Sources: Iinomachi, Iino choshi, vol. 3 (2) (Iinomachi, Fukushima Prefecture: Iinomachi, 2005), pp. 18-19; “Autographs of the Members of the Imperial Japanese Troupe” (listed on poster in possession of National Museum of Japanese History)
The Risley Act
“The story of professor Risley Carlisle . . . is full of curious changes.”
—Hartford Daily Courant, May 30, 1874
Who was Professor Risley? In 1866, when he arrived in San Francisco as the manager of the Imperial Japanese Troupe, he was already well known, in an age that produced many legendary and colorful impresarios. As a writer for the San Francisco Daily Morning Call put it in 1867, just as Risley left that city,
Everybody has heard of this famous man, and his life and varied experiences will form a conspicuous chapter in some history of “American Showmen,” to be written in the future. He has in the pursuit of his profession travelled over nearly the whole of the globe, and is as well known in Paris as he is in New York; his name is as familiar in Yokohama as it is in San Francisco. . . .1
“Professor Risley” was the stage name of Richard Risley Carlisle, who used it for most of his adult life. Born around 1814, newspaper obituaries at the time of his death in 1874 generally gave his birthplace as Salem, New Jersey. For most of his life, he called nearby Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, his hometown. Recent research pinpoints the place of his birth in Bass River, Burlington County, New Jersey, near the coast. Noted circus historian Stuart Thayer, who wrote one of the best summaries of Risley’s life, aptly refers to him as “A Man in Motion,” but until the beginning of the twenty-first century, when it became easier to search disparate sources of information, it was not clear how early Risley developed his extraordinary velocity. At times, he appears to us almost as someone who appeared on earth fully developed, with muscles tensed, ready to spring into action. 2
Map of northeastern United States.
As an adult, Risley was described as “proficient in athletic sports and a man of great personal strength and endurance.” Solidly built, he was also “a fine wrestler, skater and swimmer, with a fine musical voice, and performed with taste on the flute.” From an 1849 passport application, we also know he was 5’ 8”, had gray eyes, brown hair, fair complexion, high forehead, oval face, an average mouth, round chin, and a Roman nose. One detailed obituary in 1874, apparently written by someone who knew him, describes him as “a man of wit, a rapid talker . . . , and of a most jovial disposition.” He was also said to have had a speech impediment that, combined with his speed of talking, sometimes made him hard to understand. But it did not stop him from being
highly entertaining.3
Nothing in Risley’s origins immediately suggested that he would become the first person to introduce American-style circus into Japan, or to stage some of the first presentations of Japanese acrobats in the West. In 1814, Japan was about as far away from the shores of New Jersey, figuratively speaking, as the moon is from Earth today. The United States was a brand-new nation, having declared its independence from Britain only thirty-eight years earlier. It was a fraction of its current size, consisting of only eighteen small states hugging the Atlantic coast, and its focus was entirely on expanding its own western frontier, and on Europe. In the year of Risley’s birth the so-called “War of 1812”—America’s second war with Britain—was ending, and that summer the White House was burned by British troops. Japan, meanwhile, was isolated from the outside world and had been so for two hundred years, so whatever Americans knew about it usually came indirectly, via China or Holland, which had limited interaction with the Japanese. If ordinary Americans referred to anything remotely Japanese, it was usually with the adjective japanned, which meant “lacquered” items.
A Restless Spirit
In an era when most people lived and died in the same area, Risley was born into a traveling tradition. His father was John Carlisle, a sea captain at a time when the ports of southern New Jersey were bustling with commerce and ships from distant lands. In 1821, in preparation for his retirement from the sea, the captain built a house overlooking the Mullican River in New Jersey, where young Risley presumably lived with his sister, Elizabeth. In 1945 the house still survived, and a faded photograph from that period shows it to have been quite substantial, with at least two stories. One of four giant sycamore trees planted by the “jolly sea captain” was still standing, and the owner of the house had one of the captain’s original ledgers—written in a neat, looping hand, with copious notes.4
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, skillful sleuthing by John Kovach, the official historian for St. Joseph’s County, Indiana, helped fill in some of the missing details in Professor Risley’s early life. An article appeared in the local South Bend Tribune about a man who, when cleaning out a former old church, had discovered an iron cross with a note that said, “This cross marks the graves of the two children of Richard Carlisle, founder of New Carlisle.” The next day, Kovach was deluged with questions from readers, and he began unearthing old, forgotten records, revealing the astounding gyrations of Risley’s early years, before he became a professional acrobat. As Kovach reflected in 2011, “Little did I know what roads I would be traveling down!”5
On October 15, 1833, following his father’s death in 1828, Risley married Rebecca C. Willits of Philadelphia. He was not yet twenty-one, and it must have been an awkward union since (for reasons that are not entirely clear) the next year Risley’s new father-in-law named him as a defendant in a lawsuit, establishing a trend that would last throughout his life of being involved in legal actions. The year after that, in 1835, Risley’s first son, John, was born, and that spring the new family moved to St. Joseph County in the then-new state of Indiana. The area had been rapidly opened up to settlers in the wake of an 1827 treaty with the Potawatomi Indians. Perhaps hoping to make his fortune, in 1835, for two-thousand dollars, the twenty-one-year-old Risley purchased 160 acres of land from Lazarus Bourissa, a French fur trader in the area, and in the same year he submitted a “plat,” or plan, for a town he called (after himself) “New Carlisle.” Risley’s original “dedication” shows his meticulous attention to detail and linearity in design, for he specified that the main boulevard, Michigan Street, should be made one hundred feet wide, with alleys parallel to it sixteen and a half feet, while those perpendicular to it were to be eight feet in width.6
New Carlisle survives today, but Risley did not live long in the town that he established. In 1836, his second son, Henry, was born, but all did not go well. As Kovach has discovered, in 1837 the twenty-three-year-old Risley was sued by his brother-in-law, John Egbert. And while the lawsuit was going on, a campaign advertisement in the April 17, 1837, edition of the South Bend Free Press newspaper shows that Risley apparently decided to run for the Indiana State Legislature, as a representative of the County of St. Joseph. In 1838, a daughter was born and died, and that same year Risley sold his land and declared bankruptcy. He was briefly hired by St. Joseph County to be a bounty hunter, and in 1839 he purchased 160 acres in Michigan. The certificate of purchase survives, made out to a “Richard R. Carlisle, of St. Joseph County Indiana,” and testified to by then-President Martin Van Buren. It seems to have been one of the last times Risley used his real name.7
Much information about Risley’s movements in this period is still murky. In addition to being a bounty hunter and investing in real estate, he also was at one point a postmaster and a shopkeeper or merchant. One man who knew Risley later claimed that he lived in Philadelphia and was in the glass-cutting business with a shop and a warehouse “in Third Street near Arch,” but where this fits into an already complicated timeline is unclear.8 At any rate, by 1840 Risley had left Indiana, and he had also left some deep impressions on its people. Two decades later, the Ohio Repository in Canton ran a long,