“The performer who essays to follow in the footsteps of radiant Bird Millman must possess a combination of beauty, personality, grace, charm, and courage, along with dancing toes so light that they may perform pirouettes and arabesques not upon ballroom floor but upon a thread of steel, a combination of artistry and talent which thus far the world of the theater has seen but one.”
~Dixie Wilson
~Dixie Wilson
When it comes to my circus and funambulistic obsession, I don’t just want to learn the tricks, I also have a passion to study and research. I have a growing collection of fiction, biographies, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and manuals on the topic of rope walking. (I was rather surprised when a good friend kindly told me that this level of “delving” isn’t actually something that everyone does.) My analytical mind is looking for the how and why of balance work, my social side is looking for a glimpse into the culture and community, and my heart is looking for heroes.
Heroes are important. As Scott Labarge put it, “The critical moral contribution of heroes is the expansion of our sense of possibility.”1 Learning about the lives of the legendary wirewalkers does indeed reinforce that feeling of possibility for me—the possibilities of achieving my dreams—of becoming a rope walker as well as a truly decent human being. Scott Labarge continues:
I was first intrigued by Bird Millman when I ran across two quotations ascribed to her; I couldn’t resist looking into an incredibly quotable tightwire artist. There isn’t much about her online, but I found a museum and historical center2 in Bird’s hometown with a librarian willing to do some digging for me. You can imagine my delight when a thick packet arrived in the mail. Delving into the photocopies of countless newspaper articles, magazine interviews, and book excerpts, like the luckiest of deep sea treasure divers I surfaced with a gem worth—in my opinion—a king’s ransom: a hero.
In addition to her being quite quotable, I was, admittedly, predisposed to admire a fellow Rocky Mountain girl—an “exotic from the far West.” Jennadean Engleman—stage name Bird Millman—was born in 1890 in Cañon City, Colorado, population 2,800. She went from performing with her parents as a child in small time circuses to performing for royalty in Europe and as a repeat star attraction of Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The height of her circus career was 1904 – 1920, during what is known as the Golden Age of the American Circus. She was called “Queen of Silver Strand,” “Queen of the Circus,” a “whirlwind on the tightrope,” “the most dashing, daring and fascinating girl that ever stepped upon a tightwire,” and “the daintiest and greatest of all wire walkers.”
She wasn’t from a long line of circus performers. Her father developed a passion for gymnastics during his time at a military academy. After graduating he continued to play on improvised equipment he’d rigged on the second floor of the town hall. He got his wife to try. She didn’t like it all that much at first. Then one day she slipped and fell during a stunt—and broke through the floor so her bottom half hung over the dancers performing on the stage below. That was the day she vowed to give the town something else to talk about besides the garters and corset strings they'd seen hanging through the ceiling. The two became very good; soon enough people were definitely too busy gasping and gaping and applauding to remember that early embarrassment. The Engleman couple auditioned for and received spots in a local circus. Little Jennadean—Bird—was born and later came on the road with them, the pet of the circus…and soon joined them in their acts.
As for the origins of her stage name, the change in her last name from Engleman to Millman was her father’s doing—Engleman was just too likely to be misspelled, so he pulled out a dictionary and picked a good word. There are several conflicting stories for the change from Jennadean to Bird: perhaps it was her grandmother who nicknamed her because her cry sounded like a bird chirp, or perhaps her father just happened to be looking at a bird sitting on a telephone wire when he was trying to think up a stage name for her. Either way, it became a fitting name for a girl who, even as a small child, “had a way of ignoring the earth,” a girl with “twittering feet and lyric personality,” who fluttered “as though she wore winged boots,” who loved to flit and fly along a wire in the sky.
Bird was known for her grace and poise on the wire. She didn't perform tricks that looked excruciatingly difficult, but she made the most daring of tricks look beautifully finished. She was known for her dancing most of all—sliding, whirling, jumping, waltzing, cake-walking, and pirouetting “until the crowd completely lost sight of the fact that she danced on only a taut slender wire.” In fact, she once admitted that it was harder for her to dance on solid ground than on her wire. Her speed also was her signature: using the natural spring of the wire, her dancing toes moved "so fast it took your breath away." At other points in her acts, she would dispense with her parasol and, freehand, dash the length of her wire, then sprint back again at lightning speeds.
Reading about her, it seemed to me that the one word best characterizing Bird Millman is laughter. Over and over again journalists talked of her laughing. That laugh was one of the things that won her such fame: “She laughed and danced her way into the hearts of the show-going public as no other had done before her.” The shy little girl who hid behind her mother’s skirts was fearless up in the air. As a small child, even before she discovered tightwire, she participated in her parents’ act. Her father would hang from his knees on a trapeze bar, she would stand on top of the bar—and then JUMP off. She laughed while plummeting down through the air head-first in a swan dive, laughed when her father caught her ankles and swung her forty feet in the air. As she danced on the wire, the sound of the music was “punctuated with the ripple of her laughter,” laughter of “light-hearted and almost childish glee.” When reporters managed to corner her for an interview, she would laugh as, with girlish delight, she showed off a beautiful new costume, laugh as she recounted past trips and slips, bumps and bruises, and laugh that her feet—of their own accord—were tapping their impatience to be back on the wire.
In my opinion Bird Millman, an “ambitious little bit of humanity,” thoroughly deserved the public adoration she won because, in addition to daring and talent, she also had “rare charm and graciousness,” she was “charmingly natural.” She was one of the greatest wirewalkers who has ever lived and was also a genuinely decent and likable human being. For all her fame, her stardom never seemed to go to her head. The “fun of pleasing her audience means more to her than compliments,” wrote a journalist. She avoided publicity when she could, when she couldn’t she “smilled and shrugged deprecatingly.” It mattered to her to set a good example for the other children in the circus who looked up to her as a big sister. She was one of the highest paid performers, but was generous to a fault with her money and rarely turned down requests to perform at charity events. One of her greatest stunts was a skywalk in New York between two buildings across Broadway, a free public performance to raise money for war bonds during World War I.
Bird Millman (Jennadean Engleman O’Day) died in 1940, succumbing to spinal cancer. Taking some literary liberties of my own, below I combine two versions of a quote that her close friend author Dixie Wilson wrote at the time of her death:
History is the slender strand that runs in the opposite direction, allowing us to bridge time and space to connect with the lives of people we could never otherwise meet. Nearly half a century separates my birth and Millman’s death, and yet in the last week, I feel that I’ve found an inspiration, a role model—a hero—and almost a friend. I hope that I learn to laugh in life and dance as fearlessly as she did.
Still, in spite of that sense of connection I gained by immersing myself in all the literature I’ve collected, I leave this excursion into the past still longing to truly meet Bird Millman. If ever I get a chance to meet my heroes in heaven, I hope Bird Millman is there.
1 Scott Labarge. (2005). "Heroism: Why Heroes are Important." Ethics Outlook. https://.scu.edu/ethics/publications/ethicsoutlook/2005/heroes.html
2 Special thanks to the Royal Gorge Regional Museum and History Center for supplying me with a wonderful packet of Bird Millman resources and references.
Note: The quotes and snippets came from more than a dozen sources. The former academic in me is unsettled by my lack of individual citations, but laziness is winning out over precision, and, as this is a blog, I’m hoping that this laxness can slide. Anything not my own should be in quotes, and I will gladly find and provide specific citations on request.
Heroes are important. As Scott Labarge put it, “The critical moral contribution of heroes is the expansion of our sense of possibility.”1 Learning about the lives of the legendary wirewalkers does indeed reinforce that feeling of possibility for me—the possibilities of achieving my dreams—of becoming a rope walker as well as a truly decent human being. Scott Labarge continues:
The term "hero" comes from the ancient Greeks. For them, a hero was a mortal who had done something so far beyond the normal scope of human experience that he left an immortal memory behind him. … We need heroes first and foremost because our heroes help define the limits of our aspirations. Our heroes are symbols for us of all the qualities we would like to possess and all the ambitions we would like to satisfy. … [T]hese magnificent spirits, these noble souls, amazingly, are like us, they are human too. They stumbled, they wavered, they made fools of themselves—but nonetheless they rose and accomplished deeds of triumphant beauty. Perhaps we might do so too.I’ve done enough research that the names of a few legendary wire walkers are familiar: Madame Saqui, Blondin, the Wallendas, Con Colleano, Philippe Petit, Adili Wuxor…and Bird Millman.
I was first intrigued by Bird Millman when I ran across two quotations ascribed to her; I couldn’t resist looking into an incredibly quotable tightwire artist. There isn’t much about her online, but I found a museum and historical center2 in Bird’s hometown with a librarian willing to do some digging for me. You can imagine my delight when a thick packet arrived in the mail. Delving into the photocopies of countless newspaper articles, magazine interviews, and book excerpts, like the luckiest of deep sea treasure divers I surfaced with a gem worth—in my opinion—a king’s ransom: a hero.
In addition to her being quite quotable, I was, admittedly, predisposed to admire a fellow Rocky Mountain girl—an “exotic from the far West.” Jennadean Engleman—stage name Bird Millman—was born in 1890 in Cañon City, Colorado, population 2,800. She went from performing with her parents as a child in small time circuses to performing for royalty in Europe and as a repeat star attraction of Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The height of her circus career was 1904 – 1920, during what is known as the Golden Age of the American Circus. She was called “Queen of Silver Strand,” “Queen of the Circus,” a “whirlwind on the tightrope,” “the most dashing, daring and fascinating girl that ever stepped upon a tightwire,” and “the daintiest and greatest of all wire walkers.”
She wasn’t from a long line of circus performers. Her father developed a passion for gymnastics during his time at a military academy. After graduating he continued to play on improvised equipment he’d rigged on the second floor of the town hall. He got his wife to try. She didn’t like it all that much at first. Then one day she slipped and fell during a stunt—and broke through the floor so her bottom half hung over the dancers performing on the stage below. That was the day she vowed to give the town something else to talk about besides the garters and corset strings they'd seen hanging through the ceiling. The two became very good; soon enough people were definitely too busy gasping and gaping and applauding to remember that early embarrassment. The Engleman couple auditioned for and received spots in a local circus. Little Jennadean—Bird—was born and later came on the road with them, the pet of the circus…and soon joined them in their acts.
As for the origins of her stage name, the change in her last name from Engleman to Millman was her father’s doing—Engleman was just too likely to be misspelled, so he pulled out a dictionary and picked a good word. There are several conflicting stories for the change from Jennadean to Bird: perhaps it was her grandmother who nicknamed her because her cry sounded like a bird chirp, or perhaps her father just happened to be looking at a bird sitting on a telephone wire when he was trying to think up a stage name for her. Either way, it became a fitting name for a girl who, even as a small child, “had a way of ignoring the earth,” a girl with “twittering feet and lyric personality,” who fluttered “as though she wore winged boots,” who loved to flit and fly along a wire in the sky.
Bird Millman (Jennadean Engleman O’Day) died in 1940, succumbing to spinal cancer. Taking some literary liberties of my own, below I combine two versions of a quote that her close friend author Dixie Wilson wrote at the time of her death:
If there is an invisible thread which links the mortal to the eternal life, we may well imagine that lovely, dancing, laughing little figure [of Bird Millman O’Day] in tulle and swansdown bridging the distance between...[her] gay feet rushing [forward]…as death released the spirit of the world famed aerialist.I love that image of a soul on tiptoe, rushing forward laughingly along a thread of light into the next world.
History is the slender strand that runs in the opposite direction, allowing us to bridge time and space to connect with the lives of people we could never otherwise meet. Nearly half a century separates my birth and Millman’s death, and yet in the last week, I feel that I’ve found an inspiration, a role model—a hero—and almost a friend. I hope that I learn to laugh in life and dance as fearlessly as she did.
Still, in spite of that sense of connection I gained by immersing myself in all the literature I’ve collected, I leave this excursion into the past still longing to truly meet Bird Millman. If ever I get a chance to meet my heroes in heaven, I hope Bird Millman is there.
1 Scott Labarge. (2005). "Heroism: Why Heroes are Important." Ethics Outlook. https://.scu.edu/ethics/publications/ethicsoutlook/2005/heroes.html
2 Special thanks to the Royal Gorge Regional Museum and History Center for supplying me with a wonderful packet of Bird Millman resources and references.
Note: The quotes and snippets came from more than a dozen sources. The former academic in me is unsettled by my lack of individual citations, but laziness is winning out over precision, and, as this is a blog, I’m hoping that this laxness can slide. Anything not my own should be in quotes, and I will gladly find and provide specific citations on request.
Thank you for this blog and a description of Bird. I’m working on a screenplay and in developing a character without any information is fun but it does leave a longing for what she was really like. Someone who rose from such simple means here in Canon City to the height of stardom in what was the entertainment industry of it’s time. Your description was what I imagined her to be like but even more, like her laughing. I moved to Canon City 3 years ago and discovered a small article about her in an art gallery a few doors down from her grandfather Englemans store. The article was about a statue of her on Highway 50 which runs East and West through Canon City and wanting to move it off the highway into town. Funny people who have lived here a long time don’t even know the statue exist or a teacher in town for 30+ years even thinking it was Mary Poppins. August Mergelman who wrote a stage play “Bird Millman & Dixie Wilson”, written as a monologue by Dixie Wilson has a done a lot of research about Bird which is online.
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