by Michael Daly
“The beasts would themselves wrap their trunks around the wooden bar before them and hold fast, and in this position the waves might toss the vessel as much as they pleased but they couldn’t throw the elephants off their feet,” reported a captain of the era who transported elephants from Ceylon to New York.
If the baby was like most elephants, she got seasick. If she was like other baby elephants torn from their mothers, she cried out shrilly in her sleep, seeming to relive the trauma. She otherwise may have seemed to her captors to be mute, though she may have been sending out a rumbling long-distance call below the range of human hearing like the call whales send through the sea. She would have been calling out to the mother from whom she had been fully weaned nearly six years too early, the mother whom she would never see again.
The baby likely felt serious cold for the first time on the Atlantic. She almost certainly had enough control of her trunk to tuck it between her forelegs in the way of elephants when they are chilled. The country toward which she sailed had celebrated its one hundredth birthday in the heat of the summer just past but now was at the wintry start of a new year.
On finally reaching New York, the ship sailed past Coney Island on the port side and Staten Island on the starboard. Another elephant, Fanny, would make an astonishing swim across these waters a quarter century later in a bid to escape after being spooked by the ultimate fate of this same smuggled baby.
Just ahead lay the busiest harbor in the world. The Statue of Liberty was still nearly a decade from rising on a small island off to the left, and Ellis Island just beyond would not open until six years later. Human new arrivals were still being received directly on the tip of Manhattan at Castle Garden, which had served as the sandstone Fort Clinton during the War of 1812, then been converted into an entertainment arena whose many attractions had included the occasional circus and menagerie. It was now America’s first immigration receiving center, with the primary purpose of protecting new arrivals from the swarms of sex traffickers, swindlers, and thieves who awaited each shipload. The inflow of immigrants had slackened after the Panic of 1873, which had been triggered largely by reckless speculation on railroads that reverberated into widespread bankruptcies and foreclosures. The economy was now rousing itself back into growth so prodigious that the dawn of America’s second century had the glow of destiny. The Reconstruction Era was nearing an official end and in this new Gilded Age railway trackage was tripling, connecting boundless natural resources to burgeoning industry, goods to markets, supply to demand, all of it made more productive and efficient by an inventive spirit that would produce five hundred thousand new patents in twenty years. Coal production in those golden decades was increasing eightfold. Agricultural production was more than doubling even as society was being industrialized and urbanized. Business was being reshaped by the forces of incorporation and consolidation, changes that led to the rise of a small number of super-rich titans but also saw the overall per capita income increase to double that of Germany and France and higher by 50 percent than that of Great Britain. Those seeking to share in the prosperity were arriving in such record numbers that Castle Garden would process more than eight million immigrants before it was closed thirteen years hence. The demand for workers was so great that employers waited there to hire the able-bodied as soon as their arrival was duly recorded.
The ship carrying the baby elephant would have continued on to one of the port’s cargo piers, which then handled more than half of America’s international commerce. The newest arrival must have found the pier to be a disorienting assault of unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells and icy air. Other elephants had been met by reporters and clamoring crowds. This was the first to arrive in secrecy, hustled ashore, then transported by wagon, ferry, and wagon again to Philadelphia and the winter quarters of the Adam Forepaugh show, with considerable care taken to avoid any attention.
Forepaugh was a onetime butcher boy turned shady horse dealer who had found his present calling when he took part ownership of a circus that had failed to make good on a debt. He was now in a fierce and protracted struggle with P. T. Barnum for supremacy as the greatest showman in what was surely becoming the greatest of nations.
Both Forepaugh’s show and Barnum’s show were growing to a thousand performers, sideshow attractions, canvasmen, ticket takers, hawkers, teamsters, cooks, bill posters, and press agents, as well as trained horses, lions, and the perpetual favorite, elephants. Both had big tops so big they could hold huge crowds of those who worked in the factories and tilled the fields and labored in the mines and laid the railroad track. Both offered an escape from grinding drudgery into the fabulous, a brief reprieve so enticing that some employers simply called a circus day rather than try to press on with distracted and discontented workers. Both rewarded anyone who could fork over a modest fee with a three-ring extravaganza that was more than any one pair of eyes could take in. Both gave spectators a sense that it all arrived just for them, that it was all for them, that if their labors made other men into giants of industry and finance, then at least a giant of show business was coming to them, needing them, soliciting them. Both shows also imparted a sense of connectedness not just to the rest of the immediate crowd, but also to the crowds at all the other locales along the route, making the audience part of a popular culture that transcended differences in ethnic origin, that put everyone under one tent, that made them Americans.
But no matter if Forepaugh matched or even exceeded his rival in every other way, Barnum demonstrated an unmatched genius at capturing and manipulating the public’s imagination. Barnum had made himself the patriot’s patriot in the Centennial year just past. He had opened each performance with a salute by a battery of thirteen cannons representing the original colonies. A woman clad as the Goddess of Liberty would appear, accompanied by a bald eagle and men costumed as Continental troops along with a chorus that sang the “Star-Spangled Banner” and then urged the audience to join it in a rousing rendition of “America.” The show would conclude with fireworks.
“A Fourth of July celebration every day,” Barnum later wrote of that season.
And there had been a promotional souvenir magazine called the Barnum Centennial Advance Daily, the front cover emblazoned with a photo of Barnum surrounded by American flags, as if he were central to the great celebration, which indeed he strove energetically to become. The back cover offered a depiction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence credited to the “Bureau of Engraving.”
“Circulation 2,000,000,” the magazine had announced on its cover before the actual circulation of the very first copy.
On his part, Forepaugh had renamed his circus the Great Centennial Show, but otherwise it remained too much the same, featuring creatures whose intended appeal was that they were exotic and not American. That had not served him well in a birthday year when things American were the most prized.
The poster that had accompanied the Forepaugh show’s Fourth of July appearance in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was headlined “Our Nation’s Centennial Jubilee,” yet the center was absent of even a single star or stripe and was dominated by a drawing of a bellowing rhinoceros that Forepaugh had imported the previous February from the animal dealer in Hamburg. Forepaugh’ procession into town had been dwarfed by the city’s own parade, in which forty-one different groups passed under a seventy-foot-high arch. They had included a wildly costumed “crew” called the Horribles and Forepaugh had offered them a small fortune to admit him as a member so he would at least be part of the celebration if he could not marshal it. The Horribles had declined, though they had requested and received two of Forepaugh’s elephants to draw an ambulance thereby made comic.
Whatever fireworks display Forepaugh may have planned for that night had been preempted by an elaborate spectacular long planned by the city. The thirty-four elements had included a representation of its own Goddess of Liberty as well as George Washington on horseback
and an “emblematic piece in letters of fire” spelling out “Peace, Prosperity, Freedom, the Result of 100 Years.” The final element, what the program had termed “the finest of the evening,” had featured “flags and shields surmounted by ‘Grand Rapids, July 4, 1876’ and underneath ‘Good Night.’”
After such a finale, only an anticlimax could come from a circus owner who had not been able even to buy his way into the Horribles. And that had been neither the first nor the last town where the Forepaugh show had been out of step with the patriotic passions of the Centennial year. The 1876 season had been the first and only season where Forepaugh lost money. He was now resolved to restore his good fortune and top his rival in the season to come with an all-American sensation.
Adam Forepaugh understood that the transformative event after arriving in this nation of immigrants was not securing a job or gaining citizenship. It was the birth of the first child on U.S. soil, a child not subject to jus sanguinis, nationality by bloodline, but jus soli, nationality by birthplace; not from but of, as American as anybody.
In early February of 1877, the newspapers received a copy of a breathless missive that Forepaugh had supposedly sent to one of his top assistants:
I sent you a short dispatch about our good luck this morning. It no doubt surprised you, but I am now able to give full particulars of the strange event. The performing elephant “Betsy” of the five which my son had in training in our winter quarters in Germantown made us all happy this morning by giving birth last night to the only baby elephant ever born on American soil. The mother is a mammoth beast, standing over 11 feet high and as docile as any I ever saw. The newcomer is only about 18 inches high, but a little beauty. It is male, and began walking just before noon. From its birth to that moment it lay as though sleeping and we were very much afraid it would not live, although it seemed healthy in every respect this afternoon. There is no doubt that we shall be able to keep it and put it on the road this summer. At the sight of this intruder, the other elephants seemed very uneasy and cross and bellowed and threw themselves wildly around, so it was about all we could do to prevent them from demolishing everything within reach. We had a conference of medical men at our winter quarters this afternoon to see this native American elephant and they were very much delighted. The little fellow takes quite naturally to the situation and will soon become a great pet. We shall put him in training as soon as practicable and next summer shall be able to present to the country a real marvel of wonder to the American public. Today I would not take $20,000 for the baby.
A. Forepaugh
News of the first American-born elephant generated all the excitement that Forepaugh sought. The bills posted in advance of performances now included, “A Beautiful Baby Elephant. The first ever born in captivity outside the Tropical Zone. To see this newborn infant nursing with its mouth and trunk is the rarest, queerest sight ever beheld.”
Forepaugh’s rival then sent a missive of his own to the newspapers:
I deem it a duty to warn the public against the fraud being perpetrated on them by one Adam Forepaugh in conspicuously advertising for exhibition and as the principal feature in his menagerie, a baby elephant, which he falsely claims was born in Philadelphia last winter. It is an established zoological fact that elephants do not breed in captivity and there never was [one] born on this side [of] the Atlantic. The one advertised by Adam Forepaugh is a small and inferior Asiatic elephant, exported from Singapore to Hamburg, and there offered to my agent, who declined to purchase it.
As conclusive evidence of the correctness of this statement, I will give $100,000 for either a baby or full-grown elephant born in America.
Your obedient servant,
P. T. Barnum
Forepaugh had said he would not take $20,000 for the baby and here was Barnum pledging five times that. The Barnum response also conveyed the reason he knew that Forepaugh could not even consider the offer. The animal dealer in Hamburg was Carl Hagenbeck, whom Barnum had met several years before, when he visited Hamburg and ordered $15,000 in animals, including elephants, giraffes, and a dozen ostriches. Hagenbeck subsequently also sold animals to Forepaugh, in particular elephants. Hagenbeck would later write:
My faithful friend Barnum sent me huge orders for elephants. Barnum and another American named Forepaugh were at this time serious competitors in the circus world, and the American public seemed to have an especial predilection for elephants. At all events, elephants were the chief attraction and the fact was very fortunate for me. . . . I was perpetually receiving fresh orders not only from Barnum but also from Forepaugh, for the rivals were continually endeavoring to out trump each other.
Forepaugh must have assumed that Hagenbeck would not risk alienating one of his two biggest customers by telling Barnum or anybody else the true origin of the baby elephant. Forepaugh clearly did not anticipate that one of Barnum’s agents might have been offered the same baby. This also could have been just a cover story. Hagenbeck could have secretly tipped off his “faithful friend” Barnum about all his rival’s purchases.
Whatever the case, Forepaugh now faced a big test of nerve over a little elephant. He backed down without a reply and abandoned his sensational claim. The subsequent ads listed a baby elephant among the other attractions but dropped any reference to the purportedly historic circumstances of the baby’s birth. The exact details of her capture and transport would remain murky for the very reason that the fraud had required Forepaugh to sneak the creature into its supposed birthplace without notice. What is certain is Forepaugh’s baby was born in the wild, most likely in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), but perhaps in India or Burma or Malaysia.
And the baby boy was a baby girl.
She was back with a group, if not a family, joining five grown elephants as the Forepaugh show prepared for the start of the 1877 season in Philadelphia. The first step of her training would have been to teach the baby to respond to her name. Hers came from a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a young slave girl snatched by “speculators” so soon after her birth that she has no memory of her mother.
“How old are you, Topsy?” another character asks the girl.
“Dun no, Missis,” the girl says.
“Don’t know how old you are? Didn’t anybody ever tell you? Who was your mother?”
“Never had none!” said the child, with another grin.
“Never had any mother? What do you mean? Where were you born?”
“Never was born. . . . Never had no father nor mother, nor nothin’. I was raised by a speculator, with lots of others. . . .”
“Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy? . . . Do you know who made you?”
“Nobody, as I knows on. . . . I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.”
That line gave rise to the popular expression “grow’d like Topsy,” which originally meant growing without particular intent or plan. It also came to mean growing at a remarkable rate, as was the whole country, as was the motherless baby elephant who grew a pound a day, seven pounds a week, thirty pounds a month. She learned that when “speculators” made a certain sound they meant her.
“Topsy!”
TWO
The ELEPHANT
Eight decades before Topsy’s secret offloading, a sailing ship named after the country that was three months shy of its twentieth birthday and just beginning its remarkable growth entered New York harbor after a long and perilous voyage from India. The junior officer who kept the America’s log on this thirteenth day of April in 1796 happened to be Nathaniel Hathorne, father of the novelist, who would add a w to his name, supposedly to distinguish himself from a predecessor who had been the hanging judge at the Salem witch trials. Hathorne’s normally diminutive handwriting dramatically increased in scale as he recorded a hugely unusual passenger: “Elephant on board.”
T
his first of such creatures to land on these shores had been acquired in Bengal by the captain, Jacob Crowninshield. He wrote of his purchase and of his accompanying expectations in a November 2, 1795, letter from India to two seafaring brothers: “We take home a fine young elephant two years old, at $450. It is almost as large as a very large ox, and I dare say we shall get it home safe. If so, it will bring at least $5000.00.”
Crowninshield went on, “I suppose you will laugh at this scheme, but I do not mind that, will turn elephant driver. We have plenty of water at the Cape and St. Helena. This was my plan.”
He noted that a third brother, who co-owned the America with him, had declined to go in on the elephant.
“If it succeeds, I ought to have the whole credit and honor, too.”
The primary motive may have been profit, but there was more at work. He ended by saying, “Of course you know it will be a great thing to carry the first elephant to America.”
The arrival was reported in the New York Journal: “The Ship America, Captain Jacob Crowninshield of Salem, Massachusetts, Commander and owner, has brought home an ELEPHANT from Bengal in perfect health. It is the first ever seen in America and is a great curiosity. It is a female, two years old.”
Ten days later, the ELEPHANT was put on display at the corner of Broadway and Beaver Street in Manhattan. The New World had already seen its first African lion in 1720, first camel in 1721, first polar bear in 1733, first leopard in 1768, first jaguar in 1788, first orangutan in 1789, and first ostrich in 1794. None approached the elephant in size and novelty and impact.
This largest of land mammals was not caged or otherwise restrained and would have needed little effort to snuff out a beholder’s life; it posed no immediate danger only because it so chose. It remained outwardly tranquil, as if nature were not ultimately just a fierce struggle for the survival of the fittest, as if there were something more in existence’s grand scheme. Its big, extravagantly lashed eyes were neither piercing nor cringing, but simply watchful. Its size seemed less a weapon than a vantage, in the way a mountain is. Its serenity was that of a living peak risen above the fray.
