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[Iowa?] 1880. Illustrated broadsheet, 22.75” x 8.5” plus margins. Faint black stamp at bottom of recto, “Cadiz [Kentucky] Monday July 11.” CONDITION: Very good, minor wear, a few faint tape excise marks on verso.

An appealing and unrecorded illustrated broadsheet from the inaugural season of Miles Orton’s newly-organized circus following his circus-owner father’s death in 1879. Featured is an illustration of nine women engaged in daring aerial performances.

Circus owner/manager Miles Orton, the son of circus owner Hiram Orton (1811–1879), here advertises a performance of his New Mastodon Show, which was to appear in Cadiz, Kentucky. The performers highlighted are Azel, “The Herculean Wonder,” and “the fearless mid-air gymnasts” Allie and Bernard, four and five-year-old “midget marvels” dubbed “the smallest child artists in the world”: “Their thrilling and daring leaps and somersaults through space, far above the heads of the audience and the pirouettes and explorations across the top of the high pavilion, are executed with an apparently reckless disregard for personal safety truly astonishing.” The aerial feats of Azel—called “phenomenal atmosphere paradox” and “the only lady horizontal bar artist in the world”—are described:

in her gigantic aerial passages from bar to bar blindfolded and her head encased in sacks, plunging downward through the air from a great height to a net receiver, concluding her gallantry by a tremendous leap for life 100 feet across the grand area, and flying like a sparrow into a hanging trapeze bar which she catches by her feet. … This brave and heroic feminine has no parallel.

Allie and Bernard hung from each other by their toes, neck, and teeth. Yet their most startling act was a frightful headlong dive from a height of 60 ft. to a net below—“graphically painting to the excited imagination the descent of a fiery comet, shot from the blackened dread immensity of space illuminating the pathway with resplendent daring in their rush to earth, and, once again on terra firma, bid adieu to the spell-bound spectators.”

A new feature in Orton’s show was a Spanish Circo of novel athletes, jugglers, and gymnasts whose performance comprised a genuine bull fight, jugglers of burning balls of fire, a herd of acting alpine elks, the juvenile circus company, and Hagenbeck’s Royal German menagerie and tierpark. The show also included Orton’s moral circus of “over 100 famous performers,” consisting of a musical congress, a bicycle quartette, clowns, lions, a museum, and more.

The verso text lists twenty “open challenges to the show world,” each of which Orton bets $1,000 no one can match. These include such statements as: “I challenge the show world to duplicate the juvenile circus company of midget artists, all under 12 years of age” and “I challenge the show world to duplicate the appalling courage of Madame Lucera, whose determination and fearlessness accompanies this beautiful and winning lady into an iron-clad prison of savage, treacherous beasts.” Orton asserts that his show contains more that is unique, attractive, and original than the entire body of shows combined and now traveling in America. Vignettes on the verso show individuals performing tricks on top of, and with, animals, as well as images of animals performing tricks, and a man trapped in a cage with two lions. The public is exhorted not to “confound my date with that of any inferior concern.” A ticket admitted one to the museum, menagerie, aquarium, and “rain-proof arenic tents” where the show took place.

Born in Pennsylvania, Miles Orton (1837–1909) was a circus director who grew up performing in his father Hiram Orton’s Iowa-based circus along with his six siblings. Miles was an equestrian performer who was known for riding horses bareback, standing up, and with two children standing on his head and shoulders. For a period, the Ortons were the oldest active circus family in the U.S., with over thirty members of the family performing. In 1862, Miles married Mary Ann Cook of one of the foremost circus families of England; Mary appeared with the Orton circus until 1872. In the spring of 1881, two years after Hiram’s death in 1879, Miles launched his newly organized circus, which he operated until his death in 1909.

No copies recorded in OCLC.

REFERENCES: “Miles Orton” at Elephant Encyclopedia online; “Orton Family circus.” The Des Moines Register (Des Moines, Iowa, 4 May 1913), p. 59; Stanley, Rod. “Ortonville and the Orton Family Circus,” Raccoon River Greenbelt Newsletter (Summer 2009), p. 6.

Item #7928

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