IIIF for Educators

Until the 1880s, Phineas Taylor "P.T." Barnum, the Mayor of Bridgeport, CT and member of the Connecticut House of Representatives, was not really known as a circus guy, much less a politician. Barnum bought Scudder's American Museum in 1842 and reopened it as The American Museum. It had a bit of anything: beluga whales, Siamese twins, a flea circus, trained bears, and a 3-foot tall little person called General Tom Thumb. Confederate agents burnt the museum down in 1865, and most of the poor animals died in the massive conflagration. Its replacement, Barnum's New Museum, also burned down three years later.

But we know P.T. Barnum from "The Greatest Show on Earth," Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus. Barnum lent his twisted business acumen to a growing craze, and brought his menagerie and sideshows on a modernized circus train to a rapidly expanding post-Civil War re-United States.

Barnum's biggest stunt was his purchase of Jumbo, an African elephant, for $10K from the London Zoo in 1882. As far as celebrities go, Jumbo was the biggest of them all. He had been captured 20 years earlier in Sudan, and sold from Germany to France before landing in England. The British public adored him and didn't want to give him up. Once state-side, Jumbo quickly became the star attraction of Barnum's circus. Jumbo met his earthly end in early 1885 when he was struck by a speeding freight train. The show must go on, insisted Barnum, and he sent Jumbo's corpse off to Ward's Scientific Establishment in Rochester, NY to be stuffed and returned inside and out to the circus for posthumous labor. 

There's more than one way to skin a cat, they say, but you'd better make sure it's dead. The cutter  on hand at Ward's was Carl Akeley, who was about to disrupt the moribund field of taxidermy. From the Italian Renaissance Akeley developed an appreciation for flayed human bodies taking mannerist poses in sculpture and fresco. As for technique, from the French he borrowed papier-machet with shellac. Akeley's signature style can be seen in natural history museums across the land, such as The Field Museum. As for Jumbo, Barnum eventually donated his taxidermied remains to Tufts University in 1889 along with a (scientific) museum in his name. It burned down in 1975 and all that remains of Jumbo is a bit of trunk and his tail.