Struggles and Triumphs, P. T. Barnum [good books to read in english .txt] 📗

on the stage, I explained to the large audiences the names and characteristics of each. When I came to Yellow Bear I would pat him familiarly upon the shoulder, which always caused him to look up to me with a pleasant smile, while he softly stroked down my arm with his right hand in the most loving manner. Knowing that he could not understand a word I said, I pretended to be complimenting him to the audience, while I was really saying something like the following:

“This little Indian, ladies and gentlemen, is Yellow Bear, chief of the Kiowas. He has killed, no doubt, scores of white persons, and he is probably the meanest, black-hearted rascal that lives in the far West.” Here I patted him on the head, and he, supposing I was sounding his praises, would smile, fawn upon me, and stroke my arm, while I continued: “If the bloodthirsty little villain understood what I was saying, he would kill me in a moment; but as he thinks I am complimenting him, I can safely state the truth to you, that he is a lying, thieving, treacherous, murderous monster. He has tortured to death poor, unprotected women, murdered their husbands, brained their helpless little ones; and he would gladly do the same to you or to me, if he thought he could escape punishment. This is but a faint description of the character of Yellow Bear.” Here I gave him another patronizing pat on the head, and he, with a pleasant smile, bowed to the audience, as much as to say that my words were quite true, and that he thanked me very much for the high encomiums I had so generously heaped upon him.

After they had been about a week at the Museum, one of the chiefs discovered that visitors paid money for entering. This information he soon communicated to the other chiefs, and I heard an immediate murmur of discontent. Their eyes were opened, and no power could induce them to appear again upon the stage. Their dignity had been offended, and their wild, flashing eyes were anything but agreeable. Indeed, I hardly felt safe in their presence, and it was with a feeling of relief that I witnessed their departure for Washington the next morning.

In the spring of 1864, the United States Consul at Larnica, Island of Cyprus, Turkish Dominions, wrote me a letter, declaring that he and the English Consul, an American physician, resident in the island, and a large company of Europeans as well as natives, had seen the most remarkable object, no doubt, in the world⁠—a lusus naturae, a feminine phenomenon. This woman was represented to have “four cornicles on her head, and one large horn, equal in size to an ordinary ram’s horn, growing out of the side of her head”; and the consistency of the horns was represented to be similar to that of cows’ or goats’ horns. This singular story continued: “These horns have been growing for ten or twelve years, and were carefully concealed by the woman until a few weeks since, when a vision appeared in the person of an old man, and warned her to remove the veil she wore, or God would punish her. She sent to the Greek priest (she being of that persuasion), and confessed to him, and was ordered to uncover her head, which she at once did.” She was subsequently seen by the entire population, and the French consul, in company with others, offered her fifty thousand piastres to go to Paris for exhibition. The English consul, I was further informed, had pronounced this woman to be “worth her weight in gold”; and I was assured that if I wished to add her to my “wonderful Museum, and present to the American public the most remarkable object yet exhibited,” I had only to “send an agent immediately to secure the prize.”

Informing myself of the trustworthiness of my correspondent (who also wrote a similar account to the New York Observer), I was not long in making up my mind to secure this freak of nature; and I despatched Mr. John Greenwood, Jr., in the steamer City of Baltimore, for Liverpool, April 30, 1864. He went to London and Paris, and thence to Marseilles, where he took a Syrian and Egyptian steamer to Palermo, and from thence proceeded to Cyprus. On arriving, if he could have seen the woman at once, he could have re-embarked on the steamer, which sailed again in a few hours for other islands; but unfortunately, the woman was a few miles in the interior, and poor Greenwood was detained a month on the island before he could take another steamer to get away. Worse yet, the woman, spite of the impression she had made upon so many and such respectable witnesses, was really no curiosity after all, as it proved upon examination, that her “horns” were not horns at all, but fleshy excrescences, which may have been singularly shaped tumors, or wens. It is needless to add that my agent did not engage her; and after a month of discomfort and hard living, he succeeded in getting away, and sailed for Constantinople, mainly to see what could be done in the way of securing one or more Circassian women for exhibition in my Museum.

On his way through the Mediterranean, he had the following adventure: On board the steamer, the harem of a Turkish Pasha occupied one side of the quarter deck, which was divided off from the rest by a hurdle fence run longitudinally through the middle of the deck. Greenwood was one day sitting in an easy chair with his back to these women and their attendants, when, feeling his chair move, he turned and saw one of the Pasha’s wives getting over the hurdle, and as there was scarcely room for her to squeeze herself between the chairs in which passengers were sitting, he moved his own chair out of the way