IN 1999, ON A whim, a building contractor and shrunken-head collector named Billy Jamieson bought the contents of Canada’s oldest museum. In spite of its age, the museum was hardly distinguished. In fact, it was considered a joke. Jamieson’s purchase included around 700,000 objects: not just the animals, birds, shells, fossils and freaks of nature that had constituted the museum’s original natural history collection, but Egyptian mummies, Chinese weapons, Japanese art, South Pacific war shields, Native American beadwork, model dinosaurs and the base of a giant redwood. As a collection, it was, literally, all over the map.
So when Billy turned around and sold the Egyptian artifacts to an American museum for a price rumored to be at least double what he had paid for the entire collection, the collecting world simply snickered. But when the American museum’s curators declared one of the mummies to be the long-lost pharaoh Ramesses I, the same world reeled. Egyptologists professed amazement, and a flurry of art dealers and reporters declared they were shocked, shocked to find there were valuable objects in this outdated curiosity cabinet, a ragtag jumble of shoddy specimens, mislabeled artifacts and oddities, ancestor to Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, rather than the British Museum. No one imagined the place might hold items of value, let alone ancient kings. Its provenance, after all, was Niagara Falls.
As it turned out, Ramesses wasn’t the only treasure to be found in the Niagara Falls Museum. Billy found two items casually draped around the neck of a wax Hawaiian warrior—a feather cape and a necklace made of whalebone, ivory and human hair. Rather nice, he thought. The museum catalog—full of maddeningly vague entries such as “Central African Bow,” “Chinese Paper Fan” and “African Penile Cover”—didn’t say what the cape and necklace were: it subsumed both under the heading “Wax Figures.” Billy had the two items cleaned and listed them with Sotheby’s. The necklace sold for $313,750, and the feather cape for $335,750. It was a new record for Polynesian art.
Somehow, Billy Jamieson, the contractor-turned-connoisseur, saw what a century of visitors and scholars had failed to notice: the curiosity cabinet at the brink of the waterfall was a treasure trove.
I start digging into the history of the Niagara Falls Museum because its reputation seems to track Niagara’s; like the Falls, it went from class act to carnival to kitsch. Historical records aren’t even clear on exactly when the museum was born. Its founder, Thomas Barnett, was born in Birmingham, England, in 1799. He trained as a cabinetmaker, but arrived in Canada in 1824 and opened a museum sometime around 1827 in Kingston, Ontario. A local newspaper paid a visit to his Kingston museum in 1830:
We yesterday visited Mr. Barnett’s Museum, in Church St., and were at once delighted and surprised to meet with so fine a collection of Natural Curiosities. It is only two years since Mr. Barnett commenced the laudable undertaking, and to his individual industry and skill are the public indebted for as beautiful a collection of Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Insects, &c. as British North America can afford—all prepared in the best manner, and arranged with great taste and judgment. By frequently visiting the Museum, the inhabitants of Kingston will at once promote the cause of science, and reward the unwearied exertions of a meritorious individual.
Kingston readers seem to have ignored the reporter’s praise, because shortly thereafter, Barnett relocated to Niagara. The year 1831 found him at the Falls advertising “a splendid collection of natural and artificial curiosities” with “upward of 700 stuffed animals—from the hummingbird to the elk…including the choice specimens of birds, reptiles, fish, insects, and minerals of every hue and variety.” Visitors to the new Niagara Falls Museum would find it educational, he assured them, as “the classical manner in which the numerous objects composing this selection are arranged affords a favourable opportunity for prosecuting the science of Natural History.”
Thomas Barnett was a serious man: in the most commonly printed photograph of him, he peers out with an almost simian frown, face flanked by the bushy sideburns of an eminent Victorian, thick brows drawn together with what looks like worry. Overcoated and wool-trousered, lacking the mercurial air of the period’s other great museum man, P. T. Barnum, Barnett looks the man of science, not the showman. It’s said he used to walk his dog Skipper, born with no front legs, around Niagara Falls, the dog’s legless front end propped on wheels. For Barnum this stroll would have been pure showmanship, the dog dressed in a coat with the museum’s name on it, the wheeled contraption fitted out with bells. Thomas Barnett is different; he simply wanted to walk his dog. When Skipper died, Barnett mounted the dog and his skeleton separately, as Barnum had done with Jumbo the elephant, but without the attendant hoopla. Barnum issued progress reports on “the world’s largest taxidermy job” and unveiled the overstuffed elephant at a media gala featuring the elephant’s mourning “widow” and a gelatin dessert said to be made from Jumbo’s tusks. Former cabinetmaker Thomas Barnett simply mounted his dead dog beautifully and added him to his freaks of nature display.
At Billy Jamieson’s apartment, I pick up Skipper. He’s lighter than I expect; he looks so real, it’s surprising to heft him and be reminded he’s just a dog skin wrapped around a rag form. He has little bony stumps in the place of front legs. Barnett mounted him sitting up on his hind legs, and his face has an almost inquiring look, ears pert, snout lifted. Balanced between his ears is a label from the museum. Billy is upstairs, working in his study, and I feel vaguely furtive about touching his collection. I put Skipper down and take his picture, head-on. He looks undignified wearing the typed piece of paper, so I remove it and take his picture again. He regards me, so eager and hopeful that I can’t help giving him a pat. His fur is coarse and dry. I put the label back where it was and go look at two lambs with deformed faces. One of them appears to have its head on upside down.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Mr. Barnett’s museum was the second-best-known attraction at Niagara Falls. It’s mentioned in the first Falls guidebook, and the second edition, printed in 1835, declares that “the rooms are arranged very tastefully so as to represent a forest scene…. There are bipeds and quadrupeds; birds, fishes, insects, shells and minerals; all calculated to delight the eye, improve the understanding, and mend the heart.” The museum was one of the few spots early mapmakers labeled on the Canadian side. Guides pointed out its local interest—regional flora and fauna, as well as Native American artifacts—and recommended its souvenirs. Barnett would even mount dead animals brought in by visitors. “Few persons visit Niagara Falls without calling at Barnett’s Museum,” wrote the Boston Journal in 1852, “and few are disappointed.”
The museum grew along with the Niagara tourist trade. Barnett built a new building in 1837. In 1848, the first bridge over the Niagara Gorge was completed, connecting the Canadian side more easily with the busier American town; visitors no longer had to wait for the Maid of the Mist ferry to cross the river. Hoping to capitalize on the Canadian side’s subsequent growth, Barnett sent away to England in 1859 for architectural plans and built a larger and even more impressive museum. Said to have cost $140,000, the completed building was one of the grandest on either side of the river. Large windows let in light, and colonnaded terraces offered spectacular views. On its grounds were greenhouses, a pond stocked with waterfowl, Native American wigwams, and cages with buffalo, wolves, deer and birds. Barnett had an exclusive lease on a staircase down to the base of the Falls, where he rented boots, coats and guides to take visitors “behind the sheet” of water. Like the museum, “Behind the Sheet” quickly became a must-see.
As the number of visitors increased at the Falls, the number of attractions also mushroomed, creating a carnival atmosphere along both sides of the river. The American side was known as “the Midway,” the Canadian side “the Notorious Front.” Indian curiosity shops, observation towers and fenced-off vistas shared the streetscape with an array of sideshow attractions—freak shows, battle reenactments, panoramas, acrobatic acts, snake dens and Moorish palaces. And of course, there were drivers of hack cabs who took kickbacks for delivering passengers to certain attractions, barkers who ballyhooed patrons into shoddy shows, photographers who snapped a visitor’s picture and then threatened him if he wouldn’t buy it. By the middle of the nineteenth century, disparaging the rip-offs and tacky attractions had become almost as much a tradition as watching the waterfall. British crank George Warburton was typical: “The neighbourhood of the great wonder,” he declared in 1847, “is overrun with every species of abominable fungus—the growth of rank bad taste, with equal luxuriance on the English and the American sides—Chinese pagoda, menagerie, camera obscura, museum watch tower, wooden monument and old curiosity shops.” He doesn’t include Barnett’s museum in his list of travesties, only its new tower. Throughout the nineteenth century, the museum was held above the fray. It was, after all, designed to serve the same purpose for which people came to the Falls: the contemplation of nature, whether human, animal, vegetable or mineral.
“I have endeavored to establish an institution,” Barnett later wrote, “to which any Canadian might point with pride, an institution that should rank with other great museums of the world.” He collected endorsements from prominent scientific men of the era, including eminent Yale professor Benjamin Silliman, British dinosaur expert B. Waterhouse Hawkins, and naturalist Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz, who traded natural history specimens with Barnett, declared that the Niagara Falls Museum “unquestionably deserves the patronage of the public and the support of the government.” In 1859, a year in which 20,000 people visited his museum, Barnett applied for just such help from the Canadian provincial legislature, hoping to enlarge his museum further and gain the respectability to exchange objects with other museums. Every member of the parliamentary select committee appointed to investigate concluded that the museum was a valuable addition to the cultural life of the dominion, and should receive governmental support. Caught up in political struggles between Upper and Lower Canada, the Canadian legislature never considered his request.
The first time I visit Billy Jamieson to see what remains of the Niagara Falls Museum, he’s late for our appointment, because he’s walking his dachshund Ramses. I sit outside his warehouse building in the trendy Toronto fashion district, and after fifteen minutes he zooms into the driveway in a yellow Austin-Healey convertible, top down, dog on his lap, waving like a pop star.
A robust, fiftyish man, Billy has sparkly black eyes and straight black hair not unlike that on some of the shrunken heads he collects. His face is round, with the broadly defined features of a Mayan stone carving. He says he’s not one of the Seneca Jamiesons, though he looks like a Seneca, and his name is spelled in the Seneca way. He crackles with a gee-whiz sense of glee at his own luck, as you would expect of a man making loads of cash traveling to Amazonian jungles and South Pacific islands to buy carved skulls and shark-tooth daggers. He’s terminally busy: when you get him on the phone, he’s always on another phone too.
We take the elevator upstairs to his sprawling loft, packed with items from both the museum’s collection and his own. In two downstairs rooms, he has painted the walls red and installed cabinets and objects from the Niagara Falls Museum, attempting to re-create the feel of the museum circa 1860. Before he takes me to see them, he shows me around his apartment, crammed with objects ranging from the gorgeous to the grisly.
“You wanna know what things cost?” he asks brightly, charging around with an excited Ramses at his heels. “A shrunken head goes for fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. That shirt (a beaded Cheyenne war shirt) about a hundred thousand dollars.” He has just sold a baby mummy to a museum in Houston for $100,000, and he points it out in the corner of his living room. “They didn’t even see it!” he cries. “They bought it based on a picture!”
Willingness to talk openly about money is just one of the things that makes Billy unlike your average art dealer. Another is his cheerfully cavalier attitude toward his artifacts. “You wanna hold a shrunken head?” he asks, pulling one out of a case and weighing it in his hand like a grapefruit. “This one’s a white guy.” He smiles down at the surprised little face. Headshrinking, he tells me, is the only form of posthumous preservation that lets you recognize someone you knew in life. Eyes and mouth stitched shut, red hair and mustache bright, this guy still looks amazed at having been reduced to a citrus-sized trophy.
Billy Jamieson was born in Etobicoke, a suburban neighborhood in Toronto’s west end whose postwar sprawl reflected its middle class aspirations. His father was a brakeman for the Canadian National Railroad. When Billy was twelve, his parents divorced, and he went to live with his grandparents in Jacksonville, Florida. He didn’t go to college; when I ask him if he graduated high school, he waffles. As an adult, he worked construction, eventually becoming a building contractor. He did well. He bought a nice car. He got engaged.
Then, like Thomas Barnett, Billy Jamieson left the safety of the civilized building trades and waded into a howling wilderness, only to discover his connoisseur’s eye. It began in 1994, when he went to Ecuador to visit a shaman and drink some hallucinogenic ayuhuasca. His drug-fueled vision quest—ayuhuasca, according to Billy, is “like twenty years of therapy in one night”—had dramatic results: he canceled his marriage, quit his job and immersed himself in the life and art of the Shuar, an Ecuadorian warrior tribe known for shrinking heads. He got to know Tukúpi, a Shuar warrior and shaman known for killing twenty-two people. He attended healing ceremonies with Tukúpi and interviewed him about his infamous killing career. And he learned about headshrinking, becoming an expert in dating and distinguishing heads. He began to build a collection, which quickly branched out to include South American tribal art, then South Pacific and Indonesian artifacts. He bought what he liked, learning about it as he went. Back at home, he discovered an eager market for his heads, including buyers of the macabre-loving rock-star type as well as highbrow connoisseurs of tribal art.
He was still reinventing himself as a tribal art dealer on the fateful day in 1998 when he and a girlfriend took a stroll around the Niagara Falls Museum. The night before, he had drunk some opium tea and had a dream featuring Egyptian symbols and shapes. But he wasn’t drawn to the Egyptian artifacts at the Niagara Falls Museum; he liked their tribal art. Billy was looking to expand his collection of tribal art. He noticed the museum didn’t have a shrunken head. Maybe they could work out a trade?
Billy asked the man hanging around at the front desk if he was the manager. In fact, he was the owner, Jacob Sherman. Billy asked Sherman if he might be interested in trading some tribal artifacts for a shrunken head. Sherman said no, he didn’t like to tamper with the collection. Well then, Billy said on impulse, how about selling the lot?
The question came at the right time. Sherman was tired. The museum was financially strapped. Its collections needed more upkeep than he could provide, and the building, an old corset factory, was in need of repairs. The displays were outdated and the display copy full of factual errors. He had been reduced to bringing in traveling exhibits—moving model dinosaurs, reproductions of the British crown jewels—to boost attendance. It wasn’t working: visitorship lagged. A Nisga’a tribal council in northwestern British Columbia seemed to be the only party with any serious interest in the collection: they were demanding the return of a pair of native mummies. Scholars ignored the museum. Reporters made fun of it. Kids came to climb on the dinosaur models and ogle the three-eyed pig. Sherman had recently had to sandblast the tourist signatures off his whale skeleton.
“Make me an offer,” he told Billy.
The Barnett museum was antiquated long before Jacob Sherman inherited it. Based on the European model of the curiosity cabinet, or Wunderkammer (wonder chamber), early museums collected objects that were beautiful or strange. They made little distinction between the natural and the man-made, including paintings, scientific instruments and exotic artifacts along with animals, rocks and birds, displaying all of it with an eye toward aesthetics rather than explanation.
All that changed after The Origin of Species was published in 1859. In the wake of Darwin and a new taxonomic understanding of the natural world, scholars came to see early museums like Barnett’s, with their jumble of objects foreign and domestic, as signs of mental, if not moral, weakness. An article in an 1898 issue of Science magazine is typical: the author decries the “collecting instinct of man,” which, if not regulated, “can produce the most fantastic and inane combinations of objects.” Unlike the modern, truly scientific museum, which reflects “a conspectus of things, such as embodies the consensus of modern science,” older museums were “mixtures of oddities, monstrosities and perversions.” In such curiosity museums, the author declares, “art is not separated from natural history, nor from ethnology, and the eye of the beholder takes in at a glance the picture of a local worthy, a big fossil, a few cups and saucers, a piece of cloth from the South Seas, a war club or two, and very possibly a mummy.” He could have been describing Barnett’s museum exactly.
The corrective was large public museums like the Smithsonian, designed for education and research. These stately institutions, reflecting the era’s zeal for social reform, were managed by scientists and scholars whose mission was to explain the world. It followed that the world must be orderly and explicable. The products of culture—art, design, industry, arms—were moved into their own museums, increasingly sorted and separated into neat categories of human production: art, artifact, technology. Nature—plants, rocks, trees, animals and “primitive” human cultures—was relegated to the natural history museum. Freaks and oddities had no place in either world. Lacking logical explanation, they flew in the face of this newly ordered universe, where the spread of science across the globe meant, as the Science writer put it, “the world, the universe and even the life of man fall into orderly and necessary arrays of evolutionary stages.” So ceaseless was this march of knowledge that the author compares the advance of science to that of Alexander. Labeling the world—reducing its marvels to answers—is, after all, the first step in controlling it. It’s a straight line from curating to conquest.
A child of the early nineteenth century, Thomas Barnett based his museum on the Wunderkammer model. His true passion, and the center of his collection, was natural history. But unlike later museum curators, he didn’t exclude the works of man from that category. A self-taught collector like Billy Jamieson, he lined up shells, dried herbs, pinned insects and mounted animals for his museum. He was a gifted taxidermist, which is apparent when you look at the older specimens in Billy’s apartment: the birds and owls about to lift themselves into flight, the alligator ready to clamp down on your leg, the two-headed calf and three-eyed pig regarding you mournfully with long-suffering eyes. Barnett even created “habitats,” setting up realistic dioramalike displays with elaborate painted backdrops. He was proud of his northern whale skeleton and the mastodon he acquired after it was dug out of a marsh about 130 miles west of the Falls in 1857. But he was also proud of a collage made of moths and beans laid out in striking patterns, and another of dried seaweeds organized to look like a basket of flowers. For Barnett, the museum was not simply its collection, but the art used in displaying it.
“This past week I have been engaged most of the time in learning to stuff birds under my father’s guidance,” wrote his nineteen-year-old son Sidney. “I never imagined that it was so beautiful an art before now.”
Sidney Barnett’s journal offers up a gripping window on the life of a nineteenth-century museum family. The young Sidney, raised to take over his father’s business, worked as a guide for the trip “Behind the Sheet,” and as a salesman in the museum’s store. Behind the scenes, he learned to wire up skeletons, mount animals and create displays. He sometimes spent days working on a single mount, trying hard to please his meticulous father.
In his free time, he took long walks with friends, sketched the Falls and read, always with an eye to improving his mind. He frequently visited one or the other of several young ladies in town—always with a nice bouquet from the museum’s gardens—and always insisting to his journal later that he would never marry. He dreamed of bigger things. Like any young man, Sidney longed to step out of his father’s footsteps and make his mark on the world. Upon turning twenty, he asked his journal, “Were I to die at this moment, would the world lament my death? No! for it does not even know me by name. I must now certainly do something more than I have been doing, or my existence on this earth will have been a drag, instead of a buoy and a light.”
Even as he spent his days peddling Indian artifacts to tourists—he was especially good at chatting up the young ladies—Sidney cast about for his ticket to renown. He got some sketches published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. He took classes in daguerrotyping, struggling to master the difficult new technology. He set himself reading programs and wrote essays to improve his style. He thought up new lines of business for the museum and carefully noted the ups and downs of the tourist trade. But he also dreamed of exotic locales and distant cultures. He studied Spanish and pored over the travel journals of his hero, Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Travel, he wrote, “may be the idol that I worship.”
Slowly, over the three years his journal records, Sidney Barnett figured out how to put the two things together. In August of 1855, he set it down. “I have now a great desire to travel,” he wrote, “and I think I could be of some use to my father in so doing for I think I have a taste for collecting curiosities, both material and artificial. Thus if I were successful, I could materially aid our institution in raising it up higher and higher until it called the attention of all the scientific men of the world to its importance and sterling worth.”
Two years later, he realized his wish. His father came up with the funds to send him on a trip to Europe and then down the Nile. His companion would be a colorful family friend, Dr. James Douglas of Quebec; a man who, 140 years later, would provide the final key to Billy Jamieson’s transformation from shrunken-head collector to art dealer.
Originally from Scotland, Dr. Douglas trained as a physician, but like Sidney Barnett, he craved far-flung adventure. He shipped out as a surgeon on a whaling ship, patching up harpoon injuries and treating sick sailors. Then he signed on as medical advisor for the principality of Poyais in Central America. This utopian new colony, funded by government bonds issued in London and ruled by a swashbuckling Scottish soldier, was said to be crammed with rich land, untapped resources and hardworking English-speaking natives. Poyais sounded too good to be true, and it was: it was the invention of a con man named Gregor MacGregor, who sold land, government appointments and Poyais scrip to a few hundred eager colonists, organized their departure and then skedaddled to Paris. Two boatloads of hopeful immigrants landed not in a thriving new nation but in the inhospitable wilderness of the Mosquito Coast. Most died of malaria and yellow fever; others committed suicide. The ones who could get out, did. Douglas, deathly ill, was shipped out on a boat that happened to be going to New York. Around fifty Poyais survivors eventually straggled back to London, where the newspapers jumped on their tale. The fraud became a national scandal and MacGregor was jailed. In the States, Dr. Douglas got well enough to take the Northern Tour. In Utica, he met a girl and, in no hurry to go home and take his place as one of the duped, decided to settle in upstate New York.
Highly admired as a surgeon, Douglas began teaching at the medical college in Auburn, New York. Unfortunately, like many nineteenth-century medical professors, Dr. Douglas had to sidestep grave-robbing laws and prospect for cadavers for his teaching demonstrations. Medical professionals were careful to dig up indigent people or slaves; local authorities turned a blind eye to the practice. Dr. Douglas got into trouble when he took the body of what he thought was a homeless man. The poor stiff turned out to be a local eminence; the corpse was recognized by a stagecoach driver who wandered into Douglas’s unlocked study.
“I guess I never expected to see my friend P. again,” the driver remarked dryly. Douglas, who had already had one wrist-slapping for grave-robbing, extracted a vow of silence from the driver, but, on second thought, decided it prudent to hop in his sleigh and make for Canada. He and his wife hitched up the horses and crossed the frozen St. Lawrence, arriving in Montreal that night.
In Canada, Douglas again became a well-respected local doctor, eventually founding Quebec’s first humane asylum for the mentally ill. But Canadian weather was a bit more than he had bargained for, a problem he solved by indulging his passion for all things Egypt every winter. In 1857, he took Sidney Barnett along.
For Sidney, the trip to Egypt was his life’s turning point. He was no longer a dreamy youth but a traveling museum man, an explorer like his hero Humboldt. Local newspapers reported on his travels and published his letters from abroad. Upon his return, he was asked to give a public lecture about Egypt. His father’s museum added his acquisitions to its collection. The ambitious young man was now an expert.
Sidney began to travel whenever there was money for it, collecting specimens wherever he went. He collected birds and other animals in Cuba and South America, coins in the ancient world, and pottery and swords from the Far East. In 1859, when the museum moved to its fancy new home, it advertised new collections of ancient and modern coins and Chinese relics, as well as some new mummies.
What makes any object valuable is its story. Museums call that story “provenance.” At some point, someone made up provenances for the Niagara Falls mummies. They were clearly fake, as debunkers loved to point out. A newspaper headline from 1996 is typical: “Museum’s Collections Are Bogus.” The reporter does not moderate his derision. General Ossipumphneferu, who still bears a scar from fending off an elephant attack on King Tutmosis? Balderdash. Princess Amenhotep, daughter of the king who built Thebes? Not likely. As far back as the thirties, a visiting Egyptologist had called the Egyptian collection “comic.” Modern institutions value truth and verifiability more than the ability to weave a good yarn. Sidney Barnett’s mummies were tainted by their false tales.
“To tell you the truth, I was more interested in the Native American artifacts than the mummies,” Billy tells me. “I knew the mummies were worth something, but I thought the American Indian material was worth more than it was.” Although he won’t disclose the amount of the offer he made for Sherman’s collection—friends of his guess it was around half a million dollars—Billy cheerily admits he didn’t have the money on hand. Needing to sell something immediately to fund the purchase, he called a few experts and asked about the museum’s Native American artifacts and Egyptian relics. A curator from the Royal Ontario Museum named Gayle Gibson had spent some time with the museum’s Egyptian collection while working on her master’s degree, and she assured Billy that the coffins, at least, were worth something. Sotheby’s appraised the coffins—policy forbids them from appraising mummies—at $200,000. Billy asked for $2 million. “I just liked that number,” he says cheerily in The Mummy Who Would Be King, a NOVA documentary about the Ramesses mummy that aired in January 2006.
Billy had to offer the artifacts to Canadian institutions first. As museum after museum in Canada passed on the collection, Peter Lacovara heard about it. Newly appointed curator of ancient art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University, Lacovara was eager to expand the museum’s Egyptian holdings. He flew to Canada to look at the coffins, and promptly recommended buying them. Back home in Atlanta, the museum organized a hasty fund drive to raise the purchase price. Schoolkids sent in their pennies, museum members wrote checks, and local businesses came up with the rest.
“I had the people from the Carlos Museum in one room and the people from the Niagara Falls Museum in another room, and I was going back and forth between them,” Billy tells me, grinning. “I closed on the museum purchase and the sale of the mummies at the same time.”
Part of why Billy asked so much for the Egyptian artifacts was that he had some reason to believe one of the mummies might be an interesting find. Gail had told him that the mummy with the crossed arms looked royal. Earlier Egyptologists had taken an interest in it; one German scholar had even notarized a statement in which he declared his belief that it was a pharaoh. Radiocarbon analysis had confirmed that the mummy was at least 3,000 years old, which indicated royalty: before 600 B.C., crossed arms were reserved for pharaohs. But even that was not enough for scholars to take seriously. Then Billy was contacted by an archivist and book-dealer named Hugh MacMillan. MacMillan told Billy that the grave-robber-cum-relic-finder Dr. Douglas had written a travel journal about his trip to Egypt called Honeymoon on the Nile. As soon as Billy saw it, he knew it would make a difference to the Michael Carlos Museum. It was the kind of story they could tell.
James Douglas published Honeymoon on the Nile in 1861. In it, he described how he acquired an excellent mummy for the Barnett museum from a well-known antiquities trader named Mustapha Aga Ayat. Ayat was the middleman for deals between European tourists eager to own a piece of ancient Egypt and Egyptian sellers who had “come into” artifacts. It was widely known that one of Ayat’s mummy connections was a family of tomb robbers with the name Abd el-Rassul. The Abd el-Rassuls—allegedly while hunting up a lost goat—had stumbled upon a cache of royal mummies in the cliffs of Deir el-Bahri. They lived off the find for years, selling mummies and tomb artifacts to people like Sidney Barnett and James Douglas. Eventually, authorities grew suspicious at the number of royal artifacts coming onto the market, and family members were questioned. One of the clan ratted the others out and the jig was up. The cache was “officially” discovered in 1881. The coffin of Ramesses I was in it. It was empty.
Billy sent the Michael Carlos Museum a copy of Dr. Douglas’s journal. For the first time, they had a plausible explanation of how a royal mummy made its way to the Niagara Falls Museum: through Mustapha Aga Ayat, the Abd el-Rassuls sold a royal mummy to Dr. Douglas for the Barnetts. The curators began to look at their mummy. At the Emory medical center, CAT scans showed the mummy’s preparation was consistent with procedures reserved for kings. A computerized analysis of the mummy’s skull placed him squarely in the New Kingdom’s spectacular 19th Dynasty, a family that ruled from 1292 to 1185 B.C., and whose famous rulers included Seti I and Ramesses II. Most of the 19th Dynasty’s mummies were accounted for, but its founder, Ramesses I, was still at large. All in all, it was enough to interest the Egyptian experts. The final determination fell to Zahi Hawass of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. Hawass flew to Atlanta and examined the mummy personally. Actually, he sniffed it; Hawass claims to be able to smell the difference between well-prepared royal mummies and their reeking plebeian counterparts. One look, a couple of whiffs, and Hawass declared the mummy likely to be Ramesses I.
Sidney Barnett had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in acquiring for his father a curiosity that could make his name. He had managed at last to call “the attention of all the scientific men of the world” to the Niagara Falls Museum. But, alas, it did not confirm the museum’s “importance and sterling worth,” as he had hoped it would a century and a half earlier. Instead, the find was trumpeted as a bizarre anomaly, and Thomas Barnett, rather than being hailed as a man of taste and vision, was recalled as the father of a freak show. An article on the sale of the mummies in Toronto Life called Barnett “a man with all the acumen of a sideshow barker” who had “neither scruples nor the faintest idea what he owned.” In the NOVA documentary, scholars and Egyptologists have fun taking pot shots at the pharaoh’s former home. Peter Lacovara calls it “an ignominious kind of display,” and University of Bristol Egyptologist Aidan Dodson declares it “looked like the cases in a cheap jewelry store.” As footage shows Ramesses being packed into a box headed for Atlanta, the narrator intones that he is “no longer a creepy curiosity,” but “now a valuable archaeological artifact,” as if merely the fact of the mummy’s purchase has magically transformed him into something worth buying.
The Carlos Museum exhibited Ramesses for a season and then returned him to Egypt with fanfare worthy of P. T. Barnum. They subsequently posted the whole history of the mummy’s discovery on their Web site. But they wrote Billy Jamieson out of the story. In their version, they bought Ramesses directly from the Niagara Falls Museum. They too have a kind of story they like to tell.
The second time I visit Billy Jamieson, I ask to see any files he has on the Niagara Falls Museum. When I get there, he has unloaded a filing cabinet’s worth of paper onto his dining room table.
“Go through it if you want,” he says cheerily. A college film crew is hovering about; one of them is the son of an artist friend of Billy’s, and they’re making a documentary about him for school. He’s letting them film the electric chair he recently bought. They have dragged the chair into his living room.
“Oh my God, it’s Old Sparky,” I say when I see it.
“It’s one of the three original electric chairs made by Gustav Stickley for the State of New York,” Billy tells me. “Old Sparky is at Sing-Sing. This one was at Auburn Prison.” He tells me that one of Auburn’s prisoners, while waiting to be executed in the chair, carved a cane for the prison warden with the names of all the chair’s victims. He goes to his study and gets the cane. Then he launches into the story of how he believes the Auburn electric chair—said to have been destroyed in a 1929 prison riot—was snuck out and saved for decades. The confirmation has yet to occur; an ex–prison guard, currently on his death bed, is supposed to leave Billy a letter telling all. It can only be opened when he dies. As Billy talks, the college film crew follows him around, practically beside themselves with awe.
I take an armload of files to Billy’s study so the students can get on with their interview without me rattling paper in the background. I sit at his huge desk. A giant warthog glares down at me as I read. Just outside the door, the shrunken heads grimace from their glass cabinet, eyes and mouths sewn shut with angry black stitches. According to Billy, it keeps their souls trapped inside. In the living room, camera lights go on and Billy begins to talk.
“It all started about fifteen years ago,” I hear him say. “I was very interested in hallucinogenics….”
Billy’s files are full of letters from various experts on the objects in the Barnett collection. Some of the artifacts are incredibly valuable. Others might be: some of the South Sea items may have been acquired from an English museum that bought them from Captain Cook. A saddle may have been used by Wild Bill Hickock. Sitting Bull’s moccasins are almost surely authentic; with other items it’s impossible to say. Many things are barely worth anything, tourist trinkets acquired in China or South America by the wide-eyed Sidney or someone after him. Others are valuable but tricky to sell. The Nisga’a mummies, for instance, turned out to be real: Billy had them authenticated, then returned them to the tribal council. At one point, he paid a fine for putting a mounted curlew up for sale on eBay: it turned out to be an endangered species.
As I read, Billy periodically bounds through the room on his way to answer a phone or find a book he needs.
“You need a beer or something?” he never fails to ask.
When I’m done, I go downstairs again and sit among the Niagara Falls Museum objects. Near the animals, Billy has lined up a row of small terrariums holding beautiful dioramas of local birds, posed amid forest detritus. They have intricate watercolor backdrops, similar in style to young Sidney’s sketches, which I one day requested from cold storage at the Archives of Ontario. Like the journey Behind the Sheet, the minidioramas offer the viewer a chance to look up close at something you see every day. For the Barnetts, the birds of Upper Canada were no less worthy of wonder than ceramic pagodas from Japan, a dead Egyptian king or a spectacular waterfall. The world, both near and far, is full of marvels.
Billy’s loft also mingles the near and the far, the personal and the precious. A crouched Mayan mummy is lit by a crystal chandelier salvaged from a Toronto dance hall. Carved skulls from his trips south mingle with Erté prints (one of Billy’s old girlfriends sold Art Deco). The collection invokes a feeling of wandering, not the armies of Alexander or the march of science, but a single soul charting its course through brave new worlds. Some objects are valuable, but their value is inherent in their stories: there’s a Bornean war shield, for instance, painted with comic book hero the Phantom. Billy finds me looking at it and launches into a tale about how American soldiers gave comic books to Bornean locals when posted there during World War II. American superheroes thus turn up on authentic tribal shields—another instance of the middle ground.
“You want a Bloody Caesar?” Billy says at the end of the story. “It’s the national drink of Canada.”
Decked out with the accoutrements of a Victorian gentleman—leather sofas, Persian rugs, velvet drapes, gilt mirrors, mounted jaguar lounging on his bed—Billy’s place probably looks a lot like Thomas Barnett’s did. In fact, the Niagara Falls collection is right at home here. It’s as if the drug-taking, convertible-driving art and oddity dealer reached out across one and a half centuries for a meeting of minds with the suited, bewhiskered museum man, scowling out of his photographs as if foreseeing his life’s disappointing end.
Thomas and Sidney Barnett lost their museum for one simple reason: they ran out of money. The Barnett papers at the Ontario Archives are replete with bills and collection notices. Some historians claim that Barnett could not stop collecting, even when he ran low on funds. Others lay the blame on Sidney, who turned toward pricey, Barnum-style entertainments to draw in visitors. In 1872, he spent much of the museum’s savings organizing a Great Buffalo Hunt and Wild West Show. He signed up Buffalo Bill Cody as headliner, but Buffalo Bill drank Sidney’s advance payments without ever really intending to catch a single buffalo. After months of expensive delays, Sidney substituted Wild Bill Hickock as leading man and went to Nebraska to oversee the final arrangements himself. “Should I fail in this,” he wrote home to his wife, “the consequences would be fearful.”
The show was scheduled for August. Sidney ran ads touting Wild Bill as “the most famous scout on the plains,” and promising a backup line of “over fifty Indians of different tribes…in full war dress,” and a Mexican “band of Lasso Men mounted on their Mustang ponies.” He built a makeshift arena with room for 50,000 spectators. The few thousand who turned up were treated to Hickock, four Mexicans and four Indians pelting three lazy buffalo with arrows to get them to run away. The Welland Tribune declared it “a perfect success—as a swindle.” But even as a swindle it failed: the Barnetts lost money.
The failure of the Wild West show demoralized the Barnetts. But they had been losing money for years—in large part due to the exertions of their neighbor, Saul Davis. Davis arrived in Niagara Falls around 1850 and built the Prospect House Hotel. Then he moved right next door to the Barnetts and opened Table Rock House, where he offered a competing behind-the-Falls tour. Davis is often depicted as an exploitative interloper. Whereas the Barnetts maintained a carefully tended attraction with reasonable fees, Davis lured gullible travelers into his establishment by assuring them admission was free. He would outfit them with boots, hats, coats and a guide and give them a tour. At the end, he would present them with a bill charging them for the boots, the hats, the guide—everything but admission—while his thuggish sons stood by to make sure they paid. These accounts of his activities come primarily from the Barnetts.
The battle between the Davis and Barnett clans became epic, a sort of Hatfield-McCoy standoff at the brink of the Horseshoe. The Barnetts paid off hackmen to bring customers only to their museum; Davis paid them more to bring them to him. Davis and his sons posted signs declaring Barnett’s staircase was dangerous; the Barnetts tore them up and threw them over the cliff. Davis told visitors a ticket from him also got them admission to the Barnetts’ museum; the Barnetts sent the disappointed visitors to the police to complain. The two families dragged each other into court constantly over stray hogs, broken fences, customer harassment and personal assaults. Sidney tells how one Monday in 1855, after the Barnetts broke the law by staying open on a Sunday, Thomas Barnett sent one of his own employees down to the magistrate to report him, just to deprive Davis of the pleasure. Both men constantly petitioned the Crown for the exclusive lease on the Falls stairway. It seems to have passed back and forth between them with the whim of the provincial secretary. In 1870, the feud erupted in gunplay and one of Barnett’s employees, a black man named William Price, was killed. After that, the fun was out of it.
Late in life, impoverished and bitter, Sidney Barnett claimed it was pure politics that caused his father’s lease to be canceled in the 1870s. In 1875, the Liberals came into power in Ontario, and the Barnetts were well-known Conservatives. The lease was renewed in 1877 for $1,000 a year, an insupportable amount for the strapped family. Thomas Barnett accepted the terms only, he said, “because the alternative would be absolute ruin to me and the total destruction of an institution it has taken a lifetime to build up.” Sidney wrote their creditors asking for permission to organize a joint stock company to keep the museum afloat; it was denied. The following year, Barnett went bankrupt, and his museum and its contents were auctioned off. Saul Davis bought it all for the fire-sale price of $48,000.
“Saul Davis went to the auction with his sons,” Billy tells me over our Bloody Caesars—Bloody Marys with lots of tabasco. “They were these big bull-like guys, and they stood all around the room. Whenever anyone else bid on something, they would glare at them.” This may or may not be true: according to the Welland Tribune—no friend to the Barnetts—Davis simply arrived at the auction and threw out a first bid of $45,000, which “had the effect of a wet blanket on the other bidders, some of whom turned on their heels and left.” Three thousand dollars later it was sold, and the Barnett family had lost everything. Their Newfoundland dog declined to leave the premises. Even when a rope was put around his neck, he refused to be dragged from the Barnetts’ former home.
A broken man, Sidney Barnett went to South America, where he spent the rest of his life selling Bibles and stereoview photographs, and shipping curios back for North American companies. A few years later, in 1888, Saul Davis more than doubled his money, selling the museum building and grounds to the provincial government for $102,000. While Ontario demolished the museum to build its park, Davis moved the collection into a new building on the American side of the Falls. His son Charles ran it thereafter. History casts them as villains, yet the Davis family ran the museum well. The sons traveled and added to the collection; they bought what remained from Wood’s Museum in Chicago after Chicago’s Great Fire, and a newspaper report from 1894 announces that they have just added “magnificent collections from Australia and Africa, and South California Indian relics and New Zealand curiosities.” Like Barnett, they went out of their way to build the museum a beautiful home, this one on the Riverway, across from the Niagara Reservation. Five stories high, with an open atrium topped by a cupola, it held the collection for seventy years, until the New York State Parks Authority bought it and razed it to build a parking lot.
Curiosity cabinets celebrate wonder. Compelling mixtures of fact and fiction, they teach us not to name and to rule, but to marvel. Although museum history describes curiosity cabinets as ancestors of natural history museums, they are directly opposite in intent; they don’t seek to explain and classify the world, but to celebrate it in all its strangeness. They propose an attitude toward nature that’s as much about mystery as mastery. That’s why they often feature the freakish and the bizarre.
It’s also what made Barnett’s museum such a perfect fit for Niagara Falls. What better place for a curiosity cabinet than at the flank of the Falls? Niagara itself is a great big noisy curiosity, like the Wunderkammer offering up death and beauty in equal measure. The museum completed the experience of sublime wonder by displaying objects from all over the world, collected for their ability to leave you speechless.
The post-Darwin world of empirical data and hard facts did not want to be awed. In this world, the Falls themselves were devalued as well as the museum. They were a famed sublime spectacle, but the sublime must be unknowable. So long as Niagara couldn’t be fathomed or described, it maintained an aura of mystery. In the twentieth century, as the waterfall was explained, quantified, and placed under human control, the Wunderkammer beside them came to seem like the oddity itself, a dusty example of a worn-out worldview. There were occasional expressions of nostalgia for the old museum, but for the most part, people treated it with scorn.
Jacob Sherman, grandfather to the Jacob Sherman who sold the museum to Billy Jamieson, bought the Niagara Falls Museum in 1942. When State Parks claimed the building in 1957, he decided to move the collection back to Canada, buying the old Spirella Corset factory just north of the Rainbow Bridge. The Canadian newspapers trumpeted the museum’s arrival “home again.” But the world had changed. The Niagara Falls Gazette visited the museum in New York just before it moved and declared it “a weird collection of thousands of items,” an “assortment of art and oddity.” They pronounced the taxidermied animals “dusty and not too interesting,” and cited the ancient Asian swords and samurai costumes as the most interesting and valuable part of the collection. They didn’t mention the freaks of nature at all. For its new incarnation in Canada, the museum issued brochures advertising itself as “the oldest museum in North America,” and playing up the mummies and the new daredevil relics—including a collection of stunters’ barrels—while playing down the natural history collections.
Throughout the sixties and seventies, the Sherman family struggled to get visitors to come to the Niagara Falls Museum. The reason they had trouble was not that people were no longer interested in freaks and oddities. The problem was that there were plenty of newer freaks and oddities for them to visit at Niagara Falls. A 1964 Official Guidebook issued by the Niagara Falls Area Chamber of Commerce listed fifty must-see attractions on both the American and Canadian sides. The Niagara Falls Museum was not mentioned. Instead, there was Louis Tussaud’s Wax Museum and Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, with such must-see items as a guitar made of matchsticks, a shrunken head, the throne of a cannibal chief, and a model of Columbus’s Santa Maria made of chicken bones. There was the Houdini Magical Hall of Fame, with its annual séances to contact the dead magician. And on Clifton Hill, there was the Burning Spring Museum, the Boris Karloff Wax Museum, the Biblical Wax Museum, the Sports Wax Museum, the Tower of London Wax Museum, and the Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum. All of them featured galleries dedicated to the freakish and awful: torture chambers, monsters, historical villains. A curmudgeon complained in the Niagara Falls Review in 1977 that the craze for wax museums was “another creeping blight akin to the Honky Tonk days of the 1800s…God knows if it weren’t for the Niagara Parks Commission, by now we’d have wax museums and freak shows right at the brink of the Horseshoe Falls.”
But of course, that’s just what they did have, 150 years earlier.
“If the museum was still in that location,” Jacob Sherman tells me, “and had always stayed in that location, people could have looked at it differently, as part of Falls history.”
A curly-haired blond man with a quick smile and a self-effacing air, Jacob Sherman has no regrets about the sale of his collection. He knows Billy Jamieson made a fortune flipping the mummies, but even that doesn’t seem to irk him. “The one thing we never thought would come out of the Egyptian collection would be that Egypt would look at one of the mummies as being Ramesses,” he tells me. “That was”—he casts about for the right word—“surprising.”
I have found Jacob Sherman in his new position, less than three minutes’ walk from the site of where his family’s museum once stood. He is now retail manager for the Maid of the Mist souvenir store in the Niagara Falls State Park. In a shirt and tie, a silver pen perfectly tucked into his shirt pocket, he presides over a pin-neat store: shot glasses and souvenir mugs lined up in regiments, T-shirts stacked in order of size and Maid of the Mist key chains dangling in immaculate rows. It’s all very orderly, down to the turnstiles and fences that corral tourists coming off the Maid of the Mist into the gift shop.
When I turn up, unannounced, Jacob very cordially invites me to his office, a windowless room behind the cash register. He tells me the retail business is as much a part of Sherman family legacy as the museum, perhaps more so.
“They were in the souvenir business,” Jacob says of his grandparents. “They had four or five stores.” In fact, his grandfather became interested in the Niagara Falls Museum because of the location: the beautiful building built by Davis sat right on the Riverway near the Falls.
“He thought it was a great spot for a souvenir store,” Jacob says. The elder Mr. Sherman even told the newspaper he wasn’t quite sure what was on the upper floors of the museum building.
In his even-keeled manner, Jacob speaks fondly of his grandparents. He got a degree from SUNY Buffalo in environmental design and planning, and says working with his grandmother, Louise, who managed the museum after her husband’s death, was an invaluable experience. But he had no aspirations in the museum trade. He calls it “a curious business to be in” and seems downright modest about his family’s role in the Niagara Falls Museum’s history.
“We were just the keepers of it by the time it came down to us,” he tells me. “It’s in good hands, as far as I’m concerned. Billy’s a collector and a trader. I was not a collector.” The one thing he did keep for himself was the Niagara Falls heritage collection—material pertaining to power development, and an assortment of barrels and other daredevil relics. He says he does intend to put those items on display someday. But for now, the collection is in a warehouse a few minutes’ drive away.
Later I call him and ask him if he’ll show me the collection he still has. He pauses for a moment, and then gently, but firmly, declines.
On a sunny winter day, I visit another Niagara Falls museum man, Mark DeMarco, at the Evel Knievel Museum and Pawn Shop. Mark is a local motorcycle painter, and his private shrine to Evel and other gnarly stuff is now the closest thing to the old Barnett Museum at the Falls.
A shimmery disco-style curtain divides the museum from the pawnshop at the front. Through the curtain, five windowless rooms are crammed with curiosities of all kinds, including the remains of the defunct Ripley’s “That’s Incredible” museum, the world’s largest collection of Evel cycles and memorabilia, objects with local history ties and a just-plain-weird assortment of collectibles, oddities and ephemera. Display cases are organized by theme: Elvis, gambling, Harley-Davidsons, samurai, skeletons, magician Raymond the Great, Indians, Dan Aykroyd, the Titanic, netsuke, Hitler.
I’ve called ahead, and Mark meets me cheerily to give me a tour around his place. He’s a short, trim man with alert black eyes and a tendency to put his hand on your arm or shoulder as he talks. He takes me from case to case, pointing out objects.
“That game board was played on by Winston Churchill,” he says, or “Elvis sent that necklace to my brother.” At the Titanic case, he points out a photograph of a young woman in a navy uniform.
“That’s my mother,” he says, “who was in the navy during the war. Those plates are from the ship they called the Canadian Titanic, the Empress of Ireland.”
Mark’s museum makes no narrative sense at all. It’s clearly completely personal, reflecting his own obsessions, interweaving biography and history. And yet it’s fascinating. It’s the sort of place where you could get lost for a couple of hours, staring out the window of somebody else’s train of thought.
We look at a giant statue of the Alien standing near the world’s smallest violin; Evel’s X-2 Skycycle, used to jump Snake River Canyon; and a tiny netsuke figurine of two ladies getting it on with a tiger.
“This collection belonged to a doctor,” Mark says at the netsuke case, grinning. “Some of them are pretty interesting.”
We move on to a case full of bones. There’s a skull carved with Freemasonic symbols, and Mark tells me a long and complicated story involving Freemasons, lawyers, virgins, corrupt cops and a local serial killer.
“An item is just an item unless there’s a story about it,” he tells me as we walk around, “the history behind it: Who made it? What was it used for? What lives did it change and how did they change? Everyone has a moral and ethical obligation to make sure injustice doesn’t happen in the world. And objects can help.”
We stop at his Hitler memorabilia case. A little sign inside it reads Least We Forget.
Mark looks sad for a moment.
“So much is lost,” he says, “by not pausing for that one moment to look at what historical significance an object had.”
Then he points at a small guitar.
“Some people don’t know that Evel Knievel was a musician,” he says, his face brightening.
What will be the future of Niagara’s second-oldest attraction? That depends, as it always has, on the whims of its owner. Today’s owner favors jeans and black silk shirts instead of the thick woolen coats that Thomas Barnett wore around town, or the regimental gear Sidney ordered from Toronto, but he’s not so different from them. He too is an autodidact with a yen for institutional respectability. When the Michael C. Carlos Museum threw an opening party for their Ramesses exhibit, Billy flew to Atlanta to attend.
“The president of Emory University referred to the Niagara Falls Museum as a ‘freak show,’” Billy says, indignation temporarily suspending his ebullience. The Carlos Museum still owed him $100,000, and he had been planning to make it a donation. On the spot, he changed his mind.
Billy always insists that the Niagara Falls Museum is not dead. He keeps a Web site and a phone number for it, and fields inquiries about it or its artifacts. He would like some part of the collection to stay together, as an example of what early museums were like. He’s willing to donate some of it to a museum that will put it on permanent display. So far, he has found no takers.
The majority of the collection now idles in huge crates in a warehouse in St. Catharines, Ontario, a small city about eleven miles west of the Falls. After I leave Billy, I drive from Toronto to go to see it. The warehouse sits on a nondescript strip of back-office businesses abutting the Welland Canal, the ship canal that lets freighters bypass Niagara.
I’m met at the boxy brick building by a friendly, rotund guy named Tim Montreuil. He and his adult son lead me into a large, frigid warehouse bay stacked with car-sized crates. Along one side, open shelves hold what look like giant pieces of bark.
“That’s the giant redwood tree,” Tim tells me, and his son adds, “It took five of us guys fifteen hours to take it apart.” The tree hooks together with braces. When assembled, it’s big enough that you can drive a car through the hole cut in its base. A picture of the tree fully assembled is duct taped to the shelves where it lies.
Tim and his son both say they visited the museum when it was open, and they seem proud of their role in its fate. Tim’s son tells me he saw Billy Jamieson on TV.
“I told my wife, ‘I know that guy!’” he says. “‘That’s Billy Jamieson.’ I said it before they even said his name.”
Together we stroll around the warehouse. They point out a shelf that holds a buffalo, and one where two taxidermied rhinos lie side by side, the foot of one rhino resting on the other one’s head. I put my hand on the nearest rhino’s rump—it feels hard like plastic. I have a thing for rhinos. The pert little ears on this one make me want to cry.
On a high shelf lies the five-legged cow. According to Billy, a taxidermist friend looked at the museum’s freaks and declared them all real. This is probably the same five-legged cow that author William Dean Howells saw exhibited as a living calf in a tent at the Falls in 1860.
“I do not say that the picture of the calf on the outside of the tent was not as good as some pictures of Niagara I have seen,” Howells wrote later. “It was, at least, as much like.”
“The cow’s fifth leg comes out of his neck,” Tim tells me. “You want me to put you on the forklift so you can get a good look?”
What makes a look good? No museum today would show the five-legged cow, except perhaps a museum of anatomy, where looking at it might be considered educational, but only if you were a veterinary student, or some sort of biologist. Nature today is a world of rules, not exceptions.
“I’ll take a look,” I tell Tim.
His son loads a pallet onto the forklift and I climb on top of it. “What do I hold onto?” I ask.
“You just stand there nice and solid,” Tim says, pulling a lever.
Seeing is never just looking. In late 2006, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! outbid the Chicago History Museum for the Cook County gallows, built to hang the anarchist bombers of the Haymarket Square Riot. The New York Times began their story: “Morbid curiosity beat out history to lay claim to the infamous Cook County gallows.” It’s the same gallows in either place. But the act of seeing is different, just as the act of seeing Billy’s collection—whether Skipper or the Auburn electric chair—is one thing in his apartment and something else entirely in a museum. In the museum, its meaning is fixed, just as Niagara’s meaning is now fixed in statistics and dates pasted on placards. Perhaps looking at oddities in private hands, or even in a salacious sideshow like Ripley’s, is the closest we can come to experiencing what early viewers felt when they looked at the Falls.
The forklift goes up, and the cow hoves into view. The fifth leg is not a full-sized leg, just a vestigial limb, hoofless, dangling over the side of the cow’s thick neck like a misplaced tail. The cow’s eyes are rolling and its mouth is slightly open, giving it a frantic look. Lying stiff-legged on its side, it looks as if it’s saying Stop. I stand there, up in the air, marveling at the cow. Then Tim pulls the lever and slowly I ride back down.