Born with an orthopedic condition that caused her knees to bend backward, Ella Harper made a virtue of necessity and joined W.H. Harris’s Nickel Plate Circus, where she took up a starring role and earned $200 a week ($7,200 today). Her pitch card reads:

I am called the camel girl because my knees turn backward. I can walk best on my hands and feet as you see me in the picture. I have traveled considerably in the show business for the past four years and now, this is 1886 and I intend to quit the show business and go to school and fit myself for another occupation.

She married a schoolteacher in 1905 and died in 1921 at 51.