Circus train was magnet 60 years ago

When the circus came to town in Great Falls a century ago, people paid attention. There were no radio broadcasts yet to distract them.

When the circus arrived in the Electric City 60 years ago, before television, the internet and smartphones, unloading the circus train cars drew a crowd.

Some circuses in the first half of the 20th century came to the Electric City by train to an area near 26th Street and River Drive North, on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River.

Early in Great Falls’ history, before the city limits extended out that far, the bluff overlooking the south bank of the Missouri River was referred to as Black Eagle Park — even though the community of Black Eagle is on the north side of the river. A 1919 Great Falls Townsite map in The History Museum’s archives clearly labeled the area Black Eagle Park. By the 1940s, the name of Black Eagle Park appeared to have faded away.

“No, it was just a field,” Emma White of Great Falls recalled. “There wasn’t really anything out there. There weren’t any trees out there. It was just like a pasture.” To the south was the Sapphire Flour Mill on the North Side, White said, while agriculture continued outside the city limits.

“They used to have a sugar beet farm up there,” said Evelyn Schaefer of Great Falls.

In 2016, the area once called Black Eagle Park features the Montana Veterans Memorial, the city-owned Eagle Falls Golf Course and Centene Stadium, home to the minor-league Great Falls Voyagers baseball team.

Circus time was exciting in the early 1940s.

“That was a big deal,” White said. And it wasn’t just for kids, according to Schaefer.

“A lot of the older ladies would help them peel potatoes,” Schaefer recalled. “Then they would get free tickets to go to the circus.”

White remembers getting up early “so we could be out there by 6 o’clock (a.m.). We watched them unload the train. Boy, they really worked those elephants.”

White, who was born in 1937, has memories of the circus when she was 5 or 6, during World War II.

“I was really little,” she said. “We drove up there. Dad had a 1941 Mercury. It was a three-ring circus. I think it was a Ringling Brothers (show).”

Circuses fascinated the kids, with high-wire acts, circus animals and athletic performances.

“I’ve always like the horses, and the elephants I thought were fascinating,” White said. Elephants “were the heavy-duty trucks” that unloaded heavy objects from trains and helped set up the tents.

The circus-elephant handlers wielded sticks with a pointed hook on the end to get the elephants to do as instructed.

“They’d hit the elephants in the shoulder with it,” White recalled. “It was pointed. I didn’t like things being hurt. I didn’t really care for that.”

The circus was a thrill at a time when Great Falls covered much less ground in the first half of the 20th century. In those days, 10th Avenue South, now the city’s busiest roadway, had not yet been developed.

“My mother said they could have bought property out there (10th Avenue South) for 50 cents an acre,” White mused. “Dad was not the type to want to do that.” Had her parents bought the property, they might have made a tidy sum within the new few decades, selling the land for commercial development.

In 2016, circuses still can draw a crowd, but there are plenty of other things to attract people’s attention, from television and films to video games, music and online entertainment.

Concern over animal mistreatment led Ringling Bros. to stop using elephants in its circus performances. Its elephants in May 2016 gave their final performances in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island and were shipped to a 200-acre elephant sanctuary in central Florida to spend the rest of their lives in retirement.

Elephants for 145 years were a major attraction for the company’s ballyhooed “Greatest Show on Earth.”

In 2006, USA Today reported the number of U.S. circus organizations had dropped 33 percent from 1997 to 2002, from 87 organizations to 58, but receipts rose 19 percent over the same period. The story said circuses were trying to change with the times.

The most successful circus these days is Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil, which sold more than $1 billion worth of tickets in both 2012 and 2013, according to the online Fascination! newsletter. With a slogan of “We reinvent the circus,” Cirque du Soleil — French for “Circus of the Sun” — features acrobatics and magic, mystical and classical themes, and few animals.

Richard Ecke writes a weekly column on city life. Reach him at recke@greatfallstribune.com, 406-791-1465, or follow him @GFTrib_REcke on Twitter.