. . . was quite a favorite with the ladies and the best part of “Young America” [ . . . ]—but a perfect terrifier to the rowdies. . . . [He] was the best natured fellow in town, but he was known to be as quick as a cat, and as muscular as a horse, and the rowdies seemed to have an instinctive knowledge that he was bad stock for them to invest in.9
In this story, a group of rowdies disrupted a local ball but were dispelled by Risley, who took one of the men by the heels and swung him around like a battle axe, scattering the others. Chastened, they then hired the biggest thug they could find, who days later appeared in Risley’s store. Ever the gentleman, Risley agreed to a fight on the local green, as long as the loser paid any fines for disturbing the peace. He encouraged the bully to have a friendly drink before the combat began, and then managed to “spread him out like a wet rag.” He thereafter nursed the bloodied giant, taking his pulse and talking to him kindly, as though to an old woman, saying, “You needn’t have any fears of being sued for breach of peace. . . . Nobody around here would call this a fight. . . . We’re only playing. . . . Shall we play anymore?” The two men reportedly resumed drinking and remained fast friends ever after, the bully later becoming a baggage handler in a circus.10
The role of ordinary businessman did not suit Risley well. According to some sources who knew him, around 1838 he also began appearing in “Welsh’s circus” on the East Coast, “playing the flute.”11 Exact dates aside, when Risley’s name does start to appear regularly in newspaper advertisements in 1841, he clearly already has considerable name recognition as an acrobat and entertainer.
On November 24, 1841, the New York Evening Post ran an advertisement for Welsh’s circus at the Bowery Ampitheatre in New York. It boldly announced upcoming evening performances, commencing with a grand Waltz and Gallopade and some equestrian performances, followed by Mr. Cole and “his singing Dog Billy, who will walk on two feet.” Another main attraction was to be “Mr. Risley and his little son only five years old who will go through their astonishing performances in imitation of the Polish Brothers.” There would also be vaulting by Mr. McFarland, a “Negro Extravaganza” by Messrs. “Risley and Williams” and, following a fifteen-minute break, some arena entertainment by the whole company and a comic afterpiece of “Poor Snip!” Box seats were fifty cents, but seating in the pit was a quarter. The Polish Brothers were a popular acrobatic act in the Northeast, and exactly what aspect of them Risley and son imitated is not clear. The “Negro Extravaganza” that Risley performed was presumably an early type of minstrelsy, a soon-to-be hugely popular form of musical, dancing, and comic entertainment in which White performers imitated Blacks, and especially Black slaves.12
Beyond Circus
Circuses were already popular entertainment in 1840s America. Introduced from England, they had not yet evolved into giant multi-ringed extravaganzas, but they were already well organized and populated with exotic wild animals, thrilling equestrian stunts, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, and musical and comedy acts, the last often taking the form of black-faced minstrel skits. In an era when people had few entertainments and a great curiosity for the unknown, the foreign, the exciting, and the risqué, circuses were hugely popular among the masses and could draw enormous crowds. Still, they were often scorned by the elites and the more puritanical members of local communities. An article titled “Circus” in the Freeman and Messenger newspaper in Lodi, New York, put it this way in 1840:
Our village is soon to be paid a visit by a gang of strolling mountebanks, jugglers, rope-dancers, equestrians and loafers, accompanied by their pimps and abandoned wretches. Music, excentricities [sic], negro songs and vulgar slang will be the principle feats to procure the patronage and attract the gaze of all who may be so sensually disposed as to give their money to so worthless a set of beings. We would ask, what are the benefits to be derived from visiting the circus? No one is benefitted thereby; but on the contrary thousands are corrupted in their morals, and hundreds ruined.13
In nineteenth-century America, the circus had far less social status than even the theatre, which was itself regarded as dubious entertainment at best. As the greatest impresario of the nineteenth century, P. T. Barnum (who elevated American hucksterism to an art form and helped create the modern circus) noted in 1841, “Actors maintain a profound disgust for the sawdust, and the circus people have a supreme dislike to the legitimate business, which they regard with supreme contempt. Yet it is the ambition of the circus folks to play in a regular theatre.”14
Partly because the circus belonged to a subculture and demimonde that catered to the cravings of the American public for novelty and exoticism, it was from the beginning also extremely multicultural. It was one of the few places in nineteenth-century America where performers of so many different backgrounds and utterly unrelated talents could mingle with relative freedom. And the names of the acts presented in early advertisements reveal the public’s curiosity and hunger for the foreign. When the previously mentioned “Polish Brothers” performed in Baltimore in January 1838, they also appeared in a piece called “Bedouins of the Desert.” They were followed by “Chinese and Grecian Exercises” and a then-popular equestrian number titled “The Courier of St. Petersburgh.”15
Playbill for an October 13, 1842,
performance of Welch’s New Olympic Circus, showing “The Inimitable Exercises of Mr. Risley and Son” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. courtesy, the library company of philadelphia.
Risley may have found one potential role model for the future in General Rufus Welch, the well-known impresario and owner of Welsh’s Circus, where Risley first made his name as an acrobat. In the 1840s, no one better represented the international aspects of circus than Welch, or Welsh, as he was sometimes called.
The portly Welch lived from 1800 to 1856 and was no more a real “general” than Risley was a “professor.” Yet he had a general’s view of organization and of the world, for his scope and his ambition seemed boundless. A much beloved man, he formed a variety of menageries and (often with associates) some of the most famous circuses of the mid-nineteenth century. He worked especially in the northeast of the United States, in the area of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, staging increasingly spectacular events. But he was also an early world traveler. As later obituaries noted, Welch “traveled in nearly every quarter of the globe,” through North and South America and Europe. He is also said to have visited Africa to collect lions and elephants and other exotic fauna, reportedly introducing the first giraffes into North America.16
Whether Welch directly triggered Risley’s interest in the outside world, and eventually in Asia, is unclear. But Welch’s circuses did help Risley make the acquaintance of other artists and performers who would later help him in his international career. And Welch’s international ambitions foreshadowed those of Risley. In 1843, New York newspapers were reporting that Welch would, “with his troop coast up the Mediterranean, visit Cairo, and crossing the Isthmus of Suez, descend the Red Sea, visit Western and Eastern India, and push his way to China, and ere the lapse of eighteen months, exhibit an American equestrian troop to his majesty the brother of the Sun and Moon, at the Royal Chon Chon amphitheatre at Pekin.” There is no evidence that Welch ever made it to Beijing, but he was nonetheless awe-inspiring for his time, “astonishing the semi-barbaric hordes of the East,” and “edifying the Christians, Jews and Mahometans of Algiers.” By the spring of 1844, he was said to have toured “Gibraltar, Cadiz, Algiers, Genoa, Marseilles, Palermo, Mahon, and crossed the Atlantic for South America, and at the last advices was performing in Rio with success.”17
The Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, earthquake of February 8, 1843. courtesy, national information service for earthquake engineering, university of california, berkeley.
In 1842 Risley appeared with his young son on the playbills of several