Peck's Bad Boy with the CircusPeck, George W. (George Wilbur)
General
Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus
Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
Boys -- Juvenile fiction; Circus -- Juvenile fiction
The Circus Has Bad Luck in Indian Territory--A Herd of Animals
Turned Out to Graze Is Stampeded by Indians--They Go Dashing Over
the Plains, and the Circus Tent Follows, Picked Up by a Cyclone. No
more horse racing for this circus.
The managers held a meeting at Guthrie, Okla., after we had lost our
money horse racing with the Indians, and pa said the consensus of
opinion was that we better stick to the legitimate show business, and
not try to work in any side lines. Pa says he made a speech at the
managers' meeting, in which he showed that the business man who attended
strictly to the business which he knew all about, would make money,
while the man who knew about dry goods, but worked in a millinery store
or a stock of tinware, got it in the neck. He would either get stuck on
the head milliner, or buy a stock of tinware that would not hold water.
So a resolution was passed to the effect that hereafter no temptation
could be great enough to get our show to go into anything outside of the
business, no matter how good it looked as a get-rich-quick affair. So we
gathered up our show and played a whole week in Oklahoma, and had full
houses all the time, and made money enough to redeem our animals that
had been attached by creditors. We have paid up our debts, and we got
out of Oklahoma with flying colors.
If we had gone right on to Kansas we would have shown sense, but some
cowboys from the Indian Territory told pa and the other managers that if
we would take the show to the Indian Territory we couldn't get cars
enough to haul the money away, as the Indians had got round-shouldered
and bow-legged carrying the money they had made grazing cattle, and the
territory was full of cowboys that had money to burn, and they hadn't
seen a circus since the war.
Well, it seemed a shame to go by the Indian Territory, and allow those
poor Indians to break their backs carrying money around, and so we sent
a carload of bill pasters into the territory and billed towns that would
hold us about a week, and we figured that we would clean up enough money
to last us all a life-time. I wish I didn't have to write about the
result, 'cause we are broke up so we can't look pleasant to have our
pictures taken.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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