by Michael Daly
Craven dashed into the barn just as he had into the building in Chicago, but instead of food he took up a shotgun loaded with buckshot, not deadly for an elephant, but definitely stinging. Craven stepped into the doorway and Romeo started toward him. Craven called out the command for stop.
“Det!”
Romeo kept coming. Craven fired into his trunk. Romeo turned away and began wrecking fences and scattering hay mounds.
“Well to make it short, I had two days and three nights with him. I would go out with the gun, and when he came for me and would not stop when I called, I fired into his trunk.”
On the fourth day, Craven ventured once more into Romeo’s view and ducked into an extension next to the barn. Romeo charged after Craven and over some planks that were then raised with ropes, uncovering a pit that had been dug just inside the entrance deep enough to prevent the elephant from exiting the way he entered. The gun in Craven’s hands dissuaded the elephant from making an elephant-size hole of the man-size hole that the trainer had cut in the far wall so he could slip out.
“Det!”
Stop Romeo did. Craven and his helpers soon had nooses around the trapped elephant’s feet and they pulled his legs out from under him as they had on their earlier encounter with him. Craven’s own testosterone must have been up for he did something he had never done before.
“It was the first and only time I burnt an elephant. . . . An inch bar of hot iron was pressed against his body . . .”
Craven knew the actual sensitivity of an elephant’s rough-looking skin; the burning bar must have been agony itself.
“. . . but he did not move.”
Craven reached a conclusion.
“I saw that it would do no good and stopped.”
Craven then proceeded as he had on other days, as if he had learned nothing.
“We beat him with clubs until he halloed. He gave up pretty soon and we took the chains off at once. Romeo was all right again.”
Craven used a knife to dig the shot out of Romeo’s trunk, trying to tell himself that it did no more real harm than bee stings. Craven did not consider until later that the elephant retained the memories of the gun and of the clubs and of the searing bar of iron, memories that joined those of other beatings, that would fuel other rampages, turning hormone-triggered fury into absolute rage. The ultimate outcome would lead Craven to a conclusion that would set him apart from his fellow elephant men. But this was still several years away as the Mabie show returned to the road.
That winter, the circus again toured the South. A typical newspaper notice in the Yazoo City Democrat accompanied its arrival in that Mississippi town in December of 1859: “Monsieur Craven will introduce those highly trained elephants, Romeo and Juliet, who have been received with unbounded demonstrations of applause wherever they have been exhibited. Truly they have to be seen to be appreciated.”
Less welcome visitors to this part of the country included those who opposed selling and subjugating humans no differently than animals. The newspaper reported that a “live abolitionist” had been given “pretty plain ocular evidence” that he was not wanted. He was described as “five feet five or six inches high, with light hair, [and] only one eye.”
“In his travels, let every man greet him with a kick Northwards,” the paper advised, passing on another journal’s “witty” remark that “If such men come into our midst and groan inwardly over the tortures of the slave, we should relieve them of their suppressed sobs, and make them groan outright.”
An ad in the Democrat offered for sale “four of the best negro dogs in the state” whose usefulness in tracking down runaway slaves would be confirmed by “any planter or overseer on Silver Creek.” A news item headlined simply “Hanged” reported, “The negro woman Eliza, who has been for some time under sentence of death for the burning of the gin house of Mrs. McCann, was hung on Friday.”
The newspaper proved not completely jaded as it reported on one sort of spectacle that consistently outdrew even Craven’s elephants.
“As is customary in Christian countries, a large crowd was present to witness the horrid spectacle of strangling a human being, bound hand and foot,” the paper pointedly added. “To our astonishment, white women were there, who looked with apparent unconcern upon the scene. After death, the body was given over for dissection.”
SIX
The War Between
the States, the Battle of
the Dwarfs
In the meantime, Romeo’s original Juliet had been acquired by a clown, raconteur, and social commentator who had become the nation’s first pop celebrity. Dan Rice had been born Daniel McClaren in New York, but he now went by the name of a clown who had been renowned in Ireland in his father’s time. The Dan Rice of these shores had become one of the most famous men in America, blending wisecracks and wisdom, songs and soliloquies, dancing and diatribes, pratfalls and poetry. He was a prime precursor of the stand-up comics of later years, in particular those who were also social critics. He sported a goatee but no mustache, sometimes wore clownish stars and stripes, other times a top hat, all of which were said by some to have been combined by the cartoonist Thomas Nast into the model for his famous drawing of Uncle Sam.
Rice had started out with a trained pig named Sybil. He now rechristened the elephant formerly known as Juliet as Lalla Rookh, after a popular quartet of narrative poems by Thomas Moore. Rice nonetheless did not expect that an elephant would in itself be much more of an attraction than his pig. He sought to further his new acquisition’s appeal by preceding her arrival with posters announcing that Lalla Rookh would perform a headstand.
Rice must have figured the audience would have already paid when it became clear that no such trick was forthcoming. He would later report that one town, apparently Ellicottville, New York, proved to have little tolerance for humbug. Rice would write that the local magistrate hauled him into court on charges of “obtaining money under false pretenses.” Rice naturally sought to extricate himself with more humbug.
“I explained that it was all a mistake of my advertising agents, who had inadvertently pasted the elephant pictures upside down on the fences, so that they looked like those of a pachyderm standing on its head,” Rice later wrote. “Strange to say, this story didn’t go down.”
He tried a more successful tack.
“Then I assured the court that my elephant could and would stand on its head, but as it was a female, innate modesty led it to decline to make such a spectacle of itself save under cover of darkness. Of course then I was honorably discharged.”
In August of 1860, Dan Rice discovered that there was one actual circumstance by which a single elephant could still draw a considerable audience, rivaling even executions. He announced that Juliet, now Lalla Rookh, would “take the water” and swim the Ohio River from the Kentucky shore to Cincinnati. A crowd of fifteen thousand gathered on the Cincinnati side, another three thousand on the opposite bank, their differences in politics and allegiance momentarily forgotten, the only subject of contention whether or not the event would actually take place.
The stunt was scheduled for 9:00 a.m., and at the appointed hour the crowds along the Ohio saw the celebrated Dan Rice appear. The simple sight of him often caused a sensation just in itself. One young man had written to a newspaper some time before saying he had been at an Illinois hotel where Abraham Lincoln was supposed to visit, but had decided that he would rather go to the circus to see Rice. The writer arrived to find that Lincoln himself had come to see the renowned clown.
Yet, as Rice now boarded a skiff, all eyes were not on him but on the elephant being led to the river’s edge. A reporter who watched her approach through the muggy heat of this already oppressive summer morning noted that she flapped her ears “quite majestically,” though likely he did not know this is a way elephants cool themselves, lowering their body
temperature by as much as five degrees. She was called “her aquatic majesty” and, in a double play on words, “her elephantship.”
The skiff bearing Rice started for the opposite shore and the moment of truth arrived. Lalla Rookh thrilled all in attendance by plunging right in. Her keeper, C. W. Noyes, boarded a second skiff to escort her while Rice’s craft led the way.
But rather than traverse, Lalla Rookh began to cavort, splashing and spraying as she might had she been back with her herd in her native land. The keeper afforded the scribes opportunities to offer various euphemisms for beating an elephant.
“The exertions of her keeper . . . brought her back to a sense of propriety,” wrote one.
Rice had proceeded ahead and stood on the far shore toward which Lalla Rookh was prodded. Several boatloads of gawkers had taken to the river, and when they came too close, the elephant turned to chase them away. They rowed away so quickly that “they would have put even the famous Harvard boat club to the blush,” as one reporter wrote.
The keeper renewed his “exertions” and Lalla Rookh resumed the prescribed course, amazing the crowd as she sank so deep that only the tip of her extended trunk broke the surface; Aristotle had written of elephants doing this two millennia before. A pathologist who autopsied an elephant who perished in a fire in early-seventeenth-century Dublin had noted tissue connecting the lungs directly to the diaphragm and other tissue sheathing what was simply the pleural cavity on other mammals, a unique construction that allowed elephants to draw water through their trunks and further protected them from the pressure generated by such snorkeling.
When Lalla Rookh veered off course, the keeper corrected her via whatever bit of her he could reach. She began to disappear completely, suddenly free of her tormentors. She would remain submerged for so long that the spectators would become alarmed, worried that she had drowned. She would then suddenly surge to the surface with such force that half her body exploded from the water, a sight so exciting as to make the spectators forget Rice altogether.
The keeper would be on her and down she would go again, free once more until that last desperate instant when the need for air overcame the desire for freedom and she had to burst back into captivity. She eventually reached the shore, to cheers from the crowd. The Commercial Advertiser noted that city’s more worldly citizens “are generally supposed to have ‘seen the elephant’ under every possible aspect.”
“Now they have seen the aquatic one, their education may be considered complete,” the paper concluded.
In those brief underwater escapes, Lalla Rookh had apparently stayed a moment too long. She had water in her lungs and the condition developed into a fatal infection. Rice was left with just himself and an equestrienne he dubbed Ella Zoyara. A rider of the same name for another show had caused a sensation when she turned out to be really a he costumed as a she. Rice encouraged speculation that this was the case with his Zoyara, then announced that his she really was a she, another of the show world’s fake fakes. The bogus controversy generated enough ticket sales that the she was dubbed a “dam-sell” by the Variety of its time, the New York Clipper.
His various successes with deception led Rice to risk one that would eventually lead to his downfall, to him being simply damned. He had been in his native New York the previous year for the debut of northerner Dan Emmett’s song “Dixie,” performed by the Dan Bryant Minstrels in blackface. The song had become a huge hit, dubbed by the New York Clipper to be “one of the most popular compositions ever produced . . . sung, whistled, and played in every quarter of the globe.” It gave the South the antebellum equivalent of buzz, but frictions with the North were already keeping many shows above the Mason-Dixon line. Dan Rice’s Great Show now headed down the Mississippi River aboard the James Raymond, a side paddle steamboat named after the New York menagerie impresario.
Rice was in Memphis when Lincoln was elected and one bit of news that followed the event would have caught the attention of any circus hand. King Mongkut of Siam had offered America the means to overcome its woeful lack of a native elephant population.
“Elephants, being animals of great size and strength, can bear burdens through uncleared woods and matted jungles where no carriage and cart roads have yet been made,” the king noted in a diplomatic missive addressed to Lincoln’s predecessor but arriving after the new president had assumed office.
Mongkut, who would achieve Broadway fame via Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I, offered to provide young male and female elephants “one or two pairs at a time.”
“When they arrive in America, do not let them be taken to a cold climate out of the registers of the sun’s declination,” the king advised. “Let them, with all haste, be turned out to run wild in some jungle suitable for them, not confining them any length of time.”
He concluded, “If these means can be done, we trust that the elephants will propagate their species hereafter in the continent of America.”
Lincoln diplomatically declined, writing, “I appreciate most highly Your Majesty’s tender of good offices in forwarding to this Government a stock from which a supply of elephants might be raised on our own soil. This Government would not hesitate to avail itself of so generous an offer if the object were one which could be made practically useful in the present condition of the United States. Our political jurisdiction, however, does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce.”
Lincoln’s political jurisdiction seemed in imminent danger of shrinking to only its colder latitudes, as his 1860 election was leading to the secession of the Southern states and therefore war. That specter and the accompanying rowdiness of the crowds further deterred most Northern shows from venturing South.
Rice figured he was one showman who could span all such divisions. He counted Lincoln among his myriad acquaintances, but he was also friendly with Jefferson Davis, to whom he had presented a silver-fobbed rabbit’s foot for good luck. Rice continued south, making his first visit in six years to New Orleans.
But Rice was not some elephant who could please folks of all political leanings simply by splashing around. He was known for his oratory, which meant he was expected to orate when his show opened to a sellout crowd of 1,800 on December 10, 1860. He gave the speech of a star whose perpetual aim was to please his audience.
“The South has been aggrieved and she knows it, and the whole civilized world knows it, but none more seriously than those who have attempted to deprive her of her rights,” he said.
Rice was still appearing in New Orleans in January, when the Louisiana legislature voted to secede. He needed only hear the church bells and cannons to gauge the popular sentiment and he adjusted his performances accordingly. A local paper opined that “Dan is Southern, feels it, talks it, acts it.” He continued to pack the house night after night.
Rice had started back north, leaving the South to get by on the few circuses it could call its own, when the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter. The outbreak of war made it all the more imperative and all the more difficult for him to adjust his espoused sentiments to his more northerly audiences. He was apparently assuming that what had happened in New Orleans would stay in New Orleans when he gave a speech in Erie County, Pennsylvania, to a militia regiment as it headed off to fight.
“Annihilate treason!” he told the 83rd Pennsylvania Volunteers.
A report of his remarks in Pennsylvania reached New Orleans, where he was branded the Chameleon Clown. Reports of his earlier remarks in the South, in turn, caught up with him as he opened in Philadelphia. Audiences greeted him with loud hissing and barrages of rotten eggs. The onetime star needed police protection.
Up in New York, Barnum had remained consistently pro-Union, prompting the Clipper to accuse him of “trying the pa
triotic dodge.” He festooned his American Museum with the Stars and Stripes and began admitting African-Americans. He hosted a female Union spy who seems to have been actually genuine and he staged the play The Hero of Fort Sumter, even though the really big draws were the museum’s many other attractions that offered New Yorkers a diversion from the conflict.
Business became bigger than ever as the brutal realities of the fighting grew increasingly apparent. People then wanted to think and talk of almost anything else.
As a result, Barnum was well on the way back from financial ruin. He was so encouraged that he decided to expand and sent a traveling sampling of his museum to Washington, D.C. The union’s military brass were now joined by General Tom Thumb as well as a newer feature of similarly small stature, Commodore Nutt, known as $300,000 Nutt for the sum Barnum supposedly paid him to tour. A more accurate nickname would have been $15-a-Week Nutt.
The Cremorne Garden Circus was already exhibiting in Washington with a dwarf of its own, Commodore Foote, not to be confused with either the actual naval officer or the actual general with that surname. The Cremorne show took out a newspaper ad, issuing a challenge to “place Commodore NUTT and Commodore FOOTE together on a platform in some respectable building in this city, and let the public determine which is the smaller of the two.”
The Cremorne show also proposed having an impartial committee judge the respective range of knowledge and artistic abilities of Nutt and Foote, with any proceeds from the event going to the Soldiers’ Aid Association. Barnum took out an immediate ad in response:
The only reply Mr. Barnum thinks necessary to make to the challenge contained in the morning’s paper is that he will not aid in a newspaper warfare for the purpose of giving notoriety to an itinerant adventurer. . . . The ladies and gentlemen who daily and nightly throng Mr. Barnum’s establishment declare that never within their memory has been seen any “man in miniature” worthy of being named or thought of, or who will in the slightest degree compare with these symmetrical, intelligent, and talented little gentlemen—Commodore Nutt and General Tom Thumb, and, furthermore, that they never before witnessed in any one establishment such a vast and amusing concentration of talent and novelty as are to be seen at Barnum’s Museum, Circus and Menagerie.
