Happy Saturday. Since we had our prior episode on P. T. Barnum as last week's Saturday Classic, this week we're returning to a follow up episode on some of Barnum's biggest side show acts and other stars. These are changing Ing Bunker, Charles Sherwood Stratton who was known as General Tom Thum, Jenny Lynn, and Jumbo the Elephants. And of course this means that this episode is largely about an industry that turned people's disabilities and differences into carnival attractions. And as another heads up, it does involve a pretty horrifying animal death towards the end of the episode. This originally came out on Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Blan choker Boy. And when we talked about the Prince of Humbug P. T. Barnum recently, we really focused on what a diverse career he had. He wasn't all about the circus that of course didn't even come along until he was in his sixties and was long after he had already established his name. And he also ran menagerie's, He managed a museum filled with wax works and taxidermy animals, and he had hoaxes like the Fiji Mermaid. Early in his career he staged minstrel shows and other quote low forms of entertainment, and later he of course mounted freak shows like ten in One, and even took a swing at some kind of highbrow entertainment acting as an impressario for a famous European opera singer. He did a lot of stuff he did. So today we're going to visit a few stages of Barnum's career, taking a closer look at the acts that made him famous and seeing how some of his performers could become incredibly famous and successful themselves. But since we'll be starting with some of Barnum's most famous quote freaks before moving on to more conventional and animal stars, it might be good to discuss that strange combination of exploitation and success that existed in the sideshow world of the eighteen hundreds. I mean, the fact that some freak show stars did achieve success might be surprising to modern audiences, because today it can actually be really disturbing to read the details of many of Barnum's prized acts, especially the ones involving people with physical disabilities, it really can be. I mean, everything seems wrong about exhibiting a six year old Burmese girl and allowing audience members to touch her just because she had hair covering her body, as Barnum did in fact do with kral Ferini, who was billed as the Missing Link. And some stories from Barnum's contemporaries are really just plain tragic. Theodore Lent, for instance, who toured Europe with another hair covered woman, this time Mexican born Julia Pastrna, eventually married her, but when she died after having there still born baby, Lent had both of them mummified and continued to exhibit them. But for some of these stars, a disability or an unusual skill actually really did bring fame and fortune, with many of the biggest names finding a way to separate their stage identity is so called freaks, from their off stage identities as normal business people and performers. One of Barnum's hit acts, Isaac W. Sprague, the American human skeleton who weighed only forty three pounds, was as much of a marketing man as Barnum himself. He wrote an autobiography, and he sold trading cards and all the profits went to him. Yeah, And the trading card business was a big deal for a lot of these performers because whereas the showman would get a cut of their performances, they could pocket all that money from the trading cards. And according to Laura Grand in History Magazine, Barnum quote built a strong rapport with the majority of his freaks in the US, And to me that made sense. It seems like it would be a bad idea to do otherwise, because with so competition from other showmen, it would be bad business to alienate your performers. And we're going to see some of that what kind of alienation can happen there with our first entry on this list. But the first act that we're going to discuss kicked off the heyday of small American freak shows and really set a standard to for side show performers making serious money and living lives that were also completely apart from their work on stage. So Ladies and Gentlemen, Chang and Ang Bunker. These first entries on our list were associated with Barnum, but probably less so than some of the later acts that we're going to discuss, but still they could be the names that you're most likely to recognize today because Changang Bunker Sarah mentioned they were the original Siamese twins, which meant basically that was the first time that the word Siamese twin or the term Siamese twin was used to describe this particular joint condition exactly. They were born May eleven, eighteen eleven, on a houseboat in Siam, which is out Thailand, and they were connected from birth by a band of tissue between their chests and stomachs. Their umbilical cord fed into this band, and when they were born, they were twisted so that they faced different directions. So their mother sort of untwisted that band almost so that each baby faced the same direction. If you see pictures of them, they just looked like two guys standing next to each other. And as they grew she really encouraged them to be as active as possible. They could run, they could swim, something that's very amazing. They could fight each other, which they did a lot too, and they could maneuver the houseboat that they lived on too. And they would also work on stretching that band a little bit, stretching in enough so that eventually they could each stand relatively upright, and they would usually pose with their arms around each other's shoulders. They were healthy too, and they survived smallpox, the same outbreak that killed three of their other siblings, and when their father died when they were eight, They helped support their family by raising ducks while their unique medical condition earned them an audience before the King of Siam. Interestingly, the king's predecessor had briefly considered having them executed. When he learned of their existence, he changed his mind. He decided there was nothing threatening about them, but still a close call for little Chang and Ang there. Each boy, of course, also had a completely separate identity. Chang was considered to be very outgoing, kind of had a quick temper. Ang was considered to be very thoughtful, introspective and right away. This was something that distinguished them from earlier conjoined twin acts like the Colorado Brothers from early seventeenth century Genoa, which was an act that featured Lazarus and his smaller, incomplete twin who couldn't speak, he couldn't really control his own movements. It was basically Lazarus that was in charge. The draw with Chang and Ang was that they were each so independent in a way, so distinct, and their distinct personalities, combined with their cooperative coordination, eventually caught the eye of Scottish merchant Robert Hunter, who partnered up with a captain Able Coffin to exhibit the Boys in nine They bought the nearly grown teens from their mother, and according to Holly Martin in the Journal of American Culture, they were billed as quote the Monster and then quote the Siamese Double Boys, and they were pretty much a hit from the start. At first, they also felt comfortable with their working arrangement because they'd get what they saw is a fair cut of what was made the profits, and they'd invest in their own act by adding tricks like flips and somersaults, making the show a little more exciting for folks. But in eighteen thirty one, Coffin took soul management and the brothers, who were displeased by their take. He reduced what they were making significantly, they decided to ditch their management. They left Coffin and managed themselves, and this started a very profitable stage in their career. They met Barnum, they briefly worked at his museum. The three men apparently didn't get along that well, so they left Barnum and just continued to break it in touring the US, Cuba, Canada, Europe, and even eventually earned enough to retire from show business to North Carolina and buy a farm. And they also at that point became naturalized citizens and took the last name Bunker. Chang soon began courting Adelaide Yates, the daughter of a neighboring Quaker family, while and courted her sister, Sarah. Neighbors were not in favor of this. They protested it because it was doubly scandalous to them conjoined twins who were also ethnically Chinese and from Siam. It just wasn't something that the neighborhood approved of, not at all. They even smashed out windows in the Yates family home. But the two couples were married anyway in eighteen forty three, and while at first they all shared one home, after a few years Chang and Aang set up their own houses and Mount Airy, which is interestingly the real Mayberry Andy Griffin this hometown. Their houses were about a mile and a half away from each other, and so to do this, they obviously had to set up a different kind of arrangement, and Chang and Ang, since they couldn't separate from each other, would spend three days with one wife and one family in one house, and then they would go to the other brother's house and spend three days there, and each twin would be the master of his own household. So the twin who wasn't living there would sort of, you know, keep his own opinions to himself for three days and then expect that of his brother. But the whole master of the household thing really has extra significance considering that Chang and Ang also owned thirty three slaves between them. I mean, they owned quite a bit of land and they had quite a few slaves working on it, something that I think often surprises people about them, but in a way fit into this normality they were trying to achieve as large landowners, which at the time in North Carolina might have met slaveholders, so they were trying to fit in with that. Seems like Chang and Adelaide ultimately had ten kids, while Ang and Sarah had nine, and the whole family was primarily engaged in farm work, but the brothers would still pick up extra cash by touring now and again, sometimes with the wife and the kids in tow. And their early performances had emphasized their conjoined state, but also their Chinese heritage, and in these later shows they always appeared in western clothes, and they wanted to emphasize that normalcy that you mentioned, Sarah. There were farmers with wives and big families, and that's how they wanted to be seen, just like you, but obviously not quite so. After the Civil War and after emancipation, Chang and Ang didn't have any money anymore. They were broke, they couldn't farm the farm, and they returned to show business more fully, even going back to Barnum, who employed them until they were over sixty years old. In eighteen seventy four, Chang, who had become a heavy drinker and who had suffered from a stroke, died of bronchitis, and before a doctor could arrive to separate the two brothers, Ang died. At the time, I think the diagnosis was that he had died of shock, which it would be rather shocking, I'm sure, but later analysis suggests that he probably died of blood loss because they did share an artery, and Ang may have just been pumping blood and not having it pumped back into his body, since Chang was dead at that point, and they didn't know that until later write that they shared. It was in the or that they realized they shared an artery after the autopsy, but they didn't come up with this idea until the nineteen sixties. It's interesting too that the brothers had long sought out separation and had nearly attempted surgery in Philadelphia after they got engaged. They were each willing to die if it meant a chance to live independently, but their wives stepped in. The wives begged them not to risk the surgery. They didn't want them to die. So, like we said, Chang and Eng aren't super associated with Barnum. But the next treat on our list certainly is. In eighteen forty two, P. T. Barnum met the boy who would become his most famous star, Charles Stratton, who was the four year old son of a Bridgeport carpenter. And when Stratton was born, he was a pretty large baby. He was about nine pounds, but before he was even one year old, he basically stopped growing and by the time he met Barnum, he was four years old, fifteen pounds and inches tall. After his teens he did grow a little bit more. He reached forty inches, ultimately in seventy pounds, but he had a fairly small stature for much of his life. Though Stratton was Barnum's distant cousin, he drafted him for a show, calling him General Tom Thumb and teaching him how to sing and dance and do imitations of people like Hercules, and having him pretend to be eleven years old rather than five, so that his small stature would be even more impressive. Barnum started Stratton out on three dollars a week, but as the little boy proved to be kind of a natural performer with as Barnum said, quote a keen sense of the ludicrous, he raised Charles's rate to fifty dollars a week. So in eighteen forty four Barnum and Stratton left for Europe, where they would do these sell out shows in London's Egyptian Hall. And Barnum, as we discussed in the earlier episode, was always hankering for more prestige, not just more money. He wasn't just about money. He was interested in prestige and a wider audience, and that was something he really did get through Tom Thumb when Baroness Rothschild heard about the act and invited the two over for dinner. And the dinner alone was an achievement for Barnum, but he used it as an opportunity for stirring up some humbug like like he always did. He dropped hints that the General General Tom Thumb might like to meet Queen Victoria, and soon enough an invitation to meet the Queen did arrive. According to Peter Carlson in American History, before Stratton could enter with Barnum, they got some very specific instructions, so this was upon their visit to the Queen. They were told not to speak directly to the Queen and not to turn their backs. They were escorted into the Queen's picture gallery and presented before a twenty five year old Victoria, her husband, Prince Albert, and the court, and Barnum later described the entry as such. He said, quote the General walked in looking like a wax doll gifted with the power of locomotion. The General advanced with a firm step, and as he came within Haaling distance made a very graceful bow and exclaimed good evening, ladies and gentlemen. So before a performance where he exhibited his impressions. Apparently the British really loved his Napoleon impression. Victoria spent some personal time with the little boy. They walked hand in hand around the gallery. She told him about the pictures, asked him about things he liked, and he even asked her this is very cute. He asked her if he could meet her three year olds on the Prince of Wale. She tells him no, he's asleep right now. They do ultimately meet, though, when it came time for them to leave, Tom kind of dramatically fended off one of Victoria's poodles with this cane. It was sort of like the sword fight pantomime. And I think there's an engraving of it, right, Yeah, I might have to put that one up on Pinterest at some point. Victoria's impressions of the night, though, are particularly interesting, since she was clearly bothered a bit by what she found to be troubling about this act. What we might consider to be troubling today exactly a very young boy away from his parents and performing around the world for money, and she saw this as we as you said, as we would see it. She wrote, quote after dinner, we saw the greatest curiosity I, or indeed anybody ever saw a little dwarf. He made the funniest little bow, putting out his hand and saying much obliged, ma'am. One cannot help feeling sorry for the poor little thing, and wishing he could be properly cared for. For the people who show him off tease him a good deal. I should think he was made to imitate Napoleon and do all sorts of tricks. So that's sort of the perception that folks had a guess of Stratton when he was so young five years old, six years old, working under Barnum. But as he got older, the relationship between him and Barnum did clearly become more one of business partners, with Stratton making a good living and creating a life for himself off the stage. Laura Grand wrote that Stratton quote made his stage persona a caricature completely separate from his identity as Charles Stratton. He was able to shed his guys of Tom Thumb at the end of each day, not that his personal life and stage career didn't intersect at times. Probably the most famous event in Stratton's life was his eighteen sixty three marriage to Lavina Warren, a little person from Middleborough, Massachusetts with Mayflower ancestors, and Lavigna called the quote Queen of Beauty in the New York Times write up of their marriage and Stratton were married at Grace Episcopal Church, New York City with people like the Asters and the Vanderbilts and attendants, and during their honeymoon they even got to visit the White House. It was considered to be one of the biggest celebrity marriages of the century. Our next act moves away from the kind of side show entertainments that Barnum was best known for. While he was visiting London to such great acclaim with Little Tom Thumb, he happened to hear about a singer who was selling out shows in England and Ireland, Jenny Lynn, who was better known as the Swedish Nightingale, and Barnum, who didn't even bother to attend one of her shows or request some sort of sample performance, pitched Lynd on this one D fifty date US tour with a guarantee of one thousand dollars per show was apparently a pretty unheard of some at the time, so Lynn did negotiate for a little bit more. Though she was very charitably minded, and she negotiated with Barnum to make some further donations on top of that too, charities of her choosing. She did, eventually, though, agree, and left Liverpool in August of eighteen fifty for her big American tour. Just a little background on Lynn. She was born in Stockholm in eighteen twenty and was already a European star. Charlotte Bronte, in fact, was a huge fan. According to Cassandra fell In Bronte studies, and she had debuted in Sweden in eighteen thirty eight and had studied opera in Paris, where she perfected her coloratura and became known for her range, stretching from the B below middle C to high G. And when she teamed up with Barnum she actually had been considering leaving the stage. He really made her an offer she couldn't refuse, though, so for six months leading up to that big US debut, Barnum stirred up his humbug again, even though in this case Lynn's talents really did prove to be much more than hype. He would write articles about how beautiful she it's how sweet and good she was. He would run these poetry contests like pitch us your best poem about Jenny Lynde, and he ultimately stirred up what was called Lindamania. People were just so excited to hear this young woman saying even though they were just going on his word for it, and I mean it worked as tactics really worked. There were more than thirty thousand people waiting for her steamer when it arrived in New York. Twenty thousand more lined the route to her hotel. And Barnum wasn't stingy with this either, with with her, after seeing how successful that she was. After finally hearing her and realizing how good she was, he renegotiated her contract after just a few shows. But he made out pretty well too. He probably made close to a half a million dollars that year, and it did give him some of that legitimacy that he was hoping for. He was working with a famous opera singer here. It was different from his American Museum kind of performance as he normally promote did. Other people made a lot of money off of Jenny Lynn too, though when we mentioned her in the last episode, we talked about how she was just this huge merchandizing sensation, one of the earliest sensations of that magnitude, and people marketed porcelain around her. You could get Jenny Lynde hats and face cream, sheet music. That's maybe the thing that makes the most sense here, pianos, chairs, and even a crib which I did a little Google searching earlier. Today, the Jenny lynd crobe is still a very well known type of crib. It looks exactly how you would imagine a baby's crib to look, nothing old fashioned about it. So you can still pick one up, I guess you can. After her grand u s tour, Lynd married her accompanyist Otto Goldschmidt and lived in Dresden in England, where she eventually taught at the Royal College of Music before she died in eight seven. So our final entry is a very different one from this classic opera singer. It rivals only Tom Thumb is Barnum's most famous act and even today you probably associate Ringling Brothers in Barneum Bailey Circus with elephants, but Jumbo was the original and the most famous elephant of them all. So Jumbo had been captured in East Africa when he was four years old and was purchased by a the very an animal collector. He started out his public life though in Paris at the Gardonde Plance and ironically, considering his eventual size, I mean you can get a good idea of it by his name. His Paris owners were really disappointed with how tiny he was, and according to Bill Kelly in American History, they didn't realize that African elephants grow more slowly than Indian elephants do, and so they thought they just had a dud of an elephant. He was not as big as they were hoping, so after they traded him for a rhino, the African elephant wound up in London, where he was named Jumbo, which they believed meant elephant, and he started to grow. Eventually got up to eleven and a half feet tall, and Jumbo spent most of his life there. He entertained kids who visited the zoo and even gave rides Barnum on one of his England visits. Coveted him. He said quote, I have often looked wistfully on Jumbo, but with no hope of ever getting possession of him, as I know him to be a great favorite of Queen Victoria, whose children and grandchildren are among the tens of thousands of British juveniles whom Jumbo has carried on his back. I did not suppose he would ever be sold. Finally, though, knowing that Jumbo's temper had worsened lately, his British owners unloaded him on. Barnum didn't tell him about the temper. Probably I'm an angry elephant on that on her hand, right, But he sold him for a ten thousand dollars to Barnum. So the British public, though, was very upset about this. They were mad. I mean, think of the children who loved Jumbo so much. And Jumbo's keeper, Matthew Scott remembered people actually picketing the zoo and thousands of kids lining up to see Jumbo, just crying their hearts out. And it was too bad for them because Barnum was going to be taking his ten thousand dollar elephant back to the States, and in eighteen eighty two he had Jumbo and his elephant friend from the zoo named Alice, but on board a ship. Poor Jumbo here, he did not enjoy his transatlantic trip at all. He was apparently very seasick and apparently had daily beer rations. I can't imagine that's in a normal elephants rations today. Yeah, well probably not. But it's sad that he just didn't get unlimited beer if he needed it. Poor thing one state side. Jumbo helped make Barnum's new circus a hit, also helping transform the Three Ring Circus to something more akin to what it is today, which is, of course kind of a spectacle. He even grew some more and his temper issues disappeared, so Barnum didn't have to worry about that after all. Well, and Barnum also pulled another Jenny Lynde and marketed his new elephant like crazy. You could buy Jumbo every thing. I don't know about, Jumbo face cream or Jumbo cribs. He applied the elephant's name to all sorts of products, and eventually Jumbo became ubiquitous enough to mean very large. I mean that's how we think of it today. Something is Jumbo size. So then, after four seasons with the circus, where Jumbo had certainly earned back his ten thousand dollars and really helped make Barnum's circus a hit. He was killed in a railway accident, and he and Barnum's tiniest elephant, strangely also named Tom Thumb. We're crossing some rail road tracks with their keeper, and an unexpected engine came speeding through. It knocked Tom Thumb out of the way. He rolled down an embankment, and Jumbo just panicked and he tried to run, but he was hit by the train in a crash that also killed the engineer. Barnum, who had kind of hedged his bets for a while and seen about whether Jumbo's hide and skeleton could be preserved. I think he wrote about it like God forbid anything ever happens to Jumbo, but just in case, so he did have a plan in place, and he had the elephants skeleton and hide saved and set up this big funeral procession, even spinning a whole story that Jumbo had died trying to push the baby Tom Thumb out of the way of the train. So while the hide was eventually destroyed in a fire, jumbo skeleton can sometimes be seen in the American Museum of Natural History, so you can still check that out now and again, hey, your spects to Jumbo. So it's been fun talking about these different acts, and it's been interesting to coming across all the names that you can find just a little tidbit of information on. These are obviously all pretty well documented, pretty well researched figures because they were so famous, but there are so many names, you just get the most tantalizing little peek at what their life must have been like. Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from i heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Since we had our prior episode on P. T. Barnum as last week's Saturday Classic, this week we're returning to a follow up episode on some of Barnum's biggest side show acts and other stars. These are changing Ing Bunker, Charles Sherwood Stratton who was known as General Tom Thum, Jenny Lynn, and Jumbo the Elephants. And of course this means that this episode is largely about an industry that turned people's disabilities and differences into carnival attractions. And as another heads up, it does involve a pretty horrifying animal death towards the end of the episode. This originally came out on Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Blan choker Boy. And when we talked about the Prince of Humbug P. T. Barnum recently, we really focused on what a diverse career he had. He wasn't all about the circus that of course didn't even come along until he was in his sixties and was long after he had already established his name. And he also ran menagerie's, He managed a museum filled with wax works and taxidermy animals, and he had hoaxes like the Fiji Mermaid. Early in his career he staged minstrel shows and other quote low forms of entertainment, and later he of course mounted freak shows like ten in One, and even took a swing at some kind of highbrow entertainment acting as an impressario for a famous European opera singer. He did a lot of stuff he did. So today we're going to visit a few stages of Barnum's career, taking a closer look at the acts that made him famous and seeing how some of his performers could become incredibly famous and successful themselves. But since we'll be starting with some of Barnum's most famous quote freaks before moving on to more conventional and animal stars, it might be good to discuss that strange combination of exploitation and success that existed in the sideshow world of the eighteen hundreds. I mean, the fact that some freak show stars did achieve success might be surprising to modern audiences, because today it can actually be really disturbing to read the details of many of Barnum's prized acts, especially the ones involving people with physical disabilities, it really can be. I mean, everything seems wrong about exhibiting a six year old Burmese girl and allowing audience members to touch her just because she had hair covering her body, as Barnum did in fact do with kral Ferini, who was billed as the Missing Link. And some stories from Barnum's contemporaries are really just plain tragic. Theodore Lent, for instance, who toured Europe with another hair covered woman, this time Mexican born Julia Pastrna, eventually married her, but when she died after having there still born baby, Lent had both of them mummified and continued to exhibit them. But for some of these stars, a disability or an unusual skill actually really did bring fame and fortune, with many of the biggest names finding a way to separate their stage identity is so called freaks, from their off stage identities as normal business people and performers. One of Barnum's hit acts, Isaac W. Sprague, the American human skeleton who weighed only forty three pounds, was as much of a marketing man as Barnum himself. He wrote an autobiography, and he sold trading cards and all the profits went to him. Yeah, And the trading card business was a big deal for a lot of these performers because whereas the showman would get a cut of their performances, they could pocket all that money from the trading cards. And according to Laura Grand in History Magazine, Barnum quote built a strong rapport with the majority of his freaks in the US, And to me that made sense. It seems like it would be a bad idea to do otherwise, because with so competition from other showmen, it would be bad business to alienate your performers. And we're going to see some of that what kind of alienation can happen there with our first entry on this list. But the first act that we're going to discuss kicked off the heyday of small American freak shows and really set a standard to for side show performers making serious money and living lives that were also completely apart from their work on stage. So Ladies and Gentlemen, Chang and Ang Bunker. These first entries on our list were associated with Barnum, but probably less so than some of the later acts that we're going to discuss, but still they could be the names that you're most likely to recognize today because Changang Bunker Sarah mentioned they were the original Siamese twins, which meant basically that was the first time that the word Siamese twin or the term Siamese twin was used to describe this particular joint condition exactly. They were born May eleven, eighteen eleven, on a houseboat in Siam, which is out Thailand, and they were connected from birth by a band of tissue between their chests and stomachs. Their umbilical cord fed into this band, and when they were born, they were twisted so that they faced different directions. So their mother sort of untwisted that band almost so that each baby faced the same direction. If you see pictures of them, they just looked like two guys standing next to each other. And as they grew she really encouraged them to be as active as possible. They could run, they could swim, something that's very amazing. They could fight each other, which they did a lot too, and they could maneuver the houseboat that they lived on too. And they would also work on stretching that band a little bit, stretching in enough so that eventually they could each stand relatively upright, and they would usually pose with their arms around each other's shoulders. They were healthy too, and they survived smallpox, the same outbreak that killed three of their other siblings, and when their father died when they were eight, They helped support their family by raising ducks while their unique medical condition earned them an audience before the King of Siam. Interestingly, the king's predecessor had briefly considered having them executed. When he learned of their existence, he changed his mind. He decided there was nothing threatening about them, but still a close call for little Chang and Ang there. Each boy, of course, also had a completely separate identity. Chang was considered to be very outgoing, kind of had a quick temper. Ang was considered to be very thoughtful, introspective and right away. This was something that distinguished them from earlier conjoined twin acts like the Colorado Brothers from early seventeenth century Genoa, which was an act that featured Lazarus and his smaller, incomplete twin who couldn't speak, he couldn't really control his own movements. It was basically Lazarus that was in charge. The draw with Chang and Ang was that they were each so independent in a way, so distinct, and their distinct personalities, combined with their cooperative coordination, eventually caught the eye of Scottish merchant Robert Hunter, who partnered up with a captain Able Coffin to exhibit the Boys in nine They bought the nearly grown teens from their mother, and according to Holly Martin in the Journal of American Culture, they were billed as quote the Monster and then quote the Siamese Double Boys, and they were pretty much a hit from the start. At first, they also felt comfortable with their working arrangement because they'd get what they saw is a fair cut of what was made the profits, and they'd invest in their own act by adding tricks like flips and somersaults, making the show a little more exciting for folks. But in eighteen thirty one, Coffin took soul management and the brothers, who were displeased by their take. He reduced what they were making significantly, they decided to ditch their management. They left Coffin and managed themselves, and this started a very profitable stage in their career. They met Barnum, they briefly worked at his museum. The three men apparently didn't get along that well, so they left Barnum and just continued to break it in touring the US, Cuba, Canada, Europe, and even eventually earned enough to retire from show business to North Carolina and buy a farm. And they also at that point became naturalized citizens and took the last name Bunker. Chang soon began courting Adelaide Yates, the daughter of a neighboring Quaker family, while and courted her sister, Sarah. Neighbors were not in favor of this. They protested it because it was doubly scandalous to them conjoined twins who were also ethnically Chinese and from Siam. It just wasn't something that the neighborhood approved of, not at all. They even smashed out windows in the Yates family home. But the two couples were married anyway in eighteen forty three, and while at first they all shared one home, after a few years Chang and Aang set up their own houses and Mount Airy, which is interestingly the real Mayberry Andy Griffin this hometown. Their houses were about a mile and a half away from each other, and so to do this, they obviously had to set up a different kind of arrangement, and Chang and Ang, since they couldn't separate from each other, would spend three days with one wife and one family in one house, and then they would go to the other brother's house and spend three days there, and each twin would be the master of his own household. So the twin who wasn't living there would sort of, you know, keep his own opinions to himself for three days and then expect that of his brother. But the whole master of the household thing really has extra significance considering that Chang and Ang also owned thirty three slaves between them. I mean, they owned quite a bit of land and they had quite a few slaves working on it, something that I think often surprises people about them, but in a way fit into this normality they were trying to achieve as large landowners, which at the time in North Carolina might have met slaveholders, so they were trying to fit in with that. Seems like Chang and Adelaide ultimately had ten kids, while Ang and Sarah had nine, and the whole family was primarily engaged in farm work, but the brothers would still pick up extra cash by touring now and again, sometimes with the wife and the kids in tow. And their early performances had emphasized their conjoined state, but also their Chinese heritage, and in these later shows they always appeared in western clothes, and they wanted to emphasize that normalcy that you mentioned, Sarah. There were farmers with wives and big families, and that's how they wanted to be seen, just like you, but obviously not quite so. After the Civil War and after emancipation, Chang and Ang didn't have any money anymore. They were broke, they couldn't farm the farm, and they returned to show business more fully, even going back to Barnum, who employed them until they were over sixty years old. In eighteen seventy four, Chang, who had become a heavy drinker and who had suffered from a stroke, died of bronchitis, and before a doctor could arrive to separate the two brothers, Ang died. At the time, I think the diagnosis was that he had died of shock, which it would be rather shocking, I'm sure, but later analysis suggests that he probably died of blood loss because they did share an artery, and Ang may have just been pumping blood and not having it pumped back into his body, since Chang was dead at that point, and they didn't know that until later write that they shared. It was in the or that they realized they shared an artery after the autopsy, but they didn't come up with this idea until the nineteen sixties. It's interesting too that the brothers had long sought out separation and had nearly attempted surgery in Philadelphia after they got engaged. They were each willing to die if it meant a chance to live independently, but their wives stepped in. The wives begged them not to risk the surgery. They didn't want them to die. So, like we said, Chang and Eng aren't super associated with Barnum. But the next treat on our list certainly is. In eighteen forty two, P. T. Barnum met the boy who would become his most famous star, Charles Stratton, who was the four year old son of a Bridgeport carpenter. And when Stratton was born, he was a pretty large baby. He was about nine pounds, but before he was even one year old, he basically stopped growing and by the time he met Barnum, he was four years old, fifteen pounds and inches tall. After his teens he did grow a little bit more. He reached forty inches, ultimately in seventy pounds, but he had a fairly small stature for much of his life. Though Stratton was Barnum's distant cousin, he drafted him for a show, calling him General Tom Thumb and teaching him how to sing and dance and do imitations of people like Hercules, and having him pretend to be eleven years old rather than five, so that his small stature would be even more impressive. Barnum started Stratton out on three dollars a week, but as the little boy proved to be kind of a natural performer with as Barnum said, quote a keen sense of the ludicrous, he raised Charles's rate to fifty dollars a week. So in eighteen forty four Barnum and Stratton left for Europe, where they would do these sell out shows in London's Egyptian Hall. And Barnum, as we discussed in the earlier episode, was always hankering for more prestige, not just more money. He wasn't just about money. He was interested in prestige and a wider audience, and that was something he really did get through Tom Thumb when Baroness Rothschild heard about the act and invited the two over for dinner. And the dinner alone was an achievement for Barnum, but he used it as an opportunity for stirring up some humbug like like he always did. He dropped hints that the General General Tom Thumb might like to meet Queen Victoria, and soon enough an invitation to meet the Queen did arrive. According to Peter Carlson in American History, before Stratton could enter with Barnum, they got some very specific instructions, so this was upon their visit to the Queen. They were told not to speak directly to the Queen and not to turn their backs. They were escorted into the Queen's picture gallery and presented before a twenty five year old Victoria, her husband, Prince Albert, and the court, and Barnum later described the entry as such. He said, quote the General walked in looking like a wax doll gifted with the power of locomotion. The General advanced with a firm step, and as he came within Haaling distance made a very graceful bow and exclaimed good evening, ladies and gentlemen. So before a performance where he exhibited his impressions. Apparently the British really loved his Napoleon impression. Victoria spent some personal time with the little boy. They walked hand in hand around the gallery. She told him about the pictures, asked him about things he liked, and he even asked her this is very cute. He asked her if he could meet her three year olds on the Prince of Wale. She tells him no, he's asleep right now. They do ultimately meet, though, when it came time for them to leave, Tom kind of dramatically fended off one of Victoria's poodles with this cane. It was sort of like the sword fight pantomime. And I think there's an engraving of it, right, Yeah, I might have to put that one up on Pinterest at some point. Victoria's impressions of the night, though, are particularly interesting, since she was clearly bothered a bit by what she found to be troubling about this act. What we might consider to be troubling today exactly a very young boy away from his parents and performing around the world for money, and she saw this as we as you said, as we would see it. She wrote, quote after dinner, we saw the greatest curiosity I, or indeed anybody ever saw a little dwarf. He made the funniest little bow, putting out his hand and saying much obliged, ma'am. One cannot help feeling sorry for the poor little thing, and wishing he could be properly cared for. For the people who show him off tease him a good deal. I should think he was made to imitate Napoleon and do all sorts of tricks. So that's sort of the perception that folks had a guess of Stratton when he was so young five years old, six years old, working under Barnum. But as he got older, the relationship between him and Barnum did clearly become more one of business partners, with Stratton making a good living and creating a life for himself off the stage. Laura Grand wrote that Stratton quote made his stage persona a caricature completely separate from his identity as Charles Stratton. He was able to shed his guys of Tom Thumb at the end of each day, not that his personal life and stage career didn't intersect at times. Probably the most famous event in Stratton's life was his eighteen sixty three marriage to Lavina Warren, a little person from Middleborough, Massachusetts with Mayflower ancestors, and Lavigna called the quote Queen of Beauty in the New York Times write up of their marriage and Stratton were married at Grace Episcopal Church, New York City with people like the Asters and the Vanderbilts and attendants, and during their honeymoon they even got to visit the White House. It was considered to be one of the biggest celebrity marriages of the century. Our next act moves away from the kind of side show entertainments that Barnum was best known for. While he was visiting London to such great acclaim with Little Tom Thumb, he happened to hear about a singer who was selling out shows in England and Ireland, Jenny Lynn, who was better known as the Swedish Nightingale, and Barnum, who didn't even bother to attend one of her shows or request some sort of sample performance, pitched Lynd on this one D fifty date US tour with a guarantee of one thousand dollars per show was apparently a pretty unheard of some at the time, so Lynn did negotiate for a little bit more. Though she was very charitably minded, and she negotiated with Barnum to make some further donations on top of that too, charities of her choosing. She did, eventually, though, agree, and left Liverpool in August of eighteen fifty for her big American tour. Just a little background on Lynn. She was born in Stockholm in eighteen twenty and was already a European star. Charlotte Bronte, in fact, was a huge fan. According to Cassandra fell In Bronte studies, and she had debuted in Sweden in eighteen thirty eight and had studied opera in Paris, where she perfected her coloratura and became known for her range, stretching from the B below middle C to high G. And when she teamed up with Barnum she actually had been considering leaving the stage. He really made her an offer she couldn't refuse, though, so for six months leading up to that big US debut, Barnum stirred up his humbug again, even though in this case Lynn's talents really did prove to be much more than hype. He would write articles about how beautiful she it's how sweet and good she was. He would run these poetry contests like pitch us your best poem about Jenny Lynde, and he ultimately stirred up what was called Lindamania. People were just so excited to hear this young woman saying even though they were just going on his word for it, and I mean it worked as tactics really worked. There were more than thirty thousand people waiting for her steamer when it arrived in New York. Twenty thousand more lined the route to her hotel. And Barnum wasn't stingy with this either, with with her, after seeing how successful that she was. After finally hearing her and realizing how good she was, he renegotiated her contract after just a few shows. But he made out pretty well too. He probably made close to a half a million dollars that year, and it did give him some of that legitimacy that he was hoping for. He was working with a famous opera singer here. It was different from his American Museum kind of performance as he normally promote did. Other people made a lot of money off of Jenny Lynn too, though when we mentioned her in the last episode, we talked about how she was just this huge merchandizing sensation, one of the earliest sensations of that magnitude, and people marketed porcelain around her. You could get Jenny Lynde hats and face cream, sheet music. That's maybe the thing that makes the most sense here, pianos, chairs, and even a crib which I did a little Google searching earlier. Today, the Jenny lynd crobe is still a very well known type of crib. It looks exactly how you would imagine a baby's crib to look, nothing old fashioned about it. So you can still pick one up, I guess you can. After her grand u s tour, Lynd married her accompanyist Otto Goldschmidt and lived in Dresden in England, where she eventually taught at the Royal College of Music before she died in eight seven. So our final entry is a very different one from this classic opera singer. It rivals only Tom Thumb is Barnum's most famous act and even today you probably associate Ringling Brothers in Barneum Bailey Circus with elephants, but Jumbo was the original and the most famous elephant of them all. So Jumbo had been captured in East Africa when he was four years old and was purchased by a the very an animal collector. He started out his public life though in Paris at the Gardonde Plance and ironically, considering his eventual size, I mean you can get a good idea of it by his name. His Paris owners were really disappointed with how tiny he was, and according to Bill Kelly in American History, they didn't realize that African elephants grow more slowly than Indian elephants do, and so they thought they just had a dud of an elephant. He was not as big as they were hoping, so after they traded him for a rhino, the African elephant wound up in London, where he was named Jumbo, which they believed meant elephant, and he started to grow. Eventually got up to eleven and a half feet tall, and Jumbo spent most of his life there. He entertained kids who visited the zoo and even gave rides Barnum on one of his England visits. Coveted him. He said quote, I have often looked wistfully on Jumbo, but with no hope of ever getting possession of him, as I know him to be a great favorite of Queen Victoria, whose children and grandchildren are among the tens of thousands of British juveniles whom Jumbo has carried on his back. I did not suppose he would ever be sold. Finally, though, knowing that Jumbo's temper had worsened lately, his British owners unloaded him on. Barnum didn't tell him about the temper. Probably I'm an angry elephant on that on her hand, right, But he sold him for a ten thousand dollars to Barnum. So the British public, though, was very upset about this. They were mad. I mean, think of the children who loved Jumbo so much. And Jumbo's keeper, Matthew Scott remembered people actually picketing the zoo and thousands of kids lining up to see Jumbo, just crying their hearts out. And it was too bad for them because Barnum was going to be taking his ten thousand dollar elephant back to the States, and in eighteen eighty two he had Jumbo and his elephant friend from the zoo named Alice, but on board a ship. Poor Jumbo here, he did not enjoy his transatlantic trip at all. He was apparently very seasick and apparently had daily beer rations. I can't imagine that's in a normal elephants rations today. Yeah, well probably not. But it's sad that he just didn't get unlimited beer if he needed it. Poor thing one state side. Jumbo helped make Barnum's new circus a hit, also helping transform the Three Ring Circus to something more akin to what it is today, which is, of course kind of a spectacle. He even grew some more and his temper issues disappeared, so Barnum didn't have to worry about that after all. Well, and Barnum also pulled another Jenny Lynde and marketed his new elephant like crazy. You could buy Jumbo every thing. I don't know about, Jumbo face cream or Jumbo cribs. He applied the elephant's name to all sorts of products, and eventually Jumbo became ubiquitous enough to mean very large. I mean that's how we think of it today. Something is Jumbo size. So then, after four seasons with the circus, where Jumbo had certainly earned back his ten thousand dollars and really helped make Barnum's circus a hit. He was killed in a railway accident, and he and Barnum's tiniest elephant, strangely also named Tom Thumb. We're crossing some rail road tracks with their keeper, and an unexpected engine came speeding through. It knocked Tom Thumb out of the way. He rolled down an embankment, and Jumbo just panicked and he tried to run, but he was hit by the train in a crash that also killed the engineer. Barnum, who had kind of hedged his bets for a while and seen about whether Jumbo's hide and skeleton could be preserved. I think he wrote about it like God forbid anything ever happens to Jumbo, but just in case, so he did have a plan in place, and he had the elephants skeleton and hide saved and set up this big funeral procession, even spinning a whole story that Jumbo had died trying to push the baby Tom Thumb out of the way of the train. So while the hide was eventually destroyed in a fire, jumbo skeleton can sometimes be seen in the American Museum of Natural History, so you can still check that out now and again, hey, your spects to Jumbo. So it's been fun talking about these different acts, and it's been interesting to coming across all the names that you can find just a little tidbit of information on. These are obviously all pretty well documented, pretty well researched figures because they were so famous, but there are so many names, you just get the most tantalizing little peek at what their life must have been like. Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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