Agency through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books, 1875-1925

Showmen's Rests: The Final Curtain

June 22, 1918, Ivanhoe, IN

It was 3:55 a.m. and the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train squatted on the main line track of Michigan Central. Circus performers and workers laid in wait within the old wooden cars, faces illuminated by the oil lamps. They had left Michigan City about an hour earlier after wrapping up two days of show business there. Next stop was Hammond, just some 45 miles away.

The train straddled intersections with several other lines – a strange place to sit, unless the flagmen had noticed a blazing hot box on the south side of your train. The first train, bearing the circus animals, was already passing through Hammond on its loop through the South Chicago Union Stockyards to feed and water.
The “military-style circus caste system was fully evident” in the formation of the sleeping cars, which had been detached momentarily from their position behind the flatcars carrying gilded circus wagons for the repairs. The general manager and his wife slept in their stateroom within the first of the four retrofitted cars; performers slept in the second car; and the last two “berthed many of the male canvas handlers and roustabouts. Of course, it was a warm June night, and the heat in those densely berthed sleeping cars … encouraged a number of the lowly handlers and roustabouts to find sleeping space in the wagons and trucks carried on flatcars ahead of the sleepers” and enjoy the strong south wind blowing off of Lake Michigan.

While they waited on repairs, the war continued on around them in the form of busy traffic. The intersecting G&W line was constantly lugging troops eastward en route to France, meaning an equal amount of traffic moving west as empty cars made their way back. It was this sort of empty train that Engineer Sargent commanded the throttle of this night. He hadn’t slept. The wind kept him awake and cool, but as it blew stronger with his increasing speed, he closed the window.

About eighty-six showmen died that night.
 

Train wrecks “were common, and deadly” in this era. And, trains were to circuses as coal was to trains, which meant that circus wrecks were just as frequent and fatal. Perhaps this is part of what prompted Lew Nichols (the “funny old clown of Sig Sautelle fame” and veteran sideshow manager for Buckskin Bill’s Wild West Show) to spend the fall of 1916 gathering estimates for the purchase of cemetery plots reserved for showmen.

The idea of a final resting place for showpeople had been kicked around since the formation of Lew’s fraternal organization in 1913, the Showmen’s League of America. (The League is the oldest of its kind in North America; with over a thousand members it’s still alive today, having absorbed the mid-1900’s explosion of such clubs. The first president was none other than Buffalo Bill.) Circus folk had already been taking care of their own, pitching in for one another’s funerals and burials, not a small amount of them precipitated by circus wrecks.
The purchase of plots for showmen was part of a two-pronged effort by the League to care for their members, the second piece of which was the purchase of a ward in the new American Theatrical Hospital. The League also buried non-members who were otherwise destined for the abyss of the forgotten.
 

Showmen’s Rests were a way to stay on stage, even if no one knew who you really were – which wasn’t a new concept to pseudonymic performers. Circus performers “were often known only by nicknames,” and they and stagehands alike would jump train from show to show throughout the season. Circus managements "admitted that they did not know names of workingmen ... [they had no] reason for personal contact with canvasmen in a railroad circus with its factory-like division of labor." Many killed in the 1918 Hagenbeck-Wallace crash had just joined the show and could be buried only under such names as “Baldy,” “Smiley,” “4 Horse Driver,” and “Unknown Female.”

Don’t we all want to be remembered?

By 1957, 12 clubs, coast to coast, had their own cemetery plots. A particularly large section, located in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Hugo, Oklahoma, was purchased in 1960 by D. R. Miller in memory of his brother, the circus leader Kelly Miller. But what exactly did Miller buy?

Hugo is located within the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The 1887 Dawes Act forced Native Americans to "assume a capitalist and proprietary relationship" with land, resulting in not only the loss of about two-thirds of traditional lands but also of traditional tribal leadership. The 1947 Stigler Act added insult to injury by imposing "uniquely unfair limitations on the rights of the citizens of each of the Five Tribes of eastern Oklahoma" by removing federal protections on their real estate interests through restrictive identity measures.

Like Forest Park’s Woodlawn Cemetery, the Showmen’s Rest in Hugo (aka Circus Town, USA) is adorned with elephants, trunks lowered in mourning.
 
 
My mother collected elephants, bronze, ceramic, silver, large and small urns shaped like elephants, and even a belt with the silver images of marching elephants.  After she died in 2003, my brother and I were going through her things and dividing the mementos that we each wanted to keep.  I chose her elephant collection. … I had no idea why my mother was drawn to elephants.  But it seems that circuses and elephants loomed large in the minds of American Indians in southeastern Oklahoma, and certainly in my mother’s imagination.  Small and intermediate-sized circuses began coming to Ada, Indian Territory, as early as the 1890s. … When circuses came to Ada, they always parked in Daggs Prairie about six blocks from my grandmother’s house.  My mother and my great aunt Euda and their friends would always sneak in the backside of the circus tents and watch the elephant…
  – LeAnne Howe, writer and Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma citizen


In her research with Monique Mojica, Howe uncovered the history of lands underneath the circus trappings of the 19th and early 20th centuries in which her great aunt Euda "played Indian." Circuses would unload from their trains onto indigenous burial mounds and drive tent stakes into ancestral rests. The lands chosen for memorial earthworks were retraced by circus routes, railroads webbing the same river valleys that were home to mound builders for millennia. “Why mound sites is a little unclear, but one guess is because the sites were ready made for the circus tent."

Don’t we all want to be a remembered as part of something?

Howe says that mound builders layered “different kinds of soils one upon the other” to “embody the lands of their origin” in an “earthworks embodied mnemonics aligned with moon and sun,” tying themselves to the cosmos through the earth. Traveling showmen, of all different kinds, tend to rootlessness. With the creation of Showmen’s Rests, they affixed themselves permanently with gravestone anchors. Elephants still haunt these grounds, now with the weight of concrete.

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