- A famous American showman -
( 1810 - 1891 )
* List of the stories
he appears in :
- D 96089 : "The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff" (Lo$ #6b), from 1996, by Don Rosa ; - D 98202 : "The Dutchman's Secret", from 199, by Don Rosa (by name only). |
* His biography :
Phineas Taylor Barnum was
born in Bethel, Connecticut, on July 5, 1810.
He first started as a store-keeper, and was also
concerned in the lottery mania then prevailing in the United States. He
married in 1829 with a woman called Charity.
Incurably megalomaniac and outrageously
imaginative, he turned fraud into an art to attract the attention of the
public (he used to call himself "The Humbug Prince"). Since 1835,
when he started his career as a showman, with Joice Heth whom he paid paid
1 000 $, a colored woman who claimed to be 161 years old and the nurse
of George Washington (she was in fact about eighty years less), he exhibited
a lot of nature oddities in his circus and museums, in the US and in Europe,
such as the Fiji Mermaid, "General Tom Thumb", and the
Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, Jumbo the largest elephant ever
known,...
Barnum's first, wife, Charity, died in 1873 while Barnum
was in Hamburg, Germany. The next year he married a long time friend from
England, Nancy Fish.
In 1887 Barnum and Bailey developed
the 3 Ring Show, such a large circus that it took 90 railroad cars
to move the whole circus, and this circus played in 175 cities in that
year. In 1889 Barnum and Bailey took their circus to London for the summer
and in 1890 they were back in the U.S.A. traveling across the land.
He died on the 7th of April 1891.
* His place in the Barks/Rosa stories universe
:
First, in "The Vigilante
of Pizen Bluff", which takes place in 1890, he presents a "Wild
West" show along with Buffalo Bill,
Annie
Oakley, Geronimo, Angus "Pothole" McDuck
(Scrooge's Uncle), to celebrate the choice of Phoenix as a capital, and
this whole bunch pursue, fight and catch the Dalton
brothers, who had stolen Phineas' money. In this story are seen on
the wall of Barnum's office pictures of the Siamese
Twins, and of Jumbo, the giant African Elephant Barnum bought
to a circus in England in 1882 and who died on September 15, 1885, crossing
railroad tracks in St. Thomas, Ontario. The name of Jumbo is also evocated
when Buffalo Bill thinks Scrooge should ask Banrum to hire him, and tells
him that he would be a bigger star than Jumbo the Elephant himself. Fortunately
for Don Rosa, Barnum could have been in Arizona in 1890, as he actually
was vacationing somewhere in the west that year.
Then, he appears by name "The
Dutchman's Secret", on the poster the Dutchman
gave to Scrooge.
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