockage in his intestine. They gave him morphine for the pain, and for more than a week he was critically ill. By Thanksgiving Day, November 25, he was able to sit up and visit with friends at Hurd’s, but he was sickened again in early December. A violent inability to keep food down dropped his weight from 215 pounds to an alarming 144. By the middle of the month, he asked that all the congregations in Bridgeport pray “for His blessings to rest upon me,” and there was real fear that he would die. (Even in extremis, he or someone he knew managed to get his appeal to the churches published in the New-York Times.) Barnum himself later wrote that he spent “many weeks between life and death.” By the spring he was well enough to travel to Florida to complete his recovery, but he did not return north until April, and so missed the grand opening of the Barnum & London Circus at his Hippodrome site, which was now known as Madison Square Garden.4
The arrangements by his new partners more than satisfied Barnum. Half a million people watched as the new circus snaked its way through the crowded streets on Saturday night, March 26, 1881, beginning and ending at the Garden. The parade featured twenty elephants large and small, golden chariots, car after car containing animal cages—some drawn by wild animals ranging from camels to zebras—open cages of tigers and leopards with their trainers, a dozen riders on horseback in military uniforms representing as many nations, Gen. and Mrs. Tom Thumb in their tiny carriage, four brass bands, a steam calliope, a chariot full of bagpipers, and much more, all illuminated by torchlight, fireworks, limelight, and electric lights. As the Tribune succinctly put it, “The procession was very long.” People paid up to $10 for a spot in a window overlooking the parade route.
Two days later, when the circus opened in Madison Square Garden, admission was fifty cents, half that for children under nine. “The only drawback,” a writer for the Herald said of the combined circus performing in three rings surrounded by a hippodrome track, “was that the spectator was compelled to receive more than his money’s worth. . . . While his head was turned in one direction, he felt that he was losing something good in another.” Among the attractions was the baby elephant, not yet named, that had brought the circuses together, “now one year old and still nursing,” as an advertisement for the show put it. The circus paid all expenses for nearly a hundred newspapermen from outposts along the route that the show would follow to come to New York for its grand parade and opening show. Freebies for journalists were nothing new, especially in the entertainment business, but to appeal for good press coverage on this scale, and to assure it for the months the circus would be out on the road, was positively Barnumesque. As the showman himself put it, the effort and expense yielded “a magnificent return.”5
After a short run in New York, the circus went to Washington, where Barnum met it on his return from Florida, feeling well enough to call on the newly inaugurated President James A. Garfield, to whom he had sent a congratulatory and promotional letter in March, headed “No office wanted!” and including an eerie expression of hope: “Do please have the kindness to live, and then our country will be blessed.” (President Garfield would be shot a few months later and die of his wounds in September.) Barnum gathered endorsements for the show from the president, who called him “the Kris Kringle of America,” and other Washington worthies. He also had time in April to sue the Philadelphia Sun for writing that he did not own the circus but only leased his name to it. The newspaper relented and the suit was withdrawn.6
As further evidence of his recovery, he, Nancy, and his grandson Clinton Hallett Seeley—Pauline’s oldest son—sailed to England in May, staying for a month, after which he reported that he was now “invigorated by that finest of all tonics, a sea-voyage.” In August he presented to his native village of Bethel a comically oversized Baroque bronze fountain topped by a statue of Triton. The fountain had originally been placed just beyond the fence at Waldemere, sized for its distance from the house and its backdrop of Long Island Sound. Saxon writes that Barnum tried to give the thing to Bridgeport, but when its Common Council demurred, he dropped it on Bethel instead. The day of the presentation, August 19, 1881, turned into a village holiday, with a large crowd before which Barnum gave a nostalgic homecoming speech about growing up there. Even given his warm memories of his boyhood, Barnum concluded that the present was “a more charitable and enlightened age,” evidence that “the world is continually growing wiser and better.”7
Barnum’s optimism might have been enhanced by the recovery of his health but also by how well the new combined circus was doing on the road. It would travel more than twelve thousand miles in 1881, before closing for the season in Arkansas in November, having netted more than $400,000. The next year the show would clear more than $600,000, and it would be profitable every remaining year of Barnum’s life.
Early in 1881 there had been some testing of the limits of authority on both sides in the new arrangement, and several of Barnum’s people left when they felt preempted by the London Circus managers. Hutchinson, nicknamed Lord Hutchinson by Barnum’s people, was especially irksome to them. He had worked for Barnum before, as a sales agent for Struggles and Triumphs, and had been head of the concessions for the Cooper and Bailey circus. Now he was the financial officer for the new circus and Bailey’s second in command. When the frustration he caused induced Barnum’s bookkeeper for the show to quit, Barnum replaced him with a cousin of Nancy’s from England. The cousin, Benjamin Fish, who had also previously worked for a Barnum show, would discover that Bailey and Hutchinson’s bookkeeping left something to be desired. But he ultimately counseled that this unscrupulousness be overlooked because of how much money the show was making. The partnership held together, but it undoubtedly reassured Barnum to have a family member watching the show’s finances.
Besides employing Fish to look out for his interests on the road, Barnum had two other faithful employees in Bridgeport who helped him with his many interests. From offices on Main Street, Henry E. Bowser closely watched Barnum’s other business finances, assisted with his correspondence, and generally kept things moving smoothly with or without Barnum’s immediate involvement. Charles R. Brothwell, whose background was in public works, managed Barnum’s real-estate empire, advising him on purchases and sales, overseeing construction projects, and handling rental properties. Barnum’s holdings just in Bridgeport and East Bridgeport were estimated to be worth more than a million dollars in 1880, plus he owned a considerable amount of property in New York City, on Long Island, and in Colorado and a number of other heartland states. Barnum liked to call Bowser and Brothwell his “Busy B’s,” and they seem to have been as loyal and honest as they were busy.8
But it was another B, James Anthony Bailey, who was undoubtedly the great find of Barnum’s later business life. Bailey was a showman through and through, even acquiring his surname from a circus advance man named F. H. Bailey, who hired him at the age of fourteen. Named James McGinnis when he was born in Detroit on July 4, 1847, the boy lost both his parents by the age of eight and was afterward treated as the Cinderella of his guardians’ family. “I was made to work like a dog,” he later said. “On the slightest provocation I was whipped. . . . I was kept working so hard that I was always late at school, so I was continually being whipped by the teacher and kept after school.” He ran away from this unhappy arrangement at twelve, barefoot and wearing “a big straw hat”; his “only possession was a jackknife, with one broken blade.” He worked for a farmer until he met Bailey in Pontiac, Michigan, and after that did a variety of jobs, including posting bills for the circus before working in 1865 as clerk to a sutler (a civilian who sold provisions to the army) for Sherman’s army near the end of the Civil War.
After the war, back in the show line, he eventually saved enough money to buy into a circus, and by 1874 he was half owner of Cooper & Bailey’s International Allied Shows. That circus went on an extended tour in 1876, sailing from San Francisco, making its way through the Pacific to Australia, Tasmania, Java, New Zealand, and from there to Peru, around Cape Horn, and eventually up to Rio de Janeiro. The circus made money on the Pacific part of the tour but lost many animals on the rough and lengthy passage to Peru, and the South American tour did not pay. When they returned to New York in December 1878, they restored themselves by buying the Great London Circus and its menagerie with what money they had left and soon became the threat to Barnum that led to the uniting of the two major shows.9
Bailey and Barnum were different in striking ways, but ways that turned out to be complementary. As the lion tamer George Conklin, who worked for what became Barnum & Bailey, recalled:
Barnum was a big, strong man; Bailey was small and thin; Barnum was seldom troubled; Bailey was always anxious. There was never a man who loved publicity more than Barnum, while Bailey disliked personal notoriety. . . . He enjoyed best being the great silent power that made the show go and grow. . . . Bailey was the first man to appear in the morning, and no detail was too small for him to consider.10
Bailey was extremely hardworking, not only the first man up when the circus was on the road but continuously in evidence as he kept personal tabs on every aspect of the show. Yet he was also extremely taciturn. According to Conklin, “he seldom spoke to anyone round the show except on business,” but instead was often seen nervously “chewing away on an elastic band, and slowly turning his pocketknife between a thumb and forefinger.” By the time he teamed up with Bailey and Hutchinson, Barnum, who had for most of his career also sweated the details, was perfectly happy to be the face of the circus, to meet with presidents, create publicity stirs, and make occasional forays to England to find new acts, while leaving the day-to-day operations to his partners. On his seventy-eighth birthday (one day after Bailey’s forty-first), Barnum wrote to Bailey, “You manage [the circus] ten times better than I could do it, & I have no fault to find.”11
That anxiety Conklin alludes to led to some serious health problems for Bailey, including one breakdown in the mid-1880s that required him to leave the circus and sell out his share. On his own seventy-fifth birthday, Barnum wrote to Mrs. Bailey, expressing his concern for her husband and assuring her that he himself had had similar problems, having “overworked my brain.” His diagnosis was that Bailey too was suffering from too much “thinking” and advised her, “Mr. Bailey need not think of the show for six months to come.” He promised her that it was being run by good people and wouldn’t suffer from Bailey’s being away from it: “It will be well managed and make money.” It was an extremely kind letter meant to reassure the couple, and offered the parting advice, “Keep quiet in a cool place—don’t fret, but look on the bright side.” In that year, 1885, the circus netted $312,000, an improvement of about $35,000 over the previous year. Bailey did return in 1887 and would continue to manage the circus until his own death fifteen years after Barnum’s.12
THROUGHOUT THE 1880S, BARNUM OFTEN mentioned his age in his letters, with a combination of wonder that he had somehow grown so old and pride that he was still both enjoying life and prospering as a showman. Soon after his health crisis, he also began to focus on his mortality, in a practical but not a morbid way. In early 1882 he filed his will, a seventeen-page document he wrote out in longhand, which he continued to work on in his remaining years.
But at just this time his life offered one last act to compare with his promotions of Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind: the enormous African elephant known as Jumbo. The great beast—weighing seven tons and reaching nearly twelve feet at the highest point of his back—was said to be the largest elephant in the world and was undoubtedly the largest beast most people had ever seen.
Jumbo had been a beloved feature of the Royal Zoological Gardens in London’s Regent’s Park for more than sixteen years when one of the circus agents asked the superintendent of the zoo, a friend of Barnum’s named A. D. Bartlett, whether the Zoological Society might sell him. To his surprise, and Barnum’s shock, the society said yes. Barnum had “often looked wistfully on Jumbo, but with no hope of ever getting possession of him,” because the elephant had for so long been such a great attraction, providing rides to thousands and thousands of British children, including the royal offspring of Queen Victoria. Even Barnum himself had ridden the beast years before with Tom Thumb.
What Barnum didn’t know was that Jumbo had reached a time in life when male elephants can become obstreperous, owing to a hormonal condition known as musth, and according to Bartlett, Jumbo had on occasion “commenced to destroy the doors and other parts of his house, driving his tusks through the iron plates, splintering the timber in all directions.” Although these “fits of temporary insanity” were few and far between, Bartlett had become so worried about them that he asked the Zoological Society for a rifle powerful enough to kill Jumbo if one of his fits endangered the public or his keeper. Given this, the society was all too willing to let the elephant go for £2,000, or $10,000, which Barnum eagerly agreed to pay, plus all expenses of getting him out of the zoo and across the Atlantic.13
When news of the sale hit the British papers, pandemonium broke out. The reaction was partly wounded national pride: could what had become a cherished British institution really be allowed to go to America, and at the hands of a man who had once threatened to buy and remove Shakespeare’s birthplace? But even more powerful was the simple affection that so many British children and former children felt for the beast. They believed his absence would diminish the whole experience of growing up British. As Barnum put it, “The newspapers, from the London ‘Times’ down, daily thundered anathemas against the sale, and their columns teemed with communications from statesmen, noblemen, and persons of distinction advising that the bargain should be broken at all risk.” Queen Victoria herself telegraphed Bartlett asking for the facts of the case, and the Prince of Wales demanded that Bartlett explain in person how the sale had taken place. Both royals then denounced it. The great critic John Ruskin, a fellow of the Zoological Society, also decried the sale as “disgraceful to the City of London and dishonorable to common humanity,” and declared himself “not in the habit of selling my old pets or parting with my old servants” because “I find them subject occasionally . . . to fits of ill-temper.”14
A legal challenge to the contract between Barnum and the society led to a temporary injunction preventing Jumbo’s removal, but the suit was soon rebuffed in court and the injunction lifted. British schoolchildren contributed to a subscription meant to buy Jumbo back, and the Daily Telegraph wired Barnum from London, asking the terms necessary to change the showman’s mind. Barnum’s reply was that he would not undo the deal for even £100,000—and as the paper’s cable had offered for him to “answer, prepaid, unlimited,” Barnum took the free opportunity to toot his horn as a showman and toss in some advertising language about his circus.15
At the same time, the London correspondents for American newspapers managed to rouse national pride in the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, then, what became known as Jumbomania broke out, with a flood of Jumbo-inspired paraphernalia, poems, songs, letters, and other tributes. People flocked to Regent’s Park for one last viewing, augmenting the zoo’s income, Barnum claimed, by £400 per day, which he regretfully and to his own mind graciously allowed the society to keep despite his now owning the exhibit.
In February an attempt was made to walk Jumbo from the zoo to a ship, but as soon as the beast got outside the gates of the familiar zoological gardens he let out a trumpet call, lay down in the street, and refused to budge. When Barnum’s agent cabled for advice, the showman replied, “Let him lay there for a week if he wants to. It is the best advertisement in the world.” But the next day Jumbo was allowed to return to his enclosure in the zoo, from which he would not move for several weeks. During this time he received visits from the archbishop of Canterbury and his wife, dukes and duchesses, and the Lord Mayor of London. It was also during this time that the hysteria to keep him in London reached a high point.16
Eventually Barnum’s agent realized that the reason for Jumbo’s stubbornness was that Matthew Scott, the keeper who had attended him since the elephant had first arrived at the zoo from France at age five in 1865, was working at cross-purposes with the attempt to get Jumbo moving. Not only had Scott received a substantial amount of income from the fare for each of what he estimated to have been “hundreds of thousands” of Jumbo rides that he had overseen, but many of his countrymen let Scott know that it was his patriotic duty to discourage his charge from decamping. First, Barnum’s agent offered to quintuple Scott’s wages, and when that didn’t work, he threatened to fire him. The very next day, March 22, Jumbo assented to leave his enclosure for a specially built box on wheels that would carry him to the ship and also serve as his new quarters throughout his journey to New York.17
According to Scott, “thousands of people, many of them women, tramped all the way to [St. Katharine] Docks, six long miles, to see him off.” Jumbo was fed more than the usual amount of buns and other unhealthy treats along the way, including two bottles of ale. After he was finally transported by lighter to the oceangoing vessel Assyrian Queen, the odd ritual of a luncheon celebration, with many invited guests from the Zoological Society, took place. At the luncheon, William Newman, a Barnum employee known as “Elephant Bill,” who had been sent over to England to help with the removal and transport of Jumbo, received a gold medal from the society “for his coolness and skill in managing the monster,” as the Tribune put it. Scott and Newman took turns on the fifteen-day voyage of sitting with their charge, whose cage was little bigger than he was. Although the passage was generally rough and for the first two days Jumbo was seasick and wouldn’t eat, much of the time after that was spent in eating or drinking. A typical day’s nourishment on the ship included “ten or fifteen loaves of bread, two bushels of oats, three quarts of onions, a bushel of biscuit, two hundred pounds of hay,” and as many treats as those onboard could feed him. “He was never stinted in his supply of liquor,” the Sun reported, “and when he condescended to drink water, took in ten to fifteen gallons at a time.”18
On the morning after his arrival at Quarantine, Barnum and Hutchinson went out by boat to meet Jumbo up the river near the Jersey City piers, where the Assyrian Queen had anchored. Its captain, John Harrison, hailed them with the shout, “Jumbo is all right; fine as silk.” Barnum “clambered nimbly” on board the ship, and “his eyes sparkled with boyish eagerness” to see Jumbo again. When he was led down to the big cage, he cried out, “Dear old Jumbo,” and “seemed inclined to weep.” He declared that he had spent $50,000 acquiring the beast, at which point Hutchinson coughed theatrically and suggested that the real amount was more like $30,000. Barnum asked those assembled how high the elephant could reach with his trunk, hazarding a guess of forty-nine feet. His figure was again challenged when a keeper responded that the real height was a mere twenty-six feet. To which Barnum complacently replied, “If I were a showman, I would have exaggerated it, but there’s nothing like the truth.” Barnum objected when Jumbo was given a quart of whiskey but did not prevent him from drinking it, and soon after he himself had drunk a ginger pop, he departed.19
It took the rest of the day and evening to get Jumbo to Madison Square Garden, as he was lifted in his traveling box onto a barge, which was pulled by a tug to a Manhattan pier, and then a derrick set the box on a flat wagon on land. All of these operations proved difficult and time-consuming. Barnum had sent sixteen horses to pull the wagon, but even with the assistance of two ropes, each two hundred feet long and manned by hundreds of people in the crowd, the wagon would not move. Elephants were then sent for from Madison Square Garden, but eventually the wagon was pulled to more solid ground and moved onto Broadway, only there meeting the two rescue elephants. It was 1 a.m. when Jumbo finally reached the Garden, but because the box was too large to fit through the entrance, he was unceremoniously left outside, his cage covered with tarps to protect him from the cold. The next morning, Scott coaxed him out of the cage, into the Garden, and around the hippodrome track to his new, if temporary home.20
Barnum wrote in his edition for 1882 that it took only two weeks of exhibiting “the most famous beast alive” to earn back his investment. Although he would travel tens of thousands of miles by rail for the better part of four seasons, Jumbo’s duties remained relatively few: to march in the circus parade into new towns, to give rides, to eat appalling amounts of treats, and to be on exhibit as part of the larger menagerie. Not for him the tricks and dancing of the thirty smaller performing elephants in the Greatest Show on Earth: given his extraordinary size, his dancing might well have been on a par with Barnum’s. Under the showman’s teetotaler management, Jumbo was no longer permitted to indulge his taste for whiskey, but he was allowed a nightly quart of ale alongside Scott, who would down his own quart.21
Something about his enormous size, coupled with his gentleness, opened people’s hearts to Jumbo, and he became the greatest attraction the circus offered for the time he was with it, drawing many people for the single purpose of seeing him. He would bring in more than a million dollars in the four seasons he was in America, Bailey estimated. So it was a tremendous emotional loss to two nations, and a financial loss to the Barnum show, when on the evening of September 15, 1885, Jumbo was struck by the engine of a Grand Trunk freight train outside St. Thomas, Ontario. Scott had been leading both Jumbo and a relatively diminutive elephant named Tom Thumb along a main track. The circus cars were on a track on one side, and a ten-foot embankment on the other. The train, which had been unscheduled, whistled down an incline, trying unsuccessfully to stop, first striking Tom Thumb and breaking his leg and then crushing Jumbo, who was unwilling to go down the embankment and was too large to fit in the space between the tracks. After being struck from behind, Jumbo was pushed a hundred feet. A disconsolate Scott tried to soothe his groaning friend for the long minutes until he was gone. Apparently unwilling to enlist the other elephants for the morbid task, those in charge rallied more than a hundred circus workers to pry and pull Jumbo’s corpse off the tracks and over the embankment, where the grieving Scott lay with it all night.22
News of the tragedy went out by wire to the far reaches of the earth, and Barnum heard it the next morning at his favorite hotel in New York, the Murray Hill. Whatever his true feelings about the death, he could not resist tastelessly telling a reporter that although he had planned to return Jumbo to England for a visit, “while men propose, locomotives dispose.” On the one hand, Barnum let it be known that he valued Jumbo at $300,000, but on the other hand it was to his competitive advantage to somewhat underplay the blow this represented to his show, especially at a time when Bailey was on leave for his mental health and ready to sell out his share. Barnum told the press that a taxidermist was hurrying to the site to preserve Jumbo’s hide and skeleton. Perhaps because so many animals died in the circus business, Barnum had had the foresight nearly two years earlier to make arrangements with Henry A. Ward, of Ward’s Natural Science establishment in Rochester, to be telegraphed immediately “if we lose Jumbo (which heaven forbid!)” so that he could immediately go about his work. Ward went to the site when learning of Jumbo’s demise, and Barnum wired him there, “Go ahead, save skin and skeleton. I will pay you justly and honorably.” It was one of the most heroic jobs of taxidermy ever. The skin alone weighed more than 1,500 pounds, and the tons of rotting remains were consigned to a huge bonfire as the skeleton was exposed.23
By the next season, both the hide (somewhat overstuffed to make Jumbo seem even bigger than he had been) and the skeleton were ready to go on display with the circus, mounted on wheels so that they could be pulled in the circus parade. Meanwhile Barnum had purchased from the Royal Zoological Society an elephant named Alice, which had been presented without much evidence as Jumbo’s “wife” before he had left the zoo in London and was now being called Jumbo’s “widow” in the British press. As the supposedly grieving widow, she followed the mounted Jumbo specimens in the parade, and other elephants meant to be her attendants followed her, having been trained to wipe their eyes in sorrow with black cloths. Eventually the stuffed Jumbo would go to Tufts College (whose athletic teams are to this day known as the Jumbos) and the skeleton to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in whose collection it remains.24
Bailey officially retired from the circus soon after Jumbo’s death, with Barnum and Hutchinson buying him out and bringing in a rich circus owner from Chicago, William W. “Chilly Billy” Cole, and Bailey’s former partner James E. Cooper, who ran the menagerie. Barnum wrote Bailey a friendly letter saying how much he admired him and expressing his hope that he would fully recover and eventually get back in business with him.25
The new arrangement did not satisfy Barnum as the old one had, in part because the new contract left him only a three-eighths owner, so for the first time he did not have majority control and had to negotiate with his three partners. He got along fine with Hutchinson and Cole, but he and Cooper tangled over what was to be done with the animals in the menagerie when they died. Cooper felt strongly that the dead animals should be sold and not given away to the Smithsonian or elsewhere, as it had been Barnum’s wont to do. What might seem like a minor problem deeply irritated Barnum. Although in 1886 the circus visited 144 cities in twenty-one states and the next year the number of cities was up to 175, the profits for both years were merely satisfactory.
By the end of the 1887 season, however, Bailey was indeed recovered and Barnum reached out to him. Yes, he was ready to return to the circus, and Barnum’s other partners took their share of the profits and “withdrew from the firm, with my free consent.” For $150,000, Bailey bought his way back into an equal share with Barnum, and one of the most famous partnerships in entertainment history, Barnum & Bailey, was officially born.26