LOOKBACK: Carnival dog poisoned along Cedar in 1908
Traveling show gave Spot funeral service before burial on riverbank in Austin
“Spot is dead.”
That’s how the Austin Daily Herald opened its long tribute (headlined “Dog Has Funeral”) on July 22, 1908, for the “unlovely looking, nameless, friendless canine of a bull terrier variety” that had traveled for three months as C.W. Parker Carnival Shows’ adopted mascot.
At the start of the carnival’s week-long stop in Austin, Spot got into a stray bone apparently laced with poison on a Sunday evening — the night before the shows opened — that immediately sent him into a seizure. Before his carnival band friends could help, Spot died.
The Herald called it an “irony of fate” that Spot — welcomed in each community visited by the carnival — met an “inglorious death in Austin as the victim of the organized dog poisoners that have wrought so much woe in dogdom lately.”
A photo of Spot’s burial in Austin can be found online, showing a group of people surrounding a small box with the dog. The carnival photographer took the snapshot; each band member ordered copies.
As a trouper, the dog was entitled to the carnival fraternity’s honors.
A day after Spot died, carnival members gathered at 5 p.m. after their afternoon performances for a burial service with the band playing Chopin’s funeral march. A cracker box was decorated into a coffin for Spot.
“No ordinary dog’s funeral would do for Spot,” the Herald wrote.
Part of the carnival’s “train gang” dug a grave on the banks of the Cedar River for Spot — as for the exact area, that is unknown.
The assumption is Spot was buried on the Cedar’s west side below the Bridge Street bridge (2nd Ave NE). That’s because the carnival was set up in a vacant lot along Bridge Street near the river.
A few decades later, The Terp Ballroom and a bowling alley were built on this lot.
Back in 1908, the C.W. Parker Shows was known as “by far the largest and best carnival company on the road” and had performed in Austin two years earlier.
This carnival featured 14 shows, an array of animals, two brass bands and a steam calliope musical instrument. It traveled via a 27-car train called the “Yellow Streak” and powered its shows with two, large portable electric light plants.
Several weeks after Austin experienced its worst-ever flood in June 1908, the C.W. Parker Shows arrived for a week of shows.
A large corps of mechanics, electricians, canvas men and carpenters converted the vacant lot along the Cedar into a “real, live, up-to-date amusement park, with thousands of electric lights, band stands, a big ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a How-Old-Is-Ann, a topsy turvy house…,” the Herald wrote July 20, 1908.
More than 100 animals, including lions (one of which rode a horse for an act), leopards, elephants, pumas, a pony, monkeys, orangutans, bears, dogs and an “educated group” of Arabian horses came to Austin.
Among the free, daily performances were band concerts, a high-wire walker, balancing trapeze artist and a daredevil on bicycle leaping across a 25-foot gap.
Offering performances at 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., the carnival featured colored show fronts and a row of concession stands all lit up greatly at night.
The Parker carnival “surpasses anything in its line that has visited Austin before,” the Herald wrote July 21, 1908. “There is too much to be seen to get around in one evening, and the humdrum of midsummer monotony will be pleasantly broken by the carnival.”
Some attractions included Barney, a black bear that worked with lions and showed a “clever manipulation of a beer bottle.” A small woman handled a group of Persian leopards with “great ease and grace.”
There was an illusion show with dancing and electrical effects; a “statue” coming alive before returning to stone; and a Vaudeville show with dancing, songs and comedy.
With tin cans tied to his tail, Spot the dog was part of the carnival for a brief time after joining the crew in Kansas. He then was locked up by a “brutal dog catcher” in Omaha, Neb., before the carnival band freed him.
Spot didn’t wear a uniform or play an instrument but was a recognized member of the carnival band known for “howling long, appreciative accompaniments to the band concerts.” He got “meal tickets to the cook house with unfailing regularity.”
“Spot made friends in every town he visited, and never lost a fight his benefactors rushed him into,” the Herald wrote.
The Herald’s memorial article for Spot concluded with a short poem about the dog.
A day after Spot’s memorial article in the Herald, the newspaper’s “Potpourri” column included a note about one of Austin’s leading businessmen telling a reporter that “all he would ask is that the Herald give him as good an obituary notice as the dog Spot received.”
Another merchant nearby suggested the Herald hold Spot’s obituary notice and just plug in the man’s name for Spot when the time comes.
C.W. Parker Shows returned in 1914 for another run in Austin but that seems to be its last visit.
