His real name was Joseph Shelley, but he wasn’t, as he claimed, related to the famous poet. Nor was he even Mexican. He had been born on a cotton plantation in America’s Deep South, and after fighting on the Confederate side in the Civil War, he went on to have all sorts of adventures in the Far West.
Britain first encountered him in 1887, during a long and lucrative season in Liverpool. There were visits to other towns too. But there were also unfavourable comparisons with Buffalo Bill, whose own Wild West show had arrived here first and was still by some way the larger.
Mexican Joe’s first proper trip to the North East began four years later. He brought 40 performers with him, cowboys and Sioux mainly, with one or two Apache as well. And his first stop was Garrison Field in Sunderland, where a 300-foot-long tent was waiting for him. What he called his ‘Great Wild West Exhibition’ took place there every evening, with three matinees a week and tickets priced at sixpence or a shilling.
Respectable persons
The show began with Joe leading the troupe out on horseback, wearing a black sombrero with a silver star on the front. His face was weather-beaten, even though he wasn’t even fifty. He had a walrus moustache and sad eyes. And he looked magnificent in leather breeches, a blue velvet tunic covered in gold brocade, and an overcoat with a fur collar.
As the troupe came to a halt inside the tent and the audience fell silent, Joe would speak. He had a chest-full of medals, and he would say that he had been proud to serve in the Texas Rangers, and in the US and Mexican armies as well.
There would follow two hours of lasso throwing, bucking broncos, and a wrestling match on horseback. Old Western skirmishes would be re-enacted and a horse-thief lynched. And the show would culminate in a loud and frenzied attack on a stage-coach.
Joe also took the opportunity of his visit to Sunderland to give a public lecture at the new Assembly Hall on Fawcett Street. Admission would be free, but newspaper advertisements warned potential patrons that a silver collection would be taken, “in order to confine the attendance to select and respectable persons.”
Dangling scalps
The adverts also promised that Joe would talk about his “20 years among the Redskins and Desperadoes of the Far West”. And he would be accompanied by the Sioux and Apache, who would perform “their wonderfully realistic and weird Ghost Chant”, while other performers would sing spirituals and camp-fire songs.
The hall was packed to the rafters on the evening of the talk. Those present heard Joe explain how, after his military service, he had been a cattle-rancher, and then a prisoner of the Apache. He claimed to have helped capture the Apache leader Geronimo and kill Sitting Bull. And he showed everyone the shirt Sitting Bull had been wearing at the time, which had a good 20 scalps dangling from it.
Joe reached Newcastle in May and took up residence on the East End Football Ground (which now lies beneath the Heaton Quarter housing estate). The most expensive tickets for his show were now 3 shillings each, but there were plenty of things to see.
One of those things was an attack upon Joe by a Sioux with an axe. Though wounded, he was able to defend himself, and he announced straight away that he wouldn’t be pressing charges.
An iron hall
This was, in truth, a common occurrence, especially when Joe had just arrived in a town and wanted to drum up business. Precisely the same attack was said to have happened only a fortnight later, when the show arrived in South Shields.
His attacker was often said to have been Running Wolf, whose real name was Charles Jefferson, and who was always getting into trouble. Mexican Joe got into lots of trouble himself, however, and he was frequently up before one bench of magistrates or another, accused of mistreating his horses, letting his dogs run free, or employing children who were much too young.
Joe returned briefly to the North East in 1892, when Running Wolf was caught actually trying to scalp a customer in Middlesbrough. Then, in April of the following year, he returned to Garrison field. He performed there not in a tent, but in Arcadia, a great iron entertainment hall 150 feet long and 50 feet high. He also made returns to Newcastle, South Shields and West Hartlepool. And in July 1893, he took pride of place in Darlington’s celebrations for the wedding of the future King George V and Queen Mary.
A fancy dress ball
The shows became smaller and less frequent after that, and there were even rumours that Joe had gone bankrupt. He carried on giving his talks, though, and that was what brought him back to the Assembly Hall in Sunderland one November night in 1900, nine years after he had last been there. He spoke again about his time in the American West. But he also told his audience that he had recently been in South Africa, fighting with the British in their new war against the Boers.
Joe went on lecturing. He even worked as a phrenologist. He attempted to raise 300 men for an expedition to the Yukon. And then he returned to America, where he died in 1912, at the age of 65. But he wasn’t quickly forgotten in the North East.
The year after his death, and fully two decades after his last visit to Hartlepool, several dozen people turned up at a fancy dress ball in the Waldon Street Hall in the town. Most of them came in the costumes of kings and queens. But a Mr H Kirby was awarded second place and a silver-plated cruet set for dressing up as Mexican Joe.
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