Saturday, February 09, 2008

19th Century Tents (From Richard Flint)


Barnum Caravan tent, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

P.T. Barnum Caravan

Posted by Buckles at 2/09/2008 06:13:00 AM

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the left side of the openintg page of this blog...there use to be a feature whereby one could access the comments recently posted.

Now, if I understand correctly, once the comments have filled the alotted space they are banished to the permanent comment space under the original posting.

Is there anyway to access the most recently postetd comments or am I not understanding this blog thing?

09 February, 2008 10:26
Anonymous said...

Looks like the flag tent from the Clint Eastwood movie Bronco Billy.

09 February, 2008 10:27
Buckles said...

To Juicy Lucy,
The feature is still here on my screen which is all I have to go by.
As always, I'll ask Shannon.

09 February, 2008 10:38
Dick Flint said...

Here is the view of the striped Barnum Caravan tent referred to by someone in a comment to my earlier tent posting last month. It comes from Gleason's Pictorial of June 7, 1851. Barnum's Caravan, for those who may not know, was a side show/menagerie managed by partner Seth B. Howes that toured 1851-54 featuring, among else, Tom Thumb and ten elephants (the most seen together previously were four).

09 February, 2008 10:59
Anonymous said...

I always wonder looking at illustrations like this one, or the Rice Show illustration -- to what degree they're accurate and to what degree they're fanciful? Maybe what I don't understand and knowing nothing about is whether pre-photography these illustrators where held to some kind of journalistic standard? You can exaggerate this but you can't exaggerate that... How did that work?

09 February, 2008 12:26
Anonymous said...

Ben, it's a tough call but generally they present a good sense of what it looked like. With the advent of illustrted newspapers in the 1850s (Gleason's was the first in 1851), their novelty was to present what was seen to a world that was otherwise confined by its visual opportunities. But photography, which was now common (the NY Tribune estimated in 1853 that 1 in 8 Americans had had his likeness taken), was even questioned for its accuracy at times (this was before Photoshop!). We know, also, that some Civil War photographers re-arranged bodies before they "shot" their pictures. But I think the essential facts are correct. Ask, for example, how an artist would have come up with the design of what we know to be a working tent today, if he had not seen something close to what he drew.
Dick Flint
Baltimore

09 February, 2008 12:49
Anonymous said...

This Barnum Asiatic Caravan, as it was called, also had an Indian rhino.

The animal wound up with Dan Rice who had it enter the ring as a trained animal of sorts.

It died in 1861 when its cage went overboard in the Mississippi River near LaCrosse, WI. The barge carrying the Rice show was struck by another causing the rhino cage to go overboard.

09 February, 2008 15:41
Buckles said...

I have in my notes that in 1873 the Barnum Show leased a rhino and a young elephant to the Orton & Older Show.

09 February, 2008 15:59

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)