Three Times Three a Tiger?

[George Thompson]

Jonathon Green writes, concerning Three Times Three a Tiger: FWIW I offer this proposed etymology, culled from the Bulletin  (Sydney,Australia).
1900 Bulletin (Sydney) 30 Jun. Red Page/2:  Tradition and custom hold that the ‘tiger’ is a howl which accentuates the cheers and intensifies the applause.  The best of several ‘origins’ tells how, early in this century, an American politician, S.S. Prentiss, was stumping the country, and came to a town where there was a small menagerie on exhibition.  This he hired for a day and threw it open to all-comers, availing himself of the occasion to make a political speech.  The orator, holding a 10ft. pole, stood on the tiger’s cage, in the roof of which there was a hole, and whenever the multitudes applauded one of his ‘points’ with three cheers, Prentiss poked the tiger, who uttered a harsh roar. From this 'three cheers and a tiger' spread over the country.

The politician in question is evidently Seargent Smith Prentiss, a congressman from Mississippi in the early 19th C.  There is an article on him in the Dictionary of National Biography, but not in the more recent American National Biography.  He should also be in the Biographical Directory of the American Congress, which, at the moment, isn't available to me.
The following books might authenticate this story:

The life and times of Seargent Smith Prentiss, by Joseph D. Shields. -- Philadelphia : J.B. Lippincott, 1883.
NYPG   AN (Prentiss) (Shields, J. D. Life and times of Seargent Smith Prentiss)

Prentiss, George L., 1816-1903.  A memoir of S.S. Prentiss, Edited by his brother. New York : C. Scribner's sons, [c1855]  2 v.
NYPG   AN (Prentiss) (Prentiss, G. L. Memoir of S. S. Prentiss)

Seargent S. Prentiss, Whig orator of the old South, by Dallas C.  Dickey. Baton Rouge, La., Louisiana state university press, 1945.  422 p.   (Southern biography series)
NYPG   AN (Prentiss) (Dickey, D. C. Seargent S. Prentiss)

None of them are at Bobst, which is this instance fails to show itself as one of the great libraries south of 14th street.  All are at the NYPL and I will look at them there some one of these days, unless Barry beats me to it.

I will say that it was not uncommon for menageries with exotic animals to travel the country in Prentiss's day, so that the idea that there should be a caged tiger in the back-woods of Mississippi isn't impossible.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.