P.T. Barnum's Biggest Stars

P.T. Barnum worked with many performers. Perhaps the most famous was the diminutive General Tom Thumb. Barnum also promoted Swedish singer Jenny Lind, but his biggest act was Jumbo the Elephant, an African elephant he bought from the London Zoo.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Ferry Dowdy and I'm Delane a Chruk Reboarding. And
when we talked about the Prince of Humbug P. T.
Barnum recently, we really focused on what a diverse career

(00:23):
he had. He wasn't all about the circus that, of
course didn't even come along until he was in his sixties,
and was long after he had already established his name.
And he also ran menagerie's. He managed a museum filled
with wax works and taxidermy animals, and he had hoaxes
like the Fiji Mermaid. Early in his career he staged
minstrel shows and other quote low forms of entertainment, and

(00:47):
later he of course mounted freak shows like ten in
One and even took a swing at some kind of
highbrow entertainment acting as an impressario for a famous European
opera singer. He did a lot of stuff he did.
So today we're going to visit a few stages of
Barnum's career, taking a closer look at the acts that
made him famous and seeing how some of his performers

(01:08):
could become incredibly famous and successful themselves. But since we'll
be starting with some of Barnum's most famous quote freaks
before moving on to more conventional and animal stars, it
might be good to discuss that strange combination of exploitation
and success that existed in the sideshow world of the
eighteen hundreds. I mean, the fact that some freak show

(01:30):
stars did achieve success might be surprising to modern audiences,
because today it can actually be really disturbing to read
the details of many of Barnum's prized acts, especially the
ones involving people with physical disabilities. It really can be.
I mean, everything seems wrong about exhibiting a six year
old Burmese girl and allowing audience members to touch her

(01:52):
just because she had hair covering her body, as Barnum
did in fact do with kral Ferini, who was built
as the missing link. And some stories from Barnum's contemporaries
are really just plain tragic. Theodore Lent, for instance, who
toured Europe with another hair covered woman, this time Mexican
born Julia Pastrna, eventually married her, but when she died

(02:14):
after having their stillborn baby, Lent had both of them
mummified and continued to exhibit them. But for some of
these stars, a disability or an unusual skill actually really
did bring fame and fortune, with many of the biggest
names finding a way to separate their stage identity is
so called freaks, from their off stage identities as normal
business people and performers. One of Barnum's hit acts, Isaac W. Sprague,

(02:39):
the American human skeleton who weighed only forty three pounds,
was as much of a marketing man as Barnum himself.
He wrote an autobiography and he sold trading cards and
all the profits went to him. And the trading card
business was a big deal for a lot of these
performers because whereas the showmen would get a cut of
their performances, they could paw get all that money from

(03:01):
the trading cards. And according to Laura Grand in History Magazine,
Barnum quote built a strong rapport with the majority of
his freaks in the US, And to me, that made sense.
It seems like it would be a bad idea to
do otherwise, because with so much competition from other showmen,
it would be bad business to alienate your performers. And

(03:21):
we're going to feed some of that what kind of
alienation can happen there? With our first entry on this list,
But the first act that we're going to discuss kicked
off the heyday of small American freak shows and really
set a standard to for sideshow performers making serious money
and living lives that were also completely apart from their

(03:41):
work on stage. So, Ladies and gentlemen, Chang and Ang Bunker,
these first entries on our list were associated with Barnum,
but probably less so than some of the later acts
that we're going to discuss, but still they could be
the names that you're most likely to recognize today because
Changang Bunker. Sarah mentioned they were the original Siamese twins,

(04:02):
which meant basically that was the first time that the
word Siamese twin or the term Siamese twin was used
to describe this particularly joined condition. Exactly. They were born
May eleven, eighteen eleven, on a houseboat in Siam, which
is now Thailand, and they were connected from birth by
a band of tissue between their chests and stomachs. Their
umbilical cord fed into this band, and when they were

(04:24):
born they were twisted so that they faced different directions,
so their mother sort of untwisted that band almost so
that each baby faced the same direction. You see pictures
of them, they just looked like two guys standing next
to each other. And as they grew she really encouraged
them to be as active as possible. They could run,
they could swim, something that's very amazing. They could fight

(04:47):
each other, which they did a lot too, and they
could maneuver the houseboat that they lived on too. And
they would also work on stretching that band a little bit,
stretching it enough so that eventually they could each stand
relatively upright, and they would usually pose with their arms
around each other's shoulders. They were healthy too, and they
survived smallpox and the same outbreak that killed three of

(05:10):
their other siblings, and when their father died when they
were eight, they helped support their family by raising ducks
while their unique medical condition earned them an audience before
the King of Siam, and interestingly, the king's predecessor had
briefly considered having them executed. When he learned their existence,
he changed his mind. He decided there was nothing threatening
about them, but still a close call for little Chang

(05:32):
and Ang. There, each boy of course, also had a
completely separate identity. Chang was considered to be very outgoing,
kind of had a quick temper. Ang was considered to
be very thoughtful, introspective and right away. This was something
that distinguished them from earlier conjoined twin acts like the
Colorado Brothers from early seventeenth century Genoa, which was an

(05:54):
act that featured Lazarus and his smaller, incomplete twin who
couldn't beak, He couldn't really control his own movements. It
was basically Lazarus that was in charge. The draw with
Chang and Ang was that they were each so independent
in a way, so distinct, and their distinct personalities, combined
with their cooperative coordination, eventually caught the eye of Scottish

(06:17):
merchant Robert Hunter, who partnered up with a captain Able
Coffin to exhibit the Boys in nine They bought the
nearly grown teens from their mother, and according to Holly
Martin in The Journal of American Culture, they were billed
as quote the Monster and then quote the Siamese Double Boys,
and they were pretty much a hit from the start.

(06:38):
At first. They also felt comfortable with their working arrangement
because they'd get what they saw is a fair cut
of what was made the profits, and they'd invest in
their own act by adding tricks like flips and somersaults,
making the show a little more exciting for folks. But
in eighteen thirty one, Coffin took sole management and the brothers,
who were displeased by their take. He reduced what they

(07:00):
were making significantly, they decided to ditch their management. They
left Coffin and managed themselves, and this started a very
profitable stage in their career. They met Barnum, they briefly
worked at his museum. The three men apparently didn't get
along that well, so they left Barnum and just continued
to break it in touring the US, Cuba, Canada, Europe,

(07:23):
and even eventually earned enough to retire from show business
to North Carolina and buy a farm. And they also
at that point became naturalized citizens and took the last
name bunker. Chang soon began courting Adelaide Yates, the daughter
of a neighboring Quaker family, while and courted her sister, Sarah.
Neighbors were not in favor of this. They protested it

(07:47):
because it was doubly scandalous to them. Conjoined twins who
were also ethnically Chinese and from Siam. It just wasn't
something that the neighborhood approved of, not at all. They
even smashed out windows in the Yates family home. But
of two couples were married anyway in eighteen forty three,
and while at first they all shared one home, after
a few years Chang and Hang set up their own

(08:07):
houses and mount Airy, which is interestingly the real Mayberry
and Griff of this hometown. Their houses were about a
mile and a half away from each other, and so
to do this they obviously had to set up a
different kind of arrangement, and Chang and Hang, since they
couldn't separate from each other, would spend three days with
one wife and one family in one house, and then

(08:29):
they would go to the other brother's house and spend
three days there, and each twin would be the master
of his own household, though the twin who wasn't living
there would sort of, you know, keep his own opinions
to himself for three days and then expect that of
his brother. But the whole master of the household thing
really has extra significance considering that Chang and Ang also

(08:51):
owned thirty three slaves between them. I mean, they owned
quite a bit of land and they had quite a
few slaves working on it, something that I think often
surprises people about them, but in a way fit into
this normality. They were trying to achieve as large landowners,
which at the time in North Carolina might have met slaveholders,
so they were trying to fit in with it. Seems

(09:12):
like Chang and Adelaide ultimately had ten kids, while Ang
and Sarah had nine, and the whole family was primarily
engaged in farm work, but the brothers would still pick
up extra cash by touring now and again, sometimes with
the wife and the kids in tow. And their early
performances had emphasized their conjoined state, but also their Chinese heritage,

(09:32):
and in these later shows they always appeared in western clothes,
and they wanted to emphasize that normalcy that you mentioned, Sarah.
There were farmers with wives and big families, and that's
how they wanted to be seen, just like you. But
obviously not quite so. After the Civil War and after emancipation,
Chang and Ang didn't have any money anymore. They were broke,

(09:52):
they couldn't farm the farm, and they returned to show business.
More fully, even going back to Barnum, who employed them
in till they were over sixty years old. In eighteen
seventy four, Chang, who had become a heavy drinker and
who had suffered from a stroke, died of bronchitis, and
before a doctor could arrive to separate the two brothers,

(10:13):
Ang died. At the time, I think the diagnosis was
that he had died of shock, which it would be
rather shocking, I'm sure, but later analysis suggests that he
probably died of blood loss because they did share an artery,
and Ang may have just been pumping blood and not
having it pumped back into his body. Since Chang was
dead at that point, and they didn't know that until

(10:35):
later write that they shared. It was in the or
that they realized they shared an artery after the autopsy,
but they didn't come up with this idea until the
nineteen sixties. It's interesting, too, that the brothers had long
sought out separation and had nearly attempted surgery in Philadelphia
after they got engaged. They were each willing to die
if it meant a chance to live independently, but their

(10:57):
wives stepped in. The wives begged them not to risk
the surgery. They didn't want them to die. So, like
we said, Chang and Eng aren't super associated with Barnum.
But the next entry on our list certainly is. In
eighteen forty two, p. T. Barnum met the boy who
would become his most famous star, Charles Stratton, who was
the four year old son of a Bridgeport carpenter. And

(11:20):
when Stratton was born, he was a pretty large baby.
He was about nine pounds, but before he was even
one year old he basically stopped growing, and by the
time he met Barnum he was four years old, fifteen
pounds and twenty inches tall. After his teens he did
grow a little bit more. He reached forty inches, ultimately
in seventy pounds, but he had a fairly small stature

(11:42):
for much of his life. Though Stratton was Barnum's distant cousin,
he drafted him for a show, calling him General Tom
Thumb and teaching him how to sing and dance and
do imitations of people like Hercules, and having him pretend
to be eleven years old rather than five, so that
his small stature would be even more impressive. Barnum started

(12:02):
Stratton out on three dollars a week. But as the
little Boy proved to be kind of a natural performer
with as Barnum said, quote, a keen sense of the ludicrous,
he raised Charles rate to fifty dollars a week. So
in eighteen forty four Barnum and Stratton left for Europe,
where they would do these sell out shows in London's

(12:24):
Egyptian Hall, and Barnum, as we discussed in the earlier episode,
was always hankering for more prestige, not just more money.
He wasn't just about money. He was interested in prestige
and a wider audience, and that was something he really
did get through Tom Thumb when Baroness Rothschild heard about
the act and invited the two over for dinner. And

(12:45):
the dinner alone was an achievement for Barnum, but he
used it as an opportunity for stirring up some humbug
like like he always did. He dropped hints that the
General General Tom Thumb might like to meet Queen Victoria,
and soon enough an invitation to meet the Queen did arrive.
According to Peter Carlson in American History. Before Stratton could

(13:08):
enter with Barnum, they got some very specific instructions, so
this was upon their visit to the Queen, they were
told not to speak directly to the Queen and not
to turn their backs. They were escorted into the Queen's
picture gallery and presented before a twenty five year old Victoria,
her husband, Prince Albert, and the court. And Barnum later

(13:28):
described the entry as such. He said, quote the General
walked in looking like a wax doll gifted with the
power of locomotion. The General advanced with a firm step,
and as he came within haaling distance, made a very
graceful bow and exclaimed good evening, ladies and gentlemen. So
before a performance where he exhibited his impressions. Apparently the

(13:50):
British really loved his Napoleon impression, Victoria spent some personal
time with the little boy. They walked hand in hand
around the gallery. She told him about the pictures, asked
him about things he liked, and he even asked her
this is very cute. He asked her if he could
meet her three year olds on the Prince of Wale.
She tells them, no, he's asleep right now. They do

(14:12):
ultimately meet, though when it came time for them to leave,
Tom kind of dramatically fended off one of Victoria's poodles
with his cane. It was sort of like the sword
fight pantomime. And I think there's an engraving of it, right, Yeah,
I might have to put that one up on Pinterest
at some point. Victoria's impressions of the night, though, are
particularly interesting, since she was clearly bothered a bit by

(14:33):
what she found to be troubling about this act. What
we might consider to be troubling today exactly a very
young boy away from his parents and performing around the
world for money. And she saw this as we as
he said, as we would see it. She wrote, quote
after dinner, we saw the greatest curiosity I, or indeed
anybody ever saw a little dwarf. He made the funniest

(14:56):
little bow, putting out his hand and saying much obliged, ma'am.
One cannot help feeling sorry for the poor little thing,
and wishing he could be properly cared for. For the
people who show him off tease him a good deal.
I should think he was made to imitate Napoleon and
do all sorts of tricks. So that's sort of the
perception that folks had a guess of Stratton when he

(15:16):
was so young five years old, six years old working
under Barnum, But as he got older, the relationship between
him and Barnum did clearly become more one of business partners,
with Stratton making a good living and creating a life
for himself off the stage. Laura Grand wrote that Stratton
quote made his stage persona a caricature completely separate from

(15:37):
his identity as Charles Stratton. He was able to shed
his guys of Tom Thumb at the end of each day,
not that his personal life and stage career didn't intersect
at times. Probably the most famous event Stratton's life was
his eighteen sixty three marriage to Lavina Warren, a little
person from Middleborough, Massachusetts with Mayflower ancestors, and Lavigna called

(15:59):
the quote Queen of Beauty in the New York Times
write up of their marriage and Stratton were married at
Grace Episcopal Church in New York City with people like
the Asters and the Vanderbilts and attendants, and during their
honeymoon they even got to visit the White House. It
was considered to be one of the biggest celebrity marriages
of the century. So our next act moves away from

(16:22):
the kind of side show entertainments that Barnum was best
known for. While he was visiting London to such great
acclaim with Little Tom Thumb, he happened to hear about
a singer who was selling out shows in England and Ireland,
Jenny Lynde, who was better known as the Swedish Nightingale,
and Barnum, who didn't even bother to attend one of
her shows or request some sort of sample performance, pitched

(16:46):
lynd on this one d fifty date US tour with
a guarantee of one thousand dollars per show. Was apparently
a pretty unheard of some at the time, so Lynn
did negotiate for a little bit more. Though she was
very charitably minded, and she negotiated with Barnum to make
some further donations on top of that, two charities of
her choosing. She did, eventually, though, agree, and left Liverpool

(17:10):
in August of eighteen fifty for her big American tour.
Just set a little background on Lynch. She was born
in Stockholm in eighteen twenty and was already a European star.
Charlotte Bronte, in fact, was a huge fan. According to
Cassandra fell In Bronte Studies, and she had debuted in
Sweden in eighteen thirty eight and had studied opera in Paris,
where she perfected her coloratura and became known for her range,

(17:34):
stretching from the B below middle C to higg and
when she teamed up with Barnum, she actually had been
considering leaving the stage. He really made her an offer
she couldn't refuse, though, so for six months leading up
to that big Us debut, Barnum stirred up his humbug again,
even though in this case Lynn's talents really did prove

(17:55):
to be much more than hype. He would write articles
about how beautiful she was, felt sweet and good she was.
He would run these poetry contests like pitch us your
best poem about Jenny Lynde, and he ultimately stirred up
what was called Lindamania. People were just so excited to
hear this young woman saying even though they were just

(18:16):
going on his word for it, and I mean it worked.
His tactics really worked. There were more than thirty thousand
people waiting for her steamer when it arrived in New York.
Twenty thousand more lined the route to her hotel, and
Barnum wasn't stingy with this either with with her after
seeing how successful that she was, if you're finally hearing

(18:36):
her and realizing how good she was, he renegotiated her
contract after just a few shows. But he made out
pretty well too. He probably made close to a half
million dollars that year, and it did give him some
of that legitimacy that he was hoping for. He was
working with a famous opera singer here. It was different
from his American Museum kind of performance as he normally

(18:59):
promoted it. Other people made a lot of money off
of Jenny Lynn too, though. When we mentioned her in
the last episode, we talked about how she was just
this huge merchandizing sensation, one of the earliest sensations of
that magnitude, and people marketed porcelain around her. You could
get Jenny Lynn hats and face cream, sheet music. That's

(19:20):
maybe the thing that makes the most sense here. Pianos, chairs,
and even a crib which I did a little Google
searching earlier. Today, the Jenny Lynd crobe is still a
very well known type of crib. It looks exactly how
you would imagine a baby's crib to look nothing old
fashioned about it, so you can still pick one up.
I guess you can. After her grand u s tour,

(19:43):
Lynde married her accompanist Otto Goldschmidt and lived in Dresden
in England, where she eventually taught at the Royal College
of Music before she died in seven So our final
entry is a very different one from this classic opera singer.
It rivals oly Tom Thumb is Barnum's most famous act
and even today you probably associate Ringling Brothers and Barnum

(20:06):
Bailey Circus with elephants. But Jumbo was the original and
the most famous elephant of them all. So Jumbo had
been captured in East Africa when he was four years
old and was purchased by a very animal collector. He
started out his public life though in Paris at the
Gardond Plance, and ironically, considering his eventual size, I mean

(20:29):
you can get a good idea of it by his name.
His Paris owners were really disappointed with how tiny he was,
and according to Bill Kelly in American History, they didn't
realize that African elephants grow more slowly than Indian elephants do,
and so they thought they just had a dud of
an elephant. He was not as big as they were hoping,
so after they traded him for a rhino, the African

(20:52):
elephant wound up in London, where he was named Jumbo,
which they believed meant elephant, and he started to grow.
Eventually got up to eleven and a half feet tall,
and Jumbo spent most of his life there. He entertained
kids who visited the zoo and even gave rides. Barnum,
on one of his England visits, coveted him. He said quote,
I've often looked wistfully on Jumbo, but with no hope

(21:15):
of ever getting possession of him. As I know him
to be a great favorite of Queen Victoria, whose children
and grandchildren are among the tens of thousands of British
juveniles whom Jumbo has carried on his back, I did
not suppose he would ever be sold. Finally, though, knowing
that Jumbo's temper had worsened lately, his British owners unloaded
him on. Barnum didn't tell him about the temper. Probably

(21:38):
I'm an angry elephant on on her hand right, But
he sold him for a ten thousand dollars to Barnum.
So the British public, though, was very upset about this.
They were mad. I mean, think of the children who
loved Jumbo so much, and Jumbo's keeper, Matthew Scott remembered
people actually picketing the zoo and thousands of kids lining

(21:58):
up to see Jumbo, just crying their hearts out, and
it was too bad for them because Barnum was going
to be taking his ten thousand dollar elephant back to
the States, and in eighteen eighty two he had Jumbo
and his elephant friend from the zoo named Alice put
on board a ship. Poor Jumbo here, he did not
enjoy his transatlantic trip at all. He was apparently very

(22:21):
sea thick and apparently had daily beer rations. Can't imagine
that's in a normal elephants rations today? Yeah, well probably not.
But it's sad that he just didn't get unlimited beer.
He needed a poor thing. One state side. Jumbo helped
make Barnum's new circus a hit, also helping transform the
Three Ring Circus to something more akin to what it

(22:43):
is today, which is of course kind of a spectacle.
He even grew some more and his temperate issues disappeared,
so Barnum didn't have to worry about that after all.
Well and Barnum also pulled another Jenny Lynde and marketed
his new elephant like crazy. You could buy Jumbo everything
I know about Jumbo face cream or Jumbo cribs. He
applied the elephant's name to all sorts of products, and

(23:06):
eventually Jumbo became ubiquitous enough to mean very large. I mean,
that's how we think of it today. Something is Jumbo size.
So then, after four seasons with the circus, where Jumbo
had certainly earned back his ten thousand dollars and really
helped make barnum Circus a hit, he was killed in
an eight railway accident, and he and Barnum's tiniest elephant,

(23:30):
strangely also named Tom Thumb. We're crossing some rail road
tracks with their keeper, and an unexpected engine came speeding through.
It knocked Tom Thumb out of the way. He rolled
down an embankment, and Jumbo just panicked and he tried
to run, but he was hit by the train in
a crash that also killed the engineer. Barnum, who had

(23:52):
kind of hedged his bets for a while and seeing
about whether Jumbo's hide and skeleton could be preserved. I
think he wrote about it like God forbid anything ever
happens to Jumbo, but just in case, So he did
have a plan in place, and he had the elephant
skeleton and hide saved and set up this big funeral procession,
even spinning a whole story that Jumbo had died trying

(24:15):
to push the baby tom Thumb out of the way
of the train. So while the hide was eventually destroyed
in a fire, jumbo skeleton can sometimes be seen in
the American Museum of Natural History, so can still check
that out now and again pay respects to Jumbo. So
it's been fun talking about these different acts, and it's
been interesting to coming across all the names that you

(24:37):
can find just a little tidbit of information on. These
are obviously all pretty well documented, pretty well researched figures
because they were so famous, but there are so many
names you just get the most tantalizing little peek at
what their life must have been like. Yeah, but still
very interesting to find out about. And we actually have
some articles to this effect on our website, don't we,

(24:59):
And they would we have one on Female Side Show.
We do Kristen wrote an article on famous female side
show freaks, which features Joyce Half who was in our
last episode on P. T. Barnum and Tom Thumb's wife too.
So a few a few folks in there. Yeah, and
there are photos in there too, So if you're really
curious about how these people looked, um, we tried to

(25:20):
describe them as best we could, but you can check
them out by checking out that article. But if you
know of some other side show acts that we left out,
maybe you have some favorites that you'd like us to
cover in the future, you can definitely write us and
recommend those were at History Podcast at Discovery dot com
and you can write us there and tell us all
about what you want us to cover, or just comment

(25:41):
on any of the issues surrounding these acts that we discussed,
or you know, just comment on any of the details
we shared. You can also look us up on Facebook
and we're on Twitter at Misston History, And like I
just mentioned, we do have a stuff you missed in
History class Pinterest account to which I've pinned a few
photos on there and I can do some more, so
you can check out with some of these folks look

(26:03):
like you can see I think Tom Thumb's house. He
had this great mansion, all sorts of interesting visual details
about their lives. And again, if you want to learn
more about some other female sideshow acts, we do have
that article. It's called ten famous female side show Freaks
and you can search for that on our home page
at www dot how stuff works dot com for more

(26:28):
on this and thousands of other topics because it how
stuff works dot com