Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison
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TOPSY
TOPSY
THE STARTLING STORY OF
THE CROOKED-TAILED ELEPHANT,
P. T. BARNUM, AND THE AMERICAN WIZARD,
THOMAS EDISON
MICHAEL DALY
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2013 by Michael Daly
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Jacket design and artwork by Michael Tedesco; Jacket art: poster for
Forepaugh & Sells Brothers combined show and photographs of
P. T. Barnum and Thomas Edison courtesy of the Library of Congress
All insert photos courtesy the Library of Congress, with the following
exceptions: Photo 4.3 (“Jumbo has fallen”): McCaddon Collection of the
Barnum and Bailey Circus. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books
nd Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Photo 5.1 (Adam
Forepaugh) and Photo 5.2 (Addie Forepaugh): Billy Rose Theatre Division,
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations. Photo 6.2 (The Fearless Frogman): Print Collection,
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The
New York Public Library; Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9457-2
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
To the Daly girls: Dinah, Sinead, Bronagh, and, yes, Stella
CONTENTS
ONE: The 200-Pound Baby
TWO: The Elephant
THREE: Barnum
FOUR: The Elephantine Expedition
FIVE: Ugly
SIX: The War Between the States, the Battle of the Dwarfs
SEVEN: 4-Paw
EIGHT: The Fire, the Plowing Elephant, the Panic,
and the “Dusky Attendant”
NINE: Crooked Tale, Crooked Tail
TEN: The Continued Magic of Kindness and the First
Beauty Contest
ELEVEN: The Wizard
TWELVE: The White Elephant War
THIRTEEN: Eph’s Escape, Pickpockets, and Pink Lemonade
FOURTEEN: The Tree of Knowledge and the Fearless Frogman
FIFTEEN: Another War Begins
SIXTEEN: The Executioner’s Experiments
SEVENTEEN: The Chair
EIGHTEEN: Westinghoused
NINETEEN: Reading Your Own Obituary
TWENTY: The Great Name Vanishes
TWENTY-ONE: Topsy Somersaults; Gold Dust and
Duncan Get a Home
TWENTY-TWO: The Wizard’s Latest Marvel and So
Many Elephants
Twenty-Three: Sid Sorrows, Topsy Traipses
TWENTY-FOUR: Topsy and the Tormentor
TWENTY-FIVE: From Lady Moody to the Billion-Dollar Smile
TWENTY-SIX: “Here I Am! Here I Am! Where Are You?”
TWENTY-SEVEN: The Big Swim
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Index
TOPSY
ONE
the 200-pound baby
The 200-pound baby thudded from womb to earth somewhere in an Asian forest on a date historical records list no more precisely than circa 1875. The first sounds she heard would have been the trumpeting and rumbling of the other elephants welcoming her into the world just as they each had been welcomed in their own first moments. She would have begun to learn even as she struggled out of whatever remained of the amniotic sac that she had been born into a uniquely caring society. This society’s bonds only began with the mother who had remained standing during the birth and now gingerly stepped back to gaze upon her stirring newborn.
The others would have kept protective watch as the newest arrival awkwardly rose, the mother gently nudging the baby with a foot or giving a little hoist with her trunk, but only if it was needed. The baby would have rolled upright from her side and raised herself first on her forelegs, the two rear legs scrambling in earth wet with the cascade of fluids that had accompanied her arrival. She would have soon been up on all fours, and within minutes of her birth she would have been taking her first wobbly steps, her eyes huge and wide and pink-rimmed. The surrounding grown females would have stood ready to help the mother guide her baby between her forelegs, where she could begin to nurse. The baby would have suckled with her mouth, for it would be some days before she began to control an elephant’s most distinctive appendage, her trunk, with its one hundred thousand muscles.
Among the myriad possible uses for the mother’s trunk was giving her child a dusting of earth, perhaps to protect against biting insects and to dampen the scent that might attract predators hoping to snatch a vulnerable newborn. The whole group would have maintained a sunrise-to-sunrise vigilance against that threat as it waited for the baby’s postnatal steps to become sure and strong enough for travel. A maternal shadow would have followed the baby as stagger became gambol.
The males in these extended family groups are driven off when they reach adolescence, usually to wander alone, sometimes in small “bachelor” groups. The other adults would all have been females, and they would have been as gentle as the mother in steering the baby back when she ventured too far, the sensory cells along the length of their trunks helping to gauge a touch that was gentle as well as firm, imparting a caress along with a nudge. These were allomothers, mothers in every way save when the baby sought to feed. There remained but one mother in the fullest sense as the baby’s connections with the rest of the group branched out and deepened, caress by caress, touches so light as to prove the sensitivity of an elephant’s skin despite its wrinkled thickness.
The usual wait would have been two days before the most senior female, the matriarch, gave the signal and began to move. The others would have followed, perhaps a dozen or more, any mothers with calves toward the front. The matriarch would have restricted the pace to that of the littlest one. The baby would have been not just with the group, but its
immediate and collective priority.
Even so, the baby still would have been expected to walk unassisted through the forest, finding and developing her footing. The only time she would not have been moving on her own power was when the herd had to swim. The mother would then support the baby in front of her with her trunk as the herd moved tirelessly through the water, their buoyancy liberating them from an otherwise unrelenting demand of elephantine existence that the baby was still too small to know: gravity’s translation of size to encumbrance. Elephants have been known to swim as long as six hours without touching bottom.
The perfection of their evolved design would have been demonstrated anew as they left the water and again became subject to gravity’s pull. Elephants’ footpads expand under their weight, reducing the depth they sink into wet earth. The footpads then contract as they are raised, breaking the mud’s suction.
Back on dry land, another marvel of evolution would have made their tread appear to be considerably lighter than that of much smaller animals. The skeletal structure of their feet is angled in a way that has been compared to a platform shoe, so they walk on their toes, the weight spreading evenly toward the heel on a cushioning pad of fatty tissue. The pad is similar to the seismic tissue that whales and dolphins use to detect and receive sound waves in the sea and may enable elephants to detect vibrations in the ground. The footpads as well as the trunks contain Pacinian corpuscles, liquid capsules surrounded by layers of tissue and gel and containing nerve endings so sensitive to pressure as to enable these biggest of land beasts to detect the faintest of stirrings. This and similarly acute senses of hearing and smell compensate for relatively weak eyesight to such a degree that blind matriarchs have been said to lead a group successfully.
Along with their improbably light and sensitive tread came a gait by which the rear leg on one side moved up to land precisely in the print just made by the forefoot on that side and the same then happened on the other side, imparting a hint of what would in the next century come to be called a moonwalk. The group would have thus proceeded to a promising place to forage, their speed determined by the youngest, their direction by the oldest, who was necessarily the only female surviving from the time, as many as eight decades before, in which she had been born. Her position as matriarch was granted in recognition not of her physical supremacy over the others, but of wisdom distilled from the years she had followed her predecessor, the predecessor’s wisdom derived from what her own predecessor had learned, it all going back generations with the promise of ever greater collective wisdom in the generations to come.
The group would have continually paused to feed, needing to do so some sixteen hours a day, each of the adults consuming some three hundred pounds of fodder. They likely would have paused during the midday heat, some of the adults keeping watch while others dozed standing up and the baby lay on her side, safe and secure. The group would then have moved as one with the newest member, on into the night and its rhythms of chirping insects and croaking frogs.
Had the baby been a male, he would have been destined to be banished in his early teens, perhaps to form a small group with other males, or to lead a solitary existence relieved by occasional encounters with females for breeding, a joining of just forty-five seconds. But the baby was a daughter seemingly destined to become a mother herself, then a grandmother, maybe even a matriarch who would pass on the ancient knowledge she was beginning to learn even now.
Meanwhile, the nursing baby would have consumed some three gallons a day, gaining as many as thirty pounds a week. She would have begun to master her trunk, siphoning up water to transfer it to her mouth and using the single sensitive little “finger” at the tip to feed herself samples of what her mother was eating.
When the forest up ahead suddenly erupted with shouts and gunshots, the baby would have ducked between her mother’s legs. The clamor would have ceased as the matriarch led a retreat and the danger would have seemed to pass.
Tranquillity would have appeared to return to the forest, but the elephants would not have been able to travel more than six miles in any direction without again encountering the shockingly sudden noise and fire. They likely kept trying, particularly at night, when there would have seemed a better chance of slipping past. Each time it would have been the same.
In the mornings, the elephants might have sensed movement through the forest. Their fanning ears might have detected sounds of chopping and then of trees falling until evening, when there would again have been a furtive rustling in the surrounding undergrowth. The twin nostrils of their upraised trunks would have detected a scent foreign to the forest where they had harmoniously evolved over the ages, but they would not yet have understood the danger it signaled. The grown elephants might have leaned forward on a front foot to detect vibrations, what a scientist in a future time would term “listening with their feet.”
After maybe a fortnight would have come the morning when the shouts and gunshots and fire erupted simultaneously from every direction but one, forcing the elephants to flee the lone way open to them. The group would have been driven to a fifty-yard space between two opposing walls made with felled trees. The elephants may have sensed danger ahead and balked at continuing, but the terror was now almost right upon them and they would have proceeded on, a gray and thundering storm, the matriarch still in the lead, but the wisdom born of centuries suddenly for naught.
The terror would have kept coming and the group would have kept fleeing, trumpeting shrilly not as the baby would have first heard them at her birth, but in total fear as the walls converged on either side of them. The baby would have found herself in a fast-moving and quickly thickening forest of huge legs. Even in such panicked circumstances, the bigger elephants would have remained so sure-footed and aware of where they stepped that the baby and the other little ones would have been in no danger of being trampled.
After one hundred yards, the walls would have narrowed to a gap not much wider than the space for a grown elephant and a calf. The space beyond would have suddenly opened up and it might have momentarily seemed to the group that it had escaped.
But the group was trapped within the twelve-foot walls of a kheddah, more felled trees lashed together with cane into an enclosing stockade. Any elephant who sought to test her strength against the wall would have first come to a trench four feet wide and four feet deep. And on the far side of the wall would have been men who fired guns and waved torches and jabbed with spears.
Elephants seeking to turn back would have found the four-yard gap had been closed with a reinforced gate as soon as they passed through. The baby would have been sheltered under the mother as the adults formed a protective circle, facing outward. Most likely, they would have just been left there for several days without food or water.
As the baby grew hungry, she would have discovered that captured mothers initially run dry of milk. Her plaintive cries and those of any other calves would likely have been joined by the adult elephants’ signal of apprehension and uncertainty, made by rapping the end of the trunk on the ground while exhaling sharply, a sound a nineteenth-century catcher compared to “a large sheet of tin rapidly doubled.”
When the captors deemed the time was right, the gate would have opened long enough to admit pairs of tame elephants called kookies. Each kookie would have had two men atop. One, a mahout, or tender, straddled the neck to guide the creature. The second, a roper, sat behind him.
The mahouts would have steered pairs of kookies so as to separate a grown elephant from the herd, squeezing in on either side. The two ropers would have slipped down, first slipping a rope hobble around the wild elephant’s rear legs, then looping a rope around her neck. The captors then would have used the ropes and the power of the kookies to drag a captive out of the stockade and into the forest, where she would be tied to a tree. The captives who struggled would have been liable to be beaten and stuck with spears. The unmanageable o
nes, particularly any adult males who happened to be with the herd at the moment of capture, were sometimes killed right then and there.
When it came the mother’s turn to be straddled and hobbled, the captors would not have needed to bother with the baby. She would have come along wherever the mother was dragged. No rope was required to retain a baby after the mother was tethered to a tree.
Either in the forest or after the extended march to a market town, the baby and the mother would have been forcibly separated. The mother would have been kept in restraints, for the captors otherwise would have had to kill her as the baby was pulled away, vainly struggling and screaming, ever more desperate as the distance between them grew.
Captors are known to have kept a baby moving in the desired direction and pace by placing her in a rope sling on a long pole with two men at each end, the baby low enough so her scrabbling feet touched the ground and relieved some of the weight.
Then would have come the long sea voyage, four months if direct to America, longer if first to an animal dealer in Germany, as was most likely in this instance. The baby probably would have been shipped to Hamburg along with at least some of the other captured elephants as a wholesale consignment intended for whatever buyers might express interest. A need for secrecy would have arisen only when the baby was purchased by a circus owner who was hatching a scheme that began with sneaking a baby elephant into America with no public notice. The arrival of any number of grown elephants was likely to attract attention, so the baby almost certainly traveled to New York alone, devoid of the company of her own kind, as she had never been, as she was never meant to be.
She traveled in her solitude either between decks or deep in the hold, a dark, dank dungeon that rose and fell, leaving the baby without even the security of her footing. The baby was probably kept in place during rough weather with a variation of what was employed with grown elephants: two iron ringbolts driven into the hull to tie the rear legs, and a teak bar installed at the front of the stall as a kind of handrail, only for a trunk.