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One of the seminal events in the history of American circus equestrianism is the introduction of bareback riding. However since it occurred so early in the history of the art - 1822 - and because the man who introduced it was in this country only seven years, it is a milestone to which little attention has been paid.
James Hunter, the man responsible, has received only the barest of recognition and is largely unknown. He was born in England of Protestant parents about 1805. We know nothing of his life prior to 1821, when we know he was employed at Astleys in London as a rider.
Stephen Price and Edmond Simpson owners of the Park Theatre in New York City, the leading drama house in the country bought James West’s circus in 1822. It would appear that they did so to get rid of West as a rival to their theatre presentations.
West had the largest circus in America at the time and by purchasing it, Price and Simpson could guarantee that it didn’t perform simultaneously with their dramas. The sale was announced in August; in December James Hunter arrived from England, having been hired by the new circus impresarios.
On December 9, 1822, in Baltimore, bareback riding was presented for the first time in America. This was done at the building called the Market Street Circus. Circus riding had begun in Astley’s day as saddled riding, the horse accoutered just as he would be on the road. This gave way to pad riding in which a padded saddle blanket secured by a cinch was used. However, less talented people used a pad that was stiff, a platform on the horse’s back. Women riders used these into the twentieth century. Joseph Cowell has been quoted as saying that some pads were the size of sideboards. In all of these manifestations, the horse was controlled by bridle reins, the manipulation of which restricted what the rider could do.
Bareback riders eschewed both pad and bridle, the horse being in “the rude state of nature” as the advertisements proclaimed.
Abandoning the reins made it necessary for another person to control the horse, mainly to keep it at its gait. Thus was introduced the “master of the circle,” or as he was soon to be called, the ringmaster.
Hunter’s act was an immediate success. Of him the Baltimore American of 12 December 1822 said: “The circus attracts crowds every night to witness the wonderful feats of the celebrated equestrian Hunter, which are said to surpass anything of the kind ever witnessed in this country.”
Not only did he ride, he appeared on the tight rope and in the old, by then, standard “The Polander’s Ladder.” This was a balancing act using a break-away ladder. The performer struck attitudes atop the single upright after the rest of the ladder had fallen away. Its name is derived from a pre-circus European acrobat known as “The Polander.”
Hunter worked for Price & Simpson through 1825. After that year he brokered himself out to whoever could meet his salary, which must be presumed to have been substantial. If no one needed him for a month or so, he would organize his own troupe. By this time, Sam Tatnall and Timothy Turner were both presenting bareback acts, but Hunter was clearly the leading ring performer in the country.
For periods varying from a week to two months he performed for most of the leading shows until his final affiliation with William Harrington in 1827. It was Hunter who, in Hartford in 1826, ran afoul of the Connecticut law against theatricals and was tried and convicted of “rope dancing and extraordinary feats of agility and dexterity of body.” (1)
Hunter last appeared in America in March 1829 in Washington, D. C. with William Harrington’s troupe. He was billed as “the most celebrated horseman in this or perhaps any other country,” and in fact, he may have been just that. (2)
He returned to England and presumably continued his circus career, though problems developed. Mr. and Mrs. John Greene, whose travel diary was edited by Charles Durang, were quoted in the 24 June 1865 New York Clipper as saying that in 1830 they went to England and found James Hunter in rags. Their conclusion was that “through a weak mind and dissipated habits he lost all.”
George Stone in his history of entertainment in Albany, reports that Hunter innocently took Benjamin Stickney’s coat one night in Liverpool. Stickney, seeking to frighten Hunter, reported the theft to the police, whereupon Hunter was tried and convicted. (3) He was sentenced to be transported to Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania), the vast dumping ground for England’s criminals.
This was the limit of our knowledge of Hunter until quite recently. Fred Braid, the leading historian of the circus in Australia, has uncovered more on Hunter, which is the reason for this article to be written. Hunter’s convict record in the Tasmanian Archives Office indicates, if we read the nineteenth-century hand correctly, that for the theft of Stickney’s coat he was sentenced to three months in the Hulks, the decommissioned ships that served as jails for felons. Later, he stole some bedding from furnished lodgings and for this was transported for twelve years. Sentence was passed in the Surrey Assizes on March 28, 1842.
Twelve years seems to us to be a harsh sentence for the theft of some bedding, but in the nineteenth century transportation to Tasmania was used as a means of dealing with the overpopulation in England. People were sent out for the theft of a handkerchief; a boy for the theft of a coin.
The record describes Hunter as being five-foot, two inches tall with black hair, a black beard and having hazel eyes. He was listed as able to read and his occupation was shown as equestrian performer. He was thirty-seven years old when he was sentenced, indicating that he had introduced bareback riding in America at seventeen.
During his stay in the colony - and we don’t know that he ever left it - he was in trouble with the prison officials on several occasions. He absconded in January, 1843, and received thirty days at hard labor. He repeated the offense the next March and received another thirty days, this time in chains. He was insolent to someone in July of the same year and drew seven days solitary confinement. In May, 1845, his record was clean long enough for him to be released from the first stage of probation.
He may still have been troubled by drink, as a note in the file reads, “not to be hired in Launceston by any publican [barkeeper].” In April 1848, November 1848, and September 1849, he was in trouble again and served short sentences at hard labor. In October, 1850, he again was granted a Ticket of Leave, which allowed him his freedom within the colony. On June 10, 1854, he was certified a free man and allowed to go where he chose.
Mark St. Leon, another Australian researcher, has ascertained that one Golden (or Golding) Ashton from Essex in England was sentenced to fourteen years transportation on June 28, 1836, for stealing a silver brooch and pin. Ashton, whose death certificate says his father was a circus owner in England, claimed to have been a member of Bell’s circus and Batty’s circus in the U. K. Neither of these affiliations seem possible to us.
The connection between Hunter and Ashton is that they were both in the same part of Tasmania as prisoners in 1843 and again from 1845 to 1848. Ashton was given his Ticket of Leave in 1846. He adopted the name James Ashton at this time. By December, 1848, he was appearing as a bareback rider, “without saddle or bridle,” with Radford’s Circus in Hobart, Tasmania. It is Fred Braid’s contention that Hunter had taught Ashton the art of bareback riding.
Ashton went to Australia in 1849 to appear with Hay’s shortlived circus at Port Philip. The next year he was back in Tasmania riding for Radford. In March, 1851, he opened Ashton’s Royal Amphitheatre in Launceston, Tasmaina. Among his roster of performers was James Hunter.
Hunter, now forty-five, appeared on the tight-rope and as a clown. At his benefit April 5, 1851, he presented his bareback act for what appears to be the first time since he was transported. He then regularly rode for Ashton in that month. Nothing more has surfaced regarding his performing career.
As for Ashton, he went on to form the Ashton Circus in Sydney, Australia, in 1852, a troupe that is still before the public. As part of the celebration of the bi-centennial of Australia in 1988, Ashton’s Circus toured the country under government auspices. James Ashton died January 17, 1889.
Footnotes
1. Stuart Thayer, Annals of the American Circus, 1793-1829 (Manchester,
Michigan, 1976), p. l68.
2. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D. C.), 6 March 1829.
3. Joel Munsell, ed., Collections on the History of Albany (Albany, 1865-
1871), 4 vols., II, 40.
CHS webmaster J. Griffin, last modified December 2005.