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the Western Museum into a bona fide sensation, a must-see attraction for visitors to the Queen City. This was an elaborate funhouse display variously known as “Dorfeuille’s Hell,” “Dante’s Inferno,” and the “Infernal Regions.” The apparent brainchild of Mrs. Fanny Trollope—the British novelist and caustic observer of American manners, then residing in Cincinnati—this “stupendous and colossal entertainment” was realized by the museum’s young waxwork modeler and chief inventor, Hiram Powers, later to become America’s most celebrated sculptor.
    Born and raised in Vermont, Powers had migrated to Ohio with his family in 1819 at the age of fourteen. Two years later, he found work as a stock clerk in a Cincinnati grocery store, where, in his spare moments, he gave vent to his creative urges by sculpting mounds of butter into hissing rattlesnakes, gaping loggerhead turtles, and other “horrid forms.” When the grocery failed, Powers went to work at a local clock and organ factory, displaying an aptitude that soon got him promoted to head mechanic. Among his accomplishments during this period was the construction of a mechanical organ equipped with life-sized angelic automatons that “moved, sounded trumpets, and rang bells.” 5
    During a visit to Dorfeuille’s museum, Powers was so taken with areplica of Jean Antoine Houdon’s marble bust of George Washington—then the most popular piece of statuary in America—that he promptly enrolled in a local artist’s studio, where he soon mastered the art of making plaster casts. Before long, he came to the attention of Dorfeuille himself, who hired him as the museum’s full-time “wax-figure maker and general mechanical contriver.”
    Powers’s skills as both sculptor and technician found their fullest expression in the creation of the Infernal Regions. An antebellum precursor of the kind of “animatronic” spook house epitomized today by Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and similar theme park thrill-rides, this lurid spectacle—located in the museum’s cramped, darkened attic—offered customers an effects-laden tour of the horrors of hell, complete with automated demons, writhing sinners, swirling smoke, artificial flames, and a “continuous clamor” of hair-raising sounds. To provide an extra—and quite literal—jolt, an electrified iron grating was installed between the spectators and the moving wax figures, so that (as Mrs. Trollope put it) “should any daring hand or foot obtrude itself within the bars, it receives a smart shock that often passes through many of the crowd.” 6
    While this mechanized spectacle quickly established itself as the museum’s biggest draw, Dorfeuille continued to offer live entertainment as well, including the ever-popular administration of nitrous oxide, whose amusing effects on audience volunteers were celebrated by one anonymous poetaster:
    Have you ever been at the museum
When D—— was giving the gas?
By jokers, it’s funny to see ’em
When candidates plenty he has
.
    Some fence, some caper and shout
And some of them act like a fool,
And others will tragedy spout—
I suppose they have learnt it at school. 7
    Early on (as this bit of newspaper doggerel indicates) Dorfeuille himself “gave the gas,” though he had evidently quit performing by the time “Dr. Coult” arrived in Cincinnati.
    We know of Sam Colt’s appearance at the Western Museum from a letter sent to him many years later by none other than Hiram Powers, who began a long-lasting friendship with the six-gun inventor in Cincinnati. By the time this letter was composed in 1851, Powers was living in Florence, Italy, where he had won international renown as the creator of
The Greek Slave
. A life-sized marble statue of a chained female nude, this piece achieved a level of popular success that no other American sculpture has ever rivaled (at least partly, no doubt, because it afforded Victorian gentlemen the chance to ogle a naked, nubile