Mountain Clown Hand Puppet

Mountain Clown Hand Puppet. Puppets are approximately 10” tall by 5” wide and come in 14x11” packaging.

Mountain Clown has several meanings in the Rocky Mountains.

1. Sharp Shooters in the various traveling wild west shows who got too drunk to shoot well often became Mountain Clowns, which were a cross between a Rodeo Clown and a Circus Geek.

2. Men who traveled to the west with the illusion of being great outdoorsmen but simply stayed at boarding houses in town, ate at restaurants instead of hunting for food and still dressed as though they were mountain men were called Mountain Clowns. Though ineffective, they’d frequently be recruited into search parties because they were were generally available.

3. In the late 1970s a teenager from Bozeman named Travis Beach dedicated himself to running the 4 minute mile after surviving a drunk driving accident. He trained obsessively for two years until he achieved his goal alone one Saturday night on the track and attempted to reach it again in front of his entire school. Unfortunately, the stopwatch he’d been gifted by his grandfather was faulty and inaccurate so, throughout his training his results were (unbeknownst to him) varied and never remotely approached 4 minutes. When he attempted the feat and ran a mile in front of his classmates with the coach’s regulation stopwatch he clocked in at 11 minutes and 37 seconds. It is believed he was referred to as a “Mountain Clown” by a sophomore foreign exchange student following the incident.

All three of these are acceptable tales to tell with your Mountain Clown Hand Puppet.