Like many sideshow performers, Che Mah had an exotic backstory. It was claimed that he was born in Ningpo in 1838 off China’s coast on the island of Choo-Sang and discovered by Barnum on one of his worldwide scouting expeditions. The reality is likely more mundane. After his death the book This Way to the Big Show: The Life of Dexter Fellows made the claim that he was Jewish and from London.¹

Regardless of his ethnicity and country of origin, Che Mah was a popular attraction and throughout his career he worked in the Barnum & Bailey Circus, Kohl and Middleton dime museum in Chicago and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

Unlike many of the more diminutive performers of his day, he married a women far larger than he. His first wife, Louisa Colman was a normal-sized trapeze artist, his second, Norah Cleveland, weighed 200 pounds. Norah and he divorced after 14 years of marriage on the grounds his wife would not provide enough sex.²

Upon retirement, he bought a farm in rural Indiana but working a farm proved to be too difficult. He sold the farm and brought a house in Knox. Che Mah died in 1936 and was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Knox, Indiana.