P. T. Barnum

BARNUM

Posted By: Ken Wright (email)
Date: 3/10/2008 at 11:32:57

Maquoketa Weekly Excelsior
September 5, 1872

-P. T. Barnum’s Great Show, with its Six Separate Colossal Tents, its one thousand men and horses, five hundred animals, one hundred thousand curiosities, one hundred first-class artists, its group of monster sea lions, kept in massive water tanks, brought in whale ships all the way from the North Pacific, at a cost of $30,000; its living Giraffes and Cameleopards, wild Fiji Cannibals, from the island of Na Vit Lairow; the horse-riding goat Alixis, which performs on a fast-running horse all the feats of the most skillful equestrian; the herd of 24 camels and performing elephants, the wonderful automatons, the magnificent museum collection, the famous Admiral Dot, Sleeping Beauty, and the Dying Zouzve; Perizitian giants, Egyptian mummies, and Lilliputian dwarfs.

Three trains of forty cars each – in fact, with the largest and most attractive combination of startling wonders ever known, will exhibit in Clinton on Wednesday, Sept. 11, giving three entertainments – morning, afternoon and evening.

Special trains at reduced fares will run to convey passengers who wish to visit this mammoth exhibition. Such is the magnitude and variety of this aggregation that it has been compared to a great traveling World’s Fair.