their careers. The vaudeville was very popular and in high demand as it was known as "authentic" (not white blackface) and "clean negro" vaudeville, one of the few "authentic negro" vaudeville shows around. It traveled most successfully in the southeast and southwest, and also to Manhattan and Coney Island. Chappelle also established an all-black baseball team, based in Jacksonville, but which toured with the company and played the local team in each city the company visited. The team claimed "the championship of the South and South-west", and operated at least until 1916. By 1904 the Rabbit's Foot show featured more than 60 quality performers, had expanded to fill three Pullman railroad carriages, and was describing itself as "the leading Negro show in America". Pat's father Lewis Chappelle helped out as boss of the company since it had doubled in size, including the brass band that went from ten to twenty players. The show was reported to include minstrel performances, dancers, circus acts, "daring aerialists," comedy and musical ensemble pieces. For the 1904–05 season, the company included week-long stands in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. Two of its most popular performers were singing comedian Charles "Cuba" Santana and trombonist Amos Gilliard, though the latter defected to Rusco and Holland's Georgia Minstrels and claimed that Pat Chappelle and his brothers had threatened him at gunpoint before throwing him off the company train. Another performer, William Rainey, brought his young bride Gertrude (later known as "Ma" Rainey) to join the company in 1906. In 1906, Chappelle launched travelling tent companies, the Funny Folks Comedy Company, managed by his cousin Mitchell P. Chappelle. The same performers, including Happy Howe and Cuba Santana, alternated between the two companies. As Pat Chappelle's business expanded, a correspondent in The Freeman in 1908 stated that "Mr. Chappelle has no equal when it comes to managing these kind of shows... he has proven to be the black P. T. Barnum, when it comes to the success of a Negro show." However, around 1907, his brothers Lewis and James quit working with Pat, after Pat expressed dissatisfaction with their work. Lewis went to work as a blacksmith and James became a horse caretaker. In August 1908, one of the Pullman Company railroad carriages used by Chappelle burned to the ground in Shelby, North Carolina, while several of the vaudeville entertainers were asleep. The accident happened after one of their nearby