Part Five
Roland wasn’t the only principal in the Great Poison Mystery to find himself more famous than ever when the coroner’s inquest came to an end.
On Thursday, March 2, the Fifth Annual Sportsman’s Show opened in Madison Square Garden. This weeklong extravaganza, which combined Barnumesque spectacle with serious athletic competition, drew enormous crowds to the famous arena, whose interior had been transformed into a stunningly realistic replica of a frontier wilderness.
A panoramic backdrop depicting a snowcapped Rocky Mountain range hung from the ceiling. At its foot stood an actual Indian encampment, surrounded by real trees—spruce, fir, cedar, and pine—and inhabited by several Native American families. A sparkling brook ran through the encampment and terminated in an enormous pool—seventy-five feet long by forty feet wide—disguised to resemble a mountain lake, its sides concealed by sandy beaches and banks of high grass. A game park populated with live elk, deer, and moose occupied one side of the pool, along with a menagerie featuring a pair of mountain lions, several gray wolves, three opossums, five raccoons, and a black bear named Pete. There were taxidermy exhibits and shooting galleries, basket-weaving demonstrations and an aquarium stocked with a vast collection of rare fish, including a thirty-six-pound rainbow trout.
And, of course, there were the thrilling athletic events, among them the National Water Polo Championships, log-rolling contests, and a “clothes race,” in which swimmers competed while fully garbed in shoes, trousers, shirts, jackets, and top hats.
Nothing in the show, however—not Nassadao, the six-foot Algonquin Indian and former Rough Rider who paddled a bark canoe around the artificial lake between swimming events, not even the famed female sharpshooter Annie Oakley, there to compete in the clay-pigeon contests held on the rooftop range—generated as much excitement among spectators as the man responsible for managing the show’s athletic events: Harry Cornish.
Fresh from his triumphant vindication at the coroner’s inquest, Cornish, never averse to publicity, basked in his new notoriety. Wearing a top hat and full evening dress, he stationed himself in a conspicuous place during the aquatic events, drawing more attention than the swimmers themselves. He insisted on starting most of the races, firing the pistol with an extra flourish that delighted the crowds, who rewarded him with thunderous applause.1
It was Cornish who came up with one of the most sensational events of the show. Noticing that there was a steel roof girder directly above the pool, he hired a friend—a fearless forty-five-year-old Englishman named Tom Donaldson—to perform a nightly high dive. For fifteen dollars a dive, Donaldson would take a spectacular headfirst plunge into the pool. The distance was fifty-two feet. The pool was eight feet deep. The feat was advertised, not hyperbolically, as the “Drop of Death.”
For nearly a week, Donaldson performed the stunt twice a day without sustaining anything more serious than a nosebleed. When he climbed out onto the girder on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 8, however, he appeared a little shaky.
Standing beside Harry Cornish at poolside, the announcer, Peter Prunty, directed the audience’s attention to the little figure balanced high above their heads on the narrow girder. Dressed in a pair of loose-fitting American-flag pantaloons and a white jersey, Donaldson acknowledged their applause with a bow.
“Donaldson, are you ready?” called Prunty.
“Yes,” came the high-pitched reply.
Prunty looked at Cornish, who cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Go!”
Donaldson seemed to hesitate a moment before raising his hands above his head, leaning down, and plunging forward. Three thousand people held their breath, then broke into a wild ovation as he hit the water. The excitement turned to consternation, however, as Donaldson failed to reappear.
All at once, a shout broke the tense silence that had descended over the arena: “Get him out! He must be hurt!”
Tearing off his coat, Frank Spohn, a Garden employee, jumped into the pool, while Nassadao and another Algonquin leapt into a birch canoe and paddled to the spot where Donaldson had vanished. At almost the same time, Harry Reeder, captain of the Knickerbocker water polo team, dove into the water.
After several attempts, Reeder came up with Donaldson in his arms. With Spohn’s help, he swam the unconscious man to the side of the pool, where a hundred hands were waiting to help pull Donaldson from the water. There was an ugly wound on his head where it had struck the bottom of the pool, and blood gushed from his nostrils, mouth, and ears. He was rushed to New York Hospital, where he died of a severe skull fracture the next day.2
In the wake of this tragedy, Garden officials decided that they had seen enough of Harry Cornish. Not only was he responsible for the ill-advised stunt; his insistence on making himself such a conspicuous feature of the show was, they felt, “in bad taste, in view of the recent notoriety he had attained” in the Molineux case. From that point on, he was banished to a little office near the Garden entrance.3
Once again, Cornish found himself on the defensive, vehemently denying that he had “sought notoriety by exhibiting myself to the crowds” and insisting that Donaldson—who had been making even riskier dives at Manhattan Beach—“had personally superintended” every aspect of the stunt.4
Cornish still had plenty of supporters in the athletic world, and few held him to blame for the accident. Still, the more superstitious of his friends began to wonder if some terrible curse had suddenly attached itself to him.
Wherever Cornish went lately, death seemed to follow.