Chad Hanna

The story of Chad Hanna is a tale of growing for one young man. Chad Hanna is a young man of about 20 years of age, and sets out in the world to escape trouble at home. He joins a circus troupe that travels across New York as a simple layman, but ends up becoming the ringmaster. He is surrounded by a plethora of different personalities in both the men and women that he encounters through his travels. He is also faced with challenges in both his personal life and as ringmaster of the circus troupe that must be decided upon.

Chad is portrayed as a young man of no consequence in the village of Canastota, and only a stable boy at The Yellow Bud Tavern where he lives. Chad has worked many jobs after being taken away from the orphanage in Troy by a farmer near Mechanicsville. He ran from that job because he was more of an "indented servant", a driver on the Erie Canal for multiple captains and then as a stable lad for The Yellow Bud Inn. The people in the town do not think of Chad as being very smart or having any important responsibilities. As we read the novel though we find out that Chad spends his time listening to the people around him and traveling through town using their backyards. He knows the goings on in the village because people do not take notice of his listening or travel through the village. These actions of his are noticed by the evil men of the town, and he is recruited by them. Chad is innately good though, and uses the knowledge brought to his attention for a different purpose entirely.

The men that try to recruit Chad are both of a dark nature in spirit and are described as such. The first sighting of Al Heeney is of him nosing around sneakily in the barn that Chad works at and he is described as, "he looked like a snipe-nosed, undersized bird dog hitting the scent of a quail on a fence" (Edmonds, 14). Chad knows that Heeney is not a good man to cross, but is also able to verbally fence with him and come out the victor, making Heeney seem a fool. Heeney wants Chad to get him information that he hears around town, and tells him to deliver it to Cisco Trid. Cisco Trid is the other dark figure in the town and is described as, being a loner and a man not to cross. Elias Proops even warns Chad telling him, "Don't go mixing with Cisco or Al. You got the nigger away; if you had the sense of a pig's whistle, you'd let it go at that" (Edmonds, 80). Despite warnings Chad still chooses to betray Cisco and give him mildly false information.

The opposite of these two would be the people that Chad