Hiram and Barney - savages of Borneo (7 photos)

How to surprise the audience? We must give them something that is not available even if we have the means.





Thanks to this obvious desire, a duet of unusual artists called “Wild People of Borneo” was born.



Its members, the Davis brothers, Hiram and Barney, naturally, were not natives of Borneo. Hiram was born in 1825 in England, and Barney was born in 1827 in New York. The guys were dwarfs, but with preserved body proportions. Each of them was a little over a meter tall.





The brothers began their career in 1852 after showman and promoter Lyman Warner bought them from their impoverished and widowed mother. The woman married a second time, and the stepfather did not find a common language with his stepsons, telling them to get out of sight and earn a living on their own.

Warner came up with an intricate legend for the tiny brothers, calling them Vaino and Plutano - savages from Borneo. Viewers of that time had most likely heard of Borneo, but this area was still shrouded in great mystery and not particularly inferior in degree of mystery to, for example, Mars.



As a result, the public received this story with a bang, and Warner was inspired to further develop the fictional biography. He created a promotional booklet entitled “What We Know About Waino and Plutano, the Wild People of Borneo,” and within its pages he detailed their “captivity.”



For their part, the brothers played their roles to the best of their ability. At the performances, the “savages” behaved really wildly and spoke a strange gibberish language. Over time, the brothers began to develop personalities. Vaino played a gentle savage who read poetry, and Plutano played a cunning and stubborn man.

What is noteworthy is that, despite their physical disabilities, both brothers were surprisingly strong for their height and often lifted volunteers from the audience. According to unconfirmed reports, at the peak of his career, each could lift about 140 kilograms. During a career lasting about a quarter of a century, the brothers earned about 200 thousand dollars (about 6 million today).



Warner died in 1871. His son Hanford supervised the duo until their retirement in 1903. Due to their age, the “savages” could no longer perform and remained to live with Warner’s grandson.

In 1905, Hiram (Waino) died of natural causes. Seven years later, in March 1912, Barney joined his brother, leaving the world at the age of 85.



The unusual artists, on whose tombstone the inscription “Little Men” is engraved, found their final refuge in a cemetery in Mount Vernon, Ohio.