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185 AMarriageandTwoFunerals  I n 1874 George Washington Morrison Nutt left the General Tom Thumb Company to pursue his own interests. It is not clear whether his drinking problem had caused friction in the group or if he simply wanted to leave to start a new career. Nutt did try to perform with other traveling shows at first, including with an opera company in 1877. In Terre Haute, Indiana he played a trick on “Colonel” Ruth Goshen, the giant, which Goshen later shared, saying that the theater was sold out, and “the Commodore started on a little racket,” meaning he started drinking. Apparently this scared the theater manager. “Colonel” says he to me, “I’m afraid the Commodore won’t come in time for the performance tonight.” “I will see to that,” says I, and I just picked him up and carried him up stairs, and locked him in a room. When I went up after him in the evening, there he was, as drunk as a lord, and I had the key of the room in my pocket all the time. When he saw me he put on a comic look and began to sing: “I’m Timothy Tottle, I’m fond of my bottle.” That’s a song he used to sing, and I couldn’t help but laugh for the life of me. You see he had slipped some money under the door to the call-­ boy and got him to bring up some liquor and a clay pipe. The boy put the pipestem through the key hole, and the Commodore stood on his toes and got all the whisky he wanted without having the door opened.1 Goshen’s anecdote shows Nutt’s self-­ destructive alcoholism in a humorous way, but of course this was just the sort of thing that probably caused his break-­ up with Charles and Lavinia. His replacement in the company was “Major” Edward Newell, a short, slim man with an aquiline nose and an easy bearing, whose main talent was “dancing” in parlor skates. Born in Chicago as Edmund, he received another name change when he was exhibited as General Grant Jr. by Barnum for several years at the American Museum .2 Sometimes called the “Skatorial Phenomenon,” this fresh addi- b e c o m i n g t o m t h u m b 186 tion to the troupe charmed everyone. Minnie Warren especially took an interest in him, though he was at least four years younger than she was, and according to some sources as many as eight. The public had long assumed Minnie and George Nutt were married . As Charles put it: “People fell naturally into the idea because they were the same age—he was born in April and she in June 1849— and traveled so much together. Sometimes hotel keepers would tell us that such and such a room had been set apart for Mr. and Mrs. Commodore Nutt, and they were quite surprised to learn that there was no Mrs. Nutt.”3 It didn’t help that in 1869 the New York Times had “congratulated” Nutt and Minnie Warren on their marriage, and the paper’s incorrect report led to a great deal of confusion.4 Newell was probably a huge relief to Minnie, who had been performing duets and skits with the often-­ drunk George Nutt for a decade , and probably needed a more reliable partner. They traveled together in the winters of 1874 and 1875, absorbing Newell’s skating act into their repertoire. The Company’s longest tour after the one around the world took them from the fall of 1876 to the spring of 1878, traveling through Canada and the United States for a year and eight months. In 1877 they offered “songs, duets, dances, dialogues, comic acts and laughable sketches,” including “a new and original piece, entitled , ‘The Mischievous Monkey,’” which they would continue playing all that spring.5 At one performance in Nebraska, everyone in town thought that the event was “worth the money” and commented on how small Minnie Warren looked. A small boy came up for a kiss from the little lady, but “hesitated” and the audience laughed. Minnie smiled at him, but he rushed off because she “looked too much like a little girl for him” and the newspaper predicted he would “always regret that act.”6 By this time, Minnie was kissing someone else. Now in her late twenties, she was not getting any younger, and...

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