The animal wagons was hastily covered. We drops all canvas flat to the ground and strikes all poles. We didn't have much warning. A few seconds later the twister was upon us and cuttin' a swath right through the center of the lot. But the big top was picked up and torn to shreds, and small parts of it scattered all over the surrounding country.
Train wrecks is another thing.
I been through many small wrecks in the course of years of troupin', and was also in one disastrous crackup. The railroads in the old days didn't have no block signal systems like they got now, and as circus trains was always extras and not regularly scheduled trains, wrecks was frequent. At Gary, Indiana, I was with Sells-Floto circus, when we had a wreck where over a hundred persons was killed, and a lot of valuable stock was lost. A Hey Rube was a fight between the circus folks and the town yokels. These ruckuses used to came regularly every so often in the old days.