He operated an insurance agency in Ann Arbor until his late 40s, when he retired to devote the remainder of his life to documenting the history of the American circus.

[2] His first major work was Mudshows and Railers, an account of the 1879 circus season based mainly on a close reading of the New York Clipper, the industry's trade paper, and metropolitan dailies.

It was the first extensively researched, comprehensive account of the ante-bellum American circus, obsoleting virtually all previous secondary work on the subject.

He later co-authored books with fellow historians Fred Dahlinger and William L. Slout, and continued to publish in Bandwagon.

The distillation of his thirty years of research, the book analyzed the economic and operational aspects of pre-Civil War circuses.