Indians who seemed to enjoy this particular act with a suspicious old time gusto. Old Concord was known to be eighty-seven years old when the Kemps used it in their 1905 season, but it was still in excellent condition. Hank Walker was thus attacked by Indians probably more times than any other American, living or dead. He stood straight as a ramrod, six feet six, far more a genuine representative of the old West than any of the Kemp brothers.

The business of show management became burdensome to G. P. Kemp by 1907. Bill Coe had married another Neuhauser girl in Gridley, and he stopped in La Mar, Missouri where the Kemps were then wintering for a visit. Coe had opened the first picture show in Oklahoma, but G. P. induced him to sell out and take over the next season as business manager of the Kemp shows. This left G. P. Kemp free to handle his performances, a deal which made the organization a better balanced one.

Coe was a businessman and Kemp a showman who didn't care for the financial worries, booking contracts and such. G. P. was a quick tempered man with little formal education, but he knew how to handle recalcitrant performers, be they show people or show horses. He never took a drink of liquor in his life and he demanded sobriety in his shows. If he ever caught anyone in his cups near show time, or found anyone drinking around the Indians, it quickly brought on a scene. G. P. had a flow of strong language for these breaches of show discipline with employees soon learned.

At one time the Kemps carried fifty highly trained horses, and another eighteen which defied all riders. The Kemp bulldogging acts with wild steers were the forerunner of present day rodeos. In their Great Train Robbery act, usually the climax of the performance, real trains were used with a huge western backdrop much as the modern moving picture sets in Hollywood. The robbers put on a most convincing hold up, but in the end justice always triumphed as the vigilantes arrived in the nick of time and hung the bandits to a telegraph pole.

Syracuse, Troy and Atlantic City testified to the high quality of the Kemp Wild West Shows year after year. In July, 1897, Pittsburgh reported that "this is our third year in booking the Kemps, and we find them honest, reliable and trustworthy." At the 1896 Pittsburgh celebration a huge fireworks picture of William B. McKinley was shown as a finale. He was then candidate for president. The usual eastern circuit was to play the cities mentioned and Louisville, Cincinnati, London and Hamilton in Ontario, Brooklyn, Coney Island, Providence, Hartford, Roanoke and Winston-Salem, ending the season in the warmer climate of Atlanta, Georgia. By 1912 the end of the wild west shows was inevitable as the new picture theatres were showing a western feature later known as the horse opera. The Kemps were showmen, but not moving picture actors. The show suspended.

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