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SHOWMAN
British war veteran named Captain Lewis with a proposal to import sample batches of British and Boer fighters and re-enact the famous battles of the war at the Fair.
Since the captain was just as broke as military men usually are, he had to be financed. Backing was furnished by a civic-minded group of St. Louis business men, headed by a big executive who was head of the largest wholesale drug outfit in the country. When Lewis started recruiting performers in South Africa, he was swamped by applicants. Regular pay and a trip to America, with the World's Fair thrown in, appealed strongly to recently demobilized fighting men. He landed four or five hundred assorted veterans from both sides and, for showpieces, General Cronje, the Boer hero of the whole war, General Viljoen, a Mexican soldier of fortune who acquired quite a reputation on the Boer side, and the notorious Captain Jack Hendon, whom Lord Roberts alleged to be a renegade who had devoted himself to blowing up British hospital trains. Hendon didn't exactly rate as a hero, but he was certain to attract a lot of profitable curiosity.
Well, these all wool and a yard wide fighters, reproducing the battle of Colenso and the siege of Paardeberg and such items of recent history, with Cronje riding out in a little wagon to surrender his sword to a prop Lord Roberts for finale, was as much the feature of the St. Louis Fair as Sally Rand was of the recent doings in Chicago. Its sole rival was the Phil
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