"The Turkish Giant Robbed of his Wife, his Educated Goat, his Money and his Horse and Carriage."

Arthur Caley, better known as P.T. Barnum’s “Arabian Giant,” was born in the 1820s or 1830s, though nobody knows for sure just when. His main stage name was “Colonel Ruth Goshen,” and he was billed as being near eight feel tall and weighing 600 pounds, but that was likely an exaggeration of some inches and pounds.

He traveled the world, adopted a daughter and was married several times (though one of his wives ran off with another man and stole his horse and goat). It was rumored that he was from Jerusalem or the Isle of Wight or several other places.

The Giant and Barnum had a parting of the ways at some point, and the massive man passed away in 1889 in Middlebush, New Jersey. This piece from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle concerns his ill-fated marriage which fell apart a decade before his death. An excerpt from the article, which is subtitled, “The Turkish Giant Robbed of his Wife, his Educated Goat, his Money and his Horse and Carriage”:

“That matrimonial misery may afflict the highest as well as the lowest was never better illustrated than in the affliction which has overtaken Colonel Ruth Goshen, the giant whose enormous figure has towered in Brooklyn for the past two weeks.

The Colonel is one of the most widely known celebrities of his class in the United States. His acquaintances agree that he has agreeable manners and a confiding disposition; and although his stature might easily vie with the inhabitants of Brobdignag, he is but a child in the dark and crooked ways of the wicked world.

Like the Thane of Fife, the Colonel had a wife, and well may he ask in tremulous tones, as he did this morning, ‘Where is she now?’ In fact, Mrs. Colonel Ruth Goshen has eloped with a showman and the gigantic hero of many gory fields has been compelled by perfidy of his spouse to assume the role of the injured husband and is taking steps toward the procurement of the divorce.”