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[Judy]

A Midwest Circus Girl Story - written for amusement the way I do best.


During the mid eighteen hundreds, circuses consisted of acts of courage and ability by artists and athletes who were capable of accomplishments most people could only wonder about. It was a lifestyle of choice by those who were not content with the average daily existence. They were happy-go-lucky; so different from those who thought life should be a tedious, serious ritual. Performers were admired for accomplishing things others only dreamed of! For instance:

Walking on a tightly pulled rope high up off the ground was one of the feats that made spectators wonder and exclaim out loud. Holding their breath in case someone missed a step. Entire circus families participated in these shows, down to the youngest child, who may have started out only as a babe in a basket on the back of a horseback rider, or held up in one hand by an athlete father as he balanced on a ball.
Swinging from ropes and hoops, riding, jumping, and doing flips on horses, dancing bears and dogs were common shows offered by the entertainers, which gave them enough money or bartered goods to feed themselves and their animal partners until the next show. It was a simple and happy lifestyle for these early artists in America.
Traveling circuses were home to a small cross section of people whose lives and hearts were most comfortable communicating with animals, nature and each other – making a living and livelihood from something they loved most of all.

It was in those early days of expansion in our country, west towards the Mississippi River by new European immigrants to this country that the tiny, bald, screaming Mathilde was born. She was the first child to this new family - her father was the tall, blond haired horse trainer and manager of the first Sells traveling circus. He had grown up in the Delavan, Wisconsin area. However, for circus work he lived with his family in a small trailer cottage, forerunner of the motor home and travel trailer of today. The small trailer had just enough room for built in beds and a bench for sleeping-main meals were made and served elsewhere for the entire group of performers but some of the little trailers had their own small kitchens for snacks and family meetings.
Mathilde learned to ride horses at an early age, before she could even walk. She loved performing with her papa – first by sitting with him on his horse, sometimes sitting on his shoulder and then riding a pony alone while he did tricks on his horse just in front of her as the ponies ran in circles, counterclockwise around the ring. This thrilled the crowd to see such small child on a large beast, completely calm and at ease, while still wearing diapers herself! What a life it was. And, very shocking to some.

When Mathilde was about 5 years old, some of the older women in the public crowds protested that since she was a little girl, she should be doing more sedate activities like playing with dolls and learning how to cook with her mother. But Tillie didn’t care for such things. She was more interested in the exciting circus way of life, lots of people, fun, adventure and travel. Her mother was not a key figure in her life, having had a much more conservative upbringing and coming from the severe religious background in Pennsylvania. Mother spent more and more time with her family in the east, riding the train back and forth a few times a year and leaving Tillie in Wisconsin to stay with her grandmother in Delavan. Her family disapproved of the circus lifestyle and put a lot of pressure on her to leave her husband and bring Tillie to live with them – this she did not want to do, as she loved her husband and there was a place for her behind the scenes with the other women creating costumes and sewing for the performers. She also wanted her daughter to be a daredevil the way she had never been allowed when she grew up herself, not so long before. It was sort of a rebellious nature of her own that she could live vicariously through her daughter without having to be the rebel herself. She encouraged her daughter to excel in whatever she did, and to ignore the old ladies and anyone making her wrong for doing what she liked.

When Tillie was about 8 years old and her curly white-blond hair had grown quite long, at one of the performances was uproar from some local ladies in town, about this young girl riding a horse! Young girls should not ride horses with their legs apart, they complained! They threatened to call authorities and file a complaint. Tillies papa realized it was because his daughter was so pretty that in fact one of the ladies had formed a scheme to have her taken away so this woman could raise her, as she could not have children herself and healthy happy children available for adoption on the orphan trains were hard to come by. So, from that time on and in the next town they performed, Tillie put her hair up under a cap and rode the ponies dressed as a boy! She wore leathers just like her papa, pants and all and they advertised her as Tommy the Boy Wonder. Nobody would complain about a boy – one day she was wrong as a girl, the next day she was right as a boy. Amazing, she thought.
Those ladies would faint if they knew!
Now nobody complained about a boy riding ponies, and this allowed Tillie to accomplish a lot more than she had before. She was able to jump and do flips, hang upside down and hop lightly along the backs of all the ponies, cart wheeling as they ran inside the circle under the tent to the music of Charlie O’Donnell; “My Pony Boy”. A live Oompha band performed this music for the spectators.
If Tillie fell off or somehow made a mistake, she learned to jump back up quickly, brush herself off, smile and jump back on the pony as if nothing had happened. It was a smooth show all the way. Papa had taught her early on that you never show pain or upset with anything to anyone, because it was all for the entertainment of an audience and an audience wants to be happy! She loved performing and watching the people react to her daring show. They cheered and clapped! It was a very happy life for Tillie and her family working as a team with all their friends in the circus.