Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison

by Michael Daly

  The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the elephant would be appearing with the rest of the show as it began its season the following Wednesday.

  “Our citizens need have no apprehension of danger, as Romeo, like Richard the Third, is ‘himself again,’” the paper noted.

  Forepaugh saw no need to continue paying Craven now the crisis had passed, and the trainer departed. Forepaugh’s brother, George, took charge of Romeo and the elephant remained generally docile through the season.

  The show was in its winter quarters near Connersville, Indiana, when Adam Forepaugh purchased a female elephant, the latest to be named Lalla Rookh. The new arrival was secured with ropes a distance from Romeo. She managed to pull out the stakes during the night and the elephants were standing contentedly side by side when George Forepaugh arrived the next morning. The trainer separated them again.

  Romeo made his displeasure known by grabbing George Forepaugh with his trunk and tossing him against a wall. The trainer summoned a posse of circus men and locals. Romeo ripped a wood beam from the rafters overhead and threw it at them with what a reporter termed “tolerable aim and direction.”

  George Forepaugh stayed completely out of Romeo’s range for five days while Romeo went without food or water, to no apparent effect. The men finally ventured to follow Craven’s example, using ropes to draw Romeo’s legs out from under him. Romeo lay tied on the ground as the Forepaugh brother stepped up with a bull hook. Forepaugh drove the spike into the elephant’s flank.

  “Speak!” Forepaugh commanded.

  Romeo responded by striking Forepaugh with his trunk. The other men beat Romeo for hour after hour with iron rods, spelling each other. Forepaugh jabbed with the spike again and again. The elephant finally gave that cry of surrender.

  “A child can now drive him with a rye straw,” George Forepaugh declared.

  Or so it seemed until 1872, when, after four years of George Forepaugh, Romeo suddenly seized the trainer with his trunk and tossed him into the air. Romeo was “taken” again, this time with added vengeance, suffering significant injuries to his legs. There was little if any public outcry about what one reporter called “day long docilizing treatments.” The New York Times did suggest that the elephant was becoming more trouble than he was worth.

  “Romeo has outlived his usefulness,” the paper said.

  Forepaugh sought to explain the elephant’s ill humor by saying that Romeo was still grieving the tragic death of his lover. Juliet was said to have died back in the winter of 1864, when the ground had been too frozen for burial. Poor Romeo’s prior owner was supposed to have cruelly forced him to drag her body onto a frozen lake, where it would submerge under its own weight come spring.

  None of this was true, but the tale of tragic love might have made Romeo a big draw for years to come had cruelty not been compounded by ignorance and neglect. His keepers were baffled as he became lame and then seriously ill that June during a stop in Chicago.

  “His disease was in the forefeet, which, for some unknown cause, had become affected with inflammation, resulting in acute pain and general debilitation of the system, the effect of which had been noticed by a rapid wasting of the flesh,” a reporter explained.

  His keepers apparently were unaware that an elephant’s feet need regular care, particularly if chained for long periods in a pestilential slurry of mud, urine, and dung.

  The fissures in the footpads that serve as a kind of natural tire tread to prevent slipping can deepen to where they become painful and prone to infection. And the toenails can crack and become infected during long sedentary periods if not properly maintained.

  In Romeo’s case, the injuries from the latest “taking” could not have helped matters. The infection spread up his forelegs and a Chicago surgeon from the city medical college operated, removing from his feet numerous small bones that had become necrotic. The elephant lost several gallons of blood, but the big threat remained the infection, which was unchecked.

  Two days after the operation, on June 5, 1872, Romeo died. One newspaper article was headlined “Obituary Extraordinary,” another “The Mighty Dead,” this one reporting, “Chicago . . . was the scene of an event the occurrence of which will excite interest in almost every city, town, or village in America, being no less than the death of the celebrated performing elephant ‘Romeo,’ the largest and most valuable of his species ever brought to this country, and more famous than any who have gone before him.”

  Romeo was reported to have killed four keepers besides Williams. The New York Times spoke of him as if he were human, saying, “He had many friends in various parts of the country, and his death will no doubt be sincerely mourned, notwithstanding the recollection of his crimes.”

  Forepaugh accorded Romeo a celebrity’s send-off. The elephant lay in state in the menagerie tent and a band played Pleyel’s “Hymn” and Handel’s “Dead March” from Saul. Thousands filed past.

  “Many shedding tears over the dead old hero,” the New York Clipper noted.

  The reporter observed, “The least affected person in the assemblage was Adam Forepaugh.”

  Either on the advice of a press agent or at his own prompting, Forepaugh subsequently played the heartbroken owner, one article reporting “a quiver in his voice” and a “suspicious turn of the head,” as if to hide welling tears.

  Craven grieved from afar.

  “Romeo was a fine fellow,” Craven said. “He was the greatest elephant of his day.”

  And the trainer’s thoughts were not of Romeo’s supposed crimes but of the crimes perpetrated against him. Craven understood that the final excesses by the Forepaughs had been preceded by more than two decades of brutality to which he himself had been party, an escalating cycle of subjugation and rebellion, of must and musth. He was coming to believe that it need never have been at all.

  “I knew Romeo well, and if he had been properly handled, he never would have become so bad,” Craven said. “If he had been handled right from the first he would have been the biggest card in this business today.”

  Craven took the outcome as proof of the wrong way to train and keep an elephant. Craven was formulating the right way, deciding that his initial sense when he managed to ride one-footed atop an elephant had been correct, that it was better to understand than to dominate. He had learned that a blow inflicted was a blow remembered, that a hallo of surrender was accompanied by smoldering rage. He now understood that when his own rage drove him to apply a hot iron bar it not only did no good, it did bad, made bad, the bad that was then ascribed to Romeo.

  In pondering such questions of good and bad, Craven was not reaching an ethical opinion. He had not made a primarily moral decision not to be cruel. He was simply acting on what he had come to understand about both elephants and humans, the humans including himself. The result was an elephant training and tending system requiring meticulous patience and unflagging attention to what was most effective at that specific moment with that specific creature. The underlying principle should not have been revolutionary.

  “Kindness,” Craven said. “But you still must be firm. As a general rule kindness will go further than punishment.”

  At the core of Craven’s evolved approach was a respect for the elephant along with an assumption that the animal was basically good-natured and willing to do what was required. Craven made a statement that set him apart in the circus world.

  “If there were no bad keepers, there would be no bad elephants,” he said.

  Around this time, Craven was retained by Howes’ Great London Show to train five elephants who had been captured in Ceylon by a nephew of Barnum’s partner in the original elephantine expedition there two decades before. Craven soon had them performing such novel tricks as forming a five-elephant “living pyramid” on pedestals of various heights. The feat was widely viewed as all the more remarkable because
the elephants were just a few months out of the jungle, but that very fact may well have been part of the reason he was able to accomplish it so quickly. The scant time since their capture also marked the relatively brief period they had been liable to mistreatment. And they had not known Craven before his epiphany. There were no memories of prior brutalities on his part to dilute the power of kindness. The pachyderm pyramid could be viewed as a monument to that power.

  Craven would later remark to a reporter that elephants subjected to harsh circumstances “never felt really well and fully themselves.” Two of the new captives—a female named Hebe whom Craven affectionately called Babe and likely the male Mandarin—now felt so well and fully themselves that they mated, possibly the first such coupling of elephants on American shores.

  EIGHT

  The Fire, the Plowing

  Elephant, the Panic, and

  the “Dusky Attendant”

  P. T. Barnum’s prodigious money getting had been interrupted when the great American Museum burned down in July of 1865, an added cruel twist to the Fire Annihilator saga. This blaze three months after the end of the Civil War was described as the establishment’s final spectacle, drawing thirty thousand gawkers, Barnum’s biggest crowd yet. Police shot the living animals that managed to escape the flames. The stuffed creatures consumed by the fire included Old Bet.

  Barnum opened a new museum at another location in Manhattan, the exhibits including an anaconda that ate small mammals live. The spectacle drew a protest from Henry Bergh, a shipping heir and the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

  “I assert, without fear of contradiction, that any person who can commit an atrocity such as the one I complain of, is semi-barbarian in his instincts,” Bergh declared.

  Bergh had been roused to social action originally by witnessing the cruel treatment of horses on the streets of New York City, in particular horses that drew wagons and carriages. He subsequently campaigned to end dog fighting, cock fighting, and rat baiting. He conceived of the use of clay pigeons rather than actual birds for skeet shooting. He had even sought kinder treatment for the sea turtles on display at the Fulton Fish Market, enlisting the noted Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz to declare that the creatures were indeed capable of feeling pain and thirst as they were left lying on their backs, prevented from escaping by ropes tied to holes punched in their flippers.

  Barnum himself now sought Agassiz’s opinion, enlisting the scientist to write a letter to Bergh saying the snake would eat only live prey and would otherwise likely starve to death. Agassiz wondered if Bergh “would object to eating lobster salad because the lobsters were boiled alive, or refuse oysters because they were cooked alive, or raw oysters because they must be swallowed alive.” Bergh could hardly challenge the very expert he had once cited.

  The question became moot when Barnum’s new museum also burned down in 1868. Barnum had in the meantime gone into politics and gotten himself elected to the Connecticut state legislature, where the man who had once essentially purchased “George Washington’s nurse” became a leading voice in favor of black suffrage, declaring that “without regard to color or condition, all men are equally children of the common Father” and that “a human soul . . . is not to be trifled with.”

  In his own very particular soul, Barnum was still a showman. He did not need much convincing when a Wisconsin circus operator named W. C. Coup said the time had come for him to quit the statehouse for the big top and present the world with what would soon be billed as “The Greatest Show on Earth,” not to be confused with Dan Rice’s Great Show.

  P. T. Barnum’s Grand Touring Museum Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome prepared to hit the road in 1871, starting on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. The procession, which the New York Clipper promised would be “the most gorgeous ever witnessed in this country,” concluded with a sight already familiar to railroad passengers who passed through Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  “At the close of the procession, Barnum’s historical plowing elephant will give a free exhibition of his plowing, with other exhibitions portraying the wonderful sagacity of this animal,” the Clipper announced.

  The procession proved to include a number of cages that had not yet been painted, while others were said to be “still upon the ocean.” But the show was something new and therefore worthy of hyping, no doubt with considerable encouragement from Barnum.

  “The whole procession, though far from complete, we decided [to be] one of the finest things of the kind ever seen in this county,” the Clipper reported.

  As the spinmaster Barnum headed north, the Clipper ran a letter “from a correspondent” speaking of “vast crowds that flocked from every direction.” The show at Waterville, Maine, was described as a scene “which has never been equaled in this or any other country.” The crowd was said to be so large that Barnum had to run continuous shows from day into night to accommodate everybody.

  In the meantime, Forepaugh started the season on Sixth Street in Washington, D.C., with all his wagons painted, and considerably more animals and performers than his new rival had.

  “The street procession was quite attractive, although there was no special feature,” the Clipper yawned.

  In virtually all regards save perhaps press agents, the Forepaugh show was at least the Barnum show’s equal. Forepaugh was determined to surpass his rival to the point that his undeniable superiority would overcome Barnum’s celebrity. Barnum may have been hoping to lull Forepaugh into easing up when he visited the other man’s show shortly after the start of the 1873 season. Barnum was so gracious as to make it seem he was just being gracious.

  “I have come all the way from New York solely to see Mr. Forepaugh’s famous show, and I have been amply repaid for so doing,” Barnum told the newspapers. “It is novel, varied, and interesting and I say without hesitation that the exhibition cannot be surpassed by any menagerie in the country—not even by myself.”

  Of course that did not stop Barnum from subsequently saying that his own show “by far surpassed any attempt ever made with a traveling exhibition in any country.” He reported that “such a combination of curiosities and marvelous performers” was costing him $5,000 a day.

  “I suppose there is a limit beyond which it would be fatal to go, in catering for public instruction and amusement, but I have never yet found that limit,” he said. “My experience is that the more and the better a manager will provide for the public, the more liberally they will respond.”

  Barnum’s publicity getting seemed to make Forepaugh only more determined to best him. Forepaugh kept on building up his show even as the newly reunited country was hit by the Panic of 1873. This was an unprecedented financial crisis whose contributing factors included the publicity getting of George Armstrong Custer, one of those real generals forever seeking to prove how big they are, how high they tower over lesser mortals.

  The individual who played the most significant role in triggering the panic was Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, who during the Civil War had risen to prominence as the self-anointed “God’s chosen instrument” who arranged and managed the mammoth bond sales, totaling some $1.5 billion, that bankrolled the Union side. He had naturally made himself a tidy profit. He had also made it possible for Forepaugh and other profiteers to amass their initial fortunes. He was now widely expected to be appointed secretary of the Treasury when Grant became president. Cooke had, after all, privately assisted Grant in achieving a measure of financial comfort. And Cooke’s brother was one of Grant’s poker buddies.

  Grant instead appointed a dry goods tycoon, A. T. Stewart, who had to withdraw his name because the law precluded an active merchant from holding the post. The job then went to a Massachusetts politician and early advocate of black suffrage, George Boutwell.

  Cooke needed something else for which he could be an instrument of God, and just being the head of t
he country’s leading financial firm—Jay Cooke and Company—was apparently not enough. Cooke embarked on a project that had the right ring of destiny: the construction of a second transcontinental railway, this one up through the territories where Lewis and Clark had ventured. He now began bankrolling a Northern Pacific Railroad from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound, undeterred by a warning from the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt about the folly of building a rail line “from nowhere to nowhere.”

  The proposed line ran through lands in the Montana territory that had been granted by treaty to the Sioux, and Cooke sought to preempt any trouble by hosting a tribal delegation headed by Chief Spotted Tail at his opulent mansion outside Philadelphia. The feast ended with ice cream molded in the shape of various animals. The entertainment was Barnum’s pal Signor Blitz, ventriloquist and magician extraordinaire. Blitz’s signature trick was “bullet catching,” where a bullet was marked by a member of the audience, then loaded into a pistol and fired at Blitz, who then seemingly caught it in his mouth.

  The Cooke financial expedition of 1874 was bigger than either the Forepaugh show or the Barnum show as it embarked to survey the proposed rail route, with 275 wagons and a military escort comprising fifteen companies of infantry and ten of cavalry and a contingent of seventy-five Indian scouts. Custer, there as the commander of the Seventh Cavalry, was working hard to make himself a legend as they ventured into what was termed hostile Indian territory.

  The complication was that the hostiles were not demonstrating adequate hostility, though the scouts did come upon a trio of Sioux and manage to scalp two of them. Custer rode ahead of the main column and eventually spotted and gave chase to a half dozen Sioux. They sought the urgent support of a larger group whom Custer decided had been lying in ambush. He did battle with an estimated three hundred warriors, followed by a second fight with an estimated five hundred warriors he came upon the next day. The dispatch that appeared in the newspapers dramatically reported that his horse had been shot out from under him, but his unit suffered only one fatality while killing forty of the enemy.