Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. BarnumBarnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor)
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Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum
Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor)
Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891; Circus owners -- United States -- Biography
In April, 1836, I connected myself with Aaron Turner’s travelling circus
company as ticket-seller, secretary and treasurer, at thirty dollars a
month and one-fifth of the entire profits, while Vivalla was to receive
a salary of fifty dollars. As I was already paying him eighty dollars a
month, our joint salaries reimbursed me and left me the chance of twenty
per cent of the net receipts. We started from Danbury for West
Springfield, Massachusetts, April 26th, and on the first day, instead of
halting to dine, as I expected, Mr. Turner regaled the whole company
with three loaves of rye bread and a pound of butter, bought at a farm
house at a cost of fifty cents, and, after watering the horses, we went
on our way.
We began our performances at West Springfield, April 28th, and as our
expected band of music had not arrived from Providence, I made a
prefatory speech announcing our disappointment, and our intention to
please our patrons, nevertheless. The two Turner boys, sons of the
proprietor, rode finely. Joe Pentland, one of the wittiest, best, and
most original of clowns, with Vivalla’s tricks and other performances in
the ring, more than made up for the lack of music. In a day or two our
band arrived and our “houses” improved. My diary is full of incidents of
our summer tour through numerous villages, towns, and cities in New
England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland,
District of Columbia, Virginia, and North Carolina.
While we were at Cabotville, Massachusetts, on going to bed one night
one of my room-mates threw a lighted stump of a cigar into a spit-box
filled with sawdust and the result was that about one o’clock T. V.
Turner, who slept in the room, awoke in the midst of a dense smoke and
barely managed to crawl to the window to open it, and to awaken us in
time to save us from suffocation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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